And yet Holst's intent wasn't astronomical at all, but astrological, tipping his hat to character. In this, he accidentally prefigures Newton's own forgotten works, discovered quite recently. About 2/3 of that was astrological, verging into alchemical, inspired by the foundation experiment of the whole of Chemistry, van Helmont's 1618 transmutation, which so devastated his paracelsian philosophy he started over. At that point, one can drawba line, but one detail crosses it: Hg-Au is about as simple as it gets, annihilate one proton, the two are neighbours on the atomic table. van Helmont's alchemist isn't named by him, but successful practitioners are few and far between, so to hypothesisbtwo in Brussels in 1618 is fanciful. Local historians focus on a certain Nicholas de Cerclaers. He first came to attention in 1568, delivering on a contract with the Counts of Helmont and Egmont to refinance the Flemish cause to the tune of 40 000 moutons d'or. He was indiscrete, not noticing the Dominican confessor slip out: The Counts set off in chase, from Weerde to Brussels, but lost the race, and with it their heads: they were executed for heresy. There is no doubt whatsoever he succeeded, the recipt for the delivery of the gold once everything had calmed down is in the French Regional Archives in Lille, dated 1600: the money had been held in trust by the Prince Bishop of Liege. The most direct consequence was Felipe II retasked the Escorial as the alchemical Third Temple of Solomon. Professor René Taylor's Arquitectura y Magia definitively connects it to alchemical studies in Brussels, based on texts in the Simancas Royal Archives. I was actually tracking the heritage of the Eucharist at the behest of the Belgian Supreme Court, and had already witnessed the entire history of Platinol-Cisplatin, from a Freemasonic Royal Arch study group, to the breakthrough experiment, which bears my signature as the patient's attorney. She had gone from life-expectancy of minutes to normal physiology in five minutes, out of coma and out of bed. The Third Temple is about as overt a declaration of possession of the Arca Dei, the Royal Arch, as it gets: the Eucharistic foundation under examination was established by Pope Eugenius IV as part of the establishment of the Devotio Moderna, as a votive chapel to a béguinage almshouse curiously dedicated to the thing. I cannot think of any other Roman Catholic foundation not dedicated to an intercessory Saint or demiurge. It was built in 1220-6 by Cardinal Konrad von Urach, cousin on the distaff side Simon IV de Montfort, soon after a little jaunt in midwinter to Bézu, while legate to the Albigensian Crusade. Could the legends be true? The first evidence is in Konrad's Abbey Church of the Cambre, closeby. His bones lie in a wall chest in the north transept, the south one is bare except for four ceiling ribs ending in decorative wall bosses, four capucin monkeys giving the game away in dumb crambo, "Something deadly dangeroys is nearby, and the sisters don't know". Gotcha. The last is in Charlotte Bronte's semi-autobiographical novels Villette and The Professor, based on-site, describing nuns from Eugenius' foundation, which had added a convent to the votive chapel, using a tunnel in the grounds of the school she worked in to get to the Palace, on one end, and the crypts of the almshouse and votive chapel at the other (as part of a larger network stretching from the long-abandonned Templar Commandery to the seat of the Devotio Moderna at Groenendael. The nuns weren't the only thing to emerge from the tunnel, ball lightning did too. So, suddenly Raiders meets Star wars in real life. Coincidence.
@@Despotic_Waffle Holst's did. He harks back to the Renaissance academic norm, the Qudrivium, which recognised the brain has two hemispheres, left (rational) and right (emotional), so required a thesis to be supported by both, arithmetic and music, geometry and cosmology, and Newton covered the full gamut of the latter, from hard astronomy to soft astrology. My noddle's about his level, and I've had a career at top level as a seer medium, putting the edge on a decent team turning it into a Nobel Prize-winning one (Peace, 2012). Business has got as far as recognising superforecasting, which is barely the 101 Foundation course on the subject. That's where I started, spotting the cancer in the Iron Curtain in 1978. The seer side put me at the table of thevWEU SG in 1988, giving the heads-up on what was about to happen, and it got a lot more froobie than that. Walking home with the deal Imran Khan took to Putin, a new world model, I realised the steps taken to get there indicated the next could only be what I descrkbed in my last posting. I wasn't wrong.
Well, Lucas originally wanted to use The Planets by Holst as soundtrack and asked Williams to re-arrange it for the first movie. But Williams, instead proposed to make a Planets-like symph as soundtrack
Aldo Marcelo Benites Palomino That's partly true. Lucas used Planets as the temp track before John Williams came on board as the composer. There were scenes that he particularly liked with the temp track (tatooine, death star, etc) so he used those scenes as examplars for John Williams to replicate. He always intended to have a true composer.
