die Reihe, part 2

Continued thoughts on the tension (or not) between John's film and classical music

“Ah—you’re thinking of my commercial work, where my job is to write something that will live with the sonic fabric of the film and won’t violate the style. It must marry the action, it must coexist with the film—or you won’t be asked back. But my own personal music, that which has my thumb-print on it, is quite different, and not necessarily romantic.”

This is from an interview John Williams gave to Radio Times in 1980. The timing is kind of interesting; this was after he’d written a few concert works, including his symphony, but before most of the concertos and the majority of his classical music. Still, I think it’s illuminating even now, and I’m not sure John has really changed his tune.

Last week I wrote a post about “die Reihe,” a term that specifically refers to both Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system and a defunct German music journal, but which John also uses to describe the whole “credo” of post-WWII music academia where (to put it crudely) tunes and tonality were out, math and atonality were in.

John talks about die Reihe both critically and respectfully. It stands for all the snobby antagonism toward his popular film music, but it also drove his own interest in the music of Varése and other 20th century avant-gardists, and it strongly influenced the “thumbprint” we hear in his own classical music. To reductively paraphrase his quote from the top: his film (“commercial”) music is romantic (tuneful, tonal, accessible), and his classical (“personal”) music is… not.

There’s a dichotomy here that is stated, but also which anyone who loves John’s film music feels with a lot of whiplash whenever they hear pretty much any of his concertos for the first time. This music he calls personal and “his own” literally makes us ask: Wait, where’s the John Williams I know and love?