John Williams and Film Music Since 1971 Timothy E. Scheurer In 1969, two years before the first issue of Popular Music and Soci- ety went to press, two fateful events occurred in the realm of music for the movies. The first was Burt Bacharach’s Oscar for his score for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the other was the success of the score for Dennis Hopper’s paean to the counterculture, Easy Rider. These two events seemed to signal something new in the area of scoring motion pictures. In the case of Bacharach’s score it seemed to be further confirmation that films really did not have to be underscored as they had been since the 1930s but could be scored simply by supplying a collec- tion of pop tunes. The presence of a single composer in Butch Cassidy meant there would be a sort of formal consistency in the film’s “sound,” besides which the potential for hit tunes (the plural is the important point here) was increased exponentially. Easy Rider, on the other hand, sig- naled something quite different; heck, you could hear some producer saying, maybe we don’t even need a composer at all; first, just rummage around in the bins of one of our subsidiary record companies for some appropriate, mood-evoking tunes and then get some hot (semihot!?) rock group to write something like a title tune and we're set. One could only wonder what the other Oscar nominees thought as they observed the awards that year. Represented in that group were some of the finest music composers of the last two decades: Georges Delerue was nomi- nated for Anne of the Thousand Days, Ernest Gold for The Battle of Santa Vittoria, Jerry Fielding for The Wild Bunch; and there was a minor composer named Johnny Williams, who was nominated for a delightful little film called The Reivers. That this minor composer should emerge out of this august group of nominees to become the predominant film music composer of the last 25 years is not altogether surprising, but how he did is.' For how John Williams emerged to become the dominant film music composer of the last 25 years is by not emulating either Burt Bacharach or Easy Rider but, instead, by remaining true to the conven- tions of the form—in fact, by emulating his other fellow nominees— while at the same time being able to tap into the pop vein mined so expertly by Bacharach. 5960 + Popular Music and Society If 1969 looked bad for the “establishment” composer in Hollywood, 1971 must have looked absolutely apocalyptic. Michel Legrand won the Best Original Dramatic Score award for his Summer of ’42 score, beat- ing out John Barry, Richard Rodney Bennett, Jerry Fielding, and new- comer—and portent of things to come—lIsaac Hayes for his score for Shaft. Equally portentous was the award for Adaptation and Original Song Score which went to John Williams for Fiddler on the Roof. The fact that Legrand’s thin albeit highly evocative score won and that Isaac Hayes was considered a contender seemed to confirm the direction that movie soundtracks would be taking in the future. Williams’s award was confirmation that the old guard still had some life left in them. Of course, composers should have observed the warning signs throughout the 1960s. The Beatles’ earlier successes with A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) and Simon and Garfunkel’s interpolation of songs into Dave Grusin’s score for The Graduate (1967), were only the most prominent harbingers of rock’s future as a legitimate alternative to the conventional classical film score. Then Stanley Kubrick made life interesting and difficult for the composer by dumping Alex North’s score for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and using his “temp track” score, which was a pastiche of Richard Strauss, Gyorgy Ligeti, Aram Khatcha- turian, and Johann Strauss. And indeed, the direction of film music since that time has reflected these trends. Rock and other forms of pop music have been an important adjunct not only to the content of many films but also to their marketing. Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Urban Cowboy (1980) are two notable examples of where a collection of songs substi- tuted entirely for a diegetic soundtrack; the soundtracks, moreover, dom- inated the larger music scene through the run of the film (and past as well). More recently, albums such as Dazed and Confused (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994) (not Alan Silvestri’s score) brought older rock back onto the charts; while newer films such as Clerks (1994), Tank Girl (1995), Dangerous Minds (1996), and Philadelphia (1993) have given artists, old and new, more exposure on the radio. It is almost symbolic that Williams himself has had to share disc space with pop artists on the soundtrack for Born on the Fourth of July (1989), a film set largely in the 1960s, symbolic because the disc is emblematic of the film music scene of the last 25 years: the new is married to the traditional. Williams’s climb to the top of his profession began in the 1970s with his scores for The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). Both were nominated for Academy Awards and the theme songs won Oscars in their respective years. Although Williams was not the composer of the themes, they helped album sales and drew attention to his skills in writing for the “blockbuster.” His breakthrough,John Williams and Film Music Since 1971 - 61 however, really came when he teamed up with Steven Spielberg for Jaws (1975). Jaws, in a sense, is a classic Williams score and one that is repre- sentative of the compositional approach that he has maintained to the present. Part horror film and part action-adventure film, Jaws presents a unique challenge to the composer: one could go for the avant-garde, atonal approach that much of the action seems to warrant, but that approach might not work for the great shark hunt sequences that domi- nate the last part of the film. Williams eschewed purely atonal or even post-modern approaches to scoring the film, and he also eschewed the purely classical late-19th-century post-romantic musical language. He nonetheless still reached back in time and borrowed ideas that fall between those two musical camps: instead of Schoenberg he quotes Stravinsky for the horror, and instead of Wagner/Max Steiner or Korn- gold he quotes Debussy for the seafaring ideas. The Great White’s music is a page ripped right out of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, echo- ing especially the vigorous polyrhythms of the ballet’s opening, “The Adoration of the Earth.” What he achieved was a music whose firmly grounded tonal centers wouldn’t alienate most audiences, while finding a musical idiom that captured perfectly the primordial state of which the Great White is a part. This, mixed with music evoking Debussy’s La Mer, achieved what I think is Williams's great strength as a film music composer and one of the redsons for his continued success: he found the emotional core at the center of the film, a compelling admixture of romance, mystery and terror, something primitive and noble (both on the part of humans and fish). From this point on one could expect a Steven Spielberg production to feature a John Williams score. His next film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), must have also been something of a challenge because, on the one hand, it seemed so reminiscent of the old sci-fi films of the 1950s replete with aliens and mystery, but on the other hand, there was about the whole experience—the encounter—something so innocent that, again, finding the emotional core of the film required reconciling stylistic imperatives and idioms. Williams’s score actually evokes a couple of past filmic/music experiences that would help audiences relate to the action and the characters, There is the evocation of the classic 1950s sci-fi film, @ la Bernard Herrmann’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), in some of the sounds created by the strings and other instru- ments as well as in the harmonies and minor dissonances in the melodies. There is also the evocation of Gyorgy Ligeti’s music, which Kubrick used effectively in 200/, where Williams creates tonal clusters using voices and sometimes the whole orchestra to build tension and suspense and, to a lesser degree, terror. In short, anyone who had seen a