What Motivated a Musicologist to Study the Motifs of Star Wars

Rex Features via AP Images

Even if you haven’t seen the Star Wars movies, you’ve almost certainly heard them. “The Imperial March.” The themes that follow Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia around. The iconic opening bars. The work of John Williams, they’ve been the object of parody and constant allusion.

That ubiquity prompted Frank Lehman, an assistant professor of music at Tufts University, to create a short catalog of all the leitmotifs — or basic, distinct musical themes that appear repeatedly — in the Star Wars movies, citing their appearances and even representing them in musical notation.

Mr. Lehman spoke to The Chronicle about the saga’s new film, The Last Jedi (he enjoyed it), bringing Star Wars into the classroom, and the terrible prequels. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity — and contains mild spoilers of the new film.

Q. You mentioned that you originally wanted to do your dissertation on Wagner but thought the ground was too well-trod. What was your dissertation topic?

A. It was specifically on harmony in film music and the depiction of wonderment and awe and the sublime in mostly mainstream movies.

Q. That seems to segue really nicely to Star Wars, where I can’t imagine more recognizable musical portrayals of the feeling of awe than some of the leitmotifs you point out.

A. Williams is a master at this. In some ways he’s still kind of an old-fashioned composer and uses some of the musical and stylistic conventions of the 19th century to evoke these feelings of wonderment and impossible, the impossibly impressive, both in very bombastic ways — full orchestra blasting very recognizable themes — but also some fairly subtle ways, using a theme that might easily slip your attention unless you’re truly concentrating on the music while watching a movie. I noticed some of that stuff even in The Last Jedi.

Q. One of the subtler themes in The Last Jedi I think you mentioned was a reprise of a theme associated with Emperor Palpatine.

A. I was pleased that Williams remembered this theme. He got it. It originated in Return of the Jedi, and then it was pretty pervasive through the prequels but made a reappearance during two scenes in The Last Jedi. And this is a theme that really hits the center of my research area. It’s densely chromatic. It doesn’t sort of obey the functional norms of most common practice music. It’s doing a lot of the same sort of eerie, malevolent, insinuating work that it did back in Return of the Jedi.

Q. This kind of attention seems to bring out value where it’s hard to see. And you can tell more about the film, about what’s intended.

A. I use this material as much as possible in the classroom, too. Sometimes my students want to talk about the latest film score, specifically Star Wars, without even knowing that this is kind of one of my minor research specialties. So then they find out I’m all too eager to really dig into the overt and the more understated elements of these scores with them.

I was teaching for a psychology course here at Tufts last year, and the topic was musical chills — how sometimes the right musical cue can give you chills and goose flesh and make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The example I used was the last scene in The Force Awakens, when Luke Skywalker is revealed after a long absence. The music’s building and sort of working overtime to generate this very specific effect, and I kind of picked apart some of the musical and stylistic choices that went into generating this feeling.

Q. I would imagine that sometimes that effect is achieved based on what the viewers remember and whether they remember.

A. It’s entirely based on a sort of play of memory and expectation. Here’s an example: In The Last Jedi there is a scene between — this is kind of spoiler.

Q. I’ve seen it, so you can tell me.

A. There’s a scene at long last between Luke and his sister Leia right at the very ending of the movie. And there at that very moment there’s a theme that we haven’t heard since 1983, when Return of the Jedi came out — a brother-and-sister theme — and I think that’s the kind of restraint that goes into withholding thematic payoff for so long that it really magnifies the effect when it does arrive.

Wagner knew this. It’s something that a lot of film composers know, and John Williams seems to be part of this tradition of saving stuff so that when it does arrive, it packs a wallop.

Q. Going back to the classroom, is one of the ideas here that you are able to sort of entice students who are musically inclined through this sort of popular medium, and then as soon as you got them on John Williams, now is the time to get them into Wagner?

