Another Redditor has an interesting theory on what happened behind of the scenes in relation to the underwhelming soundtrack.
Brer_Raptor
The music by Natalie Holt is very underwhelming, to put it mildly. If any Disney+ show deserved to be scored in the classic John Williams Star Wars style, it was this one. This show’s importance to the overall saga story, its place in the timeline (sandwiched halfway between ROTS and ANH), the long-awaited return of multiple legacy character actors (Hayden, Ewan, Jimmy Smitts, Joel Edgerton, etc.), means that this show is essentially Star Wars Episode 3.5, and deserved to be treated as such.The absence so far of any legacy themes (Imperial March, Force theme, Leia’s theme, Qui-Gon’s theme, Mustafar theme, Battle of the Heroes) is pretty unforgivable.
And I say all this not as some sort of John Williams purist (though I am a big fan), but as someone who greatly enjoys Ludwig Goransson’s & Joseph Shirley’s work on Mando and BOBF; the Kiner family’s work on TCW, Rebels, Bad Batch (and I’m excited for Tales of the Jedi!); the various composers’ work on Star Wars Visions; etc. And I am also very much looking forward to Nicholas Britell’s Andor. So it’s not like I have a problem with other styles and sounds in Star Wars music, in general.
It’s worth noting though that even those other shows, which obviously do not strictly adhere to the John Williams style, still manage to reference the classic themes when appropriate. It blows my mind that such a major project as this has been released with such a lackluster and disjointed score.
It’s also just sad when you consider that Gordy Haab’s upcoming Jedi Survivor score is inevitably going to sound more “Star-Wars-y” than the score for what is basically Episode 3.5. What a massive missed opportunity this show has been, musically.
EDIT: It’s also worth mentioning that it appears there might have been some major behind-the-scenes drama with this score:
For those who didn’t notice/weren’t aware, they waited far longer than usual to announce Natalie Holt as the composer for this show. (They even announced Britell for Andor, before her.) Also, Holt has stated that she originally wrote a theme for Obi-Wan. At the last minute, John Williams was brought on board to write a theme in just two weeks, and her theme was replaced.
Not only that, but as the end credits have revealed, John Williams’ longtime arranger/orchestrator/collaborator William Ross (one of the guys that many fans thought would be perfect to score this show; he adapted and conducted the entire Harry Potter 2 score because JW was too busy, and he also conducted Williams’ Galaxy’s Edge theme and arranged the other music for the park) was brought on board to adapt JW’s new theme. So every time you hear the new Obi-Wan theme in the show and it sounds “Star-Wars-y,” that’s not Natalie Holt; that’s actually Williams’ guy Bill Ross.
Holt apparently hardly got to touch the new Williams theme, and she also confirmed that she in fact did not collaborate with him at all. Contrary to the media spin, this was not like the Solo situation with Williams and Powell. Furthermore, Bill Ross evidently did so much last-minute work on the show that he didn’t simply get credited along with the “additional music” guys later on in the credits; he got his own standalone listing right after Holt’s name. The credits make it seem like all he did was adapt the Obi-Wan theme, but this is likely just the “official” story, considering the fact that he evidently also scored the Obi-Wan/Vader duel in the third episode (again, one of the only “Star-Wars-y” moments). Think about it: why wouldn’t Holt, the main composer of the show, get to score such a major scene?
So here’s my best guess at what happened: Holt gets hired, writes and records much if not all of her score. Either test audiences or someone high up is not happy, and realizes they’ve got a problem on their hands. They don’t want to announce her and then have to later announce that she’s been replaced (partly because of the optics in 2022 of potentially replacing the first female Star Wars composer with an old white male), so they hold off and see what can be done about it.
Kathleen Kennedy reaches out to John Williams and asks if he can do it, but he responds “I only want to write a theme for Benny” (lol, part of me really does wonder if that was the context of that quote, but they spun it for their own PR purposes), but he suggests William Ross to help “fix” the score. JW writes his Obi-Wan theme in two weeks, effectively replacing Holt’s Obi-Wan theme. Ross takes JW’s theme and starts arranging and adapting it for various scenes in the show. He also tackles bigger moments like the Vader/Obi-Wan duel (and likely, more scenes in future episodes), that the higher ups feel absolutely do not work with Holt’s score.
Eventually, they do decide to announce Holt as the composer (likely because there’s simply not enough time for Ross to replace virtually everything), but Ross still gets a high-level listing in the end credits, purportedly just for adapting the Obi-Wan theme… even though in truth he obviously did much more than just that, and ended up replacing multiple other big cues that were originally written by Holt/her team.
What do you think? I don’t think it’s an unreasonable theory, given what we know.