Conor Power

‘Star Wars movies are basically silent movies, therefore the music has a very large role in carrying the story’ (George Lucas, 2002). For the music of Star Wars, John Williams employed the leitmotif as a structural, developmental and musico-dramatic device which is associated with characters, emotions, and situations on the screen. Leitmotifs, pioneered by Wagner in Der Ring des Nibelungen, differed from their representational predecessors through their developmental nature and the process by which they gradually accumulated association (Bribitzer-Stull, 2015). The influence of Wagner and his leitmotifs looms over film music, consequently the motif has been transmuted from the operatic stage to the film screen. This thesis investigates the most commonly recognized function of the leitmotif: its ability to generate associative meaning, and the significance of recall and nostalgia within that function. Motifs have their own unique referentiality within these films; yet externally, they also are important to the audience which has formed an attachment to them, years after the films were made. As a result of the rebirth of the Star Wars saga (with The Force Awakens (2015)), Williams’s motifs from the original movies now have an even greater sense of meaning than they once held.
This thesis examines the sentimental function of the leitmotif: how associativity is established, the relevance of Wagnerian and pre-Wagnerian precedents, and how Williams’s recent Star Wars scores might affect our understanding of these aspects. Williams’s new scores have yet to be thoroughly analysed, similarly the nostalgic function of leitmotifs remains a mystery. Ultimately, the aim is to answer the questions: How does musically created nostalgia influence the reading of an operatic/filmic plot, how is the reminiscence function of a leitmotif created and used, and what is the consequence on an overreliance of older thematic material?

A leitmotif is a representative compositional tool which aids in storytelling. This compositional device was adopted by Richard Wagner in The Ring which premiered in 1876. A century later the leitmotif is used by John Williams in his score for the first film in the Star Wars saga – A New Hope. Due to the scores extreme popularity, Williams would continue his musical relationship with the fantastical universe for the following thirty years.  This dissertation examines the use of the leitmotif by Williams with reference to Wagner.
Motifs are representative of character, place and emotion. Parallels of certain aspects of the mythic stories which they embody exist respectively between The Ring and Star Wars – can the same be said for leitmotifs written over a century apart? The employment and deployment of selected motifs will be studied in relation to how they change, how they are representative, and how they relate to each other.
Informed by works by both music and film scholars, this dissertation will examine the effectiveness of the motifs, how they belong to the work and how their meaning is acquired and subsequently used. In essence, how is a German-romantic compositional device employed in a galaxy far, far way?

Despite having literally and figuratively ridden into the sunset in 1989, Hollywood’s favourite adventuring archaeologist returned in 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. John Williams’s score continued to revel in the established styles and codes befitting of the series’ nostalgic references: 40s and 50s B-movies. In addition to resurrecting beloved themes, the composer penned new themes for characters who, in part, progressed the franchise’s traditional gender roles. This article investigates how Williams’s neoclassical score lingers in the rigid gender codes of Hollywood’s past, at the expense of forming innovative thematic identities less reflective of traditional archetypes.