Well, thank goodness he got John to do the music because to me it's hard to imagine Star Wars with Holst's music, the problem is it's too well known, it's also too thematic for a film score, if that makes sense. Both pieces work very well and are perfect for what they are: Holst's is a Symphonic suite, and Williams's is a popular modern film score.
@@cpt.dr.hawkeye1740 I remember an interview with John Williams where he said exactly what the OP said.. that Lucas wanted The Planets reworked and Williams, in that same interview, said that he told him "I'll write you a Planets suite". Whether Lucas used Holst in his temps, that I don't know, I am only saying what Williams told the interviewer. Also, if anyone is familiar both with the planets (from start to end) and most of Williams work, they'll find many similarities, often entire sections ripped off and re-arranged. Harry Potter comes to mind.
@@alanpotter8680 temp tracks are quite common in film editing, especially today. That's why many films actually sound exactly the same. (For instance, Mad Max reworks Captain America's theme.) There was a round table discussion where composers like Danny Elfman actually expressed some frustrations about it. Because often times the director gets overly attached to it and there's no room for an entirely new composition because often times the film is already edited to the temp track and it wouldn't make sense with anything else.... In the case of Star Wars I think it definitely worked to their advantage having a more classical movie score, harkening back to the serial feel that works well in the context of a space opera like a Flash Gordon. I always say that Star Wars isn't a sci-fi franchise per-se. But a fantasy opera which just happens to be set in space... That's why most sci-fi films don't have that same feel because sci-fi has to directly possess some type of science based or technological theme to it. Star Wars is already so far removed from that. (It's not a warning of anything to come in our future for instance.) And John Williams iconic theme just furthers that notion that Star Wars is its own thing. It's so far removed from science fiction genre.
Lucas used Planets as the temp track before John Williams came on board as the composer. There were scenes that he particularly liked with the temp track (tatooine, death star, etc) so he used those scenes as examplars for John Williams to replicate. He always intended to have a true composer.
Not everything worked, though. I was in Nick Phillips lab when he was trying to hologram the full-scale X-Wing, for the second premiere. The idea was, when HM stepped out of her car, subsonics rumbling for some time before would resolve in the crack of doom, as the hologram suddenly appeared and shot down Tottenham Court Road. I don't know if London's 24-hour Golden Arches at the far end would have appreciated a bombing run.
@@JelMain I remember reading that the Soviets complained that the working Death Star laser Lucas made for the movie violated the 1972 ABM treaty. Almost started WWIII.
@@PaulvonOberstein Nick was only the West's top laser specialist: the Russians were the world's best, alongside their leadership in hyperstudies. They did tend towards the paranoid, though, which undid both, and the basic technology to stop atmospheric diffraction now exists. Those were the weeks when I spotted their financing, giving us the key to their economy.
The exact extract I had in mind. Googled it and stumbled accross your video. Nevertheless Williams remains an excellent composer and I still admire him a lot.
I agree. He might have been heavily inspired by other composers, but I think John Williams is one of the best film composers of all time and his Star Wars soundtracks are masterpieces.
The original plan for Lucas was to use Holst' music directly, but he decided that he wanted small variations to better fit Star Wars. John Williams was basically given the score for Mars, then asked to make some changes. This video goes over what Williams did to Holst' music: ua-cam.com/video/8IX1jSVmaAs/v-deo.html
"You may fire when ready ..." [Plays the end of "Mars" ... everybody thinks it's John Williams ... it's identical - note for note!] As a child, who had just discovered Star Wars after finally seeing it on TV ... when left to my own devices in the living room, I would put on the closest of my parent's records ... it happened to be "Mars" from the planet suite ... I could pretend that I was flying the Millenium Falcon or an X-wing to that music .. I knew it was similar to Star Wars, but I was too young to recognise just how identical it was! Ideally, I would have liked a record of the film's soundtrack - but my parents couldn't care less about Star Wars .. so, having listened to most of their library of classical music, I decided that the one that sounded most like Star Wars - was "Mars" from "The Planets" (and how!) John Williams is a fantastic composer - the best film composer in history by miles and miles ... I'm not at all disappointed in him for ripping off Gustav's work note for note. Essentially, he did what was absolutely necessary to fire up the imaginations of kids everywhere ... took the old piece of music that I was flying around my living room to, and transformed it into, arguably, the greatest film score in history.
