Star Wars and Modernism
film by John Powers, 2010
In March of 2010, sculptor John Powers approached me to score a film he was working on. The film, titled Star Wars and Modernism: An Artist Commentary, consists of a split-screen presentation of the 1977 George Lucas film Star Wars: A New Hope alongside an expansive art-history lecture given by Powers, complete with slides that appear underneath the film as it unfolds. The lecture re-interprets (or deliberately misinterprets) the film Star Wars as a complex, intertextual, deeply metaphorical meditation on postwar modernism in art and architecture, the Nixon administration’s “modernist” tendencies, and Lucas’ Oedipal relationship with film director Stanley Kubrick. Equating protagonist Luke Skywalker with earth artist Robert Smithson, the “light-saber” weapon with the sculptures of Dan Flavin, and the “Death Star” with the disastrous Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Powers weaves a grand cinematic conspiracy theory that recasts George Lucas’ film not as pop-culture Joseph Campbell but as a deep political and artistic allegory about postwar America.
Dubbed “fan nonfiction” by Powers, I was asked to provide music that was equally oblique and conspiratorial as a fitting accompaniment to his voiceover. I created a score for a mixed ensemble of piano, Farfisa electric organ, ARP 2600 synthesizer, and marimba that used hidden Markov modeling to algorithmically hybridize the film’s orchestral score, written and conducted by John Williams, with the 1970’s keyboard works of American minimalist composer Philip Glass. The resulting music contains the neo-Romantic harmonies and leitmotif melodies of Williams re-orchestrated using the pulsating rhythms and contrary-motion dominated counterpoint and keyboard performance practice of Glass. The score is presented, like the artist commentary, as historical fiction: it imagines a long-lost musical collaboration between Williams and Glass when they were both students at the Juilliard School in the late 1950s.
The project was funded with a production grant from Hyperallergic, produced in collaboration with the Public School and the Philoctetes Center in New York.
