Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens
Composer: oh, who do you think, John Williams, of course!
So, the bad news is that I have suddenly come down with a cold and feel
absolutely blinking awful. The good news is that this week I finally saw Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, a film
I can happily admit to loving with a fiery passion. In fact, I saw it twice,
and musically speaking, that was an interesting experience in and of
itself. Spoilers ahead: for crying
out loud, why are you reading this if you haven’t seen the film already? Do you
know how much time I have spent avoiding on the internet since December 17th?
At my first viewing, I failed to notice a single new theme (and there
are three big significant ones for Rey, Kylo Ren and the Alliance, as well as
various smaller others). All I noticed, musically, was the old themes: The
Luke/ main title theme; the ‘triumph’ chords that so often punctuate action in
the original trilogy; the Force theme; Leia’s theme, and the Leia/Han love
theme. Each one jumped out at me and my ears greeted it like a long-lost,
much-loved friend, starting with the main title (grin the size of a slice of
watermelon on my face), then the triumph chords as we see the Millenium Falcon
for the first time (hello, Millenium Falcon!), the Force theme as Han remembers
Luke, the Leia theme as we see the lovely General for the first time,
transforming into the Han/Leia version as they talk to each other; even a quick
blast of Darth Vadar’s Imperial March as we see the remains of his ruined mask on
Kylo Ren’s little altar. Oh, my lovelies, how I’ve missed you! But new themes
utterly passed me by: I was aware of the recurrence of these themes throughout
but otherwise, was just too busy watching the film.
Second time round, out they started popping, as well as other things,
such as the first time we get the Luke/ main title theme in the score is when
Finn makes the decision that effectively sets the narrative rolling and tells
Poe Dameron that he is going to help him escape – some of Luke’s agency in that
moment seems to be passed on to Finn, a fascinating character who has had
rather less attention as the first major black character of the franchise (do
not get me started on Lando Calrissian) than its first female hero, Rey. However,
I am going to focus in particular on Rey and Kylo Ren or we’ll be here forever.
Kylo Ren’s theme
Kylo Ren has a classic ‘label’ theme of the type that Adorno and Eisler
detested, seeing it as the musical lackey announcing the person we can all very
well see is there. But the general stasis of this five note motif which we
repeatedly hear in basically identical form throughout the film actually does quite
a lot of work. It’s short and unchanging – this unchanging nature reflects his
rigidity, his desire to hold to his path and I could make a possibly slightly
fanciful argument about this being how he hears himself, the aural image of
what he wants to be, sternly foreboding, a musical anchor that pulls him back
to the dark side from that oh so tempting path of light. The motif is angular
and chromatic – sorry, my notation software is up the spout, so I shall have to
do it by description. Five notes: G, F sharp, C , E flat, G again, an octave
down from where it started. So, we start with a falling minor second (G to F
sharp), which then falls to the tritone
(F sharp to C) symbol of musical evil, the diablous in musica – no villain is a proper villain without a nice
tritone in his theme; then rising by a minor third (C to E flat) before
dropping down a minor sixth (E flat to C). It is almost entirely descending and
therefore a theme for the dark side: heroic themes, by contrast, tend to be
primarily ascending, constantly pushing upwards towards ever higher goals (e.g.
the Luke/ main title theme and indeed the Force theme: nice bit of analysis
here that demonstrates the idea well: http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/john-williams-themes-part-1-the-force-theme/). All the intervals in KR’s theme are either minor or chromatic – again,
culturally coded towards the negative end of the spectrum, compared to the
major key and unchromatic Main
title and Force themes.
Rey’s theme
Rey, by contrast, has a very long theme made up of several motifs; the
opening rapid figure is derived from the (as you will learn!) all-important
last three notes of the melody of the main motif. That main motif (6 notes in
all) is the opening of a long winding melody that meanders all over the place,
shifting and slipping into different keys, the melody becoming submerged in the
textures and then re-emerging again: note already, therefore, the extreme
contrast to the rigid brevity of Kylo Ren’s theme. Rey is unfixed, unformed at
this point: unawakened!
Rey’s motif appears in so many different keys that I’m going to give it
here in the version that best makes my point about its relationship with Kylo
Ren’s. This gives us a theme that goes: C, E flat, G, C, F, G . [C up to E
flat, down to G, back up to C, then up again to F and G]. So: the last three notes of KR’s theme are the first three of Rey’s; where his sinks down to the low G at the end, her’s
rises up to the high one; where his
motif starts with a chromatic fall from G to F sharp that in turn produces
the tritone, her’s ends with the rising, non-chromatic F natural to G.
There is both a reversal of the order of phrases and of the direction of the
two notes at the start of KR’s and the end of Rey’s, which means that where his
theme has only one ascending interval, her’s has only one descending one. These
motifs are so astoundingly mirrored around each other that I do not believe for
a second that its just one of those coincidences, because our John is
altogether rather too clever for that.
The lack of chromaticism and the primarily ascending contour give Rey’s
motif much more potential as a
heroic signifier. However, at the start of the film, it just ain’t heroic: its
actually pretty softy-sweetie-girlie, in terms of its Hollywood cultural
musical coding. Lots of woodwind and strings, nice overall sense of up-and-back
down phrase shaping in the cue as a whole, smooth, legato feel – all things
that good ol’ Philip Tagg (where would I be without him) identified as
female coded musical characteristics in his 1987 study, which you can find here
if you have never read it: http://tagg.org/articles/xpdfs/tvanthro.pdf
But her motif has potential to be heroic: its has the kind of open
intervals around tonic and dominant (the C and G) that are commonly found in
Williams’ hero themes; it is ascending; and it is strongly linked (as I am not
the first to notice) to the force theme, in that it has identical harmonic movement
and several similar intervals (he actually juxtaposes them in the final minute
of the end credits cue, just in case you hadn’t noticed, something that brought
another watermelon grin to my face as I stood by the exit door to let the poor
ushers clean the cinema! Having working in one, I am acutely aware that people
who stay to the end of the credits are pretty annoying for the ushers). The
identical harmonic movement means that in the more extended Rey theme (going
beyond her first six notes into the second part of the theme) both this and the
Force theme move from a minor tonic chord to the major subdominant (so here,
from C minor to F major). Technically, in C minor, the subdominant should be F
minor, so the brightening of the shift into a major chord gives it a sense of
hope (A New Hope! The Force Awakens! Woohoo!) that again pushes this toward the
heroic.
And that latent heroism and the force awakening in Rey gets its musical
realization in the final battle scene between her and KR, which you can hear
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnvaA984uIc
I will confess that I was getting mightly frustrated by the end of the
film: we got the Force theme with the heroic bras (solo horn) mostly when
people were talking about Luke -
when it was used for Rey, back came the strings and woodwinds; and her own motif also kept on coming
back on strings and woodwind. For crying out loud, John (I was thinking) when
are you going to let her be a hero? And then, hurrah, in this cue, we finally
get both the Force theme and her motif transformed into a properly brass-led
heroism as she comes into her own and takes down KR. I may have cried a little
at the sound of massed brass around 2.40 in the above clip.
And so, to the crazy speculation. Why do Rey and KR essentially share a (mirrored)
theme? Why is the very first thing Leia does when she meets Rey is to clasp her
in a fierce embrace? Could they all be – gasp – related??? I seriously do not
know how I am going to get through a year and nine months without knowing the
answers to these questions.