@@jazzx251 Its a bit over the top to say he took the piece of music, just because he took this one 10s second idea of these Grand Chords. I mean He composed like 2 hours of very fitting and Original Music for the film.
Let me supply a simpler answer. Holst was working in the model of late 19th century neo-gnosis, extrapolating various mediaeval philosophies in the light of neo-gothic romanticism. Faced with the then-new subject of history, which can be best exemplified by Hollywood's 1930s historical epics, stuffed full of creative anachronism such as Arthurian knights charging around in plate armour (invented 800 years later), speaking Jacobean English (a thousand years apart), with romantic lines coined by Eleanor of Aquitaine (500 years), he was addressing their world-outlook musically. Williams goes the other way, an almost equally void world of fantasy (actually, Cowboys and Indians shoot-em-ups in space). He actually paints a symphonic structure, where others might have lapsed into a post-Tomita world of electronica. Both therefore have the same palette at their disposal, Holst goes in the direction of the Greek legends, as figurative of the cosmologic avatars, while Williams, in utter contradiction to the concurrent A&R interdiction of concept rock, releases a soundtrack of themes not very far removed from Peter and the Wolf in terms of motifs. Mars or Vader, duck or Leia? The dark rumbling from which both neo-pagan germanic rock and Hans Zimmer would emerge, or the etherial of LOTR (I may have defined the style in a masterclass with Paddy Moloney, where we launched into an hours study of what my low whistle playing could do), Kate Bush-Flo Welch-too many to mention. I should mention, out of full disclosure, that I was program controller of the radio station which introduced Mike Oldfield and Kraftwerk to Radio One, host Stage Manager ofvQueen thevSaturday Bohemian Rhapsody hit, coached in voice by Sir Geraint Evans' lady wife Brenda as my voice broke, and much more. Flo's one of the descendants of my work, as is the current movement in pan-Atlantic Funk highlife, to a much lesser extent: I headed the backing choir which drove the blow-off of David Byrne's Southbank Atomic Bomb! collaboration into the stratosphere. I'm currently intermittently passing ideas to ChiChi Nwanoku in the domain of early 20th Century orchestral Afro. The latest development is the ROLI glide keyboard, extending the glissing on the low whistle into something else. It's making all the difference between classical tonality as a largely iconic temperament-based chordal form, into a microtonal world which can form other soundscapes, with different granularities and sound patterns, perhaps too inaccessible for most. The Songs of R2D2!
Another Guy On UA-cam I would. But there is nothing wrong with it. Star Wars itself is largely stolen - “farm-boy who dreams of glory is forced to leave home end embark an adventure to save a princess....with a gay robot.”
I personally do not think John Williams is a thief. (That’s just me though!) It is only one note repeated several times, Williams goes in a complete separate direction from the motif after the video ends and it isn’t a major theme in Star Wars. Maybe the main argument is not the melody but the tempo, but it is a simple tempo. Both composers just make their brass press G several times, and then Williams changes the tempo and extends the one note motif. George Lucas temped Star Wars with Holst, Williams could have created this similarity so we could have an understanding of the genre (since the music in the video plays at the opening of the film), the fluttering strings have different melodies, Holst doesn’t own fluttering strings lol. The instrumentation is slightly different. Yes, there is inspiration, but in my opinion Williams is not a thief because of the reasons stated above. That’s just me though!
I don't really think he's a thief either. I think it's just that the provisional music used to the film was The Planets and Williams just composed something similar to the tone and style of Holst.
He's not a thief, but he did intentionally make the music sound like the planets as thats what Lucas originally wanted. He also took from the Rite of Spring and a couple other pieces.
George Lucas loves Gustav Holst's Mars so much that he begged his composer John Williams to compose a version of this soundtrack for his upcoming Star Wars film
I think John Williams understood as no other one the meaning of all musical parts of The Planets (and their deep-leveled Music of the Spheres meaning) and incorporated by emulating similar parts in the Star Wars movie as themes for that movie were it was seemingly BUT ONLY PSEUDO-"appropriated" when the word "appropriated" is used in her mean/nasty signification. When "appropriated" is used in the "just what it needs" (no more no less)-signification it's just what John Williams did. Try to understand : John Williams picked the righ music pieces up to place them in another environment (Star Wars) with similar psycho-analogics and according to the deep significance meaning in The Planets. The Music Art of John Williams was to know exactly were music parts of The Planets fits into another story : Star Wars. John Williams was NOT AT ALL pretending in one way or another he was himself inventing something "unique musical" in this new filmscore. It's not (at all, in my humble opinion) about being influenced by another music composer but to let shine and radiate the composer Gustav Holst of the musical masterpiece The Planets in the movie Star Wars. It has nothing to do with copy-and-paste.
