Mason Taylor
4th Hour
7 November 2017
Dual Literature
Gustav Holst vs. John Williams
Gustav Holst’s The Planets suite heavily influenced the soundtracks for John Williams’s Star Wars movies. This is shown through each production’s use of rhythm, tone, and orchestration.
Gustav Holst - creator of famed suite, The Planets - is widely considered one of the best-loved 20th-century English composers, and is actually more serious of a composer than one might assume from listening to The Planets. In his life before The Planets, he composed works such as First Suite in E-flat for Military Band, St Paul's Suite, and In the Bleak Midwinter. Holst wrote The Planets suite during 1914-1916. This suite was a cultural shift in the world of classical music …show more content…
Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, originally released in 1977 simply as Star Wars, was equipped with two of the most recognizable themes in film: The Imperial Attack (the main title theme), and The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s theme). The main title theme was constructed by Williams to be memorable and, like other memorable songs, the theme shares certain characteristics of the top 100. It starts with the primary hook. This is used to put audiences on the edges of their seats by using two main factors: melodic leaps and coming together. The melodic leaps use a series of descending notes with a high note hit in order to hook the audience repeatedly and form an easily hummed melody. The coming together factor is used when bringing each of the instruments back in to accentuate the theme of unity and coming back …show more content…
One of the most well-known themes in Star Wars is The Imperial March. “Frederic Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2, nicknamed the Funeral March, is where Williams found Vader’s melody. To give the Imperial Death March some momentum, Williams turned to a different work about outer space, Gustav Holst’s "The Planets," specifically "Mars, the Bringer of War."” (Nowacki, Shobe) These two works have evident parallels in their rhythms; for example, both use an ostinato pattern for an underlying bass line that is sometimes used as a counter-melody. The rhythm for Mars is , while the rhythm for the main title theme of Star Wars is . These rhythms are very similar in the way of using triplets and they both use this rhythm as an underlying bass-line to the main brass fanfare of the
4th Hour
7 November 2017
Dual Literature
Gustav Holst vs. John Williams
Gustav Holst’s The Planets suite heavily influenced the soundtracks for John Williams’s Star Wars movies. This is shown through each production’s use of rhythm, tone, and orchestration.
Gustav Holst - creator of famed suite, The Planets - is widely considered one of the best-loved 20th-century English composers, and is actually more serious of a composer than one might assume from listening to The Planets. In his life before The Planets, he composed works such as First Suite in E-flat for Military Band, St Paul's Suite, and In the Bleak Midwinter. Holst wrote The Planets suite during 1914-1916. This suite was a cultural shift in the world of classical music …show more content…
Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, originally released in 1977 simply as Star Wars, was equipped with two of the most recognizable themes in film: The Imperial Attack (the main title theme), and The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s theme). The main title theme was constructed by Williams to be memorable and, like other memorable songs, the theme shares certain characteristics of the top 100. It starts with the primary hook. This is used to put audiences on the edges of their seats by using two main factors: melodic leaps and coming together. The melodic leaps use a series of descending notes with a high note hit in order to hook the audience repeatedly and form an easily hummed melody. The coming together factor is used when bringing each of the instruments back in to accentuate the theme of unity and coming back …show more content…
One of the most well-known themes in Star Wars is The Imperial March. “Frederic Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2, nicknamed the Funeral March, is where Williams found Vader’s melody. To give the Imperial Death March some momentum, Williams turned to a different work about outer space, Gustav Holst’s "The Planets," specifically "Mars, the Bringer of War."” (Nowacki, Shobe) These two works have evident parallels in their rhythms; for example, both use an ostinato pattern for an underlying bass line that is sometimes used as a counter-melody. The rhythm for Mars is , while the rhythm for the main title theme of Star Wars is . These rhythms are very similar in the way of using triplets and they both use this rhythm as an underlying bass-line to the main brass fanfare of the