At the end of the day, a job is a job. Whether you’re flipping burgers or penning the theme to Star Wars, there’s always something better out there. Just ask 93-year-old John Williams, widely considered the greatest composer of film scores who ever lived, and who admits in a new biography, “I never liked film music very much.” Imagine how good the score to Harry Potter or Schindler’s List would be if he did. “Film music, however good it can be—and it usually isn’t, other than an eight-minute stretch here and there,” the five-time Oscar-winning composer of the theme to Jaws continues. “I just think the music isn’t there.”
Per The Guardian, biographer Tim Greiving, whose John Williams: A Composer’s Life will be published in September, was shocked to find out that Williams considered his life’s work “just a job.” However, he tempers that by saying we shouldn’t take Williams’ words at face value. Williams, he says, took the job of composing film music “as seriously as anyone in history ever has.”
“He has this internalized prejudice against film music,” Greiving said. “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.”
According to Williams, if the composer could do it all over again, he would’ve made “a cleaner job of […] having the film music and the concert music all being more me.” Unfortunately, that’s not how it happened. “The film thing was a job to do, or an opportunity to accept.”
This is hardly the first time Mr. Williams has been dismissive toward his work. Back in 2016, he hand-waved away any lingering cultural memory toward his Star Wars work. “I don’t know. A lot of them are not very memorable and so on,” he said of an oeuvre containing some of the most beloved film music ever recorded. “It’s probably the most popular music that I’ve done.”
