Now more than ever, John Williams clearly has some sort of future for orchestral concert music. In an era when Beethoven keeps concert halls half-empty, Williams's music sells out. Is it as great as the greatest classical music? Well, no. Not even close. And for future generations who do not have the same umbilical relationships with ET and Star Wars, there will be no further depths to plumb. Will he last? Probably - at least for a while. Should he last? Maybe not...
Williams is perhaps the greatest film composer of all time, at this point, it's almost not even a question. However good a movie is, Williams makes it 50% better. He has a sixth sense, perhaps even a seventh, for a movie's every ambiguous emotional color, every turn of mood is registered by Williams with a new chord. Williams is also the last great orchestral movie composer - in an era when pop music slowly but surely overtakes orchestral composition, Williams is its final glorious outpouring - the final vestige of studio Hollywood, and the very climax of film music's influence on movies. Soon enough, it'll probably be nothing but pop songs already written, and Williams will be a dinosaur fit for Jurassic Park. Take Williams out of the film, his music is all surface, and derivative to a hundred pieces of earlier music to the point of plagiarism. There's no challenge to either your intelligence or your emotions, it's pure pandering.
But film music, like opera, is entirely different from concert music, and even if opera is often performed in small excerpts, it should never be. Doing it that way isn't serious art - it's like a whole program of encores or a meal with nothing but dessert. Play Williams in excerpts divorced from his movies, and he's all surface, cliche after cliche, with as much artistic value as Pauly Shore and Carrot Top. But play Williams on the actual soundtrack to the movies, and there is no question, none at all, that what he does is very much art.
Play the final 15 minutes of ET, and you see that it's all Williams. However virtuoso Spielberg's filmmaking, without Williams, it's just pure technique and sloppy emotional pandering, but with Williams, it's pure sublimity - one of the most awesome 15 minutes ever put to film.
So even with all that, I still love the music. For a member of my generation, it is impossible to not have a visceral reaction to John Williams. The threatening pomp of the machine gun brass offset by the warmth of swelling strings and glockenspiel bells. In an uncanny way, Williams' music, like his master Spielberg, seems to promise the American covenant of liberal freedom, but always couched within force of iron. It's practically Ronald Reagan set to music, but it's also our childhoods, the promise our parents seemed to hold out for us that however threatening the big world was, the world was a secure place that always led us back home to families and communities that love us, would always be there for us, and never let us down. Life isn't like that, but that dream of the 80s and 90s is permanently lodged in my generation's subconscious, and it's a place to which every one of us longs to go back. Our ancestors underwent colossal struggles to bring us the secure lives they never had, and we grew up amid the promise that our lives would be different - only to discover in adulthood that our lives would have far more struggles even than our parents.
John Williams's music, even more than Spielberg's movies, is a lie. But it's a lie we need to believe; the lie of the American dream; just as our great-grandparents believed in the imperial lies which John Philip Sousa and Edward Elgar conjured. Every society, every person, depends on believing lies in order to get up every morning to face the world. We can't help believing in this thing that isn't true, and if we stop believing in it, we could destroy half the world.
So yes, we have to welcome John Williams into the concert halls and let people believe again in the American covenant. It's our civic responsibility. Play ET, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Superman along with the movies as though they're Beethoven's 9th, repeated ad nauseum, so that people can experience Spielberg and Lucas with an immediacy as never before, and revive this dream for audiences for their entire lives long so that they might teach it to their children, so America can live on, on the off-chance that orchestral music can help spare the world the horrors of its collapse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGP2o8lBgV8
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