136: John Williams and Music as Image-Painting

 There’s a special kind of music that seems to move in sync with emotion itself — the kind that doesn’t just accompany a scene, but becomes the feeling of it. Flying Theme from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is one of the clearest examples. The melody begins with wonder and hesitation, then rises into something almost weightless, as if the orchestra itself is lifting off the ground. What makes it unforgettable is how perfectly it mirrors the scene: childhood awe, freedom, fear, and joy all swelling together at once. The music doesn’t tell you what to think — it opens the emotional space where those feelings can happen.


Film music like this often works through motion. Composers build momentum with repeating rhythms, expanding harmonies, and melodies that climb higher and higher until they feel inevitable. When the bicycles soar across the moon in *E.T.*, the score surges upward too, making the scene feel larger than reality without losing its intimacy. That balance is difficult to achieve. If the music becomes too grand, the humanity disappears; too restrained, and the magic never arrives. Great cinematic themes hover right between those extremes, where emotion feels both personal and mythic.


Many iconic movie moments rely on this same emotional architecture. John Williams mastered it through themes that feel instantly recognizable yet emotionally flexible. A soaring phrase can express adventure in one moment and longing in another depending on the orchestration beneath it. Strings often carry the emotional core, while brass adds triumph and woodwinds preserve innocence or mystery. The result is music that feels like memory while you are hearing it for the first time.


What audiences often respond to most in these scenes is not spectacle, but transformation. The music signals that ordinary reality has briefly opened into something larger: a child flying through the night sky, a spacecraft leaving Earth, a character realizing who they truly are. In those moments, the score becomes a bridge between the visible scene and the invisible emotional meaning underneath it. Long after viewers forget dialogue or plot details, they remember the feeling carried by the music — the sensation of lifting, searching, escaping, or finally arriving somewhere beyond words.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

54: Trills in the Baroque vs. Classical Periods

Image
Baroque music is known for its incredibly technical and ornamented style. The most common and fundamental of those ornaments is our focus today: the trill. Most simply, a trill is a very fast, repeated alternation of two notes. In the vast majority of cases, those notes are adjacent, but that is not a requirement. Given how fast and common they are, regardless of what you play—whether it’s a string, wind, or keyboard instrument, or your voice—they have a reputation for being quite tiring to play. The period matters when considering a trill. Classical and later composers treat trills, in a sense, in the opposite manner than Baroque composers do. Let me show you two examples: First, the Baroque way of thinking. This is a PAC:   and especially in the Baroque era, when the plucked harpsichord dominated over the hammered piano, it was hard to sustain sounds for long since the sound of the plucking decays quickly. The trill was developed in response, out of a need both to ornam...
Read more

35: Figured Bass

Image
  There’s a system of notating harmonies that’s rather unique to the Baroque era, but which is so frequently used there, and so important to it, that no discussion of theory would ever be complete if we did not cover it. This is the notation of figured bass: “figured,” in the sense of using figures (numbers) to notate the bass. Figured bass was, in a sense, its own notation completely separate from the five lines and four spaces of the staff, which was nearly exclusively the purview of cellists, bassists, harpsichords, and organists.  Figured bass, fair warning, can be intimidating at first. But, just as with anything else we’ve covered so far, the more you practice reading it, the better you’ll get.  In this system, we use numbers to indicate intervals above the bass. We stack them, and this is how we build chords. If you can’t stack them, nowadays, it’s perfectly fine to use slashes and write the numbers horizontally.  Let’s start with the easiest figured bass nota...
Read more

102: Wagner (who was terrible, in case you didn't know), Tristan, and French Sixths

Image
 Let’s turn our attention to one chord—yes, one literal chord, not one class: F-B-D#-A. The original context that made this “The Chord” that everyone talks about—the reason this opera is as famous as it is—is its inclusion in Richard Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde.” The whole opera lasts just shy of four hours, but it’s most remembered for this one chord. Here it is, in red, from the Wikipedia article about the opera, during which a hugely significant amount of time is spent just talking about this single chord. It almost cannot be overstated how important this chord was to the development of music in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Some have said—again, referring to quotes in the Wikipedia article—that the power of this one chord in the late 1800s was the same as the transformative power of Beethoven 3 or 9 in the first part of the 1800s; I don’t think that’s hyperbole in the slightest. Deplorable as his personal politics were (he was violently antisemitic and the favorite com...
Read more