‘I’m a musician standing on the shoulders of what people have done in other centuries. I spend a lot of time reading the Beethoven symphonies, with the greatest pleasure.’ So John Williams about himself, showcasing how much film music is linked to classical compositions.

It is not a new concept that composers are being influenced and inspired by what their contemporaries are doing and what their predecessors have successfully done. Also many classical composers use snippets of other composers’ works and build on their success, so, for example, wrote Brahms the Variations on a Theme of Paganini, op. 35, which are based on Paganini’s infamous “Caprice No. 24”.  But not always does a composer quote direct snippets, sometimes they are just inspired by another work.

Film music, being a genre, where time for producing suitable compositions is very limited, lends itself to regular ‘inspired moments’ and concepts being taken from other works that encapsulate the spirit the film composer is trying to achieve.

John Williams is often seen as the master of lush melodies, who is able to let bikes fly, depict force, and make dinosaurs walk the earth, but his success, as he said himself, is also due to the inspiration he takes from the masters before him.

Let us explore some of these ‘inspired moments’ of the Star Wars score below:

Everyone who has seen Star Wars knows this moment, Darth Vader is walking into the scene and one of Williams’ most recognisable themes is being played – the “Imperial March”.

What happens here is something that was coined by composer Richard Wagner, called Leitmotif. This means that the composer is giving certain people, objects, moments, etc special recognisable melodies that reoccur throughout the score. Putting it into other words for the above example, music and person becomes one thing. We do not need to see Darth Vader when we hear the “Imperial March” because we already link it to that person and assume he will show up in the scene when the music plays. At the same time, when we see Yoda explaining to Luke Skywalker how to control the force, we hear the horns in our head sounding the respective theme.

Another way John Williams bases his writings on those of the old masters is by employing similar orchestration techniques, i.e. how the different instruments play with each other.  One of the big inspirations here was Gustav Holst’s piece The Planets, which, as the title suggests, could not be more fitting for a franchise centring around the stratosphere and different moons.

One of the examples from The Planets could be how Williams uses the sweeping textures of “Neptune” in “Yoda’s Theme”.