800 Words: A Brief History of Film Music - John Williams - Culmination of the Silver Age

(The Planets. Whatever else it’s become, it’s a fantastic piece of music.)

Gustav Holst is the name you most often hear John Williams being accused of ripping off. Most of today’s music lovers remain dimly aware that a world of symphonic music exists beyond the two movements of it (Mars and Jupiter) they played in high school concert band. But since The Planets is a work heard by millions of people who barely know another note of classical music, it’s considered something approaching de rigeur to say that John Williams got his entire bag of tricks from that one piece. However, if you spend enough time among music snobs, you’ll hear accusations of Williams lifting from Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner, Erich Korngold, Miklos Rozsa, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Antonin Dvorak, Gyorgy Ligeti, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Dimitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, Benjamin Britten, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Jean Sibelius, Duke Ellington, John Philip Sousa, Elmer Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, .....eventually, you begin to think that the Williams ripoff list is nothing more than an honor roll of orchestral music.

Is John Williams a ripoff artist? Well, yes, yes he is. But that isn’t the right question. I look at the above list, and I can point to passages where most of these composers of ripped off other composers just as blatantly - and occasionally just as often. Plagiarism may not make for great scholarship, but it’s an under-regarded part of the creative process. Writers borrow heavily from other sources, and at their best they completely transform old material into something so different from the original as to be unrecognizable to any eye or ear that wasn’t searching for plagiarism in the first place. Many people say that this is a particularly fertile era for the transformation of old material, and give the process fancy academic names like ‘recontextualization’ or ‘intertextuality’ as though these are the latest revolutions to hit human thought. But what we now call recontextualization has been occurring since the first caveman performer described hunting a woolly mammoth. Reframing the context is one of the artist’s primary concerns, and if that process is ever mastered, it often takes a lifetime’s work to do.

So no, if John Williams is a ripoff artist, then so are Wagner, Mahler, and (especially) Stravinsky. John Williams’s music may sound like other people’s, but the way he uses other people’s music is totally original. Yet there’s another question, a perfectly legitimate one to ask, which doesn’t put John Williams in a very flattering light. Independently of the movies, can you listen to his music for pleasure, consolation, enlightenment?

Pleasure? Yes. I think so at least. But what kind of pleasure? Is it the high-minded pleasure one can derive from a Bach fugue or a Leonard Cohen song? Um...no. The pleasure of John Williams is the kind of pleasure one derives from drunkenly belting out Journey or The Eagles in a crowded bar. It’s overwrought, emotionally sappy, and simplistic for simplicity’s sake. If you’re looking for deeper meaning in John Williams, you’re just as dumb as you seem. And yet....

Rock fans can pretend to ironically listen to Journey thousands of times without ever admitting to each other that there's never been any irony there. In the exact same way I can listen to John Williams at least hundreds with that pretense to irony. But in an honest moment I have to reluctantly admit that in fact, there is something completely unironic about my response to this most unironic of composers.

Yes, by the standards of what we think of as concert music, the technique is threadbare, the music is not that inventive, and the emotions conveyed seem to have no ambiguity to them. Yet there is still something unmistakable in that small universe it conveys. It is a reminder of a world that you once thought uncomplicated by the insurmountable, a world before the banal was recognized as banal. It is music of penny-plain and cheap wisdom. But we all need to hear platitudes occasionally to be reminded of the truth that lies beneath them. It is music that reminds you of when you first discovered the rules of life that today seem so commonplace that you hardly think of them. But sometimes you need to hear those rules, if only to remember.

John Williams’s music is an important presence in the lives of every person who reads this post. There is not a single person among us untouched by Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, ET, Jaws, Close Encounters, Home Alone, Jurassic Park, etc. And no matter what we think of his music when taken out of the context of the movies, within the movies his music accomplishes exactly what it’s meant to, and does so brilliantly.

On the one hand, Williams is perhaps the most obvious throwback to 19th century romanticism among contemporary composers. In 2012, his orchestration still comes right out of Rimsky-Korsakov’s textbook, and he uses Wagner’s concept of the Leitmotif (think of the themes associated with all the different characters in Star Wars) more frequently and with greater skill than any composer since Wagner himself. On the other hand, there is a second Williams, far less commented upon, that reserves itself for smaller movies that strips itself of the Lucasian pomp and is replaced by moments of startling intimacy.


(Starts at 1:30)

To take just one example: remember the first futurist scene in A.I. (the one right after most people complained the movie should have ended)? The world has flashed forward 2000 years to a new ice age and watch as robots navigate a vessel through the ruins of New York so they might find David, Teddy, and their ship. To me, the power of this scene is overwhelming. I find this one of the most beautiful, disorienting, haunting scenes in all of Spielberg. As an audience member, we have no idea of where or what we are anymore, we can only sense that something terrible has happened and that we’re in for a shock.

