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John Williams’ Music Translates Well to Classical? Who Knew?

jimmiebjr | October 25, 2010 | 1 Reply

I get that web sites want to be hip and culturally edgy. I even get that the easiest way to do that is to hire a bunch of hipster writers yearning to hit it big with some ironically-titled book.

But at some point, one of those young hipsters will post something like this, which’ll make your readers wish you had hired a couple older writers to add some cultural depth.

First off, do watch the video. It’s a marvelous little re-interpretation of Williams’ Imperial March and it’s a nice catch by the author. However, two things grate at me a bit. The march wasn’t Vader’s theme but the Emperors. You know, because when you write an Imperial March, you write it for the guy in charge of the Empire, not his second-in-command.

It would also have made the post stronger if the writer had thrown in a couple nuggets about how Williams’ scores for the Star Wars movies were already very heavily influenced by classical composers. Much of the movie for the first of the original trilogy borrowed heavily from Gustav Holst’s The Planets (especially Mars, the Bringer of War and Neptune, the Mystic. Seriously, listen to the sound track then listen to those two pieces. You’ll hear the similarities almost immediately) and the Imperial March owed much to Gustav Mahler’s Symphonies Number 2 and 6 (especially the first movement of the 6th, which is a march in the same style). Then the author could have made some sort of comment about how music turns in cycles or some such.

But what do I know? I’m just an oldster without an ironic bone in my body.