John Williams and the two notes that changed cinema

John Williams and the two notes that changed cinema

Two notes. Probably the most famous two-note unit of music in modern history.

When a composer has a hit song or an instantly iconic tune, it can be a blessing and a curse. That tune becomes eternally attached to you—and sometimes it can eclipse the rest of your work.

John Williams is no one-hit wonder, and he is culturally affiliated with more than a dozen melodies—the many themes in the Star Wars series, the “Raiders March” from the Indiana Jones movies, the flying theme from E.T., the anthem from Jurassic Park, “Hedwig’s Theme” from the Harry Potter films, and so many more. An embarrassment of earworms.

And it all started with his theme from Jaws, his first “hit” and arguably the two notes of his that almost everybody around the world recognizes, even fifty years later. Jaws itself was a phenomenon: society, en masse, was scared out of its wits and out of the water—and so much of their terror was owed to Williams’ obsessive, predatory score. That film and its score took Williams, who had been toiling as a mostly anonymous film and TV composer for nearly twenty years, into the stratosphere of success and pop culture omnipresence. It cemented his partnership with Steven Spielberg and led directly to Williams scoring Star Wars.

The long, fruitful phenomenon of his career—more Oscar nominations than any individual in history, acclaim from world leaders and cultural icons and audiences around the globe—can be traced back to those ominous, oscillating E and F bass notes that signaled the first appearance of the famous great white shark.

But the Jaws score is so much more than the famous “two-note” signature; it’s an entire symphony of primal tension, tender character notes, and adventurous sea shanties. Those “two notes”—the motif actually includes a third note, D—are undeniably the score’s almost literal heartbeat, its unforgettable signature. This thematic motor is not only memorable, it’s also a powerful and clever narrative device; Williams’ concept was to have the theme stand in for the shark, which is often unseen, to speed it up and slow it down as a way of conveying its proximity to the human protagonists. Without ever feeling cartoonish, it is scoring as storytelling, music as both narrative and mind control—a gift at which Williams would prove to be a wizard.

However, to only remember the two notes is to reduce a masterpiece—a veritable symphony—to its simplest denominator. We do something similar with the opening notes in Beethoven’s fifth symphony, but both compositions are large-scale works that develop a central, hummable theme into an epic musical drama. Williams would never claim that his film scores are symphonies. Technically they are not: they don’t follow strict sonata form, and they are necessarily constructed around the architecture of movie scenes, their durations and interruptions and moods at the mercy of the filmmaker’s blueprint.

But Williams, for several years leading up to 1975, had been on an unspoken stealth mission to elevate his film scores above the perfunctory gebrauchsmusik that Hollywood film music so often was, and to approach each scoring assignment like a symphonist. He adopted the leitmotif tradition from opera—assigning a melody or motif to individual characters and story elements—and he honed a way of serving a film’s needs and all its synchronizations while simultaneously developing themes across the length of an entire score, giving each score its own compositional arc and having individual cues inherently connected to one another. Where movie music had so often been disjointed and reactionary, he labored at giving his scores internal logic and developmental integrity.

The turning point for Williams was a 1968 TV movie, Heidi, and he matured this art even further in two films for director Mark Rydell: The Reivers (1969) and The Cowboys (1972). These were the same two scores that alerted a young, soundtrack-collecting Spielberg to Williams, and that made him want to hire Williams the moment he started directing features. (Their first collaboration was The Sugarland Express, in 1974.)

It was an incredible lightning strike. Spielberg, 29, going against the grain of his peers, wanted old-fashioned, symphonic, explicitly narrative scoring in his big throwback movies—which were already like visual music and primed for big, romantic accompaniment. Williams, 43, was a veteran, trained in the old ways of orchestral scoring, and chomping at the bit to run free with his newfound self-directive. It was a match made in cinematic heaven, and Jaws was the moment when these two artists alchemized and became luminous.

Listen again to the Jaws score—the whole score. It begins with fear and, yes, those two notes—aptly swimming, churning with a brainless, relentless appetite for flesh. The theme proper, which expands from that seesaw motor into a rising-falling melody on solo tuba, a ghostly string line, watery harp arpeggios, and a lot of orchestral angst, evokes the paganistic dance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Williams goes primal with it in the many scenes of violent dismemberment.

He also introduces, in just one scene, a short passage of humanistic poetry. When Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) is sitting at his dinner table one evening, gloomy after being slapped in the face by a mother who blames him for the grisly death of her child, Brody’s own son lifts his spirits when he begins to imitate his father’s hand gestures and facial expressions. Williams scored this poignant grace note with a low pedal tone on double bass and halting, gossamer figures played by piano, harp, and vibraphone. It’s one of the earliest examples of Spielberg and Williams creating a sacred moment in the midst of popcorn action and adventure, and it’s one of the elements that makes Jaws so much more than just a “scary shark movie.”

When Brody, Quint (Robert Shaw), and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) go out to sea for the film’s second half, Williams scored their adventure like a swashbuckling, seafaring ballet—using the language of singalong sea shanties and Old Hollywood pirate movies. All the while the main Jaws theme remains an active participant, and none of this feels incongruous or out of place. Williams deftly mapped a musical story to the needs of the film’s narrative, but one that listeners can also follow as its own exquisitely satisfying journey.

It wasn’t the first time he had done this, but Jaws was by far the best film he had ever scored—and it signaled a new era not just in his career, but in film music as an art form. Working with two young directors with old-school tastes (Spielberg, and soon George Lucas), Williams revived an ancient way of composing and perfected the art of film scoring. His music ennobled and transcended the films themselves, and with Jaws he began his reign as arguably the finest composer for cinema who has ever lived.

And it all started with two notes—but really, it was a whole damn symphony.

Feature image: Photo by Noah Negishi on Unsplash.

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