There's nothing wrong with a little inspiration. John Williams made it his own. Yes, parts of it are definitely Gustav Holst's work, but John Williams incorporated it into a piece and made it his own.
It's literally copied. Quite different from Bach/ Vivaldi classic case where the theme is taken, rearranged in a different texture and orchestration, developing new ideas from it. The first case is purely cloned.
I've loved Williams all my life but the theft is so transparent, it's painful. Williams sycophants will say he was told to listen to Holst's music by Lucas and come back with his own interpretation. That it's not stealing and just adding his own spin....well, he might have been more creative with the other themes, but he sure took one hell of a short-cut with this track. Lazy.
You might wanna know that Lucas initially wanted Holst' "The Planets" as a score for Star Wars, and after Spielberg told him to hire Williams, he said "fine, but I still want the "Planets" in it, even a bit. The rest is history.
I've got no problem with this - Holst was a classical composer in the romantic tradition - he wanted his music to describe something ... the planets, and the legends that surround them, in this case. But cinema wasn't a thing when he wrote that - the ideal medium for his descriptive pieces. 70 years later - John Williams, with a couple of tweaks, puts it to the good use that Holst would have loved to have done if he had been alive in the age of amazing films like Star Wars.
Stirring Weeks The ignorance in this comment is quite frustrating. Was Tolkien lazy for having a character nearly identical to Merlin? Was Stan Lee lazy for modeling quite a few characters after D.C. heroes and villains? Artists take inspiration from other artists. Imagine how dull it would be if only one author could use a character archetype, if only one composer could use a certain series of notes. Taking inspiration from previous artists allows us to explore ideas further. Calling Williams lazy for having one track that sounds nearly identical to Mars when he's composed hundreds of songs throughout his lifetime is completely asisinine. Plus, as stated by others in this thread, it was requested by George Lucas. So go ahead, call John Williams lazy for simply doing his job.
And yet Holst's intent wasn't astronomical at all, but astrological, tipping his hat to character. In this, he accidentally prefigures Newton's own forgotten works, discovered quite recently. About 2/3 of that was astrological, verging into alchemical, inspired by the foundation experiment of the whole of Chemistry, van Helmont's 1618 transmutation, which so devastated his paracelsian philosophy he started over. At that point, one can drawba line, but one detail crosses it: Hg-Au is about as simple as it gets, annihilate one proton, the two are neighbours on the atomic table. van Helmont's alchemist isn't named by him, but successful practitioners are few and far between, so to hypothesisbtwo in Brussels in 1618 is fanciful. Local historians focus on a certain Nicholas de Cerclaers.
He first came to attention in 1568, delivering on a contract with the Counts of Helmont and Egmont to refinance the Flemish cause to the tune of 40 000 moutons d'or. He was indiscrete, not noticing the Dominican confessor slip out: The Counts set off in chase, from Weerde to Brussels, but lost the race, and with it their heads: they were executed for heresy. There is no doubt whatsoever he succeeded, the recipt for the delivery of the gold once everything had calmed down is in the French Regional Archives in Lille, dated 1600: the money had been held in trust by the Prince Bishop of Liege.
The most direct consequence was Felipe II retasked the Escorial as the alchemical Third Temple of Solomon. Professor René Taylor's Arquitectura y Magia definitively connects it to alchemical studies in Brussels, based on texts in the Simancas Royal Archives. I was actually tracking the heritage of the Eucharist at the behest of the Belgian Supreme Court, and had already witnessed the entire history of Platinol-Cisplatin, from a Freemasonic Royal Arch study group, to the breakthrough experiment, which bears my signature as the patient's attorney. She had gone from life-expectancy of minutes to normal physiology in five minutes, out of coma and out of bed. The Third Temple is about as overt a declaration of possession of the Arca Dei, the Royal Arch, as it gets: the Eucharistic foundation under examination was established by Pope Eugenius IV as part of the establishment of the Devotio Moderna, as a votive chapel to a béguinage almshouse curiously dedicated to the thing. I cannot think of any other Roman Catholic foundation not dedicated to an intercessory Saint or demiurge. It was built in 1220-6 by Cardinal Konrad von Urach, cousin on the distaff side Simon IV de Montfort, soon after a little jaunt in midwinter to Bézu, while legate to the Albigensian Crusade. Could the legends be true?
