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2/22/2021 0 Comments Profile- John Williams If any one composer’s name is synonymous with film music of the last quarter of the 20th century and arguably, the last 50 years, it would be John Williams. I had the fortune of meeting him at a rehearsal at Tanglewood when I was 16. For someone that captures such a large sound, he was very calm and soft spoken. Williams got his start as a jazz pianist and played on several of Henry Mancini’s recordings while studying composition. What many do not know is that Williams earned his first Academy Award 4 years before Jaws by adapting music for the film version of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Williams had critical and commercial success following that with several disaster movies--The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1974), and the Towering Inferno (1974). Many film music fans seem to forget about any of Williams’ work before Jaws, but these scores are worth seeking out. Initially director Irwin Allen did not want any music during the opening titles of Towering Inferno, but Williams convinced him with an exciting piece as the helicopter approaches the tower. Williams’ second Academy award was for his score for Jaws, which I discussed in an earlier post.  The film that made Williams a household name and earned him his third Academy award may also be one of the most influential films in film history and film music history--Star Wars (1977). At the time, the style of music used for the film seemed like an enigma. The Academy award winner the previous year was Bill Conti’s disco-inspired score for Rocky (1976). The top selling soundtrack of 1977 was Saturday Night Fever, so you can see the context from which Star Wars emerges. From the beginning George Lucas wanted a symphonic score not only reminiscent of large Classical works but of the music that accompanied the science fiction action serials of the 1930s and 1940s that inspired Star Wars and later Indiana Jones. Williams showed not only his talent for creating memorable themes but also an incredible knowledge of harmonies and styles that had worked for classical composers in the past and when to use certain techniques. One could spend years studying just his composition and orchestration technique. The same year as Star Wars, Williams collaborated again with Steven Spielberg to score Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The memorable note sequence used to communicate with the aliens was so iconic that many assumed it was a legitimate alien signal that the filmmakers had borrowed. I have read that Williams tried multiple arrangements of notes before hitting the perfect combination. That shows part of the craft and mathematical aspect of music.  The year right after Star Wars, Williams composed my personal favorite of his scores, Superman (1978). It is difficult to say (and hopefully not controversial), but Superman’s main title may be slightly more exciting than the opening of Star Wars. The insistent rhythms and glorious themes never let up for the full 5 and half minutes of the titles. In the film, Williams music brings realism and humanity to the larger than life superhero. He captures the grandeur of flight, the tenderness of Lois and Clark, and the simplicity of Clark’s life in Smallville. This score definitely should have received the Academy Award that year instead of Giorgio Moroder’s experimental synthesizer score to Midnight Express. Williams returned to the Star Wars universe in 1980 with Empire Strikes Back, not only expanding on themes from the original film but adding many more memorable character ideas like the Imperial March, Yoda’s Theme and the love theme for Han and Leia. The end title suite for Empire Strikes Back is absolutely thrilling as it blends the three new themes for the film. 1981 and 1982 presented two back-to-back hits with director Spielberg. The action packed theme for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was initially difficult for Williams. He had already written the first part of the theme, but was struggling to figure out a second theme. Once again returning to the mathematical side of his talent, he inverted the first theme, and the second theme is actually the result of that. Beyond the main theme, Williams’ mysterious theme for the power of the ark is haunting.  In 1982, Williams earned another Academy Award for ET: The Extra Terrestrial. Looking back, we can forget just how much of a gamble that Spielberg took on a film that presented a friendship between a lost alien and a human boy. With just too much sappiness or too much cold science fiction, the film could have failed miserably. One great reason for its success was the music of Williams. In the recording of almost every film score, the movie is completely edited and the composer has to synchronize the timing of the music to hit certain important points in the film. After trying over and over, the ending sequence of ET just was not what Williams wanted. Spielberg trusted Williams so much that he let Williams conduct the music without the picture and then re-edited the ending sequence of the film to match the music. There is so little dialogue in the sequence that it almost becomes a science fiction ballet. The ending music of the film is one of the most epic in film history, in which the awe of extraterrestrial space travel and the boundlessness of friendship is expressed in music. It is similar in meaning to the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind from five years earlier, but I believe more effective in ET.
