John Williams – The Sound Of Movies

Today we’re going to be taking a quick look at the life and impact of cinema’s most celebrated film composer; John Williams.

Imagine being in a movie theater.

You’ve waited in line to get tickets with all of the couples, the families and the first-time-daters.

You’ve got your trough of popcorn, your bucket of soda and your “sharing size” pack of milk duds and are prepared for the onset of Type 2 diabetes.

You’ve worked your way to Row F, found your seat and set up your base camp.

There’s the raft of previews and trailers. The inevitable buzz when one trailer captures the interests of the audience and they make plans months in advance to go and watch it. The advertisement to turn your cell phone off is greeted with the shining lights of people doing final checks of their facebook/instagram.

Then… the lights dim.. It is absolutely silent.

Put yourself in that moment.

That’s it!

You’re captivated. Your first experience is shaped, not by what you watch, but by what you hear. That is why this series is dedicated to the composers. The people who transport us, musically, to other parts of the world, other worlds entirely, other times, other moments that we may not have ever experienced. It’s hard to imagine Maximus and Proximo’s gladiators battling in the Colosseum without Hans Zimmer’s epic scoring as a backdrop

Jack and Rose standing on the front of the Titanic without the beautiful, sweeping music of James Horner

or even Clint Eastwood staring off for a gunfight with Leo Van Cleef without Ennio Morricone’s haunting musicbox and orchestral subtext.

JAWS

Now, think of a shark… a big shark… one that requires “a bigger boat”… You’re already toying with two repeated notes, played on a cello, getting faster and faster and louder and louder. Jaws. Anyone care to guess how long into the movie, “Jaws”, it took for us to actually see Jaws? That’s right 80 minutes. 80!

John Williams’ soundtrack was so good at conveying the famous fish and building tension that we never caught sight of it until ⅔ the way through the movie! Jaws is the perfect allusion for John Williams’ music – according to a 2005 survey by the American Film Institute, the Jaws theme ranks among the top 10 most memorable scores in movie history. Spielberg was even quoted as saying “John Williams has made our movie more adventurous and gripping than I ever thought possible.”

Williams built his soundtrack from the deep, like a shark coming from deep to attack, except this time from deep within the orchestra (low strings, low brass instruments) that were also rhythmic: “so simple, insistent and driving, that it seems unstoppable, like the attack of the shark,” Williams explained. This inexorable backing allowed Spielberg to build that outright tension throughout his movie. And here’s another thing, when Spielberg heard it, he laughed at first because he thought it too simple. Let’s be honest, it goes E-F-E-F. Put yourself in the moment; the great director comes to Williams’ home or office, like in the video for ET. He lines up the film on the projector, turns down the lights and prepares to hear the music that his friend and composer has spent the past few weeks working on. Then he hears E-F…. E-F… E-F-E-F-E-F-E-F and Williams turns and looks at him. That must have taken some stones! And, as a great example of being a creative and following your own path, it worked! It didn’t just work, it’s become the most instantly recognizable them in the history of cinema!

Indeed, here’s some trivia for you. Spielberg himself can be heard playing on the soundtrack itself! Earlier in the movie, a high-school band is playing on a street parade, and Williams needed to record a terrible-sounding rendition with his orchestra. Spielberg, having played clarinet in his high-school band, joined the orchestra to record the music for that scene and helped to make it sound rather amateurish!

That’s why I love John Williams. He has consistently managed to make our movies infinitely better with his music. I haven’t even begun on “Jurassic Park” – the moment where Dr Grant first catches sight of the dinosaurs, a species that he has studied through their fossils for his whole life and now sees them in the flesh, something seemingly impossible and unimaginable. We just hear this sigh in the orchestra that is both comforting and majestic. It’s incredible.  

JURASSIC PARK

One key aspect of the score is Williams’s use of bells tinkling in the upper register creating a childlike awe that we all experience the first time we see a dinosaur. We are all little Timmy and Dr Alan Grant when that first Brachiosaurus appears – this was the a convincing use of CGI in a world of stop motion – we are witnessing something that we thought was impossible. John Williams not only captures our childlike innocence, but also the majestic grandeur of these humongous creatures IN ONE THEME! Moreover, when we learn that the sound design team built the T-rex’s roar from the sounds of a baby elephant mixed with a walrus, then it is no wonder that his score had to match it for richness and complexity. However, it is relatively simple in it’s conception; the melody to this theme is based largely on a simple three-note motive (for those of you out there who are musically minded – B-flat, A, B-flat make up the first few breath notes before the whole theme appears).

My favorite piece of trivia about this piece comes from Spielberg who was receiving taped recordings of the theme whilst he was directing Schindler’s List and said that on his way to set, he would put the music on to cheer him up before tackling the emotional gut-punch that he was about to be dealt with the subject matter.

INDIANA JONES

Try playing the opening section of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” when River Phoenix plays a young “Indy” trying to get a golden cross from the clutches of tomb raiders and into a museum. Having been fortunate enough to attend a John Williams concert in which Steven Spielberg was the guest compere for the evening, the latter introduced this notion – that 10 minute sequence, although filled with action, humor and several nods to Indiana Jones hallmarks, passes incredibly slowly when played without the iconic soundtrack. That is what the music does. It takes the incredible visuals and adds tension, emotion, angst. It uses the dark foreboding of the lower strings and brass when things look bleak, the high pitched percussion and violins when funny things happen to the clumsy villains and the whole orchestra performing the famous Indiana Jones theme when our hero is on top.

There is no doubt in my mind that the final 10 minutes of “ET-The Extra Terrestrial” are probably the most spectacular pieces of cinema there have ever been. In the video below we see the beloved composer with his friend and (by his own admission) the man he calls boss, talking through a “Call” and “Response” of the ET theme. The irony is not lost in that the theme surrounds the subject matter of an alien being trying to contact home and waiting for a “response” of his own. However, deeper than that, something that makes John Williams stand out from the majority of other movie soundtrack composers are his use of Leitmotif.