Williams accompanies the scene with a wordless chorus that could have been lifted from Holst’s Neptune (the last movement of the Planets), singing harmonies that come almost straight from Holst’s Saturn. But it’s difficult to believe that more extraordinarily appropriate music could have been chosen for that scene. For a thousand years, the chorus has been the ideal vessel for music to address questions of eternity - questions that are both disturbing, illuminating, and strangely comforting. Whatever one’s opinion of A.I. (I like it), this scene contains as great a piece of film music as has ever been written, and a perfect example of ‘Silver Age’ film scoring in which composers use very unconventional methods to make better movies for a generation of unconventional moviemakers.

Williams was only one of a number of film composers to put us on a nostalgia trend - Marvin Hamlisch (think of The Sting’s Ragtime score) or Randy Newman (think of the Ragtime score for … Ragtime) but Williams is easily the greatest and most influential of them. He is the culmination of film music’s Silver Age in the same way that Bernard Hermann is the culmination of the Golden Age.

A very different kind of nostalgia existed in pop soundtracks. If classical soundtracks were a kind of nostalgia for a Golden Age of an American culture that was still dominated by Europe, then Pop soundtracks evoked a kind of nostalgia for the familiar music of the present day. The classicism of previous generations used to be both comforting and challenging, but its increasing distance from contemporary life came to seem both stuffy and disturbing. A 100-piece orchestra seemed the ultimate in largess, particularly for a generation coming to terms with independent financing, in which many of the best quality films were made quite cheaply. The most influential of these pop soundtracks was Mean Streets. Spielberg had John Williams, Martin Scorsese had the entire world of American music.

Click here for the scene that changed film music forever.

Obviously, Mean Streets was not the first soundtrack to use existing pop music. The Graduate and Easy Rider are only the most famous to predate Mean Streets. But Mean Streets’ use of pop music is more influential. Easy Rider and The Graduate were major releases. Mean Streets was done on Hollywood’s fringes. After Scorsese did it, it was acceptable for small independent films to not write their own music - and therefore instead of paying for lots of musicians, they only had to pay for the rights to the music. In the battle to make films independently from Hollywood, the Mean Streets soundtrack was one of the most decisive victories.

800 Words: A Brief History of Film Music - The Silver Age Part 3

(Accompaniment to a Film Scene by Schoenberg...the film was never made)

One of the most interesting phenomena of film music was the differing attitudes of the greatest composers to it. One would expect that most ‘highbrow’ composers would think of film music as something intolerably vulgar, but that attitude was not nearly as pervasive as it might seem. Composers loved movies as did every other profession, both Schoenberg and Stravinsky lived their Golden years in Hollywood and were friends of many film stars. It was generally not the lowbrowness which they abhorred, it was the relinquishing of control. There’s a famous story about how Stravinsky met with Sam Goldwyn about the possibility of writing a four-movement symphony that would be accompanied by a film score. Everything seemed signed and sealed, until Goldwyn let slip the condition that each movement had to be a minute long. Thus ended Stravinsky’s Hollywood career.

But outside of the most rarefied composition circles, the attitude of the great composers to film scores was by and large accomodating. Earning good money to write music is not something to be lightly dismissed, particularly when a composer was ordered to do so by his government. In communist Russia, both Sergei Prokofiev and Dimitri Shostakovich wrote film scores that stand with their finest music.


(The Battle of the Ice from Alexander Nevsky...the greatest thing Prokofiev ever did?)

Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky is not a particularly good movie, but it is a war epic made with incredible aesthetic sophistication. Neither Kurosawa nor Kubrick nor the grand technicolor epics of the 50's would be possible without Alexander Nevsky’s example (whether that’s a good thing is for another day). If Nevsky still retains a raw viscral power, it’s in large part thanks to Prokofiev’s score, which is so good that it allows us to forget so much of the film’s ridiculousness. Prokofiev’s music, like Eisenstein’s movies, is a monument to pure craft - with effects that can make your hair stand on end, even if you’re never particularly moved.


(Shakespeare and Shostakovich, almost a partnership of equals.)

