Film-Music Scholar Frank Lehman Explores the Musical Leitmotifs of “Star Wars”

“The film-music scholar Frank Lehman, an assistant professor at Tufts University, works fast: within a day of the opening of ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi,’ he had updated his ‘Complete Catalogue of the Motivic Material in Star Wars, Episodes I-VIII,’ which can be found online. The catalogue now includes fifty-five distinct leitmotifs—thematic ideas that point toward characters, objects, ideas, and relationships—and forty-three so-called incidental motifs, which, Lehman says, ‘do not meet criteria for proper leitmotifs’ but nonetheless possess dramatic significance.”

Read more at The New Yorker.