John Williams Is The Man
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between February 13, 2022 and February 24, 2022. It was composed of 1,199 words across 26 tweets.
It should go without saying that the music in this movie is marvelous, one of the finest achievements since movies started having dedicated musical scores. (The first one being Erik Satie's score for Entr'acte [Clair, 1924], depending on who you ask.)
John Williams was born on February 8, 1932, and was educated at the Eastman School of Music at Juilliard. In his early career, he was a studio pianist and session musician, playing on pieces such as the Peter Gunn theme and the score for West Side Story (Wise and Robbins, 1961).
The 1970s were a watershed period for Williams's career as a film composer. He received his first Academy Award for Fiddler on the Roof (Jewison, 1971) and struck up what would be long-lasting professional relationships with directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
To compose the music for SUPERMAN, director Richard Donner selected Jerry Goldsmith, with whom he'd worked on The Omen (Donner, 1976). Goldsmith withdrew due to scheduling conflicts (he wrote no less than a dozen scores between 1977 and 1978), after which Williams was approached.
Throughout his career, Williams has frequently proven himself an equal storyteller to the directors he's worked with. On SUPERMAN, Donner allows multiple sequences to play without dialogue, allowing the music to not only express emotion, but to actively advance the narrative.
Take, for example, the interlude in which young Clark Kent travels on foot to the arctic circle. Acting on instructions he doesn't understand, transmitted to him by a mysterious glowing crystal, he unwittingly creates the Fortress of Solitude and learns the truth of his origins.
This interlude includes only one character and no words spoken. Clark is being called by a feeling he doesn't understand, but cannot resist. An alien voice in his head. He first appears in this scene as a tiny speck in a vast emptiness. The desolation emphasizes his lonesomeness.
This could have been a straightforward series of images--a character on a journey, generating a simple and linear sequence of events that ends with him arriving at his destination. But not so, in Williams's hands. What he does with it is unconventional, and it is spectacular.
The Krypton theme, bombastic and triumphant earlier in the film, comes back as a lonely minor key melody played by a single woodwind. Already, Williams is providing us with subtext. A fully orchestrated, triumphant Krypton theme represents the Kryptonian civilization in life.
Here, however, a single instrument playing a minor key version of the Krypton theme must represent a lost survivor of that civilization--now left to wander alone. The theme floats above the rest of the orchestration in the same way that Clark trudges over the tundra.
Then something new happens--a musical plot twist. The lone woodwind plays the theme again, and it is answered by another woodwind playing the theme an octave lower. If the upper voice represents Clark alone on the surface of a great icy expanse, what is this new lower voice?
This voice from below calls back to Clark, prompting him to withdraw the glowing crystal from his backpack. (There is no onscreen stimulus that causes him to do this; it is all suggested by the music.) It is the same crystal he took from the spaceship that brought him to Earth.
Acting on instincts he doesn't understand, he flings the crystal. It lodges itself in the ice, then sinks in. From beneath the ice spring the crystal spires of the Fortress of Solitude--a perfect replica of Kryptonian architecture, with all its histories and technologies.
The Fortress, while it was still waiting beneath the unsculpted ice, was speaking to Clark in the same language in which he had unconsciously called out to it. Only then do we finally hear the full, triumphant brassy rendition of the Krypton theme once again, welcoming him home.
During these three minutes of screentime, the music is handling the bulk of the storytelling, with the visuals providing the accompaniment. This is the stuff of opera, except the roles are filled by the instruments themselves, which deliver all the dialogue that is necessary.
I could speak on the rest of the score with the same granularity, but I believe it speaks for itself. Cue up the opening credits--or the closing credits, if you like--which function as an overture, establishing the musical themes as an opening scene establishes its characters.
Williams is often typed as a romantic composer in the tradition of Richard Wagner, due to his prominent reliance on simple, memorable themes to signify characters and their relationships. This is true enough, but it diminishes his employment of modernist musical aesthetics.
"Modernism" is something of a blanket term that applies to a variety of experimental forms of classical music in the 20th century. In a sense, it's the rejection of traditional notions of harmony, rhythm, timbre, and other things taken for granted as beautiful in music.
It's somewhat ironic that, for something designed to challenge listeners (often to be rejected by them), modernist musical tropes found a welcome home in enormously successful blockbusters such as SUPERMAN, Jaws (Spielberg, 1975), and The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980).
It can be difficult to explain the appeal of 20th century classical music to the uninitiated. But set it to a movie and it is instantly understood. The obstacle is getting listeners to forget what they think they know, and just take the music for what it is: a piece of drama.
Take, for example, the sequence in SUPERMAN when Kal-El's spacecraft is en route to Earth. The music here is circular. The notes, in groups of three, put us in a mind of loops and whorls. The chromaticism of the harmonies flits in and out of key signatures, defying resolution.
Resolution is nothing more than a musical handhold that invites us to grab on and steady ourselves. Kal-El has to wait for it, and so must we. The piece starts out with a cold, distant sonic texture, but gradually warms up with full voicings, rich with stable notes.
Again, there's storytelling going on here. The action is down to a baby in a spaceship and Marlon Brando rambling indistinctly about history and physics. The music is what's really putting us in a mind of things happening and providing a sense of narrative progression.
When the distant Earth is finally in sight, the music makes it feel like the logical culmination of a long journey, not just the endpoint of a collage of images.
This does not mean that the film was deficient until Williams added the music--in fact, far from it.
It means that Williams is one of the filmmakers, and his music is as much a part of the end result as the images, words, and sound effects.
In recent years, Williams's activities have slowed, though he has yet to retire and doesn't appear to have any plans to do so.
He has concluded his involvement with Star Wars as of Rise of Skywalker (Abrams, 2019). He served as a musical consultant for the recent adaptation of West Side Story (Spielberg, 2021) and will compose the score for the next Indiana Jones movie, scheduled for 2023.
Previous: SUPERMAN By The Numbers
Next: The Rejects
Back to contents.
Published 3/9/2024
"365 Days of SUPERMAN"
site and contents
© 2024 Ken Alleman.