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Start Date
1-6-2026 3:00 PM
Description
The soundtracks for movie adaptation rides are often medleys of familiar songs or cues from the film. While many of these ride soundtracks contain a handful of longer cues stitched together at transitional moments in the ride, the score for Disney’s “Rise of the Resistance” is more of a megamix mashup (Boone, 2013) of much shorter cues and iconic leitmotifs from John Williams’s film scores. Williams’s scores for the nine films of the Star Wars Skywalker saga have been adapted and arranged for television (Crosby, 2023; Lawson, 2023; Tripp, 2023), video games (Bradford, 2022), podcasts, audiobooks, and theme park attractions (Camp, 2022). This paper adds to the study of adaptations of Williams’s work by exploring William Ross’s arrangement of Star Wars cues for the soundtrack to “Rise of the Resistance.” This paper sets out to demonstrate how Ross’s adaptation is far more than just musical quotation or collage; it stays true to Williams’s harmonic language (Lehman, 2018) through the use of chromatic mediant relationships at the seams that connect Williams’s iconic themes. In keeping with the conference theme of sonic cartography, the primary methodology employed in this study is the mapping of the key area relationships between adjacent cues in voice-leading spaces using Neo-Riemannian analysis. The visual paths provided in this analysis represents a rider’s aural journey through harmonic space in parallel with their physical journey through the “Rise of the Resistance” ride.
Recommended Citation
Crosby, Lauren, "Harmonic Cartography: Mapping Key Area Relationships in Disney’s “Rise of the Resistance”" (2026). Theme Park Music and Sound. 4.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/tpms/2026/asynchronous/4
Harmonic Cartography: Mapping Key Area Relationships in Disney’s “Rise of the Resistance”
The soundtracks for movie adaptation rides are often medleys of familiar songs or cues from the film. While many of these ride soundtracks contain a handful of longer cues stitched together at transitional moments in the ride, the score for Disney’s “Rise of the Resistance” is more of a megamix mashup (Boone, 2013) of much shorter cues and iconic leitmotifs from John Williams’s film scores. Williams’s scores for the nine films of the Star Wars Skywalker saga have been adapted and arranged for television (Crosby, 2023; Lawson, 2023; Tripp, 2023), video games (Bradford, 2022), podcasts, audiobooks, and theme park attractions (Camp, 2022). This paper adds to the study of adaptations of Williams’s work by exploring William Ross’s arrangement of Star Wars cues for the soundtrack to “Rise of the Resistance.” This paper sets out to demonstrate how Ross’s adaptation is far more than just musical quotation or collage; it stays true to Williams’s harmonic language (Lehman, 2018) through the use of chromatic mediant relationships at the seams that connect Williams’s iconic themes. In keeping with the conference theme of sonic cartography, the primary methodology employed in this study is the mapping of the key area relationships between adjacent cues in voice-leading spaces using Neo-Riemannian analysis. The visual paths provided in this analysis represents a rider’s aural journey through harmonic space in parallel with their physical journey through the “Rise of the Resistance” ride.