The attentive among you will have already noticed that John Williams score strongly hints that Supreme Leader Snoke is Darth Plageius. Note the identical long male voice choir drones in Snoke from the soundtrack to The Force Awakens and The Tragedy of Darth Plageius The Wise from Revenge of the Sith.
Williams, the archduke of film scores, is fond of tying characters and themes to particular musical leitmotifs – and then reusing and varying them in different contexts to express different moods and ideas.
Listen here: The Tragedy of Darth Plageius The Wise
Listen here: Snoke
But are there other clues hidden in the soundtrack?
In The Jedi Steps and Finale, Luke makes his reappearance. Early film rumours suggested that Luke had become too powerful, and was a danger to himself and those around him – hence his exile. We'll have to wait for Episode VIII for evidence of this.
But when we are granted the reveal of Luke Skywalker, at the very end of the film, John Williams treats us to a variation on an idea from The Imperial March.
Listen to the E flat major triad that ends The Imperial March here
The melody that greets the reveal of Luke Skywalker in The Jedi Steps is an inversion of the same idea. The melody is not identical. But it's another presentation of the last idea from the Imperial March, with the string melody from Rey's theme temporarily being submerged in by brass motif associated with the Dark Side. You can listen to it here
So, what does this musical flourish tell us? Will Luke, already tempted by the Dark Side in Return of the Jedi, become a more ambiguous moral presence in Episode VIII? Is John Williams bluffing?
Now, this motif is followed immediately by William's Force Theme as Rey proffers Luke his pre-Bespin lightsaber. The visual symbolism is obvious: Luke, having abandoned the galaxy, is invited back to the fray. The inversion of the idea of passing on the baton is also noted – usually, the mentor passes the baton to the mentee.
But why is Luke’s appearance accompanied by a riff on Vader’s theme? Is John Williams just teasing us? How much should we read into this? Only 17 months to go until we can know for sure...
H/t to Leif Berg, who also noticed this; and Mark Richards, whose blog, http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/, is a source of joy to John Williams fans.