The first evidence is in Konrad's Abbey Church of the Cambre, closeby. His bones lie in a wall chest in the north transept, the south one is bare except for four ceiling ribs ending in decorative wall bosses, four capucin monkeys giving the game away in dumb crambo, "Something deadly dangeroys is nearby, and the sisters don't know". Gotcha. The last is in Charlotte Bronte's semi-autobiographical novels Villette and The Professor, based on-site, describing nuns from Eugenius' foundation, which had added a convent to the votive chapel, using a tunnel in the grounds of the school she worked in to get to the Palace, on one end, and the crypts of the almshouse and votive chapel at the other (as part of a larger network stretching from the long-abandonned Templar Commandery to the seat of the Devotio Moderna at Groenendael. The nuns weren't the only thing to emerge from the tunnel, ball lightning did too.
So, suddenly Raiders meets Star wars in real life. Coincidence.
For those who didn't understand; music symbolises magic planets and zodiacs.
@@Despotic_Waffle Holst's did. He harks back to the Renaissance academic norm, the Qudrivium, which recognised the brain has two hemispheres, left (rational) and right (emotional), so required a thesis to be supported by both, arithmetic and music, geometry and cosmology, and Newton covered the full gamut of the latter, from hard astronomy to soft astrology. My noddle's about his level, and I've had a career at top level as a seer medium, putting the edge on a decent team turning it into a Nobel Prize-winning one (Peace, 2012). Business has got as far as recognising superforecasting, which is barely the 101 Foundation course on the subject. That's where I started, spotting the cancer in the Iron Curtain in 1978. The seer side put me at the table of thevWEU SG in 1988, giving the heads-up on what was about to happen, and it got a lot more froobie than that. Walking home with the deal Imran Khan took to Putin, a new world model, I realised the steps taken to get there indicated the next could only be what I descrkbed in my last posting. I wasn't wrong.
ok nerd
@@user-lv6ob7hq3k Be glad we exist. If we didn't, it's very possible you wouldn't.
@@JelMain i was joking my g chill lol
Well, Lucas originally wanted to use The Planets by Holst as soundtrack and asked Williams to re-arrange it for the first movie. But Williams, instead proposed to make a Planets-like symph as soundtrack
Aldo Marcelo Benites Palomino That's partly true. Lucas used Planets as the temp track before John Williams came on board as the composer. There were scenes that he particularly liked with the temp track (tatooine, death star, etc) so he used those scenes as examplars for John Williams to replicate. He always intended to have a true composer.
Well, thank goodness he got John to do the music because to me it's hard to imagine Star Wars with Holst's music, the problem is it's too well known, it's also too thematic for a film score, if that makes sense.
Both pieces work very well and are perfect for what they are: Holst's is a Symphonic suite, and Williams's is a popular modern film score.
Hmm
@@cpt.dr.hawkeye1740 I remember an interview with John Williams where he said exactly what the OP said.. that Lucas wanted The Planets reworked and Williams, in that same interview, said that he told him "I'll write you a Planets suite". Whether Lucas used Holst in his temps, that I don't know, I am only saying what Williams told the interviewer.
Also, if anyone is familiar both with the planets (from start to end) and most of Williams work, they'll find many similarities, often entire sections ripped off and re-arranged. Harry Potter comes to mind.
@@alanpotter8680 temp tracks are quite common in film editing, especially today. That's why many films actually sound exactly the same. (For instance, Mad Max reworks Captain America's theme.)
There was a round table discussion where composers like Danny Elfman actually expressed some frustrations about it. Because often times the director gets overly attached to it and there's no room for an entirely new composition because often times the film is already edited to the temp track and it wouldn't make sense with anything else....
In the case of Star Wars I think it definitely worked to their advantage having a more classical movie score, harkening back to the serial feel that works well in the context of a space opera like a Flash Gordon.
I always say that Star Wars isn't a sci-fi franchise per-se. But a fantasy opera which just happens to be set in space...
That's why most sci-fi films don't have that same feel because sci-fi has to directly possess some type of science based or technological theme to it. Star Wars is already so far removed from that. (It's not a warning of anything to come in our future for instance.)
And John Williams iconic theme just furthers that notion that Star Wars is its own thing. It's so far removed from science fiction genre.
They had Star Destroyers in 1918?
Of course they did. Star Wars takes place a long time ago in a Galaxy far far away.
gloriousholy, that joke cracked me up!
The Germans had Storm Troopers in 1918. So, err. Good enough?
What they needed was Snow Troopers.
