by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
PBS’s Great Performances
series did a concert special with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles
Philharmonic in a 90-minute tribute to the music of … John Williams. Yes, that John Williams, who after a period in the 1950’s when
he lived in New York (where he was born: Flushing, Queens — where did they get
those names?) and went to the Juilliard School by day and hung out on the jazz
scene by night, becoming an O.K. if nothing special jazz pianist, moved to
Hollywood and ended up working as an assistant and orchestrator for Alfred
Newman, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann (in which capacity he met Alfred
Hitchcock — the show’s biographical segment included a photo of Williams with
Hitchcock and Herrmann) and other major film composers, which gave him a chance
to learn the trade from the masters and ultimately become probably the most
successful film composer of all time. Oddly, the movie that (at least according
to this show) first established him on the “A”-list was the 1972 adaptation of Fiddler
on the Roof, based on the Broadway musical
with Jerry Bock as composer and Sheldon Harnick as lyricist — but Williams got
a “Music Arranged and Conducted By” credit and he made the rather preposterous
statement that he had to compose a seven-minute stretch of music, based on
Bock’s themes but with a lot of original development required, to cover the
opening credits. “Broadway musicals don’t have long instrumental introductions
like that,” Williams said on camera — actually they do; they’re called
“overtures.” At one point Dudamel referred on-camera to Williams as a “genius,”
which is preposterous — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner were geniuses; John
Williams is a capable craftsman who writes serviceable and sometimes stirring
music for films, but he pales by comparison not only to the giants of the 18th
and 19th century but to the great film composers of Hollywood’s
classical era (including Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose grandeur in films like The
Adventures of Robin Hood Williams seems to
try to emulate every time he has a subject that requires him to portray
heroism).
There was a brief sequence with Williams and Steven Spielberg looking
at a Moviola and Williams explaining that he doesn’t like to think about what he’s going to compose for a film until he
can see at least a director’s rough cut — which has always surprised me; I
would have assumed a film composer would want to start work as soon as the film
was in final script form before
it actually went before the cameras, but in some cases composers like Max Steiner
would come in at an even later stage than Williams and refuse to compose
anything until the film was in final
cut. Williams also recalled that for the final scene of E.T. he was unable to conduct his orchestra in the strict
tempo needed to fit Spielberg’s visuals — so Spielberg made him one of the most
unusual offers a director has ever given a composer. He told Williams to stop
looking at the screen and just conduct the music as he felt it, and Spielberg
would adjust his editing so the film would fit the music instead of the other
way around. Alas, that sequence from E.T. was not among the works
featured in the concert portions of the program: instead we got an appealing
mix of the familiar, the quasi-familiar and the totally unfamiliar. The
familiar included the Olympic Fanfare (played by the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets)
and accompanying theme, the theme from Schindler’s List (with Itzhak Perlman, who played on the original
soundtrack, saying that’s the one piece of music he’s played he gets requests
for all around the world, no matter where he appears), the seven-minute
arrangement of Jerry Bock’s Fiddler on the Roof music mentioned earlier, an orchestral medley from Star
Wars (along with a march of the storm
troopers for which Williams took the baton from Dudamel and conducted himself;
it also featured actors marching across the stage in storm trooper costumes,
including one dressed as Darth Vader, and both Charles and I expected the “Darth Vader” to push
Williams off the podium and finish the conducting himself with his prop light
saber), the infamous tuba solo from Jaws, and — ironically — the theme for the Great Performances series itself, which — previously unbeknownst to me,
Williams wrote.
The not-so-familiar and decidedly unfamiliar included two more
selections from Schindler’s List,
“Remembrances” and “Jewish Town: Krakow Ghetto, 1941” (also featuring Perlman);
and three selections from the 2002 film Catch Me if You Can (about real-life con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr.,
played by Leonardo di Caprio, and the FBI agent assigned to catch him, Carl
Hanratty, played by Tom Hanks), for which Williams reached back to his jazz
days for inspiration (the film took place in the 1960’s and director Spielberg
wanted a score that would sound like it belonged in that period; he also hired
Saul Bass to do the credits sequence and Bass came through with a series of
geometric animations much like the credits sequences he’d done for Hitchcock,
Preminger and other major directors back then). He said he wrote an alto sax solo
part with Charlie Parker’s sound in mind, though the player we actually heard,
Don Higgins, had a lighter tone, more like Paul Desmond or Lee Konitz — not bad
models — than Parker. The three selections from Catch Me if You Can — “Closing In,” “Reflections” and “Joy Ride”
— were among the most appealing parts of the program, not only because of
their relative unfamiliarity but also because they showed Williams to be
capable of sounds other than the big-orchestra “classic” style of most of his
film scores. Indeed, the most interesting piece on the program was Soundings, not written for a movie but composed as an
occasional piece for the dedication of Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A., where
the concert took place. Soundings
is a self-consciously “modern” piece, and though nothing in it would sound
unfamiliar to devotees of Debussy, Ravel or Bartók, it was a welcome breath of
fresh air in its musical complexity and made me wish Williams would bring some
of that relative sophistication to his film scores. Alas, in an atrocious bit
of production the filmmakers actually cut to an interview segment between
Williams and Dudamel in the middle of Soundings — the kind of sin committed all too often in TV
programs about music.
Probably the lowest point of the program occurred during
a piece of music from, ironically, one of the best films included: a piece for
children’s choir and orchestra from Amistad called “Dry Your Tears, Africa” (spelled “Dry Your
Tears, Afrika” on the film’s imdb.com page), with the Los Angeles Children’s
Master Chorale obliged to keep straight faces while making their way through an
interminably sappy piece of writing from a poem by one Bernard Dadié, and
Williams attempting a musical depiction of the burden of slavery by ripping off
the opening of the “Work Song” from Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and
Beige (yet another example, like the
imitation Wagner of the Star Wars
movies — the makers of the Star Wars
parody Hardware Wars scored
brilliantly by accompanying their interstellar battles with real Wagner, the “Ride of the Valkyries” in particular —
of Williams stealing from someone who really was a genius). Like Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Williams
is a “comfort composer,” one who can be counted on to deliver the goods for a
mass-market movie (in Lloyd Webber’s case, a mass-market musical) without
producing anything too threatening or too ear-bending for a large audience;
I’ve liked some of his music, gritted my teeth at the banality of some of his
scores, but I certainly don’t confuse him with the true giants of music (or
even the true giants of film music, including the now-departed ones he used to
work for) and calling him a “genius” quite frankly does him no favors. He’s a
competent craftsman, and sometimes an inspired one, and his sensibility is sufficiently
middle-brow it’s obvious why mass-market filmmakers like Spielberg and George
Lucas use him again and again.
