There's so much to learn from JW, one thing that stood out to me was measures 4-6... The initial 'souring' of the music here is saying everything: the peril of the rebels, the threat of the badguys, and Holdo making a decision. But when you transcribe it, it's incredible how JW gets this effect from two simple techniques. He has the clash of the G Hungarian minor scale challenging the G major above, which is spelled out with great economy, almost the fewest notes you could use to identify the scale. And, he has the perfectly placed 3/2 bar whose extra beat draws out the tension.... and... that's all! I find one of the major lessons of these transcriptions is that nobody can write like JW until they build up a giant storehouse of devices like he has, and also the craft to deploy them in very nuanced and exact ways. It's like an author who has a huge vocabulary AND can find the exact word he wants, not a synonym. The first 1:40 of the music is all these different ways of 'saying' that the good guys are in danger but there's so much nuance between how he scores the different scenes. It's all too easy to imagine this scene rescored with a "danger ostinato" repeating and building up, not changing for each story thread. JW eventually does unify the story threads with the "Desperation Motif" when the editing steps up the pace. It's very similar to the "Battle of the Heroes" cue where he starts by scoring the story threads differently and eventually, when the two duels cut back and forth faster he sticks with one idea over both threads. He has picked the perfect place to start it here at 1:39 on Holdo's closeup. I observe two more things about this part of the cue. The very first time he plays the Desperation melody, the orchestration is very simple and the melody stands out very clearly. He wants to make sure people get it and recognize when it repeats. The other interesting thing about this melody is the 3/2 signature which again like "Battle of the Heroes" seems to give a tragic feeling to the music.
It sounds like the last triplet motif from the 4th bar till the end was cut in the movie version. It sounds really weird when someone (like me) has been used to hearing the soundtrack version a lot Great video, as always!
Great work David! re bar 28 clusters and surrounding material - another explanation: The bottom treble stave cluster could be derived from G Hungarian Minor (so G harmonic minor with a #4) and the top could be an untransposed (T0) octatonic cluster (C Db Eb E F# G A Bb). The bottom chord is also derived from the same untransposed octatonic scale (C Db Eb E) and the Bb is also part of that as well and in the preceding bars the flute and viola A and E is also part of the same octatonic. So all octatonic derived but with an additional Hungarian minor cluster based on the G from octatonic T0.
I can't speak for him but I'd be surprised if he could do those cues. The leaked handwritten scores for LAST CRUSADE that are floating around out there are missing a few crucial cues. "Escape from Venice" and "Belly" are two of the most notable. And "On the Tank" was copied badly so only the top half of each page made it through, so all we have are the woodwind section for that one.