*See Zeppelin Bombing raids over London*
Lucas used Planets as the temp track before John Williams came on board as the composer. There were scenes that he particularly liked with the temp track (tatooine, death star, etc) so he used those scenes as examplars for John Williams to replicate. He always intended to have a true composer.
Not everything worked, though. I was in Nick Phillips lab when he was trying to hologram the full-scale X-Wing, for the second premiere. The idea was, when HM stepped out of her car, subsonics rumbling for some time before would resolve in the crack of doom, as the hologram suddenly appeared and shot down Tottenham Court Road. I don't know if London's 24-hour Golden Arches at the far end would have appreciated a bombing run.
@@JelMain I remember reading that the Soviets complained that the working Death Star laser Lucas made for the movie violated the 1972 ABM treaty. Almost started WWIII.
@@PaulvonOberstein Nick was only the West's top laser specialist: the Russians were the world's best, alongside their leadership in hyperstudies. They did tend towards the paranoid, though, which undid both, and the basic technology to stop atmospheric diffraction now exists. Those were the weeks when I spotted their financing, giving us the key to their economy.
The exact extract I had in mind. Googled it and stumbled accross your video. Nevertheless Williams remains an excellent composer and I still admire him a lot.
I agree. He might have been heavily inspired by other composers, but I think John Williams is one of the best film composers of all time and his Star Wars soundtracks are masterpieces.
@@MrRPGTHEBEST Precisely.
@@MrRPGTHEBESTYeah!☺️
At least Williams copied something "from outer space". Imagine star wars with Mozart's "Magic Flute" or Brahms "Lullaby" ...
Or Strauss ... "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Thus Spake ZarA Space Odyssey
Preposterous!
@@jazzx251 INCONCEIVABLE!
@@jazzx251 which strauss? Richard or Johann II?
"John, someone who says he's Holst's great grandson is at the door, wanting money!"
Holst should sue - lol
Mr. Williams, a letter from Hell has just arrived-Aparently Mr. Holst wants to sue you for Star Wars
+leonardo tavares dardenne
Eso es mentira
+leonardo tavares dardenne Why would Gustav Holst be in Hell? He was a great person.
It's just for comedic effect. The punchline being "haven" isin't has funny
It's just for comedic effect. The punchline being "haven" isin't has funny
I was thinking the same thing last time I heard Mars by Holst
The original plan for Lucas was to use Holst' music directly, but he decided that he wanted small variations to better fit Star Wars. John Williams was basically given the score for Mars, then asked to make some changes. This video goes over what Williams did to Holst' music:
ua-cam.com/video/8IX1jSVmaAs/v-deo.html
Thats how it exactly was done. He should do some changes, fitting it Costomlike on Starwars without changing it too much. :D
Both Masterpieces
Hey twoset fans
Gustav Holst for ever!
I love it - I think it's funny, and brilliant all at the same time. Every one of these composers, John Williams included, is amazing: )
Told my kids the very first time I heard the SW track, soooo many years ago. Thanks for making this more obvious.
I know the 5/4 meter is prevelent in Star Wars and Williams got that from Holst, but I didn't realize that he used the same key/pitch. Wowsa.
"You may fire when ready ..."
[Plays the end of "Mars" ... everybody thinks it's John Williams ... it's identical - note for note!]
As a child, who had just discovered Star Wars after finally seeing it on TV ... when left to my own devices in the living room, I would put on the closest of my parent's records ... it happened to be "Mars" from the planet suite ... I could pretend that I was flying the Millenium Falcon or an X-wing to that music .. I knew it was similar to Star Wars, but I was too young to recognise just how identical it was!
Ideally, I would have liked a record of the film's soundtrack - but my parents couldn't care less about Star Wars .. so, having listened to most of their library of classical music, I decided that the one that sounded most like Star Wars - was "Mars" from "The Planets" (and how!)
John Williams is a fantastic composer - the best film composer in history by miles and miles ... I'm not at all disappointed in him for ripping off Gustav's work note for note.
Essentially, he did what was absolutely necessary to fire up the imaginations of kids everywhere ... took the old piece of music that I was flying around my living room to, and transformed it into, arguably, the greatest film score in history.
@@jazzx251 Its a bit over the top to say he took the piece of music, just because he took this one 10s second idea of these Grand Chords. I mean He composed like 2 hours of very fitting and Original Music for the film.
