“The cantina music is an anomaly, it sticks out entirely as an unrelated rib to the score. There’s a nice little story if you haven’t heard this, I’ll tell you briefly: When I looked at that scene there wasn’t any music in it and these little creatures were jumping up and down playing instruments and I didn’t have any idea what the sound should be. It could have been anything: electronic music, futuristic music, tribal music, whatever you like.

“And I said to George, “What do you think we should do?” And George said, “I don’t know” and sort of scratched his head. He said, “Well I have an idea. What if these little creatures on this planet way out someplace, came upon a rock and they lifted up the rock and underneath was sheet music from Benny Goodman’s great swing band of the 1930s on planet Earth? And they looked at this music and they kind of deciphered it, but they didn’t know quite how it should go, but they tried. And, uh, why don’t you try doing that? What would these space creatures, what would their imitation of Benny Goodman sound like?”

“So, I kind of giggled and I went to the piano and began writing the silliest little series of old-time swing band licks, kind of a little off and a little wrong and not quite matching. We recorded that and everyone seemed to love it. We didn’t have electronic instruments exactly in that period very much. They’re all little Trinidad steel drums and out- of-tuned kazoos and little reed instruments, you know. It was all done acoustically—it wasn’t an electronic preparation as it probably would have been done today.

“I think that may be also part of its success, because being acoustic it meant people had to blow the notes and make all the sounds, a little out of tune and a little behind there, a little ahead there: it had all the foibles of a not-very- good human performance.” - John Williams. (via)

“The opening of the film was visually so stunning, with that lettering that comes out and the spaceships and so on, that it was clear that that music had to kind of smack you right in the eye and do something very strong. It’s in my mind a very simple, very direct tune that jumps an octave in a very dramatic way, and has a triplet placed in it that has a kind of grab.

“I tried to construct something that again would have this idealistic, uplifting but military flare to it. And set it in brass instruments, which I love anyway, which I used to play as a student, as a youngster. And try to get it so it’s set in the most brilliant register of the trumpets, horns and trombones so that we’d have a blazingly brilliant fanfare at the opening of the piece. And contrast that with the second theme that was lyrical and romantic and adventurous also. And give it all a kind of ceremonial… it’s not a march but very nearly that. So you almost kind of want to [laughs] patch your feet to it or stand up and salute when you hear it—I mean there’s a little bit of that ceremonial aspect. More than a little I think.

“The response of the audience that you ask about is something that I certainly can’t explain. I wish I could explain that. But maybe the combination of the audio and the visual hitting people in the way that it does must speak to some collective memory—we talked about that before—that we don’t quite understand. Some memory of Buck Rogers or King Arthur or something earlier in the cultural salts of our brains, memories of lives lived in the past, I don’t know. But it has that kind of resonance—it resonates within us in some past hero’s life that we’ve all lived.

“Now we’re into a kind of Hindu idea, but I think somehow that’s what happens musically. That’s what in performance one tries to get with orchestras, and we talk about that at orchestral rehearsals: that it isn’t only the notes, it’s this reaching back into the past. As creatures we don’t know if we have a future, but we certainly share a great past. We remember it, in language and in pre-language, and that’s where music lives—it’s to this area in our souls that it can speak. - John Williams, on the Star Wars Theme. (via)