John Williams writes beautiful music, no doubt about it. However, when his music is compared to the academic structure of pieces by composers like Machaut, Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Debussy and Shostakovich, his music doesn’t come close to being as great.

I agree that his music is and can be extremely difficult…but that doesn’t mean it’s well written music. There are pieces of music that Mozart wrote that are WAY easier to perform than the Imperial March, but are WAY more intellectually composed.

Having said that, I think John Williams does a great job with his movie scores. The themes are beautiful and memorable, and there’s something to be said for that. But he hasn’t done anything innovative enough to be remembered for more than writing music to accompany a movie.

The only thing remotely intellectually interesting that I can remember Williams doing is overlaying Short Rounds theme over the Raiders March in the end credits of the Temple of Doom. However, that’s nothing new to the music world. If you could provide any other examples in his music I;d be very interested in seeing that.

The converse is also true; how much of he music we currently consider “classical” was actually “popular” in its day?

Granted the mechanism of popular music distribution were not available to Haydn. But his music was published (and pirated) all over Europe. When he went on “tour” to Paris and London he was ecstatically received.

In music, the term classical has many meanings, but broadly speaking it is either,

A. Music composed between 1750 and 1825ish. or..

B. Not pop. Or more specifically, music that is preserved through the medium of musical notation.

The danger of this kind of discourse is that it tends to confuse quality with intent. “Classical” does not mean “good”, it is a style capable of being outstandingly good (much but no all of Mozart), or downright awful (Galuppi Sinfonia in D anyone?).

Time tends to sift the Galuppis of this world to the bottom and brings the best bits of Mozart to the top. This is an ongoing process, therefore we will know if Williams is classical in about 80 or 90 years.

It can be argued that Williams is not classical for the same reason The Beatles or Miles Davis or Duke Ellington are not classical: all of this music is primarily preserved in recorded form. The definitive rendition exist in recorded format, rather than in an idealized abstract form – the score. The great strength of classical music is that is music designed to be recreated, the perfect rendition does not, and will never, exist. This is not true Williams”, The beatles or Duke Ellington.

As for John Williams…I’m proud to be ignorant enough to feel the incomparable thrill of hearing a John Willams piece. I mean, I’m far more a movie buff than a classical composer buff, but…hey, if Williams samples other folks melodies, he’s got great taste. I think it’s a little shallow to call his music “beginner”…even the most seasoned musician might still sit up in his seat upon hearing the first blasts of the trumpet section in “Star Wars: Main Title” and feel a swell of emotion when the rest of the orchestra joins them.

Besides that, this isn’t a list of the best classical composers, just the most financially sucessful…I’d say Williams is as classical as Gershwin, certainly.

Not relevant to this blog, but I went on your homepage and was amused by the little snippet you posted on there of your father and you.

My own father used to do the exact same thing w/ my brother and I, and you and I are fairly close in age (although I am about 2 yrs younger)… must’ve been the thing to do!

Second, I suspect that the people making the list merely overlooked Williams, Glass, Elfman, etc. When people are thinking of classical music, they tend to think that it is something that is no longer being created. People tend to use the word “classical” to denote any high art music created by dead white people of European descent. Thus, modern composers are generally left out of most thought processes.

Strictly speaking, “classical” music refers to music created during the Classical Period of music (roughly 1750 – 1825). Again, strictly speaking, Haydn is the only one of the above ten composers who is a true “classical” composer.

3) If people are going to get irritated at Williams for copying others’ works, then they are going to have to also get irritated at just about any composer in history, as nearly all used others themes in their own works (see: just about any work that is called “Theme and Variations on a melody by …”).

It’s possible that time will give Williams more recognition, even with the borrowing from other people (which has been done a lot throughout history).

don’t get me wrong–I think williams is nice ‘beginner’ music–a gateway for a lot of people to get more excited/invested in other classical music. but really–nothing more for me. and there are many, many other more legitimate classical composers (gershwin and bernstein immediately come to mind) who are just as good for ‘beginners,’ but much more diverse in their repertoire.

With the exception of Schindler’s List and Minority Report — and nothing else — his scores are hardly unique when compared to each other, or when compared to their source material.

Stravinsky was a pop composer himself — as were any composers during their heyday — but he’s saved by having actually lived in the Romantic/20th Century era of music.

Williams’ accomplishments outside the cinema have been very, very few, as have Elfman’s — and Hermann’s, and all the rest. He can’t rightly be considered anything but a pop composer when the bulk of his work hasn’t started out in the concert hall.

Unlike Stravinsky, I might add.