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John Williams is a composer who needs no introduction. Over the span of his 70-year career, he has crafted scores for over 100 films, earning five Academy Awards and 54 Oscar nominations with his work on seminal pop culture films, including Superman, Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, and Home Alone. However, the legendary composer, now 93, says he doesn’t think too highly of film music.
In a recent interview with the Guardian, Williams said that, despite the power film music has as an art underscoring film, “I never liked film music very much.”
“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,” Williams said. “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 continued: “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.”
Williams went on to tell author Tim Grieving (who is writing a biography on him called John Williams: A Composer’s Life) that film-scoring assignments, even on high-profile projects, are, at the end of the day, “just a job.” Grieving characterized Williams’ eye-opening comments on film music as both shocking but not an act of false modesty. If anything, Grieving says Williams is “genuinely self-deprecating and deprecating of ‘film music’ in general,” and that folks shouldn’t take his words at face value since he’s a creator who took composing seriously over his illustrious career.
“He has this internalized 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,” Grieving said. “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.”
Despite the praise, Williams rebuffed Grieving’s compliments on how deadly seriously he takes his craft all these years later.
“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,” Williams said. “But none of it ever happened that way. The film thing was a job to do, or an opportunity to accept.”
We appreciate a humble king, and if there’s any comfort in his brutally honest perspective on musical artistry, it’s that he played a significant role in legitimizing it. As a result, movie fans are now drawn to traditional music venues to hear the themes of their favorite films when they otherwise might’ve passed up the opportunity. Even though his impressive musical achievements (to him) may pale in comparison to classical orchestrations that are not linked to modern cinematic icons, his influence remains undeniable.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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