The Rightful Heir: Part I

 

Okay, so this kind of music doesn't work ALL the time, but like one of those obnoxious yellow rental jeeps you see everywhere in Hawaii, John (Towner) Williams (Junior) has been one of the most prolific, successful and accomplished film composers in the world since…well…ever.

Who hasn’t heard a university pep band bellow the Imperial March when things aren’t looking too good for the home team? When has the devastatingly simple two-note motif from Jaws not been a portent of doom? Come on. Just admit it. Any time you heard the Raider’s March you wished you owned a bullwhip and knew some Nazis who needed a what-fer. And when you heard the Superman theme you’d run down the street, ripping off your clothes in slow motion, only to realize moments after leaping off of a building that you actually couldn’t fly.

We’ve all been there.

Over a career spanning almost 50 years and as many films, there are very few pieces of the pop culture consciousness that John Williams hasn’t touched.

But lately he’s been a bit flagging and, dare I say, lazy (seems like he’s been coasting on past laurels if you check IMDB). But that doesn’t change the impact he’s had on us. 

The real question is: who else embodies these characteristics?

The first logical step would require a classification of his style.

At its most basic form it is jaunty, light-hearted but not fantastical. Occasionally it will dip into anxious martial territory and suspenseful repose. Nor is he inclined to shelter us from the darker corners of the human mind. But from the depths he always manages to live up to his most cherished role he as a virtuoso in the majestic.  Always the guide in a land of pure and infinite wonder. 

While much of Williams’s canon seems, to us, wholly unique in retrospect, the influences are subtle but they are there.

For instance, take “The Imperial March” or “Parade of the Ewoks”. Now listen to Prokofiev’s March from the 1919 Russian opera “The Love for Three Oranges” and tell me that leitmotif isn’t familiar.  Or how about Antonin Dvorak’s 9^th Symphony?

Threadbare though the roots may be, the styles become much clearer when we segue into the 20^th Century. Listen to this comparison of main themes from “Star Wars” and film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score for the 1942 romantic drama “King’s Row”. 

Williams’s influences are a matter of public record so there’s no need to assume any form of perfidy is at play. Yet the deeper we go into his stylistic mold, the harder it becomes to find a true heir to the throne.

As a child he studied under Rosina Lhevinne, the famed Ukranian pedagogue, and later at UCLA by the Italian guitarist and composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

Beginning his official career in 1960 scoring the Dick Clark vehicle “Because They’re Young”, Williams—a Juliard graduate who had shadowed Golden Age greats like Bernard Hermann and Alfred Newman during his early years in Hollywood—would eventually strike a happy medium, blending his penchant for piano with a jazzy, often symphonic, sensibility.

In academic circles this style has become known as neoromanticism.

I should remind those of you who do not share a passion for movie music that while Williams is pretty much a league of his own, there are many other great film composers that are not regularly idolized outside of their professional realm.

For instance who else beside Trekkies are readily familiar with the work of Jerry Goldsmith? Short of a Gorillaz homage and a fistful of Eastwood fans would know just how magnificent Ennio Morricone really is?

There is no shortage of skilled composers in the contemporary film industry. Yet the music of our post-9/11 world has become somewhat different. Less operatic. Perhaps a signal of a new cultural consciousness. Popularized requiems fraught with darkness and moral ambiguity.

Hans Zimmer is the perfect embodiment of such ruminations (this school also includes Harry Gregson-Williams, Klaus Badelt & Steve Jablonsky).  Through it all is an overwhelming sense of hope marred by human tragedy.

This is decidedly not what Williams embodies. It’s far too…serious.

And yet even his nearest ‘cousins’ don’t seem to retain the same sense of majesty. And as the years move on (Williams just had his 80^th birthday this past February), he’s beginning to feel more and more like a relic. A pleasant reminder of a time that no longer exists. Because unlike the Howard Shore’s oft powerful understatement or Elfman’s percussive McMysticism, there is something about the Wagnerian power of Williams’s art that leaves us with a sense of joyous mystique.   

But I’m here to assure you that not all is not lost.

Stay tuned for a list of potential heirs in the 2^nd installment of this 2-part article and then vote for the next “Williams”!