@William said:

I have heard people say that John Williams stole this or that, but there is a HUGE difference - his main themes were completely original and totally identifiable as his own music.  There is no classical composer who created Star Wars or Indiana Jones or Schindler's List or Superman melodies  and then John Williams just disgusied them - those are pure John Williams and his own very original style. 

@FabioA said:

Not to mention the well-known similarity with "The Planets", but also a couple of musical ideas stolen from Stravinsky. And I'm talking just about Star Wars..

I perfectly agree that composers for movies have to start from something that is already in the mind of the audience, because as a composer you have to speak with a language the listener can understand and relate to. But sometimes as Williams says, it almost becomes a carbon copy.  Personally, I would be just fine if they would avoid to award those composers with an oscar, if the soundtrack is clearly "inspired" from the classic repertoire..

No offense Fabio but that video is pretty silly. Let alone that the snippets from Star Wars and Kings row sound very different, but by this argument no one should write any new brass fanfares because they all sound similar to what was already written! I can show you 'identical' sounding brass fanfares from Mahler Bruckner and Strauss.

The first commenter of the video echoes my thoughts:

Jon Adamich3 years ago "It's interesting how people with no classical understanding will put these two together. It's the same as metallica and U2. In context of the genre they steal from each other.  Since classical is to taboo and no one listens to it, people will say Williams stole from this score. It's such bullshit. Listen to ever fanfare written. Believe me, in no more was this stolen or even at least, inspiration. "

I really don't want the be the one that accuses John Williams. I would love to see more composers like him in the new generation..
And I agree with the comment you quoted. I know what he meant. But still, I never listened to a fanfare so similar to Star Wars; there are so elements in common. And I wouldnt consider myself a person with no classical understanding, but that's just my word :)

Again, I don't want to wag against John Williams, but at the same time it was hard to read that James Horner was a plagiarist and John Williams is not. If James Horner is a plagiarist, John Williams is a plagiarist as much (or more), not to mention many other composers. I could tell you so many examples of soundtracks that share with a classical piece of music not only the melody and the harmony, but the orchestration and even the key.

What about "The Dune Sea of Tatooine" and "The Sacrifice, Introduction" of "The Rite of Spring"? If you ask me, it's pretty brilliant the idea  to use such sonority on those scenes; and I also think template musics was already more common than our thoughts. But if you ask me "did he took the idea from Stravinsky?", my answer is Yes, consciously. 

The point some of us are making here is that JW is far more than these melodies, if you sum up all the work he has done over the last 50 years. Just because he took themes and Horner also took themes from others that doesnt mean they are comparable. We shouldnt even mention them in the same sentence.

By the same logic one could argue that Horner  = Mozart as Mozart copied others and himself numerous number of times. 

You have to see the sum total of a composer's output and not single instances or melodies.

Cheers

Anand

"Williams is such a strong creative force and such a superb craftsman that he will inevitably take ownership of any influence" - mh7635

That just nails it and says what I couldn't put into words.  it is the reason for the futility of finding a section of any artist's work that is like another even though overall it is totally owned by the artist because it his style.  Star Wars, E.T., Jaws, The Fury, etc. etc. etc.  - they are not any other composer, they are John Williams. 

What is James Horner?  What is his style? There is no discernible style, just a mix of other composers' work and cliches of film music arranged skillfully.  But anyway I  am not interested in spending time trashing that music, it was just an observation after being forced to hear it watching Star Trek II - a great film afflicted by mediocre music  - exactly the reverse of the first Star Trek - a mediocre film benefitted by one of the greatest film scores ever written.

@William said:

I have heard people say that John Williams stole this or that, but there is a HUGE difference - his main themes were completely original and totally identifiable as his own music.  There is no classical composer who created Star Wars or Indiana Jones or Schindler's List or Superman melodies  and then John Williams just disgusied them - those are pure John Williams and his own very original style. 

To the person who wrote this post - I have a large collection of Erich Wolfgang Korngold including rare LP records as well as CDs.  He is my favorite film composer along with Bernard Herrmann.  I have heard and studied all of his music and love it.  His Die Tote Stadt is one of the greatest operas of the 20th century. His Sinfonietta, the scores for Robin Hood,  Elizabeth and Essex,  many others are masterpieces.  But NEVER ONCE did I think John Williams simply ripped off King's Row - which I have several recordings of - to compose Star Wars.  That is absurd.  There is a huge difference between mere tonal and motific similarities in a composer who is DELIBERATELY trying give a feel like Korngold - which Williams was doing on Star Wars in order to create that Romantic quality - and someone who really did rip off every classical composer he could get his grubby mitts on.   John Williams did not do that - he created original themes and style of his own.  

This is a very interesting thread.  I don't have too much to add except to say that when I was in college it was poplular to accuse JW of plagarism and point out all the various themes and such that he "stole".  So for a long time that shaped my opinion of him.  However some years later when I decided to think for myself I came across his concert music and realized immediately that his music is his music.  

@William I also love Korngold and Hermann.  I appreciate other movie composers of that era like Waxman and Rozsa too.   

@winknotes_282 said:

This is a very interesting thread.  I don't have too much to add except to say that when I was in college it was poplular to accuse JW of plagarism and point out all the various themes and such that he "stole".  So for a long time that shaped my opinion of him.  However some years later when I decided to think for myself I came across his concert music and realized immediately that his music is his music.  

@William I also love Korngold and Hermann.  I appreciate other movie composers of that era like Waxman and Rozsa too.   

I was thinking, its not easy to "steal" like Williams. If someone argues that JW steals from other composers, my question to that person will be, can you do the same? write a score like the Star wars or E.T. on the piano, transcribe it by hand including every detail in orchestration? Only a handlful of film composers could do that in the history of film music. Let alone his concert works which reveal complete mastery of 20th century music including Jazz...he was a jazz pianist during the 50s for cryin out loud!

