The Art of John Williams

Antony Cooke ©2016

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Is it fair to say, without fear of contradiction, that John Williams was responsible for

singlehandedly reshaping the sound of the movies? In the early ‘70’s, many soundtracks

had degenerated into rather sad assemblages of popular songs, and the like. The grand old

“Hollywood sound” was thing of the past—passé. Who would have guessed that it was

about to stage a comeback, albeit in a new guise, entirely updated and appropriate to the

era? And that its prophet would be a figure who was already known in the industry as

Henry Mancini’s pianist “Johnny” Williams, and who can be heard playing on most of

Mancini’s famous scores.

Suddenly thrust into the role of composer (in the ‘60’s TV series, Lost in Space),

Williams new career exploded into a stream of successes, crossing into motion pictures

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almost from the start. I played in his first blockbuster score (while still living in London)

in the 1971 movie, Fiddler on the Roof. Only known at the time to movie insiders, it was

readily apparent, however, that John Williams was destined for something well beyond

the norm, winning an Oscar for his adaptation of Jerry Bock’s musical. His success was

followed by a string of early ‘70’s blockbusters, such as The Posiedon Adventure, The

Towering Inferno, and Earthquake, his distinctive music established among movie-goers

long before Spielberg’s iconic Jaws made him an instant household name, its sinister

motif still defining the dangers of then deep.

With major movie scores such as these, Williams had reintroduced the classic large

orchestral score to movie soundtracks, and asserted his up-to-date version of the old

Hollywood sound—a blend of twentieth century styles and old-fashioned Romanticism.

It was already identifiable as a distinctive sound, a uniquely modern manifestation of

everything that had been associated traditionally with all things Hollywood. If one can

hear strains of Prokofiev, William Walton, Wagner, Strauss, Elgar, Holst, even

Stravinsky—and how many more—these influences hardly make his music less original;

like all music, Williams’s has its roots in something that preceded it. Once Star Wars

burst upon the scene in 1977, he became iconic. The main title—a symphonic overture—

was at the top of the charts for weeks. Closely followed with such enormously successful

scores as Close Encounters of The Third Kind, Superman, and ET, The Extra Terrestrial,

the die was cast for Williams’s enduring place in late twentieth century music and

beyond. It was not long afterwards that he was appointed conductor of the Boston Pops

Orchestra, in the Wake of Arthur Fiedler. Among movie composers it seems to have no

equal.

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 Without compromising the highest artistic standards, Williams has produced a vast

body of music that speaks, not only to the educated musician and cultured layman, but,

notably, also to the “man in the street,” who has no interest (nor should he have,

necessarily) in knowing why the music is so great—just that he likes it! Attaining an

almost impossible crossover between such diverse parallel universes was achieved by

finding the wormhole that connects them. As such, the feat must be acknowledged as an

extreme rarity, because the arts normally presuppose that little great art that is original or

blazes new trails can be truly creative without the expectation of initial rejection, only

followed by a lengthy period of growing acceptance with belated canonization. Although

Williams achievement in this respect is not entirely unique throughout the history music,

the precise replication of exactly what he did will not to be found anywhere within it.

Critics’ attempts to explain away the phenomenon by pointing to his place and

circumstances, surely, the same could be said about almost anybody. However, even

those remotely comparable examples can be counted on one, or possibly two, hands.

Gioachino Rossini immediately comes to mind; its immediacy is strikingly apparent—

without sacrificing high artistic values. However, in this instance, Rossini’s music,

marvelous as it is, covers a limited range of emotions, and—despite, for instance, the

power of the storm in the William Tell Overture—high drama and emotive forces in any

depth generally are lacking. Rossini knew that, in order to reach the larger public of his

day, he needed to write in an accessible style. Audiences in the earlier nineteenth century

had not yet been subjected to the colossal barrage of ever-more vivid commercially

oriented, sensual stimulation that has increasingly defined and conditioned mass culture

since early in the twentieth century. Not ready to experience anything that would shock

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their genteel sensibilities, the popularly accepted arts had to comply with restrictions

imposed, by default, in society, or face their immediate rejection for being too heavy,

garish or gaudy.

