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On October 19th, 2019 – with my wedding a week behind me and my pending harrowing move to an island in the north Atlantic Ocean (Newfoundland) just days away – I attended what will likely prove to be my final of many, many hometown NAC concerts. This was another of the oh-so-popular Pops series (which is why they are called that, I suppose), this time featuring the music of the wonderful John Williams.
Just like Mozart, John Williams needs no introduction…but heck, if you really want one it would go something like this:
Born in 1932 in Long Island, NY, John Williams started his film-scoring career on an island in the north Atlantic (Newfoundland) at the young age of twenty when he took a gig writing music for a tourism video*. Williams followed this auspicious start by working his way through such notable notes as scoring the pilot of Gilligan’s Island as well as music for a parade of well known entities such as Lost In Space, Valley of the Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, The Towering Inferno, and up through the stratosphere with the greatest two-note melody of all time (Jaws), the most cliché alien riff ever in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and of course his greatest achievement: Star Wars.
So you’ve heard of him, have you?
Let’s start with that Star Wars main theme, just like this concert did. As I’ve mentioned several times (to the point of eye-rolling boredom?) this piece was my introduction to working with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, being the first piece that I ever called the camera shots for in my now long-standing video gig at the NAC, and since that day two decades before I have called this very piece many more times.
And it always leaves me breathless, just as it did on this night.
After the orchestra had tuned itself up the conductor strolled onstage and without a word to the packed house he turned to the musicians and dropped his magical baton, starting off that unmistakeable rhythmic cacophony that provides the opening fanfare for the greatest movie series of all time. Out of this sonic abyss appears snippets of heroic horns that flicker like tiny winks of light in a starry sky before the music all comes together and bursts out of the gate with a rhythmic wallop that sounds like the vacuum of space has been breached, those glorious French horns punctuated by militaristic bursts of timpani crashing together to create what is quite possibly the most innate melody in the galaxy, and one that is even more effective than it is surprising.
It gives my goosebumps, every time.
Start-to-finish the Star Wars (Main Title) is just such a delicious piece of work that Williams could have died the day after he composed it** and he would still be considered the top banana of the upper echelon of modern composers, bar none.
But he didn’t die the next day. Nope, instead he went on (and on and on) to compose, well, just about everything else worth hearing in the modern history of the movie biz (with apologies to Danny Elfman). Indeed as the concert went on (and on and on) this point was driven home with every subsequent drop of the baton. Hook, Harry Potter, Schindler’s List, Superman, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, E.T., Saving Private Ryan…I mean it’s ridiculous just how pervasive the guy is.
Truly, John Williams must be the most popular composer of all time. Hence, the Pops series.
Mozart Shmozart. When did he ever score a film?
*Bet you didn’t know that.
**What does a composer do when he dies? He decomposes.
Todd Man Out 