and Max Steiner, Williams is thoroughly schooled in European tradition. A master of romantic pastiche, he synthesizes everyone from Wagner through Bartok into grandiose Hollywood kitsch.
Star Wars' title theme quotes Brahms' Second Piano Concerto, and the movie's battle music attaches fanfares to
Rite of Spring orchestral rushes. The spiritual climaxes of
Close Encounters meld Bernard Herrmann with Scriabin and Shostakovich.
If Williams' scores are brilliantly descriptive, they fail to solve the problem that stymied his forerunners: how to compress symphonic ideas into an edited montage and yet compose a structurally self-contained work. Compared with the conservatory war horses they draw on, these scores amount to little more than selected fragments. Instead of being systematically developed, the themes are shuffled into tableaux dictated by the action on the screen. Stitched together into a continuous soundtrack, these treatments appear all the more episodic.
A good though derivative melodist, Williams has a real flair for orchestration. His ability to evoke epic distances surpasses even that of Prokofiev, whose widely spaced voicings he bends into still more dramatic contours. But Williams eclipses his influences only very rarely. In Close Encounters' "The Conversation," when the earthlings and the extraterrestrials first communicate, the acceleration of a cautious woodwind-and-tuba dialogue into frenetic chatter is a witty, surprising idea that's far more touching than all the pseudoreligious dither surrounding it.
If John Williams' music finally lacks the distinctive personality of Bernard Herrmann's, its scale is grander. Williams' soundtracks for Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are the last word in official Hollywood pomp. Hugely pictorial and utterly shameless in their emotional coerciveness, these scores loom as classics in a genre that they seldom, if ever, manage to transcend. (RS 260)
STEPHEN HOLDEN
