This is what happens when JAWS composer John Williams is taken out of context
John Williams conducting the recording of the JAWS score
We've all seen the headlines, but despite the bigger clickbaiit, relax. John Williams does not secretly hate film music.
You yell John Williams likes film music, here I sit. You yell he doesn't, we've got a panic on the internet. That's exactly what happened and it seemingly lost its mind after The Guardian kick-started things by running a headline quoting the maestro: as saying “I never liked film music very much.” Clickbait gold.
He said it, but stripped of any context, it makes the man behind Jaws, Star Wars and Harry Potter sound like he’s trashing his own legacy and film music in general. He wasn't and he's not certifiable.
In fact, to paraphrase Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), those proportions are not correct.
What Williams was actually talking about was the nightmare of turning film cues into concert material. Movie music isn’t written to stand alone — it’s chopped, spliced, scribbled over to fit scenes. To put it on a symphony stage, it has to be rebuilt. That’s the “not liking” part. The logistics. Not the art.
Yes, he admits film scores are more restrained than symphonies. They’re designed to sit under dialogue, not show off. But that doesn’t mean he’s ashamed of them, of course he isn't.
Williams has spent decades conducting sold-out concerts of his own work and as music director of The Boston Pops Orchestra and is still writing into his 90s. If that’s dislike, it’s a very strange version of it.
So no, John Williams not a cranky old man who is supposedly knocking the music that made him a legend. He’s a 93-year-old genius still giving the world goosebumps. Context matters. Headlines don’t.
Rest assured that the film music force is strong in John Williams and that he and film music, as you know, means friendship.
Words by Dean Newman
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