Flying Solo

As I’ve become more in touch with what drives my creative energy, I’ve tried to find ways to combine my passions togther. When I was a kid, this meant putting every topping imaginable on my ice cream. More recently it means making choral music out of new poetry inspired by film. I had the idea to take a longer look at some of the themes from scenes or moments on film and explore them in a different artistic medium. In this way, we as musicians can explore passion, fear, grief, strength and other emotions with an additional access point other than words and music.

I called Tony up and asked him if he’d be interested in this project. We talked about a few films, and then when I told him my idea for this piece, he paused and said, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to write a Star Wars poem.”

We wanted to write about a moment in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” where (SPOLIER ALERT) Chewbacca witnesses his lifelong friend Han Solo get killed. We see a moment of grief on screen, but for those of us who have been through any kind of grief, we know it lasts a whole lot longer than that. Tony and I wanted to explore that grief from a best friend’s perspective. The poem itself is very specific (and delightfully so for a geek like me), but I think Tony has captured the emotion perfectly: Starting with despair and ending with hope.

In the original poem, Tony had written a wordless wailing in between a few of the stanzas. It was obviously a wookie sound – “rruoww” – and since that’s a hard word for humans to pronounce, we will sing it on an “ah” vowel. But notice that there is a16th note tremolo in it, meant to approximate that slow, gutteral wookie vibrato.

– Timothy C. Takach, 2018