Thinking About Music: Frank Lehman

• Thinking About Music Lecture Series •
THE PERFECT LUKE-ALIKE: MUSICAL RHYMES AND REFERENCES IN THE SKYWALKER SAGA

Frank Lehman, Associate Professor of Music Theory from Tufts University

Everyone loves spotting musical connections, especially in film music, where dense intertextuality abounds. But influence-spotting alone doesn’t equal musical insight. Everyone loves spotting musical connections, especially in film music, where dense intertextuality abounds. But influence-spotting alone doesn’t equal musical insight. Nowhere is this truer than in John Williams’s Star Wars scores, long subject to claims of borrowing from Stravinsky, Holst, Korngold, and others. This talk revisits such comparisons — often overstated and under-analyzed — while shifting focus to referentiality within and across the Skywalker Saga. Beyond the familiar topic of leitmotivic recurrence, I explore subtler echoes shaped by distinctively cinematic constraints and affordances. In doing so, I pressure simplistic ideas about similarity and rehabilitate George Lucas’s oft-mocked but musically fertile notion of the “rhyme.”

Estimated run time: 90 minutes
Location: CCM Baur Room
Admission: FREE

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