How different Prokofiev is from his great rival Shostakovich, in film scoring as in every other genre in which they wrote. Whereas Prokofiev wrote film music that perfectly fit virtuoso display, Shostakovich wrote film music whose interior power can hold its own with Shakespeare. Prokofiev’s technique was perfect, and almost perfectly empty. Shostakovich’s technique was great, but could also be faulty because he put it to the service of a far more ambitious artistic mission. Shostakovich two most famous film scores are for Shakespeare adaptations. In the mid-60’s, the Russian director, Grigory Kozintsev, made cinematic versions of Hamlet and King Lear that must stand as among the greatest Shakespeare adaptations ever put to film For my money, his Hamlet is the very greatest of all Shakespeare movies. The movie is an incredible marriage of acting, cinematography, script (of course), and music. For source material like this, only the very greatest composers could meet Shakespeare on his own terms. And Shostakovich still does not get his due as the very greatest composer of the 20th century. Just watch the above scene, the Ghost scene. We never see any more of the ghost’s face than his eyes, we don’t need to. It’s all described in Shostakovich’s music, in which he finds the perfect tone to capture the eerie otherworldliness, the terror, and the lurid fascination of this apparition.



Toru Takemitsu was not only the dominant composer of late 20th century Japan, he was also the dominant film composer. His most famous score is also a Shakespeare score, Ran, Kurosawa’s adaptation of King Lear. Ran is the Japanese word for chaos, and chaos is probably as good a one-word description of King Lear as exists. But Takemitsu’s music is precisely the opposite of chaos. No composer, not even Debussy or Webern, approaches the extreme delicacy of Takemitsu’s music. Even the most dramatic passages of Ran are accompanied by extrarodinarily still music. Rather than literally imitate the action in sound, Takemitsu seems to offer a kind of poetic commentary on the action.


(Agincourt)

Perhaps it’s the effect Shakespeare’s prestige, but many of the greatest classical composers did their best work in Shakespeare movies. Another great composer who excelled in Shakespeare movies was William Walton - who scored the Olivier movies. Walton’s music is a perfect counterpart to Olivier’s Shakespeare: dramatically flamboyant, highly nuanced, and quite bombastic. Both of them found themselves a bit out of their depth for Hamlet’s complexities, but were perfect vessels for the tub-thumping extravagance of Henry V. Years later, Olivier found himself (wrongly) uncertain about the quality of his Henry V, but he had no such qualms about Walton’s score, which he thought the best thing about the movie.


(Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront. Yet another chapter of unfulfilled promise in the story of the greatest should have been composer in American history.)

Many other great composers wrote memorable film scores, including Aaron Copland, Georges Auric, Malcolm Arnold, Leonard Bernstein (his one score, for On The Waterfront, can easily convince you that he could have found a natural home in Hollywood) and more recently John Corigliano and Philip Glass. Nor were the greatest film composers always relegated to the soundtrack - Erich Korngold, Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman, and Elmer Bernstein all wrote somewhat successful concert works. Even if Nino Rota was probably the only composer to achieve something approaching equal emminence in both fields, the dividing line between one type of composer and the other was never as bifurcated as people say it was.


(in all it’s glory......, its a nice theme though.)

But a completely different type of great composer is to be found in Vangelis Papathanassiou. Simply known as ‘Vangelis’ to most people, he is one of the first truly legendary composers of electronic music. And during the fifteen year period that Hollywood largely gave its movies to electronic scores, no film composer found himself more in demand. This is partially where I have to admit to some limits to my knowledge. It’s not that I don’t know enough about Vangelis, though I probably don’t. I’ve just never seen Blade Runner, which is both his most famous score and one of the most influential movies of the last half-century (you have fifteen seconds to hiss before moving to the next sentence). Vangelis’s other most famous contribution to film scoring is the much-loved, much-abused theme to Chariots of Fire, as heard in every soft-rock compilation album of the last thirty years.

Click here to redeem Vangelis a little bit.

800 Words: A Brief History of Film Music - The Silver Age Part 2

(The ghost of Alban Berg presides over these California teenagers)

The first of the ‘silver age’ composers was probably Leonard Rosenman. The same year he did the score for The Cobwebb he also scored two James Dean movies, Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. Rebel Without a Cause is one of the first film scores in which jazz and atonal composition screams from out the soundtrack into the mainstream of musical discourse. There was jazz and atonality before Rosenman, not least in the scores of Bernard Hermann, but the presence of these more modern styles was always rather incidental and sanitized, more Tin Pan Alley than Jazz, more Salome than Schoenberg. Rebel Without a Cause was one of the first movies to address the theme of American teen angst, and a new generation required new music. But one of the ironies of Rebel Without a Cause was that this was a movie about young people made for an older generation. In order to explain the youth of their day, the movie required the music of an older generation. The result was a thorough melange of Schoenberg and Ellington for score about a thoroughly Rock’n Roll generation.

