Readers Write In #761: Oh, for the love of John

By Karthik Amarnath

Two notes. E. F.  That’s all it took. Two notes. Steven Spielberg had expected “a tremendously complex” opera, but all he got was two notes. What 40 technicians with half a million dollars had struggled to do, John Williams did with the E and F notes, played at the lowest register. He threw in the occasional D, and the Jaws theme was born. As it turned out, it was much more than just a theme. To hear Spielberg say it, in the new Disney Plus documentary, The Music by John Williams, “I didn’t know John was going to come along and give me the shark (for the one I had) that didn’t work!”

As documentaries go, The Music by John Williams by Laurent Bouzereau, delightful as it is, feels like the cotton candy of the genre. It isn’t laden heavily with the personal or the technical, but rather serves up two nice things. One, the rose tinted nostalgia, which for many like me, is of growing up years suffused with imaginary worlds brought to life by John Williams’s scores. And two, the sweet sounding praises, sung by a chorus line of artists and composers and filmmakers all led by Steven Spielberg, one of the producers of this documentary.  

If you watch the first five minutes of the documentary, you couldn’t be faulted for thinking that this is a “mass movie.” We see a collective awe of superlatives build up the legend of John Williams. “He’s a brilliant man.” “He’s inescapable.”  “More people in the planet love him even if they don’t realize it.” “He has a magical ability.” “The music comes from the sky and envelops him.”  And the music we hear, John’s greatest hits, are synonymous with otherworldliness, from his themes for gargantuan dinosaurs, the bike-riding extraterrestrial, a flying Christopher Reeve, to the legendary Imperial March that opens the door to the legendary Darth Vader. And like a typical mass hero, in the midst of all the myth building, we only get glimpses of the man himself, a still of him smiling, a shot of him composing, and bits of video where he’s conducting an orchestra. 

But there is no myth about this man. At 92 years of age, with scores of soundtracks, nominated for 54 Oscars (winning 5) and 71 Grammies (winning 26), there is just so much of him out there. Thousands of articles. Hundreds of YouTube videos. Dozens of televised interviews. A BBC special. Compared to all that, what the Disney Plus documentary covers is a patch on the fabric of this man’s legacy.  

For me, though, watching this documentary was an excuse to be teleported to an era before YouTube, before cable TV, before computers. An era where composers hand wrote their sheet music. “I haven’t had time to retool and learn the electronic systems,” John says, and it doesn’t surprise us in the least. That’s because his music, like Spielberg’s films are part of what keeps alive that thread of romanticism in the movies, a romanticism for the movies. Williams’s soundtracks are nothing if not a celebration of the bigness of storytelling, a bigness of emotion, the bigness of belief that no idea is too small for grand operatic ornamentation. That even Jawas and Ewoks can have themes performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Its that bigness of belief, that also lets two simple notes, E and F, at played at the lowest register, again and again, creeping up slowly in speed and intensity, to conjure the dread of giant gnashing teeth chopping across the waters, so much so, that a film need never show the titular jaws. 

Something strange happened to me recently when I was at a screening of Wild Robot, a riveting and remarkable adaptation of a children’s book, about an advanced futuristic robot stranded in an island of complete wilderness. There’s a moment in this film, when we realize that this metallic machine has something beyond all the fancy feats of engineering, beyond all its advanced AI. We realize that it has a heart. It’s a beautiful scene that echos a set of quiet visuals from the earlier part of the film. Now, at a moment like this, I am the kind of person who would get all warm and fuzzy and even a bit misty eyed. And yet, here, I caught myself searching for an explanation, something scientific, wondering if I had missed a detail or a line of dialogue. Some of this is perhaps who I am today, and some, where our world is. The pre-Internet me would certainly not have cared about this. But even now, when I rewatch, say Superman, I don’t care if its biomechanics or the blue-colored suit that lets Superman fly, its pure belief. A belief that is owed almost entirely to John Williams’s pulsating score. That triumphant fanfare of trumpets and trombones, as though a cosmic force just burst into the atmosphere. That soft undulating violin phrase, spiraling like a propeller’s hum, cranking our pulse with rhythm and sound, that by the time the iconic string motif bursts forth, our hearts are soaring. We don’t care if Superman can fly. We believe we can.

John calls his Superman score a “kind of theatrical camp.” He describes it as “a big heroic operatic score that doesn’t take itself seriously.”  These portions, when we hear John Williams speak, are the most charming parts of the documentary. A lot of this was shot new, with Bouzeraeau, like any good storyteller, keeping himself and his questions off camera. We also see snippets from decades old interviews of John. And all through, you can see that familiar fatherly tone and a childlike enthusiasm. He speaks openly about his scores, be it his influences, or his process. For instance, we see how the famous five note sequence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind came about. It didn’t just envelop him from the sky, as it happens in the movie, but was instead picked out by him and Steven Spielberg from sheets of five note permutations that he had meticulously penned down. He patiently explains the musical rationale for why the chosen sequence works for the film. About Harry Potter, he says the magical Hedwig’s theme “was just the easiest thing in the world to write,”  and he had scored that without knowing anything about the story or the characters. When asked why he did the film, he gives just as easy an answer. “Children and magic equals music,” which is a sharp insight not just into his approach to music composition, but also why his collaboration with Steven Spielberg was always a match meant to be. 

This documentary, at its heart, is a love story between these two gentlemen. “We were married years ago,” Steven jokes. Its a fifty year marriage that birthed thirty films, much more than any director-composer pair in Hollywood. In all these years, you see that the childlike wonder and sense of adventure has stayed unchanged. Even in their “so-called serious films,” as John puts it, the language that the music speaks is one of aching innocence. Of the deeply moving violin solo in Schindler’s List, John describes it as having “a kind of baleful wonder.” The  story may be about the unexpected hero in the face of a tragically inhuman act, but the score isn’t about the savior or the saved. It is a pain-filled plea from humanity, as though our race were still a child, walking amongst its fallen, wailing at the dastardly depths it finds itself in, wandering in the dark, searching of a way to pick up the pieces. Its a cry into the unknown, seeking the unknowable. “How can humanity be this?” as John asks.

Its that sense of the unknowable that I most associate with the era of John WIlliams music. A time where the room for mystery and wonder was vast enough for John to enrich and expand with his sweeping symphonies. Like that breathtaking music and light show at the end of Close Encounters, which John claims was “the hardest thing he had to write.” Its at that point in the film, when we, like all those people at the mountain, rejoice in our cosmic harmony with the great unknown, without asking what all those sounds and lights mean. 

But that was five decades ago. Ours is now an age of answers. An era of explanations. A world where wonder seems like that word stuck in the dictionary somewhere between woke and worship. Its a time where John admits the long standing classical tradition of orchestral music might be dying. Even as he applauds the “fantastic work by young composers who are interested in electronics and spatial effects,” he ponders if we are ever going to have “another Brahms or another Wagner in the theater?” That’s a sobering thought from one of orchestral music’s greatest champions, one who has carried its torch using the medium of cinema for the better part of a century. It’s also a bit ironic, since even today, when John goes to conduct with the Boston Pops for their annual Film night, he draws an audience that cheers “like it’s the Beatles.”

All that said, one of the blessed benefits of the Internet era is that every form of music travels instantly to the farthest reaches of humankind. And perhaps the day is not far when feats of modern engineering and advanced AI technology would create new horizons for orchestral music unimaginable to the human mind today. But for me, the real question is this: could a machine conjure a man-eating monster out of two simple notes on the piano? What would it take? A human heart? Or perhaps just a bigness of belief.