Posted on 02/08/2022 7:04:40 AM PST by Borges
John Williams, the man who changed the way we hear the movies, turns 90 today.
As the key Hollywood composer during the blockbuster era of the 1970s and 1980s, Williams had an astronomical career alongside the likes of filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
With his music for their movies, Williams revived the romantic orchestral sound of Hollywood's Golden Age — the sound pioneered by composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner at the dawn of the talkies — and reinvented it for a new era.
“John Williams has been the single most significant contributor to my success as a filmmaker,” Spielberg said in 2012.
On the numbers alone, Williams has had a career like no other. If you were going to the movies between 1970 and 1990, every second year would have had a number one box office hit with music by Williams.
(Excerpt) Read more at abc.net.au ...
Eh...it wasn’t about the Shark, really, was it? It was the expectation of when it would appear from the deep!
Just like the movie “Aliens”...they didn’t show them all the much, but having them just out of sight coming for you with malignant intent was enough to make you squirm!
Imagine if there was background music during real time life. Music goes right to the midbrain and evokes emotion. The major question is does really evoke higher intellectual function such as logical thought, analysis and problem solving. However it is certainly enjoyable.
Dude, what????!!!!! “Greatest living composer” - WHAT????!!!!
Yeah, he changed symphonic musick into background squiggles highlighting the scripted sayings of posing, self-important freaks.
I meant “Alien” not “Aliens”...
They showed them a lot in “Aliens”, but not so much in “Alien” and that was a pretty scary movie.
No, you need LSD for that :)
Yeah, it was the dread. Where is it?
It’s funny how two of the scariest movies ever are so scary because of prop failures. We hardly see the alien in Alien because they just couldn’t manage to make it not look like a guy in a rubber suit. So you get the bits. Probably the worst aspect of CGI is now you can do anything, so they do. Amazing creativity comes from “this prop sucks, how do we deal with it?”
How is it different from writing incidental music for a play? This was also technically “movie music”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7_m1om82o4
Ennio Morricone was influential and innovative as far as I’m concerned.
His score for Jaws was brilliant, especially the haunting music to start the film. My other favorites include Superman, Empire Strikes Back, and Schindler’s List.
He has worked with skill and subtlety, certainly. But the greatest living composer? One would think that would require true originality, uniqueness, a career on the cutting edge. Not sure Williams has earned that kind of reputation.
Movie music is the only listenable contemporary music.
That’s a very good point!
I found his score for Saving Private Ryan to be quite haunting.
I was watching a western some years ago and I started thinking about Doctor Zhivago - sure enough Maurice Jarre did the music for both movies.
Yup! I’ve often thought that if Joseph Goebbels would have had the Imperial March score back in 1937 and he pair’d with movie reels of Third Reich scenes, Hitler might have gone drag and married him.
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