It should follow that once the model for how to compose film music was broken, there would be lots of new models for how to write it. And since there was no longer set way to compose music, composers from around the world could create new models, far more personal than what came before.



The most traditional of the new composers hailed from Western Europe. All one has to think of is how David Lean used the swelling strings of Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia score, or the thumping martial rhythms of Malcolm Arnold’s score for The Bridge Over the River Kwai, to see that the traditional film score of Rosza and Waxmann was very much alive. And yet, even from Britain came John Barry. Like Jarre or Elmer Bernstein, Barry could write extremely facilely in the Korngold model. But he combined that with a Mancini-like appetite for hard driving rhythm and dissonant jazz chords from blaring brass. When one hears the Goldfinger soundtrack, a person of our generation immediately thinks of Austin Powers. Yet it was John Barry who provided the strings + big band combination of old world elegance and new world brashness that immediately makes us think of James Bond.



But perhaps the most memorable of the new model film composers hailed from Italy. If the ‘spaghetti westerns’ of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood have a truly American feel, it is in large part due to Morricone’s contribution. Morricone had (has) a better feel for what makes music sound American than nearly any American film composer. Whereas the Western scores of yesteryear made a curt nod in the direction of American folk music, Morricone’s spare scoring virtually forwent the European orchestra in favor of the insturmental combos one generally finds in America, writing melodies for them that sound as much a part of the American West as sarsaparilla.


(The Bouzouki theme to Zorba the Greek. Both the movie and this theme are huge, largely forgotten hits of the 60’s.)

A similarly uncanny, though very different, folk sensibility is found in the music of Mikis Theodorakis. Whereas Ennio Morricone had a chameleon-like ability to channel other parts of the world, Theodorakis’s music is utterly rooted in his native Greece - where he is considered a legendary composer and leftist political figure. Even in his score for the Al Pacino movie, Serpico, he has the electric guitar imitating the constant thrum of the Bouzouki, the Greek equivalent to a mandolin.


(the phrase is at 1 minute)

Before Italy gave the world Morricone, there was the not at all film-confined Nino Rota. Rota’s most important contribution to film music will always be as the preferred composer of Frederico Fellini, whose name Rota will always be as synonymous as Morricone’s is to Sergio Leone. But American audiences know Rota best as the composer of The Godfather. Like everything else about The Godfather, the score is absolutely extraordinary. To take just one example, listen to the music of what I think is the movie’s most extraordinary scene, when Michael visits his ailing father in the hospital after Vito was shot. When it dawns on Michael that there are no guards, and his father is vulnerable to a second assassination attempt, there is a brief brass chorale that is one of the most moving moments of film music I know. It’s just an eight-bar phrase, yet it strikes an almost impossible balance so many conflicting emotions, perfectly depicting them all. Yet what’s still more amazing is how Rota the second half of this phrase recurs after Michael shoots Sollozzo and Officer McCluskey in the Italian restaurant. What was once muted and mournful becomes a fortissimo outburst, blaring and unmistakeably tragic - as though Michael's tragic destiny was formed at the phrase's first occurrence and sealed at the next. But it’s part of The Godfather, just another extraordinary moment in that extraordinary movie.

800 Words: A Brief History of Film Music - The Silver Age Part 1

John Williams got me on a tangent. I’m deliberately working through the history of film music backwards. The reason for doing this in reverse order is that film music, perhaps more than any other type of music, has to work in familiar tropes. A composer who controls his own work can innovate everything he wishes from form to harmony to rhythm to color. But the art of the film composer is beholden to everything that’s already within the film. Film music is supposed to call associations to our mind that help explain plot, or characters, or ideas within the movie. As such, we already need the music which the score recalls within our head. If the Imperial March from Star Wars sounds particularly threatening to us, it’s in part because its sound was lodged within our heads from a hundred years before. Whether or not we realize it, those blaring six-three chords with insistent martial rhythms and menacing brass dissonances recall Hagen’s summoning of the Gibichungs from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. 99% of the people who see Star Wars have never heard of Gotterdammerung. But by 1977, the nature of what that music means, first heard in 1876, is so lodged within our minds that when we hear that blaring dissonant brass and insistent rhythm, and we immediately think of something both martial and particularly evil (no army actually marches to dissonant music). You would think that the meaning is absolutely primal, but it isn't. We had to get that association from somewhere, and we probably get it from Wagner.


