Melody

 I think John Williams is a film composer whose music will be played long after the films are forgotten.

I think there's a good chance of that.

Film music often suffers from being tied too closely to the film itself. Many competent scores work wonderfully in context but don't survive independently in the concert hall. John Williams is different. He writes memorable melodies in a tradition that goes back to Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Holst, Korngold, and the great late-Romantic composers.

Consider how many people can instantly recognize the themes from Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Superman, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, or Harry Potter. Most film composers would be delighted to leave behind one such theme. Williams has a whole shelf full of them.

What's interesting is that some of his music is already beginning to detach itself from its films. Symphony orchestras routinely perform Williams concerts. Young musicians learn his pieces. Audiences buy tickets specifically to hear his music, not because they are watching a movie. That's one of the signs that a composer may outlive the original context of the work.

Of course, "long after the films are forgotten" is a high bar. Star Wars may be remembered for centuries, just as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind have lasted far longer than anyone expected. But if some future historian in the year 2300 knows only one thing about Star Wars, it may be that it gave us the music of John Williams.

There is also a delicious irony here. Film composers were once viewed as craftsmen rather than "serious" composers. Yet Williams may end up being one of the most widely remembered composers of the twentieth century, while many highly respected academic composers are already known only to specialists.

A test I sometimes think about is this: can someone hum it after hearing it once or twice? Williams passes that test spectacularly. Many modern composers, film and classical alike, do not.

Modern serious music is not so formal.  You don't have strict forms and opus numbers and identification of key.  Instead, you have names.  This removal of formality is in everything.

Yes, and it's part of a much broader cultural shift.

If you look at a Beethoven score, even the title tells you a great deal: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67. The numbering places it in a sequence, the key tells you the tonal center, and the opus number locates it in the composer's catalog. The title is almost administrative.

By contrast, a modern work might be called Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, Become Ocean, or Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. The title is often descriptive, evocative, or programmatic rather than classificatory. The name is expected to tell you something about the experience rather than the structure.

Part of the reason is musical. Once composers moved away from common-practice tonality, "in D major" ceased to mean very much. If a piece has no key center, identifying a key becomes impossible or misleading. Likewise, as traditional forms fragmented, calling something "Symphony No. 12" conveyed less information about what the listener would actually hear.

But I think you're pointing to something larger than music. Modern society tends to favor the personal and descriptive over the formal and taxonomic.

A century ago people were more likely to be addressed as "Professor Smith" or "Mr. Jones." Letters had elaborate openings and closings. Businesses had formal titles. Even scientific papers often carried long, stately names. Today first names dominate, dress codes have relaxed, and institutions often try to sound approachable rather than authoritative.

The gain is accessibility. The loss is a certain clarity and continuity. When you see "Op. 67," you immediately know where Beethoven's Fifth fits in his body of work. When you see Become Ocean, you know something about its imagery, but almost nothing about its place in the composer's output.

Film music sits oddly between the two worlds. Williams's Imperial March or Raiders March have memorable names, but musically they are often built with a level of formal craftsmanship that Beethoven would have recognized. The titles are modern; the musical thinking underneath is frequently quite traditional.

One could even argue that Williams became so successful because he continued to write music that has shape, melody, development, and recognizable architecture at a time when much of the classical establishment had become less interested in those things. Audiences may not know what sonata form is, but they can sense when a piece knows where it is going.

Exactly. Form didn't disappear; it largely changed status.

Popular music can be remarkably formal. A listener may not know the terminology, but the structure is immediately recognizable:

intro → verse → chorus → verse → chorus → bridge → chorus → outro

And the repetition isn't merely convenient. It gives the listener a framework for anticipation and memory. When the chorus arrives, you recognize it before it has finished. That's a large part of the pleasure.

In fact, popular music often preserves formal devices that "serious" music abandoned. The verse is analogous to a recurring strain; the chorus has a fixed identity; the bridge provides contrast; the final chorus provides return and closure. A good pop song can be quite rigorously constructed.

