Magical, celestial music

For some reason, it’s been the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles that remains my prime memory association for falling in love with John Wiliams’ music.

Maybe it was the futuristic sight of the “Rocketman” Bill Suitor taking off on his jet pack (technically known as the Bell Aerosystems rocket pack) from the Los Angeles Memorial Stadium’s Olympic Rings rampart — to fly solo and glide down into a field filled with the world’s best athletes. That was the visual highlight of the opening ceremony, when the first of Williams’ Olympic themes also re-introduced our planet to man’s triumph over sky and space.

By the by, Michael Jordan was on that field, together with future fellow Dream Team members Patrick Ewing and Chris Mullin, as part of the USA men’s bas-ketball team that would win the gold.

Seven years earlier, in 1977, John Williams had already enraptured everyone with his musical theme for the first episode of Star Wars (actually No. 4: A New Hope). It was music that soared beyond entirely human parameters, much as it was simplistically classified as neo-romantic and taking a cue from the “grand symphonic score in the fashion of Richard Strauss and Golden Age Hollywood composers Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.”

For me, the LA Olympics fanfare and overture were a kind of harbinger of marvelous things to come, as exemplified by that human being flying on a jet-propelled gizmo, the way it had earlier been seen rather fantastically in a James Bond movie.

And John Williams’ music made its usual grandiose impact with its soaring theme and leitmotifs, as if he had already made a pact with the sky. Well, in a way, or rather for sure he had. Before George Lucas’ Star Wars, he had already won an Oscar for his film score for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, in 1975, with the ominous, echolalic two notes becoming synonymous with approaching danger. Isn’t the sea the obverse of sky? 

And then there had been another, now legendary collaboration Spielberg — on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where a five-note figure famously became the musical code for communicating with aliens.

All these played in my expectant mind’s ear while taking a seat at the Solaire Theatre two Saturdays ago, for the year-end repeat of “The Magic of John Wil-liams” with the ABS-CBN Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Gerald Salonga.

To my surprise, Salonga chose to start the evening with Overture: 2014 Olympic Fanfare, followed by three pieces from Harry Potter: The Sorcerer’s Stone — Hedwig’s Theme; Nimbus 2000 (only with the woodwinds section); and Harry’s Wondrous World. 

The fifth piece was the haunting, elegiac theme from Schindler’s List, with Ralph Taylan on solo violin. Of all of Williams’ pieces, this may be said to be somewhat akin to the sad, sometimes lugubrious pieces that his rival Ennio Morricone is known for. That mordant theme showed how Williams could also plumb deep beyond spatial elements to touch the very core of human poignancy, inclusive of the misery of inhumane tendencies, from which perhaps music alone can uplift us. 

Wiliams’ musical work for Spielberg’s films has spanned nearly four decades, beginning with the director’s debut film The Sugarland Express in 1974, followed by Jaws, for which Williams won his second Academy Award, this time for film score. (His first was for an original composition, for the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof.) It was Spielberg who recommended Williams to his friend George Lucas for Star Wars. And since then, only a couple of Spielberg’s countless hit films have since been exempted from this collaboration.

Back to the concert, Gerald then delivered a brief spiel on how Luciano Pavarotti’s flop of a movie, Yes, Giorgio, still provided a memorable tune from Williams: If We Were in Love. And on that magical evening at Solaire, the light and lyrical, romantic respite of a song was performed by Nikki Gil and Jose Mari Chan.

Followed the theme from Hook, then the theme called The Mission for NBC Nightly News, not to be confused with Morricone’s own for that film fave of mine. Closing Act One for the evening were the familiar themes for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

It was after the intermission that my mini-thesis found further buttressing towards conviction. Indeed, Williams has mastered the thematic and leitmotif configurations to circumscribe battles in the galactic sky, in the deep of the sea, and in the lushness of earth itself.  

For the concert’s Act 2, Salonga paired off Williams’ themes, starting with that heroic/romantic one for Superman, and then from the same film, the love song Can You Read My Mind, which was sung onstage by the rising chanteuse Morissette.

Followed the theme from Jaws, and Out to Sea / Shark Cage Fugue from the same movie. The mellifluous theme from Jurassic Park was then followed by that rousing one from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In these three sets of couplings, John Williams’ music finds its fountainhead: the sky, the sea, and the earth itself that is rife with natural wealth. Even inside a concert hall, we see and feel greenery when we hear the lush melody of the Jurassic Park theme (preliminary to the menace of dinosaurs), and our pulse pounds with the racing rhythms of The Raiders March, with Indiana Jones running harum-scarum in our minds.

Finally, the audience that Saturday instantly broke into applause upon recognizing the B-flat explosion that ushered in the melodious Star Wars theme (or Luke’s Theme), which we expected to be followed by Darth Vader’s Theme, also known as The Imperial March, which Wiliams introduced in 1980’s The Em-pire Strikes Back.

But Salonga chose to come up with something suitable for the season, ending Act 2 with three “Holiday Songs” from Home Alone: Somewhere in My Memory, Star of Bethlehem, and Christmas Suite: Merry Christmas! The Ateneo Chamber Singers were superb for these numbers.

As a final piece, the encore proved to be Darth Vader’s Theme, something I found quite ironic, as its sinister motifs seemed hardly appropriate as a holi-day-cheer concert ender. But then I guess we’ve all grown to be quite inured to the up-and-down cycles of menace and triumph as manifested in the Star Wars series. I suppose it also served to remind us of the keening interest in Episode 7: The Force Awakens, now drawing crowds all over our monomyth-struck yet still musically aligned planet.

At one point, Gerald Salonga said something precious about music, how it remains the prime form of art, for one can “travel with it, and once you perform it, it comes to life.”

How true. From the time humanoids first beat their breasts or bellies, or sticks and stones together to produce initial percussion, or mimicked nature’s own sounds to lull an infant to sleep, music laid claim to being the first art, the original expression of creativity, of human play.

From that time to the two-note ostinato of the Theme from Jaws, the five-note interplanetary code in Close Encounters…, and the B-flat burst of the London Symphony Orchestra for Star Wars, it’s been a great parade of momentous breakthroughs whose continuum uplifts the human spirit more than any other art, even film itself which it now serves to enhance.

John Williams, as the modern era’s most acclaimed master of film scoring, proves it time and again with his keys that open the doors to the celestial and magical.

He has racked up five Academy Awards and well over a score of others (Golden Globe, British Film Academy, Grammy…), and with his 49 Oscar nominations stands second only to Walt Disney (with 59).

In 2000 he was inducted into the Hollywood Ball Hall of Fame, and received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004. In 2005, the AFI (American Film Institute) selected his score for Star Wars as the greatest American film score of all time. His score for Jaws wound up at No. 6, while that for E.T. was at No. 14. He remains the only composer to have three scores on the list.

In 2009, Williams received the National Medal of Arts in the White House for his achievements in symphonic music for films, and in 2013, the Ken Burns Lifetime Achievement Award.

At 83 years old, he will be honored next year with an AFI Life Achievement Award, the first composer to be thus privileged. The former pianist and US Air Force Band conductor certainly deserves all the acclaim for the epic compositional idioms and large-scale orchestral music he has bequeathed film and music lovers.

Every time some young kid hums the Darth Vader Theme while stepping out of the shower stall, we are assured of how familiar, yet celestial, John Williams’ legacy will remain.