# Star wars leitmotifs complete by frank lehman



## ed buller (Dec 23, 2020)

Hi

This is wondourus and extensive. Surely rivals the RING for density !

https://franklehman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Star-Wars-Thematic-Catalogue.pdf

Best

e


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## Markrs (Dec 23, 2020)

ed buller said:


> Hi
> 
> This is wondourus and extensive. Surely rivals the RING for density !
> 
> ...


Wow, that is a great resource, thanks for the link!


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## Loïc D (Dec 23, 2020)

Fantastic resource !
BTW, I'm reading his book (quite hard, but very useful).

Thanks !


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## bryla (Dec 23, 2020)

Thanks for sharing! What has been your contribution to this guide?


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## Markrs (Dec 23, 2020)

Loïc D said:


> Fantastic resource !
> BTW, I'm reading his book (quite hard, but very useful).
> 
> Thanks !


That book is in my "to read list" if I ever get round to it. I haven't even read the Kindle sample of the book which I downloaded.


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## ed buller (Dec 23, 2020)

bryla said:


> Thanks for sharing! What has been your contribution to this guide?


Mine ?...nothing...I'm just a fan

best

e


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## bryla (Dec 23, 2020)

ed buller said:


> Mine ?...nothing...I'm just a fan
> 
> best
> 
> e


Okay  You are mentioned in the acknowledgements so I was just curious.


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## MauroPantin (Dec 23, 2020)

Frank is a great dude and a fantastic scholar. His leitmotif catalogue is an invaluable resource. I believe he also has another one for Indy.

His book is also great, truly an eye opener in terms of thinking harmony outside the box, or at least it was for me. All I got in college was traditional functional and non-functional (twelve-tone) harmony. Neo-riemannian theory I had never heard about and it just makes the entire film scoring landscape much more manageable IMO. It is more "painting with colors" than following a cadence (which also have a place in film music, of course). But unlike twelve-tone, the available colors don't seem to be different shades of gray... *insert S&M, 50 shades joke here*


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## ed buller (Dec 23, 2020)

MauroPantin said:


> Frank is a great dude and a fantastic scholar. His leitmotif catalogue is an invaluable resource. I believe he also has another one for Indy.
> 
> His book is also great, truly an eye opener in terms of thinking harmony outside the box, or at least it was for me. All I got in college was traditional functional and non-functional (twelve-tone) harmony. Neo-riemannian theory I had never heard about and it just makes the entire film scoring landscape much more manageable IMO. It is more "painting with colors" than following a cadence (which also have a place in film music, of course). But unlike twelve-tone, the available colors don't seem to be different shades of grey... *insert S&M, 50 shades joke here*



this is so true !

e


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## Ludwig (Dec 23, 2020)

I hadn't really looked at this since the summer and he's made a lot of changes since then! All for the better, IMHO. 

The new thing with the actual list of leitmotifs is the inclusion of many more themes as leitmotifs. And he doesn't explicitly say, but it seems that he does this by allowing a greater variety of things to be considered statements of the same theme.

The "Dark Side" leitmotifs from The Empire Strikes Back, for example, are kind of innocuous because they don't have the kind of distinctive shape of the other leitmotifs in that score. But they do return, if in highly varied guises, so he considers each a leitmotif.

I think this gets more to the core of Williams' compositional approach to themes generally in that the ideas that are more amorphous get treated with the most flexibility, yet still return and have associative meaning like his more recognizable leitmotifs do.

Another nice new feature in the catalog is the "Thematic Census" in Appendix 3, where he cites the number of times he hears each leitmotif in each film and tallies the total. This helps to understand things like the "Dark Side" themes I mentioned above, and if you actually went through the film, I think would see how flexible and varied each of those leitmotifs are.

Lehman also seems to be increasingly flexible on his leitmotif criteria, which I think is another good thing. In Appendix 1, he says a theme has to be stated in "more than three discrete cues". He's been more flexible on this since the beginning of his catalog, but it's nice to see a sort of intuitive overriding of that for new additions to the leitmotif list like "It's a Trap (B)" from Return of the Jedi. It's such a memorable little ditty that it's good to intuitively include it here even though, according to his own count, it appears only once.


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## Kent (Dec 23, 2020)

Ludwig said:


> I hadn't really looked at this since the summer and he's made a lot of changes since then! All for the better, IMHO.
> 
> The new thing with the actual list of leitmotifs is the inclusion of many more themes as leitmotifs. And he doesn't explicitly say, but it seems that he does this by allowing a greater variety of things to be considered statements of the same theme.
> 
> ...


Hey! Good to see you here!


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## YaniDee (Dec 23, 2020)

Talk about prolific..wow!


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## tebling (Dec 23, 2020)

This is brilliant. Any chance we'll see one for LotR / Hobbit?


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## ed buller (Dec 24, 2020)

tebling said:


> This is brilliant. Any chance we'll see one for LotR / Hobbit?


well there is doug's book. Which if you don't have you really should as it's a fantastic accomplishment.



best

e


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## ed buller (Dec 24, 2020)

Ludwig said:


> I hadn't really looked at this since the summer and he's made a lot of changes since then! All for the better, IMHO.
> 
> The new thing with the actual list of leitmotifs is the inclusion of many more themes as leitmotifs. And he doesn't explicitly say, but it seems that he does this by allowing a greater variety of things to be considered statements of the same theme.
> 
> ...


I'm curious. If you had to put a percentage on it , How much of the music we hear, in all the star wars films that JW wrote, has its origins in these leitmotifs ? 

best

e


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## ProfoundSilence (Dec 25, 2020)

ed buller said:


> I'm curious. If you had to put a percentage on it , How much of the music we hear, in all the star wars films that JW wrote, has its origins in these leitmotifs ?
> 
> best
> 
> e


Funny how when analysis of this feels like he's a genius for incorporating everything, but from his perspective he's just being a lazy bum and recycling everything for deadlines. 

Really though, from the listener we hear something as complicated but it's really just extremely efficient writing and it's such a hard paradigm shift


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## ed buller (Dec 25, 2020)

ProfoundSilence said:


> Funny how when analysis of this feels like he's a genius for incorporating everything, but from his perspective he's just being a lazy bum and recycling everything for deadlines.
> 
> Really though, from the listener we hear something as complicated but it's really just extremely efficient writing and it's such a hard paradigm shift


so true...It's a real eureka moment when you realize so much of writing music is basic craft. A skill set that lets you take something small and enlarge it. 

best

e


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## DennyB (Feb 28, 2021)

Film Music and Neo-Riemannian Theory


"Film Music and Neo-Riemannian Theory" published on by Oxford University Press.




www.oxfordhandbooks.com


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## jbuhler (Feb 28, 2021)

Frank has a great article on Williams’s action music in this volume:


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## Gil (Feb 28, 2021)

Hello,
An updated version (Feb 24, 2021) is available here:
https://franklehman.com/starwars/
Regards,
Gil.


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## South Thames (Feb 28, 2021)

I loved Williams' take on this, from Alex Ross's profile in the New York:

_The nine “Star Wars” scores make use of a vast library of leitmotifs—more than sixty of them, according to the scholar Frank Lehman. I showed Williams a copy of Lehman’s “Complete Catalogue of the Musical Themes of ‘Star Wars,’ ” which left him a bit nonplussed. (“Oh, wow,” he said, paging through it. “How exhausting.”) _


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## mr-sound (Mar 3, 2021)

Thanks for link!


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