Christopher Webber:

>I'd enjoyed many of these pieces hugely in the cinema, but how painfully
>few of them stood up as concert hall items.  The Walton and Prokoviev stand
>up well, but Bernard Herrmann's "Psycho Suite" sounded disappointingly thin
>- even as "homogenized potpourri writing".

You ought to hear the Sinfonietta, on which the Psycho music was based.
That's a wonderful concert piece, according to me.

>As for the "Star Wars March" - well, denuded of its immense wide- screen
>glamour, it made this listener at least blush for its perpetrator.  How
>many other pieces have earned so much for so little? It runs out of
>technical competence, let alone tune, after 7.5 bars.

Oh, come now.  No technical competence? John Williams knows more about the
craft of composing than just about anyone.  I'm convinced *that's* his
trouble.

>By chance, I saw "The Phantom Menace" in the cinema this week.  Splendid
>stuff - the score works superbly, and provides a feast of fun for anybody
>interested in learning how to disguise Philip Glass, Carmina Burana and
>most of Holst's Planets just sufficiently to avoid The Copyright Wars.

Sigmund Spaeth, the "Tune Detective" of 1930s American radio, used to take
well-known songs and classical themes, break them down into parts, and show
that the parts came from previous composers.  Big deal.  To paraphrase
Eliot: minor composers borrow; major composers steal.  It ultimately
doesn't matter where a composer got his materials.  If it did, surely
Handel could be written off as easily as Williams.  The point is how well
he uses what he takes.  I'm not a big John Williams fan - although I do
like some of his scores - but this criticism is irrelevant and so
dismissive that I doubt many who carp like this could listen to a Williams
score as anything but a compendium - that is, could never hear it for
itself.

>I join Mr Fodor in saying hats off to Mr Williams as a splendidly pragmatic
>example to us all - if only we had half so much skill as he in damping down
>our consciences ...

What has conscience to do with the enjoyment of music?

Steve Schwartz