TITLE: Close Encounters With A Modest Icon
AUTHOR: Jack Sullivan
SOURCE: American Record Guide
DATE: July/August 2006
Though he has the biggest name recognition of any living symphonic composer, John Williams is modest and softspoken. His conversation flows in amiable waves that resemble the quiet music in the second half of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film score for which he has a unique fondness. During two extensive interviews, Williams spent a great deal of time praising others, including Berlioz, Alex North, and Yehudi Wyner, whose new Piano Concerto he regards as an "absolute knockout". Still, he doesn't find listening to the music of others useful: "If it's better than mine, and it usually is, it's no help; and if it's worse, it's no help either."
Williams is so prolific it's hard to keep up with his work. When I asked him why the latest Harry Potter movie didn't have his music, he answered, "I would have done it if I could, but it overlapped pretty exactly Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and War of the Worlds." So why not squeeze in one more? After all, Williams knocked off Munich and Memoirs of a Geisha in 2005 as well.
Yet Williams is a meticulous craftsman. Unlike many in the field, he orchestrates his own scores. For him, atmosphere and physical sound are inseparable from content. "The composer without the ability to orchestrate is without some essential tools. Just from a timbral point of view, the orchestral setting in terms of the scene in the film can be more important than the melodic or rhetorical material."
Like his predecessor Erich Korngold, Williams somehow finds time to write concert music: "I do it mostly for my own instruction and edification, and even some small degree of pleasure." Much of the pleasure comes from his personal connection with soloists such as Yo-Yo Ma, for whom he wrote his exquisite Cello Concerto, or Judith LeClair, who inspired his spiky, mysterious Bassoon Concerto. Such personal contacts have also inspired some of his most celebrated film music. The elegiac violin solo in Schinder's List came to him when he sat down at the piano with Itzhak Perlman; the delicate, impressionist textures of Memoirs of a Geisha (a welcome "deviation from all the racket of space and action films") are permeated with the "voice" of Yo-Yo Ma.
The communal experience is also what draws this former Boston Pops maestro to conducting. Originally, he picked up the baton in "self-defense" against a studio music director hiring someone who didn't know the score as well as he. Now he does it for the "wonderful sense of rejuvenation that comes from going from a cloistered room, where you work weeks on end without even speaking to people, to the more objectified moment when the music is brought forward before an audience, and it becomes a public event, a physical representation of what's been abstract on paper".
That sense of joy and rejuvenation were on full display April 26, when Williams conducted the New York Philharmonic in music by himself and one of his idols, Bernard Herrmann, a gala event where he brought Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg onstage to discuss the art of collaboration. Williams drew a big, resonant sound from the Philharmonic, bringing out layers (particularly in the lower brass) that one rarely encounters in the original film versions. Hearing the Philharmonic playing selections from Citizen Kane, Vertigo, ET, the Jaws fugue, and Close Encounters, among others, made the issue of whether film music can stand on its own seem moot. It was fascinating to see a clip from Indiana Jones shown first without music--"BORING!" Spielberg intoned from the stage--then with the score. But the moments that most visibly moved the huge audience were played straight up without the big screen: Glen Dicterow's dusky, haunted violin solo from Schindler's List, and the stunning overture to Star Wars, the encore everyone was waiting for.
During the rise of pop and synthesizer music in the 60s and 70s, many predicted the demise of symphonic film music, especially when Herrmann died in 1975. Then Star Wars blazed into theaters, and the talk suddenly ceased. "We used the London Symphony playing in a grand, romantic, sweeping style. It was such a surprising success that it may have reminded people, who had temporarily forgotten, how much a symphony orchestra can contribute to a film. There is nothing yet invented that delivers the emotional impact that it can."
One director who understands this is Steven Spielberg, with whom Williams has been working for 31 years, the longest director-composer collaboration in history. Like Hitchcock, whose last film Williams scored, Spielberg is "very positive about music; a lot of directors are uncomfortable with too much orchestra playing in their film, but Steven is very receptive to it."
Now 73, Williams finds that his tastes have evolved toward fundamentals. When he was a young man, his favorite composers were Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and "the super-moderns", along with jazz composers like Ellington and Billy Strahorn. Now his favorite is Haydn. Given Williams's wit, clarity, friendliness, and astonishing creativity as he gets older, his Haydn idolatry shouldn't be surprising.
Williams thinks that film music, which reaches a far larger audience than concerts or CDs, is uniquely situated to disseminate symphonic culture. "If you could say there is such a thing as global music, it's probably coming from film. As a unified art form, a successful film, if it has a score that people will embrace, can reach across boundaries".
In the end, the issue of film music versus classical music is a false one, as silly as the divide between opera and symphonic music. Kids who are brought up on film music often move on to embrace classical as well. Many of the 40 college students I took to the Williams concert told me afterward that this was their first exposure to a symphony orchestra and that they loved it. My 12 year-old son is a Mahler fan, but I began by brainwashing him with Star Wars, Close Encounters, and Lawrence of Arabia. As Williams sees it, one thing is certain: we are "constantly glued to a computer or movie screen, and to ignore film music is to ignore a reality that's with us; the audio-visual coupling as expressed in film music is something that is with us to stay because of the way we live."
