Episode VII's Music - What do you want to hear?

I always figured that it was the sound of the opera playing in the background. I never knew it was Plagueis' theme.

 

I actually don't know if it is actually his theme, but I think it would make a great theme for him!

 

It would be cool if it was, though.

 

^This
I want the majority of the score to be dedicated to new material. In other words, I don't want the score to trip over itself doing callbacks to the previous themes and set pieces of the OT. If I wanted to listen to "Han and the Princess" or "The Asteroid Field", I'd listen to the original versions. I'm fine with subtle reworkings of previous material however.

KOTCS's score was also missing an important key element; emotion. The action cues were well constructed but they didn't really sell the emotional high and low points of the scene. To be fair, Williams wasn't given any thing really meaty to write for and he'sproven that he still does emotion very well, as proven by War Horse. I just hope that he'll tap into that for TFA.

New instrumental colors are a must too. They expand the series' musical palette and help give each score its own identity. KOTCS lacked that too.

And finally, NO SPOILERS IN THE TRACK TITLES. I don't want another "Qui-Gon's Noble End" scenario.

 

YES! I always hate when the tracklist is released, and it basically tells the story title by title; "Immolation scene", and all that...

I like your comment about the musical colors/identity thing. I said before (elsewhere I think) that the PT seemed to make heavy use of a full choir in the score. I thought some other kind of featured instrumentation, like different kinds of pipes, piano, or other key instruments (like the one used for Harry Potter's theme) or even a soloist voice in parts...That could help give the ST score a different feel that would give the trilogy its own emotional characteristic...

 

If John Williams isn't around for future episodes (hopefull he is), one compose who I think would be awesome is Harry Gregson-Williams. He did the score for Narnia, which is pretty much amazing.

 

I was just listening to an old episode of the Full of Sith podcast with Steve Sansweet as a guest - he was working at LFL at the time and said that whole thing was a total communications error. They had decided to go with another name for that track because of the spoiler but somehow the communications and content team at LFL didn't see the final, final version of the soundtrack that was going to be released, which obviously had Qui-Gon's Noble End on it. If they had, it would have been changed. I think they're VERY aware of that kind of stuff - especially given how secretive they've been in general with TFA - and it's unlikely to happen again.

 

I wanna hear the "Inception BRRRRRRRAAAAAWWWWRWRRRMRMRMMRMRMMMMM!!!"

 

80's MIDI drum loops

 

IJ4 was a disappointing soundtrack (though I liked the theme of the crystal) but Tintin was John Williams at his best so he hasn't lost it. Given that Star Wars has a lot more themes that repeat than Indy ever did I don't see how it could be truly bad. As long as it's better than AOTC I'll be fine with it.

I don't think it was the absence of traditional themes that made the PT less powerful than the OT it was more the way the themes didn't really build on each other. Most of the musical cues were references to scenes that hadn't happened yet rather than building off ones which had. If anything I think the prequels were too referential. While some of them worked (Anakin's innocent theme turning into the Imperial March was very clever) a lot of them rely on knowledge of the OT to work. The imperial march at the end of AOTC for example was awesome but again, summoning future references rather than building off existing ones. A lot of this was inherent to the whole concept of a PT. I don't think the ST will have quite the same problem.