John Williams: Hack

The year was 2005 and my skills as a Lothario were at their peak. Due to my notoriety as a high level actor in local theater, I was often invited to parties, held right in people’s apartments, where other men and women in their early twenties consumed alcohol and tried to close the gap between two human souls and their genitals.
On one such evening I met a young honey who’s considerable rack was being groped by some gay dudes because that’s something that they like to do at parties. I corrected their technique and sent them on their way, breaking out everything in my charm repertoire to seal the deal with this aspiring opera singer.
We engaged in something I like to call Hep Talk, where I break out my knowledge of classic authors like Beverly Cleary until its clear that dry humping is underway. And did we ever - dry hump that is- we must have gone on for fifteen minutes until the party's hosts asked us to leave so they could go to bed/not be grossed out anymore.
Sadly, my swinging lifestyle was not to last. Once it became clear that I didn’t have the chops to be a college thespian, I quickly retreated into a state of boozy recluse and all but gave up on dry humping my was to infamy.
It was almost a whole year before I remembered something that opera singer had said that night that didn’t jive with my worldview. When I told her my favorite musicians included The Shins and John Williams she haughtily dismissed the world’s greatest composer as “Okay, but really derivative.”

I quickly sough out whether this could be true, and the truth was truer than I could deal with. According to this Slate article Mr. Wlliams, the plucker of our youthful heartstrings and pied piper of wonderment, actually is pretty derivative of Max Steiner, the first great composer of the talky era, who himself was sort of a hack asshole. Steiner “could emit late-19th-century music, redolent of Strauss and Mahler, by the kilo. Outside Skull Island, that plush orchestral sound would dominate film scores for the following decades: the Austro-German-Hollywood grand style epitomized by Steiner and another Austrian, Erich Wolfgang Korngold.”
I don’t know who any of those people are but I’m going to go out on a limb and say they probably ended up being Nazi war criminals.

Not knowing who else to turn to, I contacted the opera singer on something we used at the time called MySpace, to concede that, yes, maybe John Williams was “sort of derivative.”
She praised the accuracy of my research but pointed out that, since I had avoided her at every turn for the past year, she wanted nothing to do with me and she hoped I learned to treat people better.
This has nothing to do with the larger point. I’m just a sad person.
So who else has John Williams raided for a dose of whimsy?

http://www.twogomers.com/?powerpress_pinw=642-podcastsmp3
The Two Gomers Run a Marathon podcast is way unfunny and light on information about running. This episode, however, cracked the JW scam wide open. About 11 minutes in, one of these Gomers beaks just how William’s scores are mere stand ins for the classical pieces from when music was just being invented. Home Alone is clearly evoking the Nutcracker throughout, stealing both key and meter for basically every sequence.

It turns out that George Lucas is fairly easygoing with licensing out the rights of Star Wars for theatrical productions. I learned from the Proudly Resents pod cast, that the Dark Room, a fifty seat theater in San Francisco, was granted permission to do stage shows of Star Wars, the only restriction being that none of the original music could be used. No matter, it turns out that audiences have little ability to decipher the original score from The Planets, the composition it clearly lifted.




Am I actually disillusioned that John Willliams is a fucking hack? Not really. While he was the first musician I ever doled out money for a cassette recording of when I was 12, I never presumed he was a great innovator. Just because the Superman theme make me feel like I imagine a coked up bull rider does God massages his temples, doesn’t mean that the source needs to be 100% original. If anything, it fills me with great hope that I could one day rip off a major talent lost to the ages. At least that’s what I’ll tell myself as I put the finishing touches on my new manuscript, War and Not War.