It started as a minimalist, eerie musical phrase — one ominous note, then two, signifying the looming, underwater danger of a great white shark. Fifty years after the film’s release, the theme to the Steven Spielberg blockbuster “Jaws” is just as recognizable and iconic as the film itself.
“The simplicity of this material is, in a way, its genius,” said Frank Lehman, who’s an associate professor of music at Tufts University and an expert in composer John Williams’ work. “Although [Williams] was perfectly capable of writing elaborate, sophisticated melodies and intricate cues for his film scores, the hardest thing is to come up with that tiny little cell which will embed itself in the ears of the movie-going public and become inextricably linked with terror and also fun.”
Lehman said the score from “Jaws” is a throwback to old Hollywood movie-making, of which Spielberg is a fan. Film scores in the 1960s and 1970s leaned heavily on pop music, making the score to “Jaws” stand out in a sea of movies hitting the American zeitgeist, like “The Graduate” and “Midnight Cowboy.”
Williams applied techniques famously present in other beloved classical pieces, including syncopated, accented notes used by Igor Stravinsky in his ballet, “The Rite of Spring”; low, rumbling, mysterious openings, like Maurice Ravel’s “La valse”; and leitmotifs — musical phrases denoting a specific character — popularized by the 19th-century composer Richard Wagner.
Those rewatching the movie might catch that the score is far more thematically rich than just the iconic, repetitive tune.
“Williams deploys that two-note — or maybe I should say three-note — motif for ‘Jaws’ the shark. [It’s] just one of the maybe