John Williams to Non-Williams

John Williams may have dominion over the Star Wars film scores with eighteen hours of music across nine films, but the mantle of responsibility for the Star Wars musical canon en masse has been undertaken by scores of many different composers, especially video game composers. Scholars of John Williams’s music such as Frank Lehman have analyzed Williams’s nine film scores, but there has been little research into the more than 100 Star Wars video game scores, which raises the question: how has Star Wars music developed without the guidance of its progenitor John Williams? Frank Lehman’s “Complete Catalogue of the Themes of Star Wars: A Guide to John Williams’s Musical Universe”1 cataloged the themes, motifs, source music, and thematic relationships of the nine films and proved musicologically insightful as well as incredibly useful when one seeks an understanding of the intricacies of Williams’s Star Wars film scores. Lehman’s research provides an ideal foundation for the ludomusicological inquisition of the hundred plus Star Wars game scores. The interactive nature of gaming mandates that the scores take player input into consideration leading to many unique methods of musical deployment that have changed from game to game. This research preludes the creation of a Star Wars sound and music anthology, similar to the Norton Anthology of Western Music, where ludomusicality found within scores from video games in the Star Wars universe are analyzed, cataloged, and explored. Each game/series would get its own unique catalog within the greater anthology consisting of a collection of analyses of the motifs, themes, and anything else of particular ludomusical interest. This poster presents a preliminary analysis of the deployment of motifs in the video games Star Wars Chess (1993) and Star Wars: X-Wing (1993), the first steps taken toward cataloging these video game scores. This proposed catalog will include analyses of ludomusicality within the Star Wars video game scores, showing how the player and computer interact to customize the listening experience of original and borrowed themes from the Star Wars movies. Combining Lehman’s method of cataloging with methods of ludomusicological analysis2 will be useful for understanding the plethora of themes, motifs, source music, thematic relationships, lyrics, diegetic music, and ludomusical methods found within the scores of each game. To present an example of this combination of analyses, Lehman’s motifs (denoted by quotation marks) are presented in combination with original analyses and transcription by the author, demonstrating the overlap between the musical material of the Star Wars movies and video games. This series of catalogs would be an excellent resource for all future Star Wars ludomusicological research as well as further expanding the literature in the field.