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2009-05-04

Happy Star Wars Day!

So, apparently today is one of a couple of days that lay claim to the term "Star Wars Day" (the other one being May 25th, which is the date in 1977 that the first Star Wars film was released). In honour of this special occasion that I just found out about, I thought I'd post about a few free Star Wars MP3s that I've been able to find.

Furman Music has a couple of recordings of some classic Star Wars music. Both are very well done, with "Princess Leia's Theme" coming across very tender and beautiful with a soaring crescendo near the end, and "The Imperial March" as brutal and hard-hitting as ever.

I found those recordings via Classic Cat's John Williams - "Star Wars episode 1" page, which also lists 5 MP3s from Harmonie Shostakovich, but when I try to access the hosting site, I merely get a message saying "At this moment Dot TK is a bit overwhelmed by all the new users. Therefore we are currently unable to handle your request. Please come back again later. Thank you for using Dot TK!" If anyone manages to access that site successfully, please leave a comment here; if I can access it sometime, I'll either update this post or make a new post about it.

Finally, Daniel Bautista has done an excellent guitar-based medley of several Star Wars themes (it's track number 13 on Classics and Soundtracks, listed as "La Guerra de las Galaxias (John Williams)"). I don't actually recognize all of the parts of this medley (I think the unconventional instrumentation is throwing me off), but some of the more dominant parts include "Duel of the Fates", the Force theme (which appears many times throughout all of the Star Wars movies, perhaps most notably in the "Binary Sunset" scene in the first movie), and a cool thrashy version of some of the music from the Hoth sequence in The Empire Strikes Back (I don't know the actual name of this piece, and I'm not sure that giving it a name would be very helpful at all, as I've seen different names for a lot of tracks across various releases of the Star Wars soundtracks).  (Have I used enough parentheses in this paragraph?)


Happy listening, and May the 4th be with you!


[UPDATE: 2007-05-06]
The URL for the Harmonie Shostakovich MP3's has been changed to http://www.shosta.info/enregistrements.htm; you can go there to grab recordings of 5 songs from Episode I.

http://www.shosta.tk/enregistrements.htm (dead link)

2 comments:

Harmonie Shostakovich said...

Hi,
I am the webmaster of Harmonie Shostakovich's website. I only found out today that the website was not responding, and it took me a few hours to figure out what to do.
I ended up changing the domain name, which is now www.shosta.info
The page you are looking for is the one with our live recordings, and the URL is:
http://www.shosta.info/enregistrements.htm
Enjoy our Star Wars music and all our other MP3's :-)

JT said...

Nice - thanks very much! I've updated the post with the new link.