Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope use of music is as uncanny and unmistakable as any out there in the film world. By this time, 28 years after the 1977 release of Episode IV: A New Hope, hardly anyone you meet on the street could not recognize the Imperial March, played during sequences that introduce and highlight the evil Darth Vader. As well, who could forget the theme that played during the opening crawling yellow text. However, the main difference between these iconic pieces of music of this film and our first two, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Aelita, is the tendency for it to appear exclusively alongside certain characters or narrative motifs. In this way, the music, striking as it is, is also partly subordinate to the image. Furthermore, there is likely more unidentified orchestral music that plays throughout the movie that is used simply as a subjective support for the scene. Take, for example, the subtle string instruments and flute trills that play during flights through space, or the heavy brass and percussion during dogfights with Imperial troops.
It seems fitting that this narrative or character-focused music was composed by a well-known film composer John Williams. George Lucas worked with Williams to break from typical pseudo-futuristic musical themes and draw on a pallette of classical symphonies, finally recording with the London Symphony Orchestra. Williams was responsible for all six Star Wars movie scores. The role of composer has grown since the induction of music into film in the 1920s, to the point of these composers often receiving independent recognition for their work - Academy Award for Best Score, for example). Williams is certainly a prime example, and Star Wars certainly demonstrates this. Some of Willams' other credits include Indiana Jones, Braveheart, The Towering Inferno, Jurassic Park, and Harry Potter.
Silent Running also demonstrates the tendency to mix background atmospheric music with one or two iconic pieces, and, like Star Wars, tends to use music in relation to characters and motifs. The main character, Freeman Lowell, has a piece, "Rejoice in the Sun" associated with his nature-loving manner that was specially composed for the feature by singer and songwriter Joan Baez (there is much attention given to this in the 'making-of' film). This is also the first notable use of popular music over orchestral, as opposed to Star Wars, 2001 and Aelita. Other instances of music used in this movie seem to sometimes relate to the environment, such as the shot zooming out from the window of the Valley Forge to show Lowell as a small dot in the vastness of space. On the whole, though, music is chosen based its anonymous and supportive qualities, such as the orchestral tension during the fight in the bio-dome between the main character and Cliff.
