Music of Star Wars

• 1. Introduction

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  The music of Star Wars is, by one measure, the largest collection of recurring musical themes in the history of cinema. John Williams wrote somewhere between sixty and seventy leitmotifs for the nine saga films alone, and the franchise as a whole has accumulated over eighteen hours of music. In 2005, the American Film Institute asked more than five hundred artists, composers, musicians, critics, and historians to name the most memorable film score of all time. They chose the 1977 Star Wars soundtrack. What makes that extraordinary is not just the fame of the brass fanfare that opens every film. It is the structural ambition underneath it: a symphony orchestra deploying roughly seventeen distinct recurring themes per two-hour film, ninety percent of which is scored with original music. This documentary asks how that system was built, why it sounds the way it does, and what happens to a musical universe when it expands far beyond one composer's hands.

• 2. Lucas and the Orchestra

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  George Lucas originally wanted to use pre-existing orchestral and film music for Star Wars, in the same manner Stanley Kubrick had used tracked classical pieces for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Williams was brought in to consult and possibly handle source music, but Lucas's approach shifted. The reason Lucas wanted familiar orchestral sounds was specific: he wanted to allude to the fantasy element of the narrative rather than its science-fiction setting, and to ground an otherwise strange universe in recognizable, audience-accessible music. Lucas has maintained that much of the films' success relies not on advanced visual effects but on the direct emotional appeal of plot, characters, and music.

  The choice of the Late Romantic idiom was not accidental. Williams drew heavily from Richard Strauss and his contemporaries, a tradition that itself fed into the Golden Age Hollywood scores of Erich Korngold and Max Steiner. Lucas's selection of temporary music gave Williams a map. The first Star Wars score contains deliberate nods to Gustav Holst, William Walton, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky. Williams described the scored film as a "musical." Over the subsequent eight films, he relied less and less on such references, incorporating more strains of modernist orchestral writing with each progressive score, though occasional nods continue to appear. The score for Revenge of the Sith shows clear resemblances to Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings, Hans Zimmer's Gladiator, and Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

• 3. The Leitmotif Engine

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  A leitmotif is a recurring musical theme tied to a character, object, location, or idea. The technique was most famously associated with Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen and, in early film scoring, with Max Steiner. Williams made it the structural backbone of Star Wars. The Force Theme plays over one hundred times across the series. Williams introduces an average of seven new themes per episode, aiming for themes that are long-lined, distinct, and memorable. He also forges smaller motifs for individual episodes, which are generally less prominent and sometimes interchangeable.

  Williams does not always use his themes in a strictly narrative sense. Princess Leia's Theme is used for the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars, a scene with little connection to her character even though she is present. Yoda's Theme appears multiple times during the Cloud City sequences in The Empire Strikes Back. The concert piece Duel of the Fates, written for the final lightsaber duel in The Phantom Menace, was used over the entire final battle of that film, then repurposed for Anakin Skywalker's search for his mother in Attack of the Clones and for the unrelated duel between Yoda and Darth Sidious in Revenge of the Sith. Williams sometimes uses a theme purely because its mood fits a scene, regardless of narrative connection.

  One of the most deliberate thematic choices in the series concerns The Imperial March. Williams did not conceive of it until he was scoring The Empire Strikes Back, so it makes no appearance in the original Star Wars. He also subtly concealed the intervals of The Imperial March within Anakin's Theme in The Phantom Menace, implying the boy's dark future. The Rebel Fanfare, initially written as the fanfare for the Blockade Runner, eventually became the theme of the Millennium Falcon. By the time of The Empire Strikes Back, Williams had already rebranded Luke Skywalker's material as the "Star Wars Main Theme" and Old Ben's Theme as "The Force Theme."

• 4. The Scale of the Orchestra

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  The Empire Strikes Back required one hundred and four players, not including the conductor or synthesizer, because it called for a fourth flute, a third harp, five oboes overall, an added piccolo, and eight percussionists. Attack of the Clones required one hundred and ten players, and all three prequel scores used a fuller string section than the original trilogy. Revenge of the Sith also added a second set of timpani. By contrast, the original trilogy and sequel trilogy films called for as few as eighty-two players with small choral accompaniment in select cues.