Let me supply a simpler answer. Holst was working in the model of late 19th century neo-gnosis, extrapolating various mediaeval philosophies in the light of neo-gothic romanticism. Faced with the then-new subject of history, which can be best exemplified by Hollywood's 1930s historical epics, stuffed full of creative anachronism such as Arthurian knights charging around in plate armour (invented 800 years later), speaking Jacobean English (a thousand years apart), with romantic lines coined by Eleanor of Aquitaine (500 years), he was addressing their world-outlook musically.
Williams goes the other way, an almost equally void world of fantasy (actually, Cowboys and Indians shoot-em-ups in space). He actually paints a symphonic structure, where others might have lapsed into a post-Tomita world of electronica. Both therefore have the same palette at their disposal, Holst goes in the direction of the Greek legends, as figurative of the cosmologic avatars, while Williams, in utter contradiction to the concurrent A&R interdiction of concept rock, releases a soundtrack of themes not very far removed from Peter and the Wolf in terms of motifs. Mars or Vader, duck or Leia? The dark rumbling from which both neo-pagan germanic rock and Hans Zimmer would emerge, or the etherial of LOTR (I may have defined the style in a masterclass with Paddy Moloney, where we launched into an hours study of what my low whistle playing could do), Kate Bush-Flo Welch-too many to mention.
I should mention, out of full disclosure, that I was program controller of the radio station which introduced Mike Oldfield and Kraftwerk to Radio One, host Stage Manager ofvQueen thevSaturday Bohemian Rhapsody hit, coached in voice by Sir Geraint Evans' lady wife Brenda as my voice broke, and much more. Flo's one of the descendants of my work, as is the current movement in pan-Atlantic Funk highlife, to a much lesser extent: I headed the backing choir which drove the blow-off of David Byrne's Southbank Atomic Bomb! collaboration into the stratosphere. I'm currently intermittently passing ideas to ChiChi Nwanoku in the domain of early 20th Century orchestral Afro.
The latest development is the ROLI glide keyboard, extending the glissing on the low whistle into something else. It's making all the difference between classical tonality as a largely iconic temperament-based chordal form, into a microtonal world which can form other soundscapes, with different granularities and sound patterns, perhaps too inaccessible for most. The Songs of R2D2!
"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal”
I wouldnt call it stealing
Igor Stravinsky lol
Another Guy On UA-cam I would. But there is nothing wrong with it. Star Wars itself is largely stolen - “farm-boy who dreams of glory is forced to leave home end embark an adventure to save a princess....with a gay robot.”
I personally do not think John Williams is a thief. (That’s just me though!) It is only one note repeated several times, Williams goes in a complete separate direction from the motif after the video ends and it isn’t a major theme in Star Wars. Maybe the main argument is not the melody but the tempo, but it is a simple tempo. Both composers just make their brass press G several times, and then Williams changes the tempo and extends the one note motif. George Lucas temped Star Wars with Holst, Williams could have created this similarity so we could have an understanding of the genre (since the music in the video plays at the opening of the film), the fluttering strings have different melodies, Holst doesn’t own fluttering strings lol. The instrumentation is slightly different. Yes, there is inspiration, but in my opinion Williams is not a thief because of the reasons stated above. That’s just me though!
I don't really think he's a thief either. I think it's just that the provisional music used to the film was The Planets and Williams just composed something similar to the tone and style of Holst.
He's not a thief, but he did intentionally make the music sound like the planets as thats what Lucas originally wanted. He also took from the Rite of Spring and a couple other pieces.
I am positive both wanted the idea of using Planets as a template. I don't mind honestly. Love that Holst sound.
John Williams: Can i copy your homework?
Gustav Holst: Yeah, but don't make it too obvious
Williams:
I read somewhere that Williams was inspired by Holst planet suite.
Star Wars premiered on the 43rd anniversary of Holst’s death.
I had to listen to this for an assignment and dang they sound so similar
George Lucas loves Gustav Holst's Mars so much that he begged his composer John Williams to compose a version of this soundtrack for his upcoming Star Wars film
brilliant tunes
Grand theft Auto , but in music....
Grand Theft Audio
Listen to Venus Bringer of Peace from Planets too...........compare to Skywalker theme
very close - just two notes away.
The chromatic scale is all the notes. You can't beat me.
