On November 7, 8, 9, and 10, the Houston Symphony continues to explore John Williams’s iconic music with performances of the score to Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back live to picture. Many Houston Symphony musicians are also big Star Wars fans, including Phillip Freeman, the Houston Symphony’s bass trombonist. Here, Freeman shares how this soundtrack inspired a generation of musicians.
For countless fans, nostalgia is the lens through which we perceive Star Wars. With its simply drawn characters from a long time ago and far, far away, the original 1977 film was itself a throwback that shared more in common with adventure movies of the 1930s than contemporary science fiction. Equally anachronistic was John Williams’s score for large orchestra, written in a neo-Romantic style more akin to Korngold and Wagner than the experimental electronic music of other space films (Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey notwithstanding). After eight further installments over four decades, everyone from teens to retirees would have wistful Star Wars memories frozen in carbonite, but perhaps no generation would claim to feel that nostalgia more keenly than mine.
My first exposure to Star Wars was shortly after my third birthday during its original theatrical run. While I have few recollections of that viewing, my memories of seeing The Empire Strikes Back in the theater are crystal clear. The continuation of the unlikely hero’s journey in outer space—combined with the explosion of themed merchandise—would have a profound impact on not just me, but every friend I had. For the next several years, our playtime was spent in the universe we saw onscreen, and accompanying every leap, tumble, and lightsaber battle was the music of John Williams.
Williams cut his teeth in television, scoring shows throughout the 1960s. He had built an impressive resumé of movie soundtracks by the early ’70s, but it was later that decade with films like Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Superman, that his melodies would be cemented in America’s collective consciousness. The Empire Strikes Back built on Williams’s Oscar-winning Star Wars score, continuing his use of leitmotifs by adding themes for Yoda and Boba Fett, plus new music to underscore Han and Leia’s burgeoning romance. The most famous addition, the menacing “Imperial March,” provided the perfect musical embodiment of Darth Vader.
By the time I picked up an instrument, the original trilogy had long been completed, and my Star Wars toys were gone. I would spend much of my adolescence practicing and listening to records. One of the first orchestral recordings I owned, and my very first soundtrack, was the score to Empire. In my Walkman, that cassette provided the musical backdrop for hours of homework, hundreds of miles behind a lawnmower, and the squandering of thousands of quarters (mostly on Atari’s 3D vector-graphic Star Wars game) at the arcade. While those hours might not be considered critical listening, they did help shape my early idea of what an orchestra should sound like.
Those of us able to realize our youthful dreams of performing his soundtracks have learned the physical demands of Williams’s music are extraordinary. One of the most exhausting musical cues I have ever played was from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that one is several minutes shorter than the longest cue in Empire. But difficulty of performance is always mitigated by the quality of composition, and just as large numbers of fans consider Empire the best of the Star Wars movies, many musicians deem it the best-scored. Meeting its challenges, while enveloped by the sonic force only a large orchestra can generate, more than compensates for the arduousness of its execution.
Between his Hollywood fame and his TV presence as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, Williams became a legendary figure to the musicians my age; it would take both hands to count my music school classmates—particularly brass players—who claimed the music of Star Wars was the single reason they picked up an instrument. Yet for a man with more than 50 Oscar nominations (second only to Walt Disney), he is very approachable. I first met him at Tanglewood nearly 20 years ago. He was walking the grounds alone, his appearance suggesting he had just awoken from a nap on the lawn. Unhurried and remarkably gracious, he posed for pictures with anyone who asked, a demeanor that was just as evident in 2013 when he led our orchestra in a concert of his music with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Among all of the great themes representing a lifetime of translating moving pictures into sound, the highlights of the show, for me, remained the cues from the Star Wars films.
My generation is not the only one to claim ownership of the Star Wars universe: the fantasy world George Lucas and Williams created certainly captured the imaginations of those older than us, and generations after ours would inhabit that world as readily as we. But those of us who witnessed all three original films in the theater as children; who first learned about Luke’s paternity on the playground from kids lucky enough to see Empire before we did; who have yellowing photos of ourselves in rebel flight suit Underoos, unwrapping Boba Fett’s ship on Christmas morning; we may always feel that Star Wars most belongs to us.
—Phillip Freeman
Experience Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back—in Concert on November 7, 8, 9, and 10. Learn more and get tickets.
