Music in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

In the midst of all the promotion, discussion, and excitement surrounding the premiere of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens in December 2015, there were several excellent essays/posts/comments on music and sound, in this film and in the series overall.

Frank Lehman analyzes the three (!) official trailers for the film: Musicology Now post. In addition to discussing themes and keys, he makes the general point that "In each preview, Williams’s recognizable melodies are offered as a kind of nostalgizing payoff, something awarded to the listener after a span of thematically ambiguous material."

Lehman also wrote a Mashable column called "7 Things we learned about Star Wars: The Force Awakens from its music." We won't tell you what those 7 things are, but they're almost all musical hints about individual characters. (Many others have speculated on different aspects of the themes and their presentation, especially Rey's.)

A relative newcomer that we can recommend to students and instructors is Film Music Notes, written and maintained by Mark Richards, a composer and music theorist (Toronto; Florida State University). He has a six-part series of posts on the new film.

And, of course, Stars Wars series composer John Williams has several interviews about The Force Awakens, a film that he says brought new energy and vitality to his writing. Here is one in the Los Angeles Times. And another on the BMI site: interview. And here are a couple youtube videos: Williams discusses the new film. Williams conducts the opening of the score.

Kristin Thompson on Gravity

We analyze Gravity (2013) as an action film in chapter 14. The focus is on the film's first act, up to the arrival of the debris field in which astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) gets caught. During this scene, we note that

music serves in the place of most of the sound effects. . . . Music is in essence performing the function of rendering [the] impossible sound [of the debris], relating how the experience feels rather than how it sounds. Underscoring feeling has, of course, long been a common function of film music, but [here the music mimics the] energy of the lethal objects much more than any subject’s inner emotional life. (HtM, second edition, 503)

For students who might want to explore the treatment of music and sound in Gravity further, we recommend a remarkable pair of blog posts by Kristin Thompson:  Gravity 1; Gravity 2. These may be called blog posts, but together they add up to an in-depth backstory and scholarly analysis of all the main aspects of the film, including sound and music.

Here are the headings:

Gravity 1: Two Characters Adrift in an Experimental Film

[Introduction]
An experimental blockbuster
Who needs psychological depth in a crisis?
Challenges and goals
Motifs and causal motivation
Character motivation, fortuitous events, and religion
It all worked

Gravity 2: Thinking Inside the Box

Screaming on the set
Follow the bouncing axis
The LED Light Box
Previs as environment
Staging without a stage
Iris in
Puppeteers and eyes
The sounds of silence
The space between

The section on "sounds of silence" in Gravity 2 consists largely of quotes, but taken together they offer a good summary of the director and composer's goals and methods.

(Note from DN: Jim Buhler actually wrote the new sections on action and war films in chapters 10, 12, and 14.)

Victor Herbert's The Only Girl in Lady Windermere's Fan

This is a postscript to yesterday's post, in which we made some comments on music in the third scene of act 1 in Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), with the historically informed performance of Martin Marks in the Treasures series. (The film provides the main case study in Chapter 4 of Hearing the Movies (second edition), 127-35.)

In a clever title-allusion, Marks quotes the march that closes the overture for Victor Herbert's The Only Girl, which was produced in New York in 1914 and might possibly have been familiar to some cinema-goers in 1925.

Very near the beginning of the film, Marks quotes the opening of the overture as well (see HtM, Table 4-4): a bright, up-tempo waltz that is a close imitation of the familiar Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss, jr.

Lady Windermere's Fan

Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), with the historically informed performance of Martin Marks in the Treasures series, provides the main case study in Chapter 4 of Hearing the Movies (second edition), 127-35.

The esteemed film scholar David Bordwell analyzes one of the scenes we discuss in detail: see his blog post (after the introductory paragraphs). The race-track scene (HtM, 132-33) is the third of four scenes in the film's first act. After some preliminaries, Mrs. Erlynne appears (at about 17:25) and is immediately the center of attention. The film's director, Ernst Lubitsch, uses an extended series of point-of-view shots in what Bordwell calls "a sequence built entirely around crisscrossed character looks."

To mimic musically the visual narration that puts all the attention on Mrs. Erlynne, Marks brings in a title-allusion: a quote from the overture to Victor Herbert's operetta, The Only Girl. As we note in Table 4-6 (HtM, 133), he plays the march that closes the movement.

Marks follows up with one of the film's important associative themes, Madeleine, which had been introduced in the previous scene. (See the melody in HtM, Figure 4-21). Madeleine is tied to Mrs. Erlynne, and specifically to her somewhat precarious position in society.