Bravo👏
I think John Williams understood as no other one the meaning of all musical parts of The Planets (and their deep-leveled Music of the Spheres meaning) and incorporated by emulating
similar parts in the Star Wars movie as themes for that movie were it was seemingly BUT ONLY PSEUDO-"appropriated" when the word "appropriated" is used in her mean/nasty signification. When "appropriated" is used in the "just what it needs" (no more no less)-signification it's just what John Williams did. Try to understand : John Williams picked the righ music pieces up to place them in another environment (Star Wars) with similar psycho-analogics and according to the deep significance meaning in The Planets. The Music Art of John Williams was to know exactly were music parts of The Planets fits into another story : Star Wars. John Williams was NOT AT ALL pretending in one way or another he was himself inventing something "unique musical" in this new filmscore. It's not (at all, in my humble opinion) about being influenced by another music composer but to let shine and radiate the composer Gustav Holst of the musical masterpiece The Planets in the movie Star Wars. It has nothing to do with copy-and-paste.
Williams, John Willams? It's your cousing Marvin Williams, you know that sound you've been looking for? Well listen to this!
Should also compare Leia’s theme and Venus as well. I think the two sound quite similar.
Dude it's the exact same chords even the same key
A galaxy far, far away, or planets in our solar system. You decide
Gustav Holst walked so John Williams can run
I'm pretty sure that's a technique used by more than just two composers in the history of classical music.
It's not
Yes
maxkm5st1 So Gustav Holst and John Williams are the only two composers to ever use this style?
Vanilla ice is singing the dings.
I'm also told that Jupiter by Gustav Holst became The Mission by John Williams.
Also: "World's Worst Water Feature" from Spider-Man Far From Home!
Nobody:
Holst: BEEEEEP
BEEEEEEEEP
...
...
...BEEEEEEEEP
There's nothing wrong with a little inspiration. John Williams made it his own. Yes, parts of it are definitely Gustav Holst's
work, but John Williams incorporated it into a piece and made it his own.
Inspiration is definitely what happens when you do the exact same piece but change the rythm
Imperial March also sounds very similar
Twoset fans r u here
Como chola nano
Me as dejao to loco
see kids, even the boomers sampled music
hmmm suspicious
Prefeer gustav. The matice of the song
Dramatic Response!
The dreaded 'just copy the temp" from the director.
listen "kings row"
Imagine if John Williams copied all the planets In Gustav Holst
Prove it.
It's literally copied. Quite different from Bach/ Vivaldi classic case where the theme is taken, rearranged in a different texture and orchestration, developing new ideas from it. The first case is purely cloned.
Me has convencido, votaré a Podemos
Doesn't sound anything like it. It is the same genera of music, but the melody in Star Wars is completely different.
Stfu it's the literal same
AGGA
At least he copied people who can’t sue 😂😂
Brah
"Steal like an artist"... more like an actual thief at this point...
John Williams !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I've loved Williams all my life but the theft is so transparent, it's painful. Williams sycophants will say he was told to listen to Holst's music by Lucas and come back with his own interpretation. That it's not stealing and just adding his own spin....well, he might have been more creative with the other themes, but he sure took one hell of a short-cut with this track. Lazy.
"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."
Therefore
John Williams wrote the score first
Holst is the thief
Stirring Weeks you mustn't know anything about artists and how they find ideas then.
You might wanna know that Lucas initially wanted Holst' "The Planets" as a score for Star Wars, and after Spielberg told him to hire Williams, he said "fine, but I still want the "Planets" in it, even a bit.
The rest is history.
I've got no problem with this - Holst was a classical composer in the romantic tradition - he wanted his music to describe something ... the planets, and the legends that surround them, in this case.
But cinema wasn't a thing when he wrote that - the ideal medium for his descriptive pieces.
70 years later - John Williams, with a couple of tweaks, puts it to the good use that Holst would have loved to have done if he had been alive in the age of amazing films like Star Wars.
Stirring Weeks The ignorance in this comment is quite frustrating. Was Tolkien lazy for having a character nearly identical to Merlin? Was Stan Lee lazy for modeling quite a few characters after D.C. heroes and villains? Artists take inspiration from other artists. Imagine how dull it would be if only one author could use a character archetype, if only one composer could use a certain series of notes. Taking inspiration from previous artists allows us to explore ideas further. Calling Williams lazy for having one track that sounds nearly identical to Mars when he's composed hundreds of songs throughout his lifetime is completely asisinine. Plus, as stated by others in this thread, it was requested by George Lucas. So go ahead, call John Williams lazy for simply doing his job.
copied.
It's just ONE chord played over and over. That's all it is. Hardly copying in my opinion.
Not just one chord, it's exactly the same chord.
... with the same number of beats rest between each chord hehe!
And the same voicing, and the same key
Oh my god, plagiarism!!
I'm so glad that William retired, he made Hollywood music stale for decades on end.