I realized that people say bad things about JW either out of pure jealosy or ignorance. Usually these are either jealous academics or ignorant fans of Zimmer. (ahhh I uttered the Z word....Ill stop here!)

 Anand

Quite true agitato although I'll not comment on Hans Zimmer :)

Another thought I've had over the years but never heard anyone talk about is that any similarity or references to classical repetoire only helps ground the music in terms of its familiarity.  So if they are concious borrowings or just instinctive they always serve the picture IMO and again bring some familiarity to the music.  

I'd again encourage people to listen to his concert music (especially the violin concerto) and I think you'll realize he's truly a masterful composer.  

Rozsa and Ben-hur ! One of my favorite films and scores ever. (but not for the religious part...sorry to some folks)

btw I wonder what people here thought of the soundtrack for 'The Artist'

I thought it was an really well crafted and fun score, full of the allusions to 20s and 30s hollowood music, jazz, swing and broadway. Ludovic Bource doesnt seem to have done much after that though.

Cheers

Anand

That was a great score and the most difficult kind to do - a silent movie.  There is nowhere to hide.  

It had one problem that caused a flap - in one scene the director used Scene d'amour from Vertigo - probably not the idea of the composer - and he hadn't gotten the rights for it!  Also it was out of place.  But the actual score for the film was fantastic.  

I love Herrman's writing.  Many of his contemporaries marveled at his exceptional skill in "shaping" his composition in just the right way to carry along the film - he was masterful at this.  The irony is, no one plagerized Herrman more than Herrman.  You can hear cues from any one of his films carried over into the next film - so blatantly that I'm surprised no one ever mentions it.  Borrow as he did however, there are few who could give the right shape to the mood as well as he.

yeah a lot of motifs from one Herrmann score to another are the same.  But on the other hand he kept adding new things - like the score to Taxi Driver his last had a very good jazzy sax solo and weird percussive sections, or the score for Sisters with analog synthesizer and glockenspiel!  He was incredibly inventive with orchestration, always experimenting. 

Have you checked out Hermann's Symphony #1?  I like it very much.  It is consistent with his movie music but not the same either.  

yes I have a copy of that!  Souvenir de voyage and "Echoes" for strings are two of his best works outside of film scoring. Echoes is very reminiscent of Vertigo though even darker, a beautiful work. 

Horner plagiarizes to an absurdly comical degree, but to say that he doesn't have his own personal voice is a bit too far.  Whatever he re-interprets, you can usually tell it is him.  If anything, I'm more bothered by how much he rehashes his material.  He has his own voice, unfortunately that voice is usually a consequence of his rather limited musical vocabulary, as his infamous Danger Motif reminds us of in all the movies he's worked on. 

Still, I don't see why you are comparing him to Herrmann of all people.  They have completely different styles and work in completely different generations with different scoring requirements.  Temp tracking was nowhere nearly as common for Herrmann's era as it was for Horner's.  Herrmann is obviously more skilled, but I don't know if he would have been able to even survive in the same scoring climate as Horner, given how notoriously picky he was.

Maybe I'm just being kind to Horner because I've encounted far more shameless and unoriginal plagiarizers than him.  Spot how many other's works have been ripped in this piece alone:

From Silvestri (Van Helsing) to Williams (Harry Potter) and then suddenly Herrmann (Cape Fear), and then ending with our dear lord and saviour Hans (PotC), of all people.  

It makes no sense to say Herrmann would not survive because it was AS A RESULT of his previous style that all the new filmmakers at the time (near the end of his career) wanted him - de Palma, Scorcese, etc.  In other words he was sought out precisely because of his style.  

If one goes back in time, and listens to prevalent scoring of others and then Herrmann, it is startling how original his style was, and how much he has influenced all film music since.  At the time of Citizen Kane his first score, almost all composers for cinema were writing in a Rachmaninoff - Tchaikovsky - Liszt late Romantic derived style.  Herrmann utterly contradicted that with a modern, completely different motific and harmonic approach, avoiding the leitmotif of Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin, Erich Korngold etc. and creating the most original orchestration of any composer to this day.

That is a really sickening excerpt you posted.  It makes me think again of how there is an entire class of composers who AS A RULE create scores by re-assembling already composed music.  They do not actually compose, but re-compose.  (Or should I say de-compose?)

Anyway very interesting comments here.

You're right, Herrmann's music did become the basis for many temp tracks- but in his later works with the Hollywood Brats, he was only able to write the music that he did because he was so revered by them.  Scorsessee wanted something like Ghost and Mrs. Muir or Psycho for Taxi Driver, and was given something completely different.  And DePalma, who dared to temp track Obsession with Herrmann's music before presenting it to him, pissed off Herrmann so much that he demanded the temp music be removed after just being shown the opening titles!  And those are just the times that Herrmann successfully worked on a project, let us not forget the fights he got into with others from that generation like Kubrick on Lolita or Friedkin on the Exorcist.  Herrmann was very skilled, but also very lucky in his last years.  Horner never had the same luxury.  Reading about his work experience with Cameron on Aliens sounds like the type of thing that would drive most composers suicidal.  Of course, plenty of others had done better than Horner despite being put in even worse situations at the time (most notably Goldsmith), but I still don't think it's fair to compare him to Herrmann. 

Still, Horner is something of an arrogant scumbag who has said and done some below-the-belt things that I deem unforgivable, like that time he replaced Gabriel Yared on Troy and pooped out his usual terrible rehash album for the movie, and then publicly badmouthed Yared's music for being "too old-fashioned".  It's sort of terrible for me to say this, but his plane crash was pure karma at work.