  The non-orchestral instruments required across all nine scores are a catalogue of unusual sounds. The first film uses a Cretan Lyra and a cümbüş. Attack of the Clones introduces an electric guitar. Revenge of the Sith adds a toy piano. The Rise of Skywalker calls for kazoo, highland bagpipes, banjo, and didgeridoo. The percussion list across all nine films includes kendhang, sistrum, shekere, hyoshigi, boobams, chu-daiko drums, a washboard, and a goblet drum, alongside more standard instruments. A chorus ranges from twelve to one hundred and twenty singers depending on the film. Rogue One, the first anthology film, followed the prequel trilogy's instrumentation with a one hundred and ten-piece orchestra and a ninety-piece mixed choir. In live concert performances, forces were often reduced to as few as sixty players with a fifty-piece choral ensemble, or with the choir omitted altogether.

• 5. Diegetic Worlds Within Worlds

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  Diegetic music is music heard by the characters in the film itself, not just by the audience. The Star Wars franchise built an entire secondary musical world through these in-universe performances. The Cantina Band from the original film is scored for solo trumpet, three saxophones, clarinet, Fender Rhodes piano, steel drum, synthesizer, and various percussion including boobams and toms. The liner notes for the 1997 Special Edition describe its concept as imagining several creatures in a future century finding some 1930s Benny Goodman swing band music and attempting to interpret it.

  Return of the Jedi contains multiple diegetic pieces from Jabba the Hutt's court. "Lapti Nek" was written by Joseph Williams, John Williams' son, and translated into Huttese for the Max Rebo Band. "Jedi Rocks," composed by Jerry Hey, replaced it for the 1997 Special Edition. The Victory Song, performed at the end of the original film, also had its lyrics written by Joseph Williams. Joseph contributed further to The Phantom Menace with four separate pieces of Eastern-sounding street music for Mos Espa, featuring a player on Cretan Lyra and cümbüş and a solo wailing female vocal.

  The Force Awakens brought in Lin-Manuel Miranda and J. J. Abrams to write "Jabba Flow" and "Dobra Doompa" for Maz Kanata's castle. The Last Jedi's "Canto Bight" is written in the style of big-band jazz and briefly quotes Ary Barroso's "Aquarela do Brasil" as a reference to the 1985 Terry Gilliam film Brazil. It also includes a brief piano statement from John Williams' and Johnny Mercer's theme from The Long Goodbye. John Williams himself appears in a cameo role at the bar on Kijimi in The Rise of Skywalker, the location where the diegetic piece "Oma's Place" is performed.

• 6. Expanding the Universe

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  Kevin Kiner composed the score for the 2008 animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars and then scored all seven seasons of the television series that followed, finishing with the final season in 2020. His material for the film introduced a theme for Ahsoka Tano and a separate theme for Jabba the Hutt's uncle Ziro. A soundtrack album for the first six seasons was released in 2014 by Walt Disney Records; three separate albums covered the final season in 2020. Kiner also scored Star Wars Rebels across its full run from 2014 to 2018, The Bad Batch from 2021 to 2024, and returned for the live-action series Ahsoka in 2023, announced at Star Wars Celebration London in April of that year.

  For the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi in 2022, John Williams returned to write the main theme while Natalie Holt composed the rest of the score, making her the first woman to score a live-action Star Wars project. Ludwig Göransson, who won an Academy Award before composing The Mandalorian's score, handed the series to Joseph Shirley for its third season in 2023; Shirley had previously provided additional music for the first two seasons and used Göransson's themes to write The Book of Boba Fett. Nicholas Britell composed the score for Andor beginning in 2022. Michael Abels was revealed in February 2024 to be composing The Acolyte. Mick Giacchino scored Skeleton Crew, announced in November 2024; his father Michael Giacchino had previously scored Rogue One in 2016.

  For Solo, Williams wrote and recorded a concert arrangement for a new Han Solo theme. In the process he developed two separate ideas conveying different aspects of the character, and he went as far as to spot the film himself to identify where each motif should appear. All other leitmotifs and material in Solo were written by the film's main composer, John Powell. Williams also composed the theme music for the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge parks at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, a project that won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition in 2020 for its Symphonic Suite.