A little The Rise of Skywalker musical appreciation today. (1/x)

I spend so much time occupied w/ the tiniest minutia of these scores that I can lose sight of the big picture, what that this music means, what it represents, what it's saying, what it's achieved. 2/

John Williams needs no special champions, of course, but I do think Ep. 9 deserves *much* more careful study and thoughtful critical consideration than it's gotten thus far. 3/

With the benefit of a year's distance, I feel more confident in my judgment that TROS is the best of the Sequel Trilogy scores. Whatever else you think of the film or its musical particulars, the score as a whole is a gift. 4/

I've found a lot of the discourse surrounding the score over the past year to be frustrating: too reductive, too cheaply unfair (or, more rarely, too reverent), little of it sufficiently engaged with or interested in the music Williams actually wrote for the movie. 5/

If nothing else, the score is a wonderful payoff to musical seeds planted in TFA and complicated in TLJ. Nowhere is this more true than in "Farewell," which is a masterclass in like 10 kinds of long-range thematic/emotional development & transformation 6/

That this sort of payoff is manufactured is all the more striking given the obvious lack of unifying narrative vision of the ST as a whole, on nearly every level besides the music. 7/

It's with that aesthetic handicap in mind that I think we need to judge the emotional & mythopoetic responsibilities of, say, "A New Home," maybe the single *densest* cue in the nonalogy, symbolically speaking—and simultaneously the simplest sounding. 8/

Unfortunately, since so much of the full score-as-written has still not been released or even leaked, we cannot know the full extent of this kind of film-spanning musical follow-through... 9/

For example, your guess is as good as mine if Rose's Theme—or any of TLJ's new music—made it into the soundtrack. Or whether and how DoTF was actually intended to be used. Or how a certain oracle was to be scored. 10/

What's clear to me is that the creative flaws of the Episode 9 soundtrack are largely superficial and decidedly *not unique* to TROS. And they're dwarfed, overwhelmingly, by its merits. 11/

I have so much, much more to say — a book's worth, at least! But for now, it's back to those minutia. Keep listening, everyone. 12/