The Daily Populous Monday August 25th, 2025 evening edition
Authored by theguardian.com and submitted by Epistaxis

As one of the greatest composers in film, John Williams has written some of the most memorable music in cinema for masterpieces such as Jaws, Jurassic Park and Star Wars.

But despite winning five Oscars, the 93-year-old believes that, as an art form, film music pales in comparison to history’s great works.

“I never liked film music very much,” he confessed in a rare interview for a forthcoming biography.

He added: “Film music, however good it can be – and it usually isn’t, other than maybe an eight-minute stretch here and there … I just think the music isn’t there. That, what we think of as this precious great film music is … we’re remembering it in some kind of nostalgic way …

“Just 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.”

He added: “A lot of [film music] is ephemeral. It’s certainly fragmentary and, until somebody reconstructs it, it isn’t anything that we can even consider as a concert piece.”

Among the more than 100 movies he has scored are the Indiana Jones films, ET, Schindler’s List and the first three Harry Potter films.

He is the world’s most nominated living Oscar recipient, with a record 54 nominations, recognising that his music has played a crucial role in enhancing and heightening a film’s emotion and atmosphere.

With two haunting notes, he captured the chilling threat of the Great White Shark in Jaws, while his mournful Jewish lament in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List conveyed the heartbreak of the Holocaust.

View image in fullscreen Williams conducting a concert in Washington DC in 2023. Photograph: Shannon Finney/Getty Images

He was interviewed by Tim Greiving for a biography, John Williams: A Composer’s Life, to be published by Oxford University Press in September.

Greiving was taken aback by Williams’s dismissal of film music: “His comments are sort of shocking, and they are not false modesty. He is genuinely self-deprecating, and deprecating of ‘film music’ in general.”

He said Williams referred to his film-scoring assignments, including the high-profile and much-lauded ones, as “just a job”. He added: “But I also don’t think we should necessarily take his words at face value. He clearly took the job of composing music for films as seriously as anyone in history ever has.

“He has this internalised prejudice against film music. It’s a functional type of music, which is funny because I consider his film music to be kind of sublime art at its best. That’s not modesty. He’s just saying it’s a lesser art form. Typically that is true, though. It is written much quicker and much more economically. But I do think his music defies that. He perfected the art of film scoring. He took it to its greatest heights. He elevated film music to a high art form.”

Despite the acclaim, Williams is self-critical, telling Greiving: “If I had it all to do over again, I would have made a cleaner job of it – 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.”

In the book, he also talks about working with Spielberg, for whom he scored Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Saving Private Ryan, among other movies.

Williams was frustrated early in his career by directors who did not understand music, a typical complaint among film composers.

With Spielberg, he has had a “very special collaboration”, he said. “He’s more … musically educated than most of the directors that I’ve worked with. He grew up with his mother who played … Clementi and Bach and Chopin and so on. And she took him to concerts … He played a little clarinet. And he is very musical.”

Away from film, Williams has composed dozens of concerti, fanfare and other concert works. He was music director of the Boston Pops for more than a decade, inspiring countless children to pursue a career in the orchestra and winning the respect of the classical community worldwide, Greiving said.

Williams has personally approved a new concert performance of his most famous scores, including Star Wars and Schindler’s List.

Titled John Williams Reimagined and featuring new arrangements for flute, cello and piano, it will take place at Cadogan Hall in London on 27 October, with an accompanying album.

Williams said: “Pianist Simone Pedroni, flutist Sara Andon and cellist Cécilia Tsan have enhanced and elevated my music and that brings me great joy.”

zerbey on August 25th, 2025 at 12:16 UTC »

I can kind of see that, I imagine many of his projects start with "You know that movie Star Wars? Can you make something like that for us?" and he will go "Well I had this other idea..." and the response is going to be "Nah, we want Star Wars".

Key_Head3851 on August 25th, 2025 at 10:18 UTC »

Many struggling orchestras and symphonies will perform music of blockbuster movies, and these film scores are mostly composed by John Williams. Without context of the movie which at these events is normally a requirement (as scenes are shown on large screens) I think most people wouldn’t bother to attend.

ButteredNun on August 25th, 2025 at 09:46 UTC »

That’s ok, many teachers don’t like kids 😀