A. That would be a great goal, and I think in a lot of cases it would go in that direction. Although I would also probably, as someone who has a little bit of skepticism about the canon and Western art music being the sort of pinnacle, I’d say, Why does it have to go from Williams to Wagner? Maybe it should go in the direction, to increase our appreciation of John Williams or Hans Zimmer. If it can broaden people’s musical appreciation in any direction, that’s great. It doesn’t have to be toward classical music or toward film music.

Q. What was your intent when you put together the guide to leitmotifs in the original movies, the prequels, and the sequels all together?

A. Part of it was for myself. Like, I have this kind of catalog to refer to and put all my thoughts down on paper once and for all. I’ve studied this stuff for so long.

Another element was I thought it was high time for there to be kind of a scholarly contribution where so much of the discussion online and in the nonacademic world is very active and vigorous but a little less systematic. People don’t have necessarily the same knowledge of the literature on leitmotifs and historical foundations.

My little, tiny corner of scholarship seems to be something that a lot of people are interested in, especially whenever these movies roll out. It’s a nice feeling as a scholar. So much of the time we’re sort of laboring in obscurity and you wonder if anyone’s actually reading our work or getting anything out of it. So why not bring a real scholarly rigor to the popular media?

Q. It seems like you know that the return of Star Wars under the Disney umbrella is really good news for you because with each movie, you’ll get to see which themes came back, which themes were created, which died.

A. It’s really exciting. It’s like a gift every year. It’s almost as though I were a Wagner scholar being back in the 1870s and awaiting the next entry into the Ring Cycle or something. Like in the case of Star Wars, you wait 10, 20 years, and then suddenly John Williams pops out a new trilogy worth of chords. It’s a gift really not only as a scholar but as a music lover or someone who is a fan of orchestral music in the 21st century.

Q. You wrote on Twitter you were a little bit upset about the dissonance in the leitmotif for a new character, Rose. Can you tell me the source of that? I went to the guide and clicked on it, and I did hear that little, tiny moment.

A. No one would accuse me of disrespecting John Williams. But as a music-theory professor and someone who teaches undergrads about this, I might actually have marked that down or said, Are you sure that you want to have this clash of different forms of the fourth scale degree? But after having written that, I’ve gotten used to that theme, and it now sounds to me kind of as an essential aspect of it rather than a little sore thumb that a music theorist might latch onto that most other people wouldn’t. So I guess I’ve softened my initial feeling.

Q. There is a noticeable clash when you hear it that doesn’t seem to jibe very much with that character, you know, very pure of heart.

A. And it’s not necessary.

Q. It sounds like you’re not really over this.

A. I do wish that he had harmonized it slightly differently.

Q. I consider myself a casual Star Wars fan, and I saw the movie. I found some of the Kylo Ren character choices a little confusing and hard to detect where they came from. And then I looked at your guide, and I listened to all the different leitmotifs that are associated with his character, and felt that they did a much better job reflecting his inner turmoil than the various details in the script did.

A. Well that is fascinating. I would go back maybe to the prequel trilogy — if that’s something you would deign to think about — but there John Williams was tasked with scoring a movie and hitting the emotional beats and these mythological bits of this tragic arc of the Darth Vader character, which, as written in the screenplay and as acted by Hayden Christensen, it wasn’t great. The film and the script were really cringeworthy in some places. Williams was sort of doing double duty. He wasn’t just normally scoring the film, but he’s compensating in a way for the shortcomings in the acting and the writing. I think he’s really sensitive to that kind of thing. If he can smooth over or address or compensate for some of the missing beats in a character’s development, that’s a pretty impressive feat.

It’s definitely the case in the prequels. Those work better as just listening to the soundtrack, which tells a nice coherent story about this Shakespearean downfall. It’s just embarrassing when you actually watch the films.

Q. I think we can probably agree that we’d both rather listen to the soundtrack.

Andy Thomason oversees breaking-news coverage. Send him a tip at andy.thomason@chronicle.com. And follow him on Twitter @arthomason.