February 7, 2019
Major Update to Lehman’s Star Wars Musical Theme Catalog
Music Theorist, Assistant Professor of Music, Tufts University, and John Williams Scholar Frank Lehman announces a huge new update to his Star Wars Musical Theme Catalog now up! Major updates include vastly improved layout, new sections on source music & concert arrangements, and music notation for incidental motifs.
Lehman’s constantly updated catalog, available for free download (link below), is a major source of reference, study, and amazement whether or not you’re a musical scholar, academic, popular culture archeologist, or just a fan of the scores or the movies.
In a January, 2018 article in the New Yorker magazine titled A Field Guide to the Musical Leitmotifs of “Star Wars,” Alex Ross wrote about Lehman’s exhaustive catalog, which he writes “refers, of course, to the eight scores that John Williams has composed for the STAR WARS cycle, with a ninth in the works. In decades past, it was fashionable for self-styled serious music types to look down on Williams, but the STAR WARS corpus has increasingly attracted scholarly scrutiny: Lehman’s catalogue will be published in “John Williams: Music for Films, Television, and the Concert Stage,” a volume [published last year] from the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini. This attention has come about not only because of the mythic weight that George Lucas’s space operas have acquired in the contemporary imagination; the music is also superbly crafted and rewards close analysis. Williams’s latest score is one the most compelling in his forty-year STAR WARS career: Rian Johnson’s film complicates and enriches the familiar template, and Williams responds with intricate, ambiguous variations on his canon of themes.”
View or download the updated Catalog here
