Not many people sit and muse on the fact that a single human being wrote the musical scores for all of the following TV shows, films, and franchises: Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space, NBC News, the Irwin Allen-produced disaster flicks The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, Star Wars (all six films), Raiders of Lost Ark (and its three sequels), Harry Potter (three of the films and the themes heard in all of them), Superman (the first Christopher Reeve film as well as music heard in the rest and in the 2006 reboot), The Witches of Eastwick, three Oliver Stone films (Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon), two Robert Altman films (Images, The Long Goodbye), an early Brian De Palma (The Fury), the first two Home Alone movies, Angela's Ashes, Memoirs of a Geisha, Hitchcock's last film (Family Plot)... and – including Jaws, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, E.T., the aforementioned Indiana Jones series, Empire of the Sun, two Jurassic Parks, Schindler's List, Amistad, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can and Munich – all of the films of Steven Spielberg except one (The Color Purple)... and many, many more. I do.
You can read the rest at his Wiki entry if you like, including the fact he's also written fanfares for four Olympic games, and has been scoring movies since 1958. Half a century. 110 films. 5 Oscars. 45 nominations; other than Walt Disney, he's the most nominated person in Oscar history. And that's interesting because, while we acknowledge the complete permeation of Walt Disney throughout our culture, we are always aware of the brand. By comparison, would you think John Williams a household name?
He is firmly behind the scenes, and works best there. Sure, he conducted the Boston Pops for almost 15 years, I watched him on TV as a kid. He still has a busy conducting schedule, while his compositional output has slowed... since he scored four films in 2005. He writes two minutes of music every day. He doesn't go to movies or listen to other people's music, including his own massive oeuvre, unless he's conducting it.
Still, fans don't call him a craftsman - he's the maestro. For them, he writes timeless melodies. For others, timeless is a synonym for tasteless. He's nowhere near as much a contemporary legend as say, Madonna. But I'm betting her music and much of our popular tuneage today will, in 150 years, be like Stephen Foster songs are to us now. "Oh! Susanna" anyone? Composers of abstract instrumental music tend to fare better over the years, as trends become irrelevant. (Bob Dylan might prevail on the strength of his poetry.)
It's hard to say exactly where film music will fit in, as that too can date horribly. Williams has never suffered from the need to be relevant or contemporary per se. He simply does his job.
He brought forward the symphonic tradition at a time when new wave filmmaking, the decline of the studio system in Hollywood, rock 'n roll, atonality, the synthesizer and other postwar musical revolutions had all just about ended it. For a while, the orchestra was not only uncool, it was not heard much in Hollywood. Eventually, symphonic, tonal music was revived in cinema as well as the concert hall, as composers began to feel it was safe, ahem, to go back in the water. Williams was a big part of this return.
I wonder if the relative economic and social conservatism of the late 1970s – which disco, punk and hip hop were reactions against – also resulted in the unlikely return of a giant symbol of European colonialism, turned somewhat on itself. Star Wars was just Saturday morning fluff when Williams was writing it; he had no pretensions to seriousness, at least for that gig. So he felt free to tear it up like some badass club DJ, but instead of using turntables and old funky vinyl, he had sheet music and a pencil (he still uses these), a baton and 150 years of orchestral repertoire at his disposal. He helped make pastiche not only popular (again), but a formidable, legitimate form in its own right. In that respect, he is a post-modernist. In most others, he's never left tradition behind.
I also wonder what our current economic times will mean for new orchestral works – for orchestras in general?
Although they are a generation apart and on opposite sides of the imaginary high-low cultural fence, maximal minimalist composer John Adams began his rise to fame in the concert music world soon after Williams finished his so-called golden decade (1975-1984, Jaws to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). Williams has mentioned Adams as a composer that interests him now, and anyone who is familiar with the younger artist's Americana could hardly refute its similarities, if unintentional, to the elder's work.
In turn, one can hear the influence of new voices like Adams' and minimalist pioneer Steve Reich in more recent Williams scores like A.I. But Williams has often been a sort of proto-minimalist himself (or post-minimalist depending on which end of his career) via one of his mentors, the great Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann's propulsive and obsessively repetitive patterns were the sound of signature Alfred Hitchcock films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, as well as early sci-fi classics The Day The Earth Stood Still and Fahrenheit 451. (Herrmann's last score, for Taxi Driver, concluded with a motif from his most famous, Psycho, almost as if he knew it was the end of his life. Williams snuck the same motif into his own score for the first Star Wars in 1977, perhaps as a tribute.)
His repetitions are of course, in passing – meant to accompany battles, chases, shark hunts, adventures archeological and alien alike. They are not the main dish for one's senses as with concert music of similarly dense construction. Many listeners though – including me – have found frequent reward in hearing the logic of the music on its own, separate from its film imagery or narrative. In this type of music, there is always a narrative; it can remain implied, or forgotten.
