Critic Wars

Anne Midgette at the Washington Post, a classical music critic whom I quite like and who is often linked to in this blog, has a piece up about the virtues of symphonic Star Wars: As a classical music critic, I used to think the ‘Star Wars’ score was beneath me. I was wrong. That headline is another example of humble-bragging or straw-man-creating that is so ubiquitous these days. Sure, John Williams is a hugely successful film music composer, but the success of the music in symphonic programs has perhaps more to do with the fact that audiences crave familiarity than actual inherent quality. Let's let Anne tell it:

I saw “A New Hope” with both the NSO and the BSO in September and found that the experience confirmed something I had started to suspect: As a classical music critic, I was clueless. That is: While I liked John Williams’s music just fine when I first saw the film at age 12, by the time I had attained legal adulthood, laden with a cargo of acquired snobbery about the superiority of Western civilization, I had learned, and bravely parroted, that “film music” was somehow beneath me. And for the next three decades, through all the sequels I didn’t see and the quartet Williams composed for the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, which I did, I continued to use “film music” as a pejorative term that, if looked at closely, probably meant to me something akin to “something which one enjoys, but shouldn’t.”

I detect something of a forced confession here. This is a standard trope these days as all classical critics are supposed to humble themselves and, of course demean the classical traditions of Western civilization. I think you have to sign a disloyalty oath or something. Let's let Anne continue:

This isn’t a reflection on Williams, who is one of the most successful and popular composers of all time. It’s a reflection on me, and a reflection on the notion of the canon that so many classical music lovers unquestioningly embrace. Buying into this hierarchy seemed for years to be an entry-level requirement for the kind of life in the arts I hoped to live: initially as a Serious Writer With Intellectual Pretensions; later as a classical music critic. Film music, and populism, were easy targets. It has taken me half a lifetime to fully realize what most people knew at the first hearing: Good means good, effective means effective. Given that I’ve always made a point of embracing the best of popular fiction — Rex Stout and StephenKing and John le Carré — why was I so closed to the best of popular music, including a score that always had me, and everyone else, humming along?

It’s not that I had a conversion experience only this September. I first started to realize the merits of the Williams score when the BSO programmed Williams alongside Philip Glass, and I realized that Williams held up just fine.

 More straw-man stuff. The phrase "notion of the canon" is already assuming the conclusion as does the subsequent phrase "that so many classical music lovers unquestioningly embrace." I can assure you that, as a matter of course, I question the quality of all the music I listen to! "Buying into this hierarchy" is another phrase making a foregone conclusion. Wouldn't it be nice if someone actually argued their point instead of just assuming it?

I had to chuckle at the Philip Glass comparison. Oh yes, Williams does hold up just fine alongside Glass. They are both very effective and rather thin musically. The truth is, if we wanted to actually pretend to be music critics for a moment, that John Williams is an enthusiastic looter of every striking orchestral effect used in the last hundred years from Rimsky-Korsakov to Gustav Holst, from Berlioz to Mahler, if there is a good trick, he has likely used it. Oh, I forgot Tchaikovsky. Sure this is good music but while effective it is also deeply, dare I say, derivative, which is why we enjoy it as a soundtrack but likely don't want to put it in the same category as some really great orchestral music by, you know, Rimsky-Korsakov, Gustav Holst, Berlioz, Mahler and Tchaikovsky who actually came up with these ideas and devices in the first place. See what I mean?

We need envois by Williams and some of his mentors. Here is a suite from Star Wars:

Here is a little Holst:

And a little Rimsky-Korsakov:

Harry Potter and John Williams

I've enjoyed reading the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. It really is one of the great fantasy epics. Yes, it is presented as a children's series, but honestly, it is hard to think of 800 and 900 page novels as traditional children's books. There is a sophisticated satire running throughout. In any case, I just spent a couple of evenings watching the film versions of the first two books and, while much is enjoyable, in many ways the films ruin the books. A lot of the blame falls to the music, provided by film composer John Williams (as opposed to the completely different person, English/Australian classical guitarist John Williams).

It was while watching the first film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone that I realized that it was that horrible music that was really ruining the story. Sure, the computer-generated imagery and special effects were a contributor, as they always seem to be, but it was the music that was the main problem. The acting is, on the whole, excellent, with people like Alan Rickman giving a master's seminar on how to deliver a line. But that music... The ubiquitous, annoying main theme, the swirling violins, the tweedling winds, all combine to make the film just as phony and overdone as every other film he has written music for: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Close Encounters... It is like a Walt Disney version of A Midsummer Night's Dream with every ambiguity and grittiness in the original turned into a kind of cartoon of itself.

Really good directors such as Stanley Kubrick and Peter Weir use music to stunning effect in their films. I doubt if anyone can hear The Blue Danube waltz without visualizing a spaceship docking and the ending of Master and Commander was inspired with the violin and cello knocking out a rustic dance while the camera rises high in the air to reveal the escaping frigate in the distance. But what do we get in Harry Potter at the end? The usual pompous, over-orchestrated bombastic phoniness of every other Hollywood blockbuster. Oh, please!