Movies and Music

I don't like Steven Spielberg very much, but I have to admire his talent, and admit that he's also, when he wants to be, a well-spoken, articulate guy. Here's some of his comments on John Williams. I'll direct your attention in particular to the closing "argument" he makes: "Without John Williams, bikes don't really fly, nor do brooms in Quidditch matches, nor do men in red capes. There is no Force, dinosaurs do not walk the Earth, we do not wonder, we do not weep, we do not believe."

The Empire of Dreams documentary that came with my original Star Wars original trilogy DVD boxed set made the comment that George Lucas was disappointed with almost everything in the original movie as it developed. Everything failed to reach his vision, with one exception: John Williams' score, which exceeded his expectations in every way. And for good reason. The Williams score for Star Wars (and some of his subsequent work with movies like Raiders, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, etc.) is some of the best neoromantic classical music working today, even though it's not really considered as part of the usual classical art-music scene. Classical-sounding movie music soundtracks is a continuation of program music in a very real sense. And Williams deliberately calls back to classical/romantic music like Holst, Stravinsky and others, and that he also calls back to guys like Korngold or Steiner (who in turn called back to the same set of classical/romantic composers as well.)

In the past, I've accused Williams of "phoning in" the scores for some of the later Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies, but that's probably not really fair and has more to do with my dislike of those movies than with a fair evaluation of the music. I maintain that as disappointing as the Disney Star Wars trilogy is, the visual design and the orchestral score are still excellent. The following video, for the technical and music-theory minded, discusses a selection from each of the trilogies and explains exactly how great that piece really is. And yes, it even includes a piece from the eye-rolling climax of The Last Jedi. I've spent too long avoiding the scores for The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker because I hate those movies... I need to give more attention to their soundtracks.

As Lucas himself noted in the late 70s, I've become disappointed and disillusioned with everything about Star Wars, even the original trilogy in some ways, except for the musical score.

One thing that I kind of miss is the fact that we only really have one iconic recording/performance of the music. For classical/romantic music that I enjoy, I've got, or at least have access to, many performances with varying subtle differences of interpretation by different conductors or even arrangers. For Der Ring, for example, by Richard Wagner, I don't have any full operatic performances, but I have several instrumental arrangements. Four of them, in fact, and of one of the four, I have four separate performances by four separate orchestras and conductors. If I want to listen to Der Ring, I have seven different interpretations to choose from. Granted, there's obviously a lot of similarity between all of them, but there are differences as well. I wish we had these kinds of slightly different interpretations of the Star Wars score, but that would, of course, require divorcing it somewhat from the movies and just treating it as a piece of program music rather than as the score for a movie, which kind of freezes it in time and interpretation.