Fletcher Marchant

WRTG 1010

November 13, 2018

What’s So Good about Star Wars’ Soundtrack?

Kalinak, Kathyrn. “John Williams and “The Empire Strikes Back” 16 May, 1007. Web. 7

November. 2018

The article talks about how “classical meets contemporary”; It starts off of how

composers were losing jobs due to the bland and unoriginal scores. Later on in the 40’s jazz

elements, title scores, and pop scores were innovated into multiple successful scores. Then

during in the 60’s, Giorgio Mordor gave birth to the genre of “synth scores” when he made

Flashdance, Midnight Express, Bladerunner, and other futuristic films. Later in the 70’s John

Williams redefined classical music with characterizing the scores with his own inspirations, such

as Jaws, E.T., Indiana Jones, etc. with late-romantic idioms. When it came to the composition of

Star Wars he focused more on the idea of unity and how the music flowed with the characters

and with the audience’s reactions, reflecting on how Williams wants the audience to react and to

expect. Williams is very careful about his sketches and he is also very time-efficient when

writing up the composition; it will usually take Williams about a week or two fully write a

simple soundtrack. The process of Star Wars’ score is different, because the production team

took on “temp tracking” where they would play some tracks that would either fit with the scene

and Williams would work with a similar idea from that foundation. George Lucas wanted to use

just a normal classic score, but Williams was able to convince him to use original, unexplored

music then said classical music.

 This article was written by Kathryn Kalinak. Kalinak’s article is academic blended with

some small remarks at the end of the article. Overall it is very eloquent with some spelling errors.

It aims on students, critics, and aspiring musicians who are focused more in the arts, especially

film scores. Kalinak’s primary arguments are texts and evidence of music theory. Her first few

paragraphs talk about the history, decline, and rise of film scores, then the last paragraphs focus

on three pieces in Star Wars that play throughout the story: the Star Wars fanfare, The Imperial

March, and the Force theme. Kalinak’s work is based on Logos because she talks about the

decline, revival, and structure of both film scores and the Empire Strikes Back score. Kalinak

uses logical evidence to support John Williams’ work on Star Wars, but her extensive use of

romantic vocabulary to describe the three pieces comes off almost as defensive.

This article was very useful because it provides logical evidence to the scoring of Star

Wars and how Williams’ work plays a huge role to the film. I find Williams’ works extremely

inspiring, amazing, and overall innovative. I wanted to know more about his most famous pieces,

being a huge fan of his work on Superman, and how the construction plays within the film and

the characters, the settings, etc.; Kalinak’s work gave me a more insightful view of how the three

pieces tie in the whole film together.

 The Fine Arts of Film Scores

Prendergast, Roy. “The Aesthetics of Film Music” 16 May. 1997. Web. 9 Nov. 2018

Music can create a more convincing atmosphere of time and place. Musical color is

associative, immediate, and easily achieved. It’s better for the composer to have free-range &

originality than to be constricted with pieces purposely placed for color sake. Music can create

connections with either characters or the situations. The music can alter naturalism to make a

“supra-reality”. Most film composers don’t’ take advantage of this or are too restricted by the

producers fearing it wouldn’t work with the film. Music serves to fill the gaps of abused silence

and it can help build a sense of continuity within the film. Music can get gut-reactions from both

a strong piece and a strong scene, but if used wrongly the composer is usually the main target of

criticism.

The article was written by Roy Prendergast, but it presents the works of Aaron Copland.

It uses logos because he supports the art of film composing by creating five distinct elements.

I found the article very useful because it helped me figure out how music plays an

important role to films, but I’m not fond of the lack of movies that play along with these ideas.
 Film Music Theory

Spande, Robert. “The Three Regimes: A Theory of Film Music” 8 Dec. 2003. Web. 11 Nov.

2018

During the era of silent films music was introduced for blocking out the sound of clunky

projecting that rolled during the film. Either by pianists or an orchestra, film producers began to

take advantage of music to be a diegetic part of the story. Film scores today are paradoxes: they

filling in the silence of certain shots just acting as background filler, but those said shots also

help interpret the purpose of the music. Even though it is a diegetic element in the narrative it is

still considered as the least memorable part by the audience. The symbolic helps emphasize the

tones and abstractions of the film, the real keeps the music hidden and unknown, and the

imaginary stimulates a feeling of appealing neurosis.

This article was written by Robert Spande. The work is credible because it has been well

researched by Spande than constructed by opinions and he tied the main idea together by

categorizing three regimes. It connects with film hobbyists, art students, and art teachers as the

primary audience, while film critics and bloggers are the secondary audience. Spande’s article is

based on Logos and Pathos because throughout the text he uses multiple examples of films that

take on these three regimes, but uses eloquent prose in order to appeal to the audience, coming

off as biased when he talks about a chatroom responding to his question, “Why does film music

exist?”

The article was somewhat useful because I already knew about how film music plays an

important role to a film’s convection, but I wanted know more about the “why” than the “what”.
He sometimes has a habit of omitting words in his texts and redundant points, but he is able to be

persuasive and keep the text logistical.

Hayashi Interview

Valdez, Nick. “My Hero Academia Composer Talks Superman Influences, Favorite Tracks” 27

Jul. 2018. Web. 11 Nov. 2018

Yuki Hayashi is a composer well-known for his works for example: Haikyuu!!, Welcome to the

Ballroom, and My Hero Academia. The interview starts with how he creates the music for a

certain scene or character before it’s even produced; using “temp-tracking”. One character

specifically the antagonist, All For One, Hayashi-san focused on using a strong female voice to

resonate more with the eeriness of All For One’s character. On the other side of the pendulum,

the secondary main hero, All Might, has a theme that is based on the original Superman

composed by John Williams because Hayashi-san didn’t find today’s superhero films to have

very good soundtracks. Hayashi-san became a composer after he did gymnastics for a number of

years but he didn’t feel the music that was played during training or performance it didn’t

motivate him to do better, so he took it upon himself to start composing his own music by

starting off small, then getting requests from friends, then sending out demo tracks to multiple

label records until composer, Hiroyuki Sawano, took him under his wing to compose his very

first soundtrack for a Japanese reality TV show Triangle alongside with Asami Tachibana.

The article was written by Nick Valdez, but the interview was conducted at the San Diego Comic

Con. The target audience is people who highly appreciate Hayashi-san’s work. The interview is

based on Logos because it was structured as a series of questions and responses with no bias.
I found the interview slightly useful because I wanted to know more about Hayashi-san’s

influences to create such amazing pieces, but it’s a shame I was not able to find the full interview.

The questions I found were very personalized towards the interviewer than it was the interview

being for the general audience. The questions also leave the general audience in the unknown

since you would really have to know more about Hayashi-san and the growth of his works.

Overall the interview was helpful, but very biased for the interviewer’s questions.