Shortly before 19:00, Marks switches to one of several gavottes he employs for "wit" or elegant comedy. The gavotte is an old-fashioned dance that gently mocks the upperclass characters throughout the first act. Bordwell shows details of the POV shots and angles for this sequence, during which three older women spy on Mrs. Erlynne and one of them observes a gray hair—at which moment, Marks of course changes to a piece called Le Secret (music in HtM, Figure 4-23).

Silent Film Sound and Music archive; cue sheets

According to a message from its director, Kendra Leonard, the  Silent Film Sound and Music Archive has received funding for a pianist to record 25 pieces from the repertoire of early ("silent") film. These are promised for September. Students without music reading (or sight-reading) skills will likely find these recordings helpful for a better understanding of the musical resources for early film. We will add an update to this post and an announcement when the audio becomes available.

The Archive overall is small but growing and already has several downloadable documents, including instruction books, sheet music, and a few cue sheets that are not available from other sources.

For more extensive and in-depth information on cue sheets and instructions from the era on how to use them, check our blog posts with the tag "cue sheet".

Hearing the Movies (2d edition) has an example of an early text-only cue list (p. 102) and one with musical incipits, typical of the 1920s (p. 117). The latter—in a series of "Thematic Music Cue Sheets"—were produced mainly for use in second-run independent theaters (that is, theaters that were not owned by a studio and that showed films after their initial presentation in the studio's own theaters; often these were the only movie theaters in small towns). A complete example, with its cover page, appears in this blog post from a "silent movie night" in Kittanning, PA, in 2011. The post itself is interesting and worth reading. We have reproduced just the graphics for the cue sheet below.

If you want to explore the topic of "photoplay music" further, an excellent, very accessible scholarly article is in a recent issue of the American Music Research Center Journal: Rodney Sauer, "Photoplay Music."

Words and Music in Sleepless in Seattle

In her note for the soundtrack CD, Nora Ephron, the director of Sleepless in Seattle, writes that "We had made a movie in which the words were as important as the pictures, and we wanted songs in which the words were as important as the music."

Song quotations can be used in a variety of ways, in both diegetic and nondiegetic contexts: as style topics, as references to time or place, to establish mood or pace—in other words, in all the same ways as original instrumental underscore. Beyond that, quotations involving a song's title or lyrics can make obvious references that are the verbal analogue to mickey-mousing—such as "In the Wee Small Hours of the Night" when Annie goes downstairs, unable to sleep beside a snoring Walter. Instrumental quotations, however, depend on a fund of cultural knowledge in viewers.

In this film, Ephron and her music director make sure that we always "get the connection": as she puts it using as an example "Bye Bye Blackbird," which eventually acquires considerable importance in the underscore as well: "'No one here can love or understand me' [Joe] Cocker sings, as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan sit alone in the moonlight 3000 miles apart from one another; and as we cut back and forth between them, the music becomes the link, almost as if the song is going through both their minds."

Cue list for Sleepless in Seattle

Sleepless in Seattle has been a staple in my film classes from the time of its VHS release in 1993. One scene in particular—the one we call "Second Botched Meeting" in HtM, chapter 1—has remained valuable as an introduction to detailed soundtrack construction in service of narrative. However, I never did not get around to making a cue sheet for the entire film. That omission has now been filled. A PDF file is available here: Sleepless in Seattle cue list. NOTE: This link has been updated as of 30 June 2023.

As typically happens, I found the musical component of the film more complex than I remembered it from viewing. Nora Ephron's early films are well-known for their song quotations, of course, but Sleepless in Seattle also contains four original songs by Marc Shaiman, only one of which is in the credits list: "A Wink and a Smile." The other three are instrumental underscore cues that are written in traditional song form, and developed in later cues. I did not have access to a studio cue sheet and so I gave those three my own labels: "Sam & Jonah," "Magic," and "Anticipation." "Anticipation" is the music in the first part of the "Second Botched Meeting" scene and "Magic" is the slower music for the second part.

Thanks to University of Chicago professor Berthold Hoeckner for noticing and asking about the first appearance of "Magic," early in the film as Annie (Meg Ryan's character) tries on her mother's wedding dress. That alone wouldn't have been enough; but "Magic" is developed at length in scenes starting with Annie's computer search (about 50:00), so that it clearly is an associative theme (leitmotif) by the time of the "Second Botched Meeting."

I learned two things from this: (1) the fact that "Magic" is developed as a tango supports re-hearing the original version as a slow, nostalgic waltz; (2) "Magic" does indeed work as we describe it—empathically mirroring Annie's deflation in mood—but it adds to the moment the idea of the magic of first meeting.