The cassette soundtrack to
The Empire Strikes Back was my first musical purchase way back in 1981.
I listened to it until the tape wore out, by which time I had two CDs of the
score, each one claiming to be more or less “complete” (yet they never quite
have all the music, do they?). John Williams’ scores not only lead me to his
other film music, but to classical music itself, becoming a ‘gateway drug’ to
Orff, Holst, Mussorgsky, and within a decade, to the entire canon of classical
musical from Bach to Bartok. Williams’ music offered me the greatest musical
appreciation course of all, since he showed me—and a million others, I
imagine—how orchestral themes and colors ‘painted’ the various moods and
emotions of a film. After watching the film umpteen times, I could ‘see’ how
each piece of music conveyed these ideas to the listener, and before long, I could
‘read’ other music along the same lines, even when there was no story attached.
While many composers argue that there is a strict difference between absolute
and programmatic music, a keen listener can find the program in anything—even a
twenty-second piano prelude by Chopin. So even though I went on to hundreds of
more established composers, I always returned to John Williams’ music,
particularly when a new film came out boasting his signature themes and
orchestration. I still remember the thrill of running to the Tower Records on
Wabash Avenue in Downtown Chicago the day The Phantom Menace soundtrack
was released (you won’t find that place anymore). New Star Wars music—that
was as exciting as a lost symphony by Beethoven or Sibelius! That score didn’t
disappoint even if the film did, and his music for the Prequels almost (almost)
made those clunky films worth watching. Hell, at least those three films gave
us The Duel of the Fates and Anakin’s Theme!
