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  • John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style by Emilio Audissino
  • Janet K. Halfyard (bio)
Emilio Audissino
John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style
Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014: 346pp.

John Williams is, without question, one of the most successful film composers that eighty or so years of film composition have produced. Even more remarkably, he has been composing for most of them, his first film score dating from 1958, just 25 years after Max Steiner launched the golden age of classical Hollywood film music with King Kong. Emilio Audissino’s surprise that there has been no book in the English language dedicated to him is perhaps understandable; although (as I mused when considering this lacuna in the literature in 2012) this is perhaps less surprising given musicology’s preference for looking at a complete opus, meaning that most of the work on individual composers tends to be done after they have died. Bernard Herrmann has had at least five monographs dedicated to him since his death and doubtless Williams will get similar attention when the time comes, although he is already quite well-represented in journals and edited collections, and several additional essays have been published since 2012, when Audissino completed the PhD on which this book is based.

Audissino is not attempting a complete critical appraisal of all Williams’s work to date and, given that there are around 150 scores, that is clearly a very wise decision. Instead, he focuses on the scores for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas primarily in the 1970s and 80s, specifically looking at Jaws, Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. In these, he identifies a ‘neoclassical approach’, in the sense of reintroducing the style of the classical Hollywood film score that had died out with the end of the studio system, superseded by other scoring practices and styles in the 1950s and 60s. He finds this neoclassicism not only in Williams’s use of a symphony orchestra (the London Symphony Orchestra recorded the soundtracks for several iconic Williams scores in the 1970s and 80s) but in two main aspects of how Williams writes for the moving image: the use of leitmotif and Mickey Mousing. Much of his discussion of the music involves meticulous cataloguing of where these two techniques appear in selected Williams scores. In particular, Audissino is interested in illustrating how Mickey Mousing contributes to a ‘spatial perceptive function’, where the musical gestures direct the viewer’s attention to specific actions and gestures in the image. [End Page 231]

The structure and coverage of the book is perhaps slightly broader than one might expect, as the first three chapters do not discuss John Williams’s music at all but instead present a chronologically historical account of film music from the silent era to the 1970s in order to provide a context for the later discussion of Williams’s style. As a historical account, it is fairly brief, but as a section of a book on John Williams, it represents a third of the main text and so arguably occupies too great a proportion overall, certainly for a reader already familiar with this history. This raises a wider question about the book’s overall intentions: it is not absolutely clear who Audissino imagines his reader to be. On the one hand, this volume presents itself as an academic book from a university press with copious endnotes, citations, and appendices, and with the discussion of Williams and his music placed into the methodological context of Bordwell and Thompson’s neoformalism. On the other, his introduction says the text has been ‘de-academised’ from his original PhD thesis (xix), with theoretical sections removed, some terms commonly used in film musicology discarded, and others introduced to make the writing more clear and accessible (although his re-introduction of the largely abandoned term ‘wallpaper music’ is one I found particularly unhelpful). Given the title of the book, it is notable that as well as the first seventy pages being given over to...

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