Even after Richard Wagner’s startling music dramas, little, it seems, changed

stylistically in the more popularly accepted art forms even by late Victorian times. Gilbert

and Sullivan's usually lighthearted, amusing "operettas," really, just continued the

tradition. However, from a purely technical standpoint, they were precursors to the

modern musical format. Musically, if not in Rossini's league, Gilbert and Sullivan’s work

did reach across what most of the public saw as a great divide between themselves and

the "cultured elite"—the privileged segment of the populace they found easy to reject out

of hand as stuffy pseudo intellectuals. Much of the public still takes great solace in this

position about the arts; it is a powerful defense against what they perceive as a self-

appointed segment of society looking down their noses at them. Just listen to many of the

hosts of classical radio broadcasts; the elitism in their tone has done more to turn the

public away from the arts than to bring them in. It is almost as if the intent of these

broadcasters, as well as the community they believe they represent, is to keep the arts all

to themselves. It is hard to imagine that anyone, other than those “elevated” by their own

assumptions of intellectual and cultural superiority, would talk “down” to the “great

unwashed” in this way.

Emerging from this period, and attempting to expand the dramatic range, both

Giacomo Puccini and George Gershwin also managed to bridge the divide, producing

works that incorporated accessible, even popular idioms within artistic and original styles

of the highest order. Such music also probes the previously absent levels of profundity

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without compromising artistic integrity, and the consistently high quality of their work

allows virtually everyone to enjoy and appreciate their creative vision, resonating as a

curious hybrid, and occupying a unique place in the arts.

Surely Aaron Copland, too, found success within a related genre of music; if less

obviously connected the popular arts, though, nevertheless, it is. However, one of my

biggest gripes with Copland’s assessment of the composers’ task involves his

commentary on Charles Ives. Although it was meant innocently enough, and certainly not

unkindly (he did admire Ives), Copland completely missed the necessary price of being a

pioneer of innovations in music, and considered that Ives's music suffered because it did

not have the "advantage" of being filtered through audience reaction. However, that is

precisely the reason why Ives was able to attain what he did: his music was not dependent

on immediate acclaim or the embrace of the public. With no disrespect intended toward

Copland, even his staunchest defenders would not claim he was among the twentieth

century’s innovators—that very quality surely being independent of positive audience

reaction at first blush. One can compare the philosophy to the “committee” airings of

movies, in which major decisions about the production are made based on audience

reaction to a screening. Because a movie must succeed at the box office immediately for

the investors to make their money back, a movie never can be the product of pure art,

alone.

Although John Williams would not claim to be an innovator in musical techniques,

either, his music following not only in the footsteps of the great tradition of classical

composers, but also in those of notable “crossover” figures. Strikingly, he resurrected

Wagner’s technique of leitmotifs in his score for Star Wars, which has many of the

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dramatic qualities of a grand opera score. Might Wagner, himself, have liked to try his

hand at a movie score had it been available to him? Although Wagner would, no doubt,

have wanted to write the screenplay and direct all his movies, too (!), á la James

Cameron—and no one can evaluate how commercially successful they would have

been—the movie as an art form surely would have been a superlative match for his

creative visions. Perhaps we can envisage a modern equivalent, in which the Ring Cycle

would be a series of movies and sequels, Wagner's hero Siegfried being, perhaps, recast

as Luke Skywalker!

Nevertheless, in relation to the important requirement that a movie composer

subjugate his independence to the subject matter in hand, far from assuming a

chameleon-like role in his music, Williams defined his language in unique ways that

make his “voice” original in its own way. The sound is unmistakably recognizable and

immediately appealing at the most casual of hearing, without sacrificing the high artistic

order of the finer traditions of Western “Classical” music. Single handedly, his own

special cinematographic sound—the “John Williams” sound—thematically, sonically,

harmonically and rhythmically, jumps out from the first note. Dramatically, too, it covers

a full range of emotions and drama; whatever the movie calls for is perfectly matched in

sound, supporting the drama without ever imposing itself upon it. Yet, it is fully capable

of standing alone in the concert hall. The full-length scores of Star Wars or ET, for

example, can be enjoyed in a continuous concert performance, and in no less than the

truly operatic context of their creation.