Two often overlooked main themes from the 1980s both have to do with flight. The first from Empire of the Sun (1987), called “Cadillac of the Skies” literally holds the film together. The second, from Always (1989) is probably the most memorable part of the film besides Audrey Hepburn’s final film appearance as an angel. Gather these with the themes from ET and Superman and Williams is a master of flight. Another of Williams’ most celebrated scores comes from 1993’s Jurassic Park. Who thought that a film about humans exploiting nature for profit and people getting eaten by dinosaurs could have such a beautiful main theme? The theme itself speaks to the imagined feeling of a lifelong paleontologist seeing a living dinosaur for the first time. Thirty years after winning his first Academy Award, Williams took on the challenge of creating the sound of the Harry Potter universe. Consider that this sound would have been developing in readers’ minds for quite a few years before the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) film. Williams music does not disappoint. He returns to familiar ideas of flight, wonder, and friendship. His score is similar enough to his previous work to be comfortable but new enough to stand on its own. By the time of writing this post, Williams has been nominated for 52 Academy Awards, winning 5, nominated for 25 Golden Globe awards, winning 4, and nominated for 71 Grammy Awards, winning 25. Beyond those accomplishments, Williams’ influence on film music will live forever.
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 (Europe: 500~1400 AD) Although popular accounts of the general mood of Europe in the Middle Ages is rather morose, focused on plagues, wars, and poverty, comedy had a vital place in those societies. Out of this era, we not only find a great number of comedies, but a great variety of comedy as well, The comedies of this time appear in the vernacular, contrasted with “serious” writing in Latin. Of course, this trait affected how widespread a comedy’s influence may be as only one who can understand the language may appreciate the comedy without the aid of a translation—physical comedy excluded, of course. The early Medieval definition of comedy was actually quite free and many works could qualify as a comedy as long as it included a happy ending. Often this idea has been confused with the Classical definitions of comedy, which were actually much more detailed and explicit in what qualified as comedy. This Medieval definition is possibly one of the reasons why today there is so much debate over what qualities make something a comedy. It is important to remember that only the wealthiest in the Middle Ages had the luxury of even knowing about Classical Comedy through reading it. The majority of the population was illiterate and therefore we see examples of characters like devils and vice figures. As I said above, the wealthy, educated members of the societies would have access to the Classical comedy of Menander, Plautus, Terence and others, but the majority of society would not have had this experience. Without knowing the existing conventions of written comedy, crafters of comedy in the Middle Ages had to determine their own ideas of what made a comedy, with the aid of their experience of comedies that would have been handed down orally across cultures. Medieval carnivals became the showcase for comic performers. For a brief time, commoners and royalty alike could escape the reality of the world around them by means of comedy. This sense of Carnival returns in later comedies, including the works of Shakespeare, Mozart, and of course, Monty Python. As I have stated in earlier posts, comedy is a group activity, and we can clearly see its roots in the Medieval Carnival. However, in this same atmosphere of the Carnival, one can see a reinforcement of the notion of comedy as being a lesser art. For indeed, comedy in the Middle Ages came from the lowly Court Jester, not the royalty. Once again, we find the comic hero coming from a low social order, as he will continue to do throughout Shakespeare, Mozart, Chaplin, and more. Note how the comic hero in any era is quite different from the contemporary tragedies and their heroic figures.  Dante Many examples of Medieval comedy demonstrate an appreciation of crude humor. It does not need to be argued that crude humor still exists today, regardless of how low it resides on the comic spectrum. Crude humor was a large part of the early Greek comedies as well, continuing in Dante’s Divine Comedy, considered not only one of the greatest vernacular Italian works but one of the greatest works in any language. Consider that writing in the vernacular gave Dante (ca. 1265-1321 AD) the opportunity to experiment with crude humor, as crude humor would not have been as acceptable in a work written in the “high” language of Latin. Scholars praise Dante not only for his comedy but for the depth of his allegorical and theological sense as well. This endurance marks the power of comedy, even when it is seemingly at its most profane. Dante’s comedy works as a foil to his serious nature of his journey through Hell. As a Twentieth Century analogy to Dante’s exploration of the profane, consider the reaction to nudity in motion pictures throughout the Twentieth Century. Nudity was understood as an artistic exploration in pre-Code American motion pictures that mostly appeared in art museums and the like. However, once the Hays Code was established and films