(give it 40 seconds)

As an older generation gave way to a new one, so did their music. Whereas Jazz was still something new and shocking in the 1930’s, it was perfectly familiar music to the 1950’s and 60’s. Jazz was the music with which our grandparents came of age, and each jazz standard had a lifetime’s worth of memories which could be recalled by hearing one particular song. As with all eras since the invention of film music, no artist is in a better position to exploit those memories than the film composer. In the next two entries, I will talk about the different composers of this era and how they responded to the challenge of finding that new/’old’ music for a new but now old generation.

The indispensible Pierro Scaruffi points to Leonard Rosemann’s score for Vicente Minelli’s The Cobwebb (1955) as the inauguarating the new Age of film scoring. Having neither seen nor heard the movie, I’m in no position to judge. But it's difficult to ignore the fact that something in the music began changing around 1955. Whereas Golden Age film composers like Korngold and Waxmann gathered inspiration from elephantine turn of the century scores by Mahler and Strauss, the Silver Age gathered inspiration from the musical developments of roughly 20 years later. When writing in a classical style, it was as likely to be derived from the pared-down, dissonant innovations of Schoenberg and Webern as not. But the scores were as likely to be drawn from the developments of jazz and Tin Pan Alley as from classical sources. Whereas the orchestra once contained the entire world of expression within it, the world now expressed itself with new instruments, new forms, and new genres. Film music had to move on accordingly.


(Huge orchestra or not, there is nothing as American as the theme to The Magnificent Seven)

To distinguish one from the other, Elmer Bernstein was often called Bernstein West while Leonard Bernstein was called Bernstein East. They were roughly the same age, looked alike, came from similar backgrounds, had similar brushes with radical politics, had a similar reluctance to devote themselves to concert composition, and had a similar universal talent for anything to which they applied themselves. Before he became a composer, Elmer Bernstein was a child actor and dancer who played Caliban in a Broadway production of The Tempest. Of his era’s great film composers, Bernstein was probably the most traditional. Bernstein loved huge orchestras as much as any golden age film composer. But whereas Korngold’s diatonic lushness puts us as much in mind of 1900’s Vienna as 1930’s LA, Bernstein’s open chords and syncopation's give his music a completely American feeling missing in Korngold. The instrumentation might not have been American, but rhythms, the harmonies and melodies, the general exuberance of his music absolutely was. Perhaps his music bears the same relationship to Korngold which Aaron Copland’s concert music bore to Gustav Mahler’s. As his career progressed, his appetite for largeness became such an anachronism that it worked best in comedies, where his larger-than-life music could be cued up to screen histrionics.


(You know...)

Whenever a film composer uses a combination of big band and cool jazz to suggest something louche and decadent, he channels Henry Mancini. Mancini is most famous for three things: 1. The Pink Panther Theme, 2. The melody to Moon River, 3. The Theme to Peter Gunn, a TV show that nobody’s heard of anymore, yet nearly everybody knows its guitar and saxaphone riff. While he was fully trained in classical music (he studied with Ernst Krenek), Mancini was truly the musician who brought jazz to Hollywood. Mancini was also one of the only film composers to be as successful outside of film as he was within it. In addition to his movie work, Mancini was a composer and arranger of pop music who had eight gold records. For many years, he was synonymous with a kind of easy listening music that is supposed to be tasteful but defines kitsch - a shame, because at his best Mancini brought a gritty edge to Hollywood music that gave films a newer sound than any other composer of his time.


(Chinatown)

My favorite among this generation of Hollywood composers was Jerry Goldsmith, whose scores I can listen to independently with pleasure. Goldsmith brought a very different jazz sensibility to film music. Mancini’s jazz sound was brashly, almost shockingly, new to the film world, whereas Goldsmith’s sensibility was subtly integrated into a much wider panoply of sound. Whereas Mancini branched out from film music, Goldsmith never seemed to want anything more than film - starting his career in the CBS mailroom and working his way to the top of his profession. When required, Goldsmith could out-Korngold Korngold. His music can have lushness to equal anything in a Golden era score, but with far more variety than any of theirs’. Goldsmith could turn out an incredible horror score like those for Planet of the Apes or Alien that channels the most Boulezian avant-garde, yet write scores that are pure Korngold for Star Trek films in their gigantic sweep and almost cartoonish depictions of exotic characters. But then, there is Chinatown. Goldsmith’s Chinatown score balances the line between so many elements so deftly that it has to be regarded as a true original in American composition. Unlike so much film music, which is supposed to derivative so that it calls associations to our mind that help explain the plot, the music in Chinatown is an equal, almost superior character to any within the script. Perhaps there is no Hollywood movie, not even from Hitchcock, in which a composer is so required to speak with his own voice. The score from Chinatown is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written in America.