John Williams has been at the top of his game in the movie industry for almost fifty

years, and has dominated with authority the now-familiar, modern cinema sound copied,

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though never equaled, by others. My good fortune in having recorded a significant

number of his scores with him has allowed me the perspective to appreciate that he stands

virtually alone today; perhaps he always did. With the loss of other great movie

composers, such as Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini, James Horner, or Elmer Bernstein,

it seems that a great age is waning. Why is this so? Is it due to a lack of talent among the

newcomers? Maybe . . . .but maybe not. Certainly such younger figures as John Powell,

Danny Elfman and Mychael Danna have proven their mettle significantly in this respect

in countless movie scores, so there are people talented enough to maintain the art form

into the future. Equal to what Williams accomplished? Maybe; maybe not. Regardless,

how many great composers have there been in any era? However, as the late Shirley

Walker noted (during the 1997 scoring of Turbulence), music for the movies is in danger

of becoming little more than sound effects. Indeed, Walker did identify one of the

problems—a direct result of the lack of higher culture in modern society.

The survival of the form has been challenged by the proliferation of pseudo-

symphonic scores by those attempting to follow in Williams's steps. Without the benefit

of a background and knowledge steeped in previous centuries of artistic sophistication,

doing so is unlikely. Does anyone believe, too, that the majority of young directors (who

hire the composers) have had the benefit of a thorough grounding in the classical arts?

Partly because of the lack of music education in the schools, and, no less, through the

plethora of rock ‘n roll “concerts” on university campuses masquerading as pure music

art (there is never any differentiation made), most young directors wouldn't know a

symphony if it jumped up and bit them in the face. A “song” is regarded as a

“composition.” How many young people know that such tunes are just the starting point

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of a composition? As a direct consequence, many young directors tend to gravitate to

sounds familiar to them. Who can blame them? In an age of bottom-line cutbacks in

education, invariably they have been only exposed to the popular arts. The composers

they hire are those they know—often not more than rock and rollers who are now trying

their hand at film scoring—now, they are attempting to write orchestral textures and

styles in which they have absolutely no background. Composers, such as the illustrious

Hans Zimmer, prodigiously gifted though he is, and having written some of the most

inventive and catchy tunes and riffs known in recent decades, nevertheless, seems to have

little idea how to write an extended compositional work. Instead, his scores degenerate

into overly thick, multi-tracked rambling essays that lack awareness of the fundamentals

of orchestral textures or the potential color at his disposal. Form, per se, is an unknown

quantity.

Most unusual in any of the arts, at eighty-four years of age, Williams shows no sign

of slowing down, nor does his work sound in any way stale, diminished, less energetic or

inventive. While managing to step within comfortably the confines of the movie that he

must match in sound, nevertheless, his music contains masterful structural form, based on

all that has evolved over the centuries. With the quality of motivic development, so

frequently lacking in the music of many, if not most, of the newcomers, is it any wonder

that Williams’s music can stand alone? He has demonstrated that a thorough grounding in

the traditional arts is never a restriction—a perception, perhaps, not appreciated by those

who do not know better. Just as musicologists seemed surprised when they realized that

Charles Ives wrote music that had direct links with European forms, did they believe he

had emerged from a culture that shared nothing with its heritage? The fact that it sounds

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 so different does not negate the fact that what preceded it was contained within its

seemingly alien confines. In the spirit of the Transcendentalists who had inspired him, all

musical components already existed; Ives merely reassembled them in ways that reflected

his environment. Similarly, John Williams took existing components and redistributed

them to reflect his own vision, which, in turn, had to reflect the visions of others; his

particularly astonishing success in juggling the requirements of his art, however, reflects

his genius—a quality that he is far too modest to apply to himself.

AC © 4/29/2016