His sense of orchestration – the composer's equivalent of a painter's palette, whether the scale is orchestral or solo piano – is unparalleled, and to hear it properly his scores have to be heard stripped of film sound effects. Though the speed of production always requires one or two orchestrators to finalize his ideas, Williams always writes out the instrumental assignments on a short score beforehand, and the end sound is unmistakably his. Frequently these instrumental combinations are the most striking aspect of a passage, whether bold or subtle.
Williams has written many pieces purely for the concert hall, in a more modern, abstract vein than his film music. I especially enjoy the cello concerto written for Yo-Yo Ma, his second violin concerto TreeSong written for Gil Shaham, and Soundings, a Messiaen-inspired, part sound installation, part orchestral fanfare for the opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
In these works, melodies are complex, virtuosic; harmony is free – sometimes tonal but either static or ever-shifting, unresolved; dynamics and tonal colour are of a range far greater than anything he could create for the more confined space of a film soundtrack. You can't hum along or tap your toes as with The Raiders March. And yet the film composer never stays out of the mix for long, especially when it comes to climaxes.
His greatest score for me (and the one rumoured to be his favourite) is 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film retains its power over thirty years later in part due to Williams' iconic, five-note "signal" theme which serves as both score and source music (music the characters in the film can hear). The score makes a vast stylistic journey, from atonal and noise-based experimentalism through military fanfares, Herrmann-esque road music and mystical echoes of Scriabin through to electronics and the ecstatic, late-Romantic, Golden Era Hollywood flourish of the film's finale. More than a few films have sampled from this musical template since.
The score serves as the voice of CE3K's otherworldly visitors, suggesting – with some understandable simplification – that music is indeed a universal language.
Not everyone today can place the Close Encounters theme, but almost everyone can identify Jaws or Star Wars (either the main fanfare – Luke Skywalker's theme – or Darth Vader's); and most children and teens (and many parents) know Hedwig's theme from Potter. Williams manages to be instantly recognizable and just about anonymous simultaneously, like no other living figure in music history, or any cultural history for that matter.
Williams is known generally for a neo-Romantic sweep which stations him at the Hollywood rear-guard. There is something fascinating about the idea that he is actually part of a tradition of rearguards redefining that boundary. Before there were digital samplers (or even turntablism), he was actually biting old school and reworking it. He has been highly criticized as being derivative, but I think he's just doing what musicians having been doing for centuries, and doing it very well. Sometimes uncannily, often mercilessly. Appropriation.
Listen to the theme from Kings Row (1942) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, one of the last of the late Romantic period composers, an early film music great and another rear-guard figure who was snubbed by critics during his lifetime.
If you've never heard it before, but are of the "Star Wars generation", you might be surprised.
Here are the raw musical materials of the Star Wars saga, 35 years early – the orchestration; the "star" music; the main theme (Luke's) in the first melody; a second melody that gave birth to musical twins (the Rebel fanfare from SW and the Superman theme) while sounding like a sort of morphed precursor to Luke and Leia's theme. The tail end of the first melody also pre-echoes the theme for Lando Calrissian. Mix with two other more well-known precedents – The Planets by Gustav Holst and Le Sacre du Printemps by Igor Stravinsky – and you have one ridiculously famous space opera.
Those who know me well, know I've been nearly obsessed with John Williams since I saw both Star Wars and Close Encounters that summer at age nine, like thousands of other kids who responded as much to the music as the visuals. I already knew the Jaws theme, even though I was still too young to view the movie. I spent the early part of my teens listening to every soundtrack of his that I could find, devoted to his music the way my peers were to their rock and punk idols.
In my college years, mention of his name was a foolish move if you wanted to be taken seriously as a budding composer. And I honestly wasn't interested in him at that time. As I started to write my own music, and to compose music to accompany dance and theatre, I began to appreciate again what the maestro had given us, without attempting cheesy imitation, and without cynicism. And yes, he's on my iPod. The truth is out.
In 1993, he chanced to walk into the CD shop I was working in (while in town sussing out Toronto's Mendelssohn Choir to potentially employ them on the Schindler's List soundtrack, which another choir sang on). I had a good chance to speak with him during what was a slow midweek afternoon, and I realized that he was still one of my idols. He probably had what was for him an increasingly common experience (even before the internet) of meeting a fan who, as he put it, "knows more about my work than I do. Hardly anyone ever talks about The Accidental Tourist!"
He was shopping for the music of a favourite English composer. Most surreal was him walking into the empty store; me seeing John Williams the great composer-conductor; and him asking, "Where is Vaughan Williams?"
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