” As a YouTube commenter puts it: all of the feels.įinally: apparently they’re making some new Star Wars movies? Anyone heard anything about this? While the main title music is the most durable earworm in John Williams’ Star Wars score, the real high point is the lovely “ Force Theme.
Read a very good analysis of this piece on Film Music Notes.
It resolves strongly on the B-flat that starts the next phrase. The notes E-flat, C, and F are three of the four notes in F7. Let’s look at the fourth bar of the simple again in the new context of the F7 chord. This process of resolution is called a cadence, and it’s the core structural element in all of European-descended harmony. Speaking more broadly, you want the F7 chord to resolve to a B-flat chord. Specifically, you want A to resolve up to B-flat, and you want E-flat to resolve down to D. In Western tonal theory, the tritone is regarded as severely dissonant, and hearing it makes you urgently want it to resolve. The interval between A and E-flat is called a tritone. This will give you the notes F, A, C, and E-flat, which make F7, the dominant chord in B-flat.
Build a chord by jumping to every alternating scale tone. But there’s a big difference here: the underlying chord. The rest of the bar is sort of an inversion of the two notes in the first bar: a high B-flat and another F.īar four is same rhythm as the previous two bars, just with different pitches: E-flat, D, E-flat, then a long C that sets up the beginning of the next phrase. Many world cultures use perfect fifths, not just ours.īars two and three begin with a quick walk down the scale from E-flat to C on eighth note triplets, meaning there are three notes crammed into the space of two. The natural overtone series of B-flat contains an audible F, and reinforcing that overtone feels right and obvious. This interval, a perfect fifth, has a primal power to it. It’s a four-bar phrase, three of which are almost identical.īar one is the simplest: the first and fifth scale degrees of B-flat major, B-flat and F. Like all great pop hooks, this one is simple, but it isn’t dumb. The main title theme is as Germanic as it gets, a straightforward military march on the B-flat major scale. John Williams’ Star Wars score owes a lot to the heroic symphonies of his favorite nineteenth century German composers, from Beethoven through Wagner.
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