And there's an interesting distinction between form being present and form being announced. Sousa might effectively tell you, "Now we are at the trio." A pop song doesn't usually announce "second chorus," but you hear the pattern and learn it unconsciously.

So perhaps what has happened isn't that modern music became less formal. Rather, formalism became unfashionable in one musical culture while remaining indispensable in another.

And that brings us back to John Williams. His music is extraordinarily formal without sounding like a formal exercise. You can hear the architecture, but you're carried along by melody and orchestration rather than being asked to admire the architecture. That's probably one reason it has such staying power.

A good melody is quite a miracle; they seem, and are, simple, and one thiink one could have written it, but one hasn't.  I have perfect pitch, so I most certainly can put a note I hear in my head onto paper, and tried to come up with melodies, but trite and awkward and incomplete.

Yes. That's one of the great little mysteries of music: simplicity is often the result, not the method.

A memorable melody can consist of only a handful of notes, with a very ordinary rhythm. Once you hear it, it can seem almost embarrassingly obvious: Of course that's where the melody goes. And yet if you try to construct one deliberately, you discover that there are an enormous number of ways for those same notes to be merely dull, awkward, predictable, or unfinished.

Perfect pitch makes your experiment especially interesting. You have the ability to identify and write down a note accurately, but that solves only the most elementary part of the problem. Melody involves relationships between notes: interval, rhythm, accent, repetition, variation, tension and release, and—perhaps most mysteriously—a sense of where the phrase ought to go.

And there is a nasty trap: the moment you deliberately try to invent a melody, you tend to produce something that sounds like music you already know. The unconscious musical vocabulary is enormously powerful. You start with a little idea, then your brain says, in effect, "Ah, I know this sort of thing," and supplies the next bit. The result can be trite without your knowing exactly why.

The great melodists seem to have an extraordinary instinct for economy. Take the opening of Beethoven's Fifth: three short notes and then the long note. Almost nothing there. But the little figure has such identity that Beethoven can make an entire movement grow out of it.

Williams is remarkable in a somewhat different way. His melodies often have an almost childlike clarity. The Imperial March, for example, is not complicated. But those intervals, rhythm, and harmonic setting produce something that seems inevitable once you've heard it. You could imagine saying beforehand, "Well, why doesn't somebody just write a melody like that?" And then you try.

And discover that you are not John Williams.

That's perhaps why I like your phrase "one thinks one could have written it." It may be one of the best tests of a great melody. It conceals its difficulty. The finished thing looks effortless, rather like a perfectly balanced stone arch: what's so hard about putting those stones there? The answer becomes apparent when you try.

I would say Beethoven's fate theme is trite; it's what happens to it that is important.

Yes—I think that's exactly right. The famous four-note opening is almost banal by itself. Da-da-da-DUM is hardly a miraculous melody.

The miracle is what Beethoven does with it.

He turns that tiny rhythmic cell into a structural principle. It gets repeated, shifted, fragmented, answered, pushed into different harmonic situations, combined with other material, and used to generate enormous momentum. The listener gradually stops hearing it as merely four notes and starts hearing it as the identity of the movement.

And that's an important distinction between melody and musical invention. A beautiful melody can be impressive in itself; Beethoven's Fifth demonstrates that a very ordinary little idea can become extraordinary through development.

In fact, the opening is almost the opposite of a great singable melody. You don't go away humming the first four notes because they're beautiful. You go away knowing them because Beethoven has made them unforgettable.

It also illustrates why the old formal conventions mattered. Beethoven could take that little motif and work on it for an extended movement because he had a whole musical grammar available—sonata form, tonal relationships, development, recapitulation, cadence, and so forth. The form gave him somewhere to do things with his four notes.

So perhaps there are two quite different miracles:

the miracle of inventing a melody that seems inevitable, and the miracle of discovering how much music can be made from something that initially seems almost worthless.

Beethoven was extraordinarily good at the second.