Showing posts with label Tractor Beam/Chasm Crossfire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tractor Beam/Chasm Crossfire. Show all posts

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring

I'm in the midst of listening to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.  At the very beginning of the Dance of the Youths section, there are sudden chords from the brass instruments on top of a foundation of rapid notes in the strings:

(notation found here)

This sounded vaguely familiar to me, and before too long I realized that John Williams used this same sort of effect in the Star Wars soundtrack, specifically while the main group of heroes are being chased around the Death Star by the stormtroopers in A New Hope.

I have the soundtrack for A New Hope, so I skipped around in it a bit before I found the sort of thing that Stravinsky did.  It might be in other places, but it's certainly in "Tractor Beam/Chasm Crossfire."  However, where Stravinsky places chords from the brass instruments above the string part, I think Williams has mostly just timpani parts.  There are other brass parts in Williams' piece, but they don't really have an equivalent in The Rite of Spring; it's just the rhythm of the string part and the suddenness of the brass chord/timpani that they have in common.