were intended for mass audience appeal, people then understood nudity as pornographic. Later in the century, we see the same discrepancy based on the context in which the nudity is framed when nudity in a 1960s art house picture would be “tasteful” while nudity in a mainstream picture would be “exploitation”. As it has been in the debate of aestheticism of the human body versus pornography for centuries, the actual subject of nudity did not change; the societal reaction to that subject did, based on the contextual framing. In much the same way, a comic work like Dante’s can have the reputation of being licentious in one era while in another era it can have the reputation of being one of the greatest works of Western literature—depending on how one wishes to interpret the nature of his comedy. In the centuries since Dante, many artists like Jonathan Swift, Mozart, and Mel Brooks have followed his example and explored crude humor. Out of this canon of Medieval comedy, we find the origins of farce, When a film attempts to enter the realm of farce, it encounters a type of comedy that has existed for hundreds of years, but one that has never really been critically well recognized.  Boccaccio The next significant comic writer after Dante has to be Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). Boccaccio studied Dante extensively and was influenced by his Divine Comedy, but Boccaccio often seems to use humor much more explicitly than his predecessor. Boccaccio’s most significant contribution to the genre of comedy is his Decameron. In The Decameron, a frame narrative occurs across ten days, and each day’s stories feature a different style of humor. The Decameron became popular as soon as Boccaccio wrote it. The fact that the Decameron appeared in translations across Europe meant that it could reach a wide audience and have great influence on writers from many different cultural backgrounds. Although there are litterateurs that question the originality of the stories that Boccaccio includes in his work, it is because of Boccaccio that the stories reached writers from other countries, and even filmmakers have followed Boccaccio’s example of using comedy as a tool for teaching moral lessons.Even more than Dante, Boccaccio demonstrates how crude humor can sometimes be the most effective means of delivering social criticism.  Chaucer Many Medieval scholars argue that no writer was more influenced by Boccaccio than William Chaucer (1343-1400). But just like any great craftsman, Chaucer learned from the style of Boccaccio to create a work distinctly his own. Chaucer continues with Boccaccio’s ability to teach through comedy. Through humor, Chaucer leaves his readers with a memorable experience, but one that will cause them to reflect on their own moral dilemmas.
From the Sixteenth Century theatre of Italy came the stylized Commedia dell’Arte, of zany situations and physical stunts. It is curious that something with the word “Art” in its title so closely resembles the slapstick film comedies, which are not held in so high a regard. The Commedia dell’Arte method of incorporating numerous gags and stock characters influenced many artists, including Shakespeare and Mozart. In addition to the comic routines and stock characters, Commedia dell’arte also exemplified physical comedy. So out of this one style of Italian comedy comes the seed for not only the anarchic slapstick comedies of the 1930s, but the stock characters of the Screwball Comedies as well.  If you remember from an earlier post, rhythm is the way that sound is organized through time. A lot of people get the idea of beat and rhythm confused and often think they are synonyms. Once you get the idea of the difference, they are easy to tell apart. Beat is the strongest pulse in a piece of music. Often, they are felt in groups of 2, 3, or 4. How do we know how many are in a group? If you listen very carefully you will hear one beat that is the strongest and one or more slightly weaker beats. A great example of this is a waltz. Waltzes are in 3 with beat 1 being the strongest and 2 and 3 being weaker. The Viennese style of Waltz especially emphasizes this feeling, as the entire foot only touches the ground on 1 and it is just the toes touching the ground on 2 and 3.  If that is the beat, then what is the rhythm? It is how we organize the beat and the space between the beats. It is very rare for a waltz to only have 3 notes all on the beat over and over. We may have longer notes that last longer than 2 beats or shorter notes that move in between the larger beats. It sounds confusing but looking at rhythms and hearing the difference between the beat and the rhythm makes it a natural process.  Rhythms are completely mathematical. Every way that we organize the rhythms is measured. Splitting the overall beat into rhythms is the work of division. For an example, we will start with music based around 4 beats. If one note takes up all four beats, it is called a whole note. To help students remember its name I remind them that it takes up the whole measure. When we split the whole note in two equal parts, the result is two half notes. Again, we notice that these take up half a measure of 4, each getting 2 beats. Splitting the whole note further into 4 parts or 1 note for each beat, the name is quarter note and notice that it takes up ¼ of the measure. Further dividing the whole note into smaller parts, we end up with 8 eighth notes in a measure, 16 sixteenth notes and so forth.
