Frank Lehman, associate professor of music at Tufts University, presents "The Perfect Luke-Alike: Musical Rhymes and References in the Skywalker Saga," in the final installment of the 2024-25 THEME Lecture Series.
Abstract
"The Perfect Luke-Alike: Musical Rhymes and References in the Skywalker Saga”
Everyone likes the feeling when they discover a musical similarity, a connection between one piece and another. But as fun as the game of spot-the-influence can be, it does not constitute musical insight. That is particularly true of film music, where some of today’s most densely referential and intertextually omnivorous compositions reside. A perennial issue in the discourse surrounding John Williams’s music for the Star Wars series is its purported indebtedness to other works. Stravinsky, Holst, Korngold—the list of cited influences is long, and the motivations for pointing them out varied. In this presentation, I’ll approach the nature of influence in the Skywalker Saga from two angles. First, external inspirations such as the Rite of Spring, The Planets, and Kings Row, whose ties to the series are somehow both overstressed and under-analyzed by many commentators. The second focus is on references strictly within the Saga’s enclosed musical universe; not just literal thematic recurrences, which are of course rife, but also subtler echoes and processes, many facilitated by uniquely cinematic demands and constraints on the composer. Along the way, I’ll dispel some facile misconceptions about compositional similarity and offer a musical rehabilitation of George Lucas’s unfairly maligned notion of the “rhyme.”
Biography
Frank Lehman is an Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He is the author of Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema with Oxford University, and the editor of Film Music Analysis: Studying the Score. In addition to publications in traditional academic venues, Frank is active in the public musicology community and has seen his work featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and many (perhaps too many) podcasts. He has recently completed The Skywalker Symphonies: Musical Storytelling in Star Wars, contracted with OUP and forthcoming soon, and is soon to commence work on the Cambridge Companion to John Williams.