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The legendary John Williams once set the soundtrack for the billion-dollar franchise. Now a new generation of Hollywood composers that he inspired are giving the Force a whole new feel.
By Tim Greiving
What is the definition of “Star Wars music”? Maybe, to paraphrase Jimmy Carter, you just know it when you hear it.
Most people would answer by pointing to the man who invented and canonized this unique subgenre: John Williams, composer of nine Star Wars films from 1977 to 2019, the original themes for two spinoffs and a district of Disneyland. Williams established an orchestral, operatic musical language, rich with tuneful character themes and draped in classical tradition, a style now so deeply familiar and revered that it is, for many fans, holy scripture.
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But as this sprawling galaxy continues to expand, the artists behind every new adventure are questioning what the musical topography should — and can — be.
In the most recent Darwinian leap, a trailer for the second season of Andor was soundtracked with the countrified clang of electric guitar in Steve Earle’s Iraq War protest anthem, “The Revolution Starts Now.” An apt text for the show’s grown-up political ambitions, but a surprising, maybe even discordant, sound for the galaxy far, far away.
“Every living thing has to evolve as it goes forward, right?” says Steven Gizicki, who ran the music department at Lucasfilm in its last years under George Lucas, a time when they were developing such animated series as Star Wars Detours — an irreverent, and ultimately ill-fated, co-production with Robot Chicken, full of pop songs. For the animated Star Wars: Rebels, Gizicki says, “We had conversations about: What can this sound like? How far can we push it?”
“The obstacle was just reverence,” he continues. But “I think we who are reverent also sort of have blinders on because … ‘Jedi Rocks.’ Enough said.”
Gizicki is referring to the funky pop song that Lucas inserted into the 1997 “Special Edition” of Return of the Jedi, written by Jerry Hey and performed by a CGI band. “Jedi Rocks” is both an anomaly and a healthy reminder: Star Wars music, even under Lucas, was always more eclectic than just heroic brass fanfares and noble leitmotifs.
Even in the original Star Wars, Williams wrote galactic bebop for the alien “Cantina Band,” and for Jedi, he wrote bizarro baroque music for Jabba’s palace and the jungly celebration song “Yub Nub” for the Ewok choir. (At one point, Lucas considered hiring the band Toto to write a finale song.) For the prequel films, Williams stretched his score palette to include pagan choral cantatas, throat singing — and, yes, even electric guitar.
But as new composers were tasked with stepping into his Chewbacca-sized shoes, the prevailing “house” style Williams had so firmly established loomed like an enormous shadow. Most of the scorers for these satellite Star Wars projects grew up worshiping Williams, who inspired some of them to become composers themselves. They were also working for Kathleen Kennedy, an old friend of Williams, and for Disney — a modern corporation reluctant to take experimental risks.
John Powell, who scored 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, joked to composer Michael Giacchino (Rogue One) that the assignment was “like walking through a minefield in clown shoes.”
The first serious break from the prevailing Williams soundtrack came courtesy of Jon Favreau and The Mandalorian. For the inaugural Disney+ Star Wars series, Favreau wanted to take this familiar-but-new character into familiar-but-new musical territory. He found the perfect co-pilot in composer Ludwig Göransson, who had proved he could stir the beloved, nostalgic flavors of Bill Conti’s Rocky music into a fresh, hip-hoppy dish with his score for Creed.
“There’s only one John Williams, and no one’s going to make that music better than what he did,” says Göransson. “I think what I proved with Creed was how you can take a franchise and breathe new life into it while still honoring it.”
Göransson realized that “if you start with orchestra and strings or brass, you’re just doomed from the beginning” — so he began by messing around with bass recorders, electric guitar, sampled boot spurs and synths. He eventually found his way into a Williams-esque main theme for Mando, still with lots of elegant Star Wars-ian orchestration, but he infused his score with Old West, samurai and retro-futuristic elements for a satisfying mutation that was entirely his own.
Andor stretched the definition even further. Composer Nicholas Britell and showrunner Tony Gilroy took a conceptual approach, coding each of the story’s cultures with its own musical language; the planet Ferrix, for instance, was scored with metallurgical sounds. Britell wrote in-world funeral music for live musicians playing retrofitted instruments, and he also used analog synths to evoke the sense of a “retro past.” (Season two is co-scored by Brandon Roberts.)
In both cases, Göransson and Britell were working for creators with eccentric visions and creative autonomy. When Natalie Holt was asked to score the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, she had to satisfy both director Deborah Chow’s desire for a more modern sound and Kennedy’s decision to commission Williams for a main theme and insisting on more orchestral nostalgia.
“It was a lot of pressure,” admits Holt, who received helpful encouragement from Giacchino and Powell as she began her daunting task of scoring a beloved character — and writing a new Darth Vader theme. “I think Ludwig and Nicholas had an easier time,” she says, “because they were in a different area where there’s less expectation. Michael and John and I had more of that weight of responsibility, of dealing with beloved heritage characters who already had themes.”
When the show Loki came out, Holt’s socials filled with “unadulterated fan love” — but when Obi-Wan premiered, “it was a bit more mixed,” she laughs. “Obviously Marvel fans are hugely passionate, but they don’t come with quite the same level of, what’s the word … interrogation?”
There is reverence, but also more leeway, on the interactive side. Composer Gordy Haab has done impressive Grammy-winning work in a Williams accent on games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. But these games also feature a diverse variety of in-world music, including tunes by Mongolian metal band The Hu. The music team for Survivor cooked up a wild setlist — “Mos Eisley Cantina by way of Coachella,” as Electronic Arts president of music Steve Schnur put it — and enlisted actual Coachella acts, indie bands like Joywave and Altın Gün, to provide original jukebox tunes that characters (and players) can jam out to inside Pyloon’s Saloon.
“My audience is obviously much younger than the fans of the movies from the ’70s and the ’90s, in many cases,” says Douglas Reilly, vp at Lucasfilm Games. “They also expect the music to match what they are doing in a way that is very different than what we do on the linear side. I think our incremental approach has allowed us to explore that space, and to push those boundaries, but not do it in a way that breaks fan expectation around what this stuff sounds like overall — and it still feels like Star Wars music at the end of the day. … That balance of new and old is the alchemy that makes the fans feel like they’re having something authentic.”
So what, exactly, is Star Wars music?
“Jedi Rocks.” Enough said.
This story first appeared in the April 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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