Star Wars

Star Wars, film score by American composer John Williams for George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), which launched the film series of the same name. At a time when many scores were largely compilations of popular music from the film’s period, Williams crafted a grand orchestral score in the tradition of Erich Korngold’s scores of the 1930s and ’40s.

Of the more than 100 film scores that Williams composed for Hollywood, for which he won multiple Oscars, Grammys, and other awards, his single most-enduring creation is arguably the music he wrote for Star Wars, the first of several collaborations with Lucas on the Star Wars series.

Beginning with his score for Star Wars, Williams assigned his characters and the scenarios they inhabit identifying melodies that recur whenever needed to aid the viewer. He also allowed those melodies to grow and expand, gaining in complexity as the story progresses, often linking one character to another by means of repeated motifs. It is a technique that Richard Wagner used in his operas, calling such melodies leitmotifs. So the Luke Skywalker theme, quietly optimistic when he first appears, becomes dark and shadowed when he stands gazing upon the smoking ruins of his boyhood home, then turns bold and heroic as he triumphs in battle. Williams’s music, in fact, provides the only hint of Darth Vader’s relationship to his children. Even before George Lucas has revealed their origins to the audience, Williams provides echoes of a falling motif from the evil Vader’s theme in those of his offspring.