Nine reasons I love John Williams [playlist]

I wrote a biography of John Williams, essentially, because I have loved his music since I was nine years old. A lot of children fall in love with Williams’ music, because it’s an irresistible and very tuneful pillar of the movies we all grew up with, whether it was the original Star Wars or Indiana Jones trilogy, E.T., Jurassic Park, or Harry Potter. His scores sang these stories in perfect harmony with the visuals and often provided their deepest emotions, and his themes were as integral to the characters as the actors who portrayed them. But Williams’ music is not childish or simple, and I loved it more powerfully as I got older and learned to appreciate the stunning level of craft and art in his popular family movie music and expanding my tastes to his darker, more complex scores for grown-up films. His music continues to break my heart, and I love that feeling.

My book is, in part, a covert love letter to Williams and a sermon to the unconverted or the half-aware about why you, too, should love his music. I’ve created this playlist as a companion, a bit of church music to go along with my 640-page homily. Here are nine (among hundreds) musical reasons why I love John Williams.

1. “Summon the Heroes”

We’ll start with a non-film piece. Among his many staggering cultural contributions, Williams has composed themes for four separate Olympic Games, beginning with his all-timer “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. “Summon the Heroes” was commissioned for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and it’s a fabulous demonstration of how Williams can write catchy, punchy music for a celebration or pageant like no one else. He is an heir to the likes of John Philip Sousa, and between his Olympics music and his perch at the Boston Pops for many years, he justly earned the appraisal of director Oliver Stone as having come “to stand for the American culture.”

2. “The Asteroid Field” (from The Empire Strikes Back)

One of the reasons I fell for Williams’ music as a kid was because his scores were a perfect marriage of classical music—all the grandeur and scale and tradition of the classical orchestra—and pop music, with their catchy earworm themes and often a verse-chorus-verse structure. This action cue from The Empire Strikes Back—a score that many consider his very best—is a perfect example of this hybrid quality. It’s also a miraculous example of how Williams could accompany an action scene, hitting lots of visual cues in perfect synchronization, while simultaneously composing a piece of tuneful music that makes perfect sense as pure music. In that skill, to my mind, he has no equals.

3. Theme from Born on the Fourth of July

Williams is definitely most famous for scoring Star Wars and the films of Steven Spielberg, but in the late 1980s and early ’90s he scored an informal trilogy of movies for director Oliver Stone that interrogated and lamented the years of the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and the Richard Nixon presidency. All of these films are worth watching (Nixon is my personal favorite), and the scores are an exquisite tapestry of Americana tinged with melancholy and tragedy. The first was Born on the Fourth of July, the 1989 drama starring Tom Cruise as a real-life figure whose body and patriotism were shattered in Vietnam. Williams wrote an anguished string elegy as well as a solo trumpet theme that together tell the story of a profound, romantic love of country that is severely wounded, but not killed.

4. “Mom Returns and Finale” (from Home Alone)

One of Williams’ great gifts is ennobling even the lowest and silliest of material, and maybe the greatest example of this is Home Alone. On its face it is a juvenile, slapstick, live-action cartoon about a little boy torturing two idiot adults. But when Williams screened it, he saw the potential for a great Dickensian Christmas story, and he not only composed two indelible new Christmas carols, but also enhanced (and perhaps supplied) the emotional depth of its character relationships. The apotheosis of the film, and score, is the scene where Kevin McCallister’s mom finally comes home, they hug, and Kevin sees old man Marley embracing his own family in the falling snow. There’s a reason this movie has become a yuletide staple, and most of that reason is because John Williams treated it with literary respect and gave it an enormous heart.

5. “Remembering Emilie, and Finale” (War Horse)

Steven Spielberg’s unfairly overlooked movie about a horse in World War I—which is really about the tragedies as well as the humanity that war brings about—inspired Williams to write a romantic and very English pastoral score. There’s an homage to Old Hollywood in several scenes and images in the film, most of all in its emotionally cathartic finale, staged against a Technicolor MGM sunset. Williams reprises several of his intimate character themes, then strips away the whole orchestra for a solo piano rendition of an elegiac melody brimming with sadness and weary relief—and then concludes the whole thing with English nobility and heaving sentiment. This, for me, is ambrosia.

6. “Among the Clouds” (from Always)

Another overlooked and (in my opinion) unjustly dismissed Spielberg film, Always was his only “romantic comedy,” but really it’s a story about death and letting go of the person you love. It’s also a film with a lot of flight, a Williams specialty, and he wrote this cue for a scene where Dorinda (Holly Hunter) is flying her plane and the ghost of her paramour (Richard Dreyfuss) is saying goodbye. There’s a shimmering, levitational quality to this tone poem, a complicated mixture of quiet heartbreak and amorous love—with some gorgeous solo French horn playing by studio musician James Thatcher—that I find irresistible.

7. “E.T. is Alive” (from E.T. The Extra Terrestrial)

Most people know the famous “Flying Theme” from E.T., a score that, for my money, is probably Williams’ magnum opus. But most of my favorite moments in his scores (as evidenced throughout this playlist) are the sadder and more intimate ones—and the scene after E.T. dies and Elliott talks quietly to his alien friend, crying, is just so beautiful. Williams scored it with a tender reprise of his friendship theme for E.T. and Elliott on a celeste, an instrument with childlike sparkle that Williams loves, and then on a keening clarinet with empathetic string accompaniment. The cue rallies when E.T.’s heart begins to glow again, and the flying theme blooms like the flowers psychically linked to the character’s health. Williams has such a gift for taking potentially silly scenes and turning them into earnest holy moments.

8. “Cadillac of the Skies” (from Empire of the Sun)

Another “holy moment,” this is one of the all-time greatest standalone pieces of Williams music, for another overlooked Spielberg masterpiece. A young boy named Jim (played by Christian Bale) has been living in a Japanese internment camp for years; he has always been obsessed with airplanes, and when American bombers fly through to liberate the camp, he runs up to a rooftop in a state of euphoria. Williams scored this with choir, turning it into a quasi-liturgical drama; he has strings and brass join in, rising and rising, and then the music suddenly turns queasy and quiet as Jim collapses into his physician friend’s arms and says, “I can’t remember what my parents look like.” The score’s heart breaks from ecstasy to anguish in an instant, with the choir continuing hauntingly as the doctor carries Jim down from the roof like a toddler, the camp exploding behind them. This is definitely one of my “desert island” Williams tracks.

9. “The Search for the Blue Fairy” (from A.I. Artificial Intelligence)

In the summer of 2001, I saw A.I. three times in the theater. I was 16. After the first screening I was confused; by the third watch, I decided it was my favorite movie of all time, and it has remained so. It’s also my personal favorite John Williams score—full of gorgeous character melodies and emotional orchestral passion, but also layers of complex darkness and minimalism. David, an extremely lifelike android programmed to love his “parents,” has spent most of the film searching for the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio in the belief that she can turn him into a real boy and his mother will finally love him back. Williams scored the scene where he finally does find her (or at least a statue of her, in a drowned Coney Island) with his Blue Fairy theme sung by solo soprano. David pleads over and over—almost as if he is praying to the Virgin Mary—and Williams’ music is itself a prayer. A.I. is as beautiful and sad and sacred as any score he ever composed, and this track encapsulates everything that I love about his music.

_{Featured image by Jake Hills on Unsplash.}