If the number of beats in a measure is constant, then we can use addition or subtraction to figure out which beat we are on. If we are looking at a measure of 4 quarter notes, the third beat is the third quarter note. Either we count to three from the left or we can subtract 1 from the right. In combinations of eighth notes and quarters we simply count each eighth note as half of one beat, so that it takes two eighth notes to fill one beat. It is the opposite for a 2 beat note or half note, there would only be two remaining beats when one half note is present. I’m going to stop here before you get overwhelmed, but be comforted by the fact that rhythms work in an organized system with rules and definite answers. Simple knowledge of fractions and division can go a long way to understanding and organizing rhythms.  A lot of people have a misconception that only singers and players of wind instruments need to concern themselves with a good seated or standing position. But imagining a drummer sitting in a recliner or a cello player laying on the floor dissolves this misconception. Proper playing or singing position is critical for all musicians, not only physically but also psychologically for the performer and audience. I will address the physical first. At its most basic level, singers and wind players do need to be concerned with the breathing mechanism and not obstructing it. The two extremes of a bad position--leaning forward or resting arms on the legs is actually squeezing a little on the lungs and abdominal muscles (depending on the age range of the students, I sometimes describe this as toilet position). The opposite, leaning back into the chair with hips forward means that muscles are working to prevent you from falling backwards (unless you literally are in a recliner) that do not need to be working to produce a sound. To demonstrate this, I do it visually and really exaggerate it. For the leaning forward, I make it hard to breathe and sometimes fall forward out of my chair. For leaning backward, I often moan to demonstrate how much it hurts to hold myself up. To describe proper playing position, I tell the students to sit so that they could stand up right away. Too far back on the chair and this becomes difficult. Leaning forward or backward, and this becomes difficult. When the students ask why they would need to stand up fast, I suggest maybe we would have a fire drill or a surprise ice cream party.  Beyond the air requirement for singers and wind players, we have the other physical requirements of playing an instrument that correct playing position is crucial. This involves different things for different instruments. For woodwind instruments, every key must be accessible to the player. This means that the arms and hands must be positioned not only so the player can reach the keys but so the players hands and arms do not grow tired due to holding them improperly. For orchestral strings, the player must consider the positioning of the hand for changing pitch as well as the bowing arm. For guitar, electric bass, and other fretted strings, one has to consider the position of the hand forming the chords and the hand picking or strumming. For keyboard players, not only the height of the arms, but the curve of the fingers is important for good technique. For any percussionist, the height of their arms to the instrument and distance to the instrument determines success. Beyond demonstration and explanation, how do we convince students of the importance of good playing position? The answer is to let students discover the benefits of a good position for themselves. Let them struggle a little and find out that it is harder to play when they hold their hand a certain way or slouch, etc. Obviously, if a student is just not getting it on their own, prompt them to adjust slightly and once they notice the difference, it is very likely that the student will continue to use the more comfortable and easier (proper) position. Psychologically, having a position that is more “at attention” will encourage students’ minds to focus even better. It will also encourage audience members to pay attention to what they hear because they see performers at the edge of their seats and think “something exciting is about to happen!” Teaching proper playing and singing position not only helps students to sound better, but they will look very sharp when performing :)  |
