Here’s an unexpected revelation: John Williams, one of the greatest, if not the greatest living composer for cinema, doesn’t think much of film music.
Williams holds a whopping 54 Oscar nominations, though he’s only (only!) won five times, but as a rare interview - which he has given for a forthcoming biography - reveals, he clearly feels it’s a second best to the classical canon of work.
“I never liked film music very much,” he confessed to Tim Grieving in his new biography John Williams: A Composer’s Life.
“Film music, however good it can be – and it usually isn’t, other than maybe an eight-minute stretch here and there … I just think the music isn’t there. That, what we think of as this precious great film music is … we’re remembering it in some kind of nostalgic way …Just the idea that film music has the same place in the concert hall as the best music in the canon is a mistaken notion, I think.”
He added: “A lot of (film music) is ephemeral. It’s certainly fragmentary and, until somebody reconstructs it, it isn’t anything that we can even consider as a concert piece.”
His biographer described Williams’ words as “sort of shocking, and they are not false modesty. He is genuinely self-deprecating, and deprecating of ‘film music’ in general.”
“He has this internalised prejudice against film music. It’s a functional type of music, which is funny because I consider his film music to be kind of sublime art at its best. That’s not modesty.
"He’s just saying it’s a lesser art form. Typically that is true, though. It is written much quicker and much more economically. But I do think his music defies that. He perfected the art of film scoring. He took it to its greatest heights. He elevated film music to a high art form.”
Now 93, Williams’ career began back in the 1950s, as a session musician working for Henry Mancini. His first Oscar nomination was for the score to Valley Of The Dolls in 1967, but he is probably best known for his collaborations with Steven Spielberg on some of the best-loved films of the 20th Century, including Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, the Indiana Jones series, E.T and Jurassic Park, among many others.
In the book, Williams refers to these and other commissions as “just a job”. He’s clearly self-critical too, telling Grieving: “If I had it all to do over again, I would have made a cleaner job of it – of having the film music and the concert music all being more me, whatever that is, or more unified in some way. But none of it ever happened that way. The film thing was a job to do, or an opportunity to accept.”
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