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Celebrating John Williams

I’m on the planet Kypton, flying over the frozen, magisterial plateaus that break off into ice crystal canyons. I’m wondering how the people of Krypton live, how much a condo with a view of the central white dome might cost me, how I can get my hands on one of those nifty crystal rods that light up and do magic things. I’m soaring in the night air, taking in the images. I’m not reading a Superman comic book and I’m not watching a Richard Donner film. I just have my music library open, listening to the Superman soundtrack. I close my eyes and it’s all there, just like in the movie. Only it’s better in my head. It’s perfect in the way the movie could never be because I can see just enough detail to stimulate, but not enough to critique.

Forty-seven time Oscar nominated composer John Williams’s gift (and I suppose – for his critics – his fault) is his scores can stand on their own as great works separate from the films they help breath life into. Mostly, they always transport me back to the worlds for which they were intended. I can’t listen to the score for Superman and think of anything else but the story of Kal-El. When the horns blast in his infamous Star Wars score, it’s all spaceships, scruffy-looking antiheroes and huts named Jabba. I hear JFK and the hairs stand on the back of my neck and I’m looking around me for the men in black. I relive these memories through his scores but it’s more interactive than that. I listen to his scores and I start telling myself stories without really needing to try.

Make no mistake; John Williams is one of the great storytellers of our time. He doesn’t work with actors or use dialogue, but so many of his scores are kind of like a foreign-tongued opera. On a purely emotional level, you know what’s going on. At least, that’s the way it feels revisiting his music.

Then again, part of this feeling could be because he’s composed so many iconic films. Superman, E.T.: Extra-Terrestrial, Star Wars (all six, though the Academy ignored his outstanding work on the prequels) Harry Potter (the first three) Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Indiana Jones films… who doesn’t know the music to these movies - even those who have not seen some of them? He is most closely associated with his working relationship with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and for good reason. Since Jaws, he has scored every single Steven Spielberg film through the director's high's (Schindler's List) and lows (The Lost World). But even Spielberg’s “failures” were accompanied by rousing, memorable scores (like Hook). Yet there is so much more to his oeuvre than Spielberg and Lucas films. Sidney Pollack's remake can't touch the original, but I always thought the composer's effort on Sabrina had just the right soft touch. His work with other filmmakers like Oliver Stone on films such as Born on the 4th of July, JFK, and Nixon is truly remarkable. These are haunting scores that have no doubt inspired other composers (I’ve heard more than a few borrow from this one in particular).

Williams knack for creating iconic, instantly memorable music is not restricted just to film tracks. His work has seeped through our modern culture in a variety of other ways. His Olympic Fanfare and Theme is a classic anthem in our modern culture, recognizable even to those who hate the movies. He helped make 20th Century Fox’s fanfare famous though he didn’t compose it originally. He did, however, create the Dreamworks Pictures theme. And does any other news hour have a better theme than the one Williams composed for NBC Nightly News (part of a four-piece set of music Williams composed for NBC. Other parts are used on shows like Today and Meet the Press)? Then there’s the NBC Sunday Night Football theme which is a strange one in terms of auditory memory. When I hear it, I think football, sure. But also stormtroopers. And the Death Star.

Last month he received his 46th and 47th Oscar nominations for music with – what else – two great Steven Spielberg collaborations (War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin) once again competing against himself as he’s often had to do in the past. John Williams turned 80 last week. Much of the music he’s created has been around since the beginning of my time. The sounds we grow up around become a part of us, become part of the memory bank, help shape us. Growing up around John Williams’ music, listening to his scores since I was introduced to my mother’s Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi records, he’s helped make a dreamer of me.

When you hear his Olympic Fanfare, you aren’t listening to one of the great themes of the Olympics. You are hearing the Olympics. When Raiders of the Lost Ark music begins, I’m not thinking solely about the one film or the one scene. I’m thinking about all the Indy adventures. When the Harry Potter title quietly eases in my mind flashes to Azkaban, the Chamber of Secrets and Potter adventures Williams never scored. These aren’t merely the themes to these stories, they become the stories. Because the movies could disappear and we’d still have the music.

Stories get past down. A script is written. A director brings it to life and in the rare case of Williams, the music tells the story all over again. We listen and we start telling the story again to ourselves. And this is the great gift John Williams has given us for decades. His music is inspiring. He’s made dreamers of all of us.  And because of it, he’s made us greater storytellers too.

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