The Guardian view on John Williams and movie music: a complex magic
Even those who might not immediately have recognised the name of John Williams, who turned 90 this week, will know his work – and many of these won’t just know it, but respond viscerally to it, as we do to childhood smells, or the pop songs of our teenage years. Over a 64-year career he has composed orchestral music for, among many other things, the Star Wars films, Superman, the first three Harry Potter films, Home Alone and 28 of Steven Spielberg’s movies, including Jaws, Jurassic Park and ET. Given the global and generational reach of these movies, Williams has a fair claim to have been heard by – and moved – many millions of people on this planet.
The use of orchestral scores harks back to the 1930s and has, despite the vast range of what is aurally possible in 2022, never gone away. Some people look down on such compositions – perhaps because the work can be so emotion-on-sleeve; so partial to a recognisable tune; so unpreciously productive; and so extremely successful. But Williams’s music, for instance, earns serious respect from the musicians who play it, who understand both the virtuosity it demands, and the difficulty of creating seemingly simple but unforgettable leitmotifs. Music written for the movies, such as William Walton’s score for Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, or Vaughan Williams’s for Scott of the Antarctic (which became his Symphony No 7, Sinfonia Antartica), or Philip Glass’s for Koyaanisqatsi, is played in concert for its own sake. There is a strong argument, too, that the movie industry has been an important patron of both orchestras and original orchestral music over the last century.
And yet perhaps there is still a difference. The film critic David Thomson has made the case that movie music “is not what we call real music”: the difference is, he argues, between something like Mahler’s Fifth, which “is sadness”, and the overture for Gone With the Wind, which says “get ready for a mighty story of sadness and glory”. There is probably a sense of mischief and provocation in this – it would be hard to argue that Miles Davis’s score for Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold, for example, wasn’t real music – but it does make the point that this music is meant to go with something.
The best movie music works on three levels – as the immediately obvious surface tune; then, underneath that, as a kind of counterpoint working either deliberately against or with a scene, maybe even telling a different story altogether; and finally, in a way so deep even the most sophisticated moviegoer can’t necessarily work out what’s going on. Emotional coercion has limited value; most successful is music that, in the words of Hans Zimmer (The Lion King, 12 Years A Slave, Thelma & Louise) “opens the door that you can walk through”.
“Used properly,” as the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky put it, “music does more than intensify the impression of the visual image … it opens up the possibility of a new, transfigured impression of the same material; something different in kind.” A film score is like an instrument in a greater orchestra that includes not only what is happening on screen but also the audience, each element listening and responding to and enhancing each other, whether they know it or not.