{"id":1977856,"date":"2025-08-24T22:06:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T22:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1977856"},"modified":"2025-08-24T22:06:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T22:06:14","slug":"to-say-film-music-is-the-best-is-a-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/to-say-film-music-is-the-best-is-a-mistake\/","title":{"rendered":"To say film music is the best is a mistake"},"content":{"rendered":"

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He is arguably cinema\u2019s greatest composer of film music, but John Williams has admitted to not enjoying the genre.<\/p>\n

Although he created the soundtracks to masterpieces<\/a> such as Jaws and Jurassic Park, Star Wars and Saving Private Ryan, the 93-year-old composer, who has won five Oscars, believes that, as an art form, film music cannot compare with history\u2019s great works.<\/p>\n

His confession has come in a series of interviews conducted by Tim Greiving for a major forthcoming biography, titled John Williams: A Composer\u2019s Life, to be published by Oxford University Press in September.<\/p>\n

Such is the power of Williams\u2019s music that it is his repetitive use of two notes in Jaws, conveying the ominous threat of the approaching great white shark, that first comes to mind when audiences think of Steven Spielberg\u2019s masterpiece.<\/p>\n

But Williams told Greiving: \u201cA lot of [film music] is ephemeral. It\u2019s certainly fragmentary and, until somebody reconstructs it, it isn\u2019t anything that we can even consider as a concert piece\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cJust 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams recalled that, during his years of working at the Boston Pops, he would be asked to \u201cplay some great film music\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I go, here, this was a great score, and I\u2019d look at it – and there\u2019s no score there. There\u2019s a couple of cues that have to be put together. Something over here doesn\u2019t play because it\u2019s two and a half minutes long, and it wasn\u2019t good to begin with…<\/p>\n

\u201cFilm music, however good it can be – and it usually isn\u2019t, other than maybe an eight-minute stretch here and there… I just think the music isn\u2019t there. That, what we think of as this precious great film music is… we\u2019re remembering it in some kind of nostalgic way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Williams<\/span><\/div>\n

Williams with Star Wars droid C3P0 in 1980 – Boston Globe<\/p>\n

Greiving described Williams\u2019s dismissal of film music as \u201csort of shocking\u201d, but said it is \u201cnot false modesty\u201d but he is \u201cgenuinely self-deprecating, and deprecating of \u2018film music\u2019 in general\u201d.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cHe clearly took the job of composing music for films as seriously as anyone in history ever has\u2026 He perfected the art of film scoring. He took it to its greatest heights. He elevated film music to a high art form.\u201d<\/p>\n

With his soft, unassuming demeanour, Williams tells Greiving: \u201cIf I had it all to do over again, I would have made a cleaner job of it \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also spoke of his long-standing collaboration with Spielberg, for whom he scored Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., among other movies. He described Spielberg as \u201cvery musical\u201d, in contrast to \u201cmost of the directors that I\u2019ve worked with\u201d.<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cMy career with Steven began to develop, one film by another. No plan. He didn\u2019t have one either, and we were just going ahead and doing what we thought we should do next.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cI think a lot of things [films] I didn\u2019t do because people thought – and they were right – that I was chronically and consistently busy with Steven. I\u2019ve had people say that to me: \u2018Well, we thought you were married to Steven.\u2019 Which I suppose, in many ways, I was, or have been, or still am.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond his film work, Williams has composed dozens of concerti, fanfare and other concert works.<\/p>\n

He has welcomed new concert arrangements of some of his most famous film scores, including Star Wars, Schindler\u2019s List, E.T., Memoirs of a Geisha and Harry Potter.<\/p>\n

Titled John Williams Reimagined, it will be performed by a classical trio \u2013 pianist Simone Pedroni, flautist Sara Andon and cellist C\u00e9cilia Tsan \u2013 at London\u2019s Cadogan Hall on October 27, with an accompanying album.<\/p>\n

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He is arguably cinema\u2019s greatest composer of film music, but John Williams has admitted to not enjoying the genre. Although he created the soundtracks to masterpieces such as Jaws and Jurassic Park, Star Wars and Saving Private Ryan, the 93-year-old composer, who has won five Oscars, believes that, as an art form, film music cannot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1977857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[311492,353832,353834,309280,353833],"class_list":["post-1977856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-john-williams","tag-movie-scores","tag-oxford-university-press","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-tim-greiving"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/To-say-film-music-is-the-best-is-a-mistake.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1977856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1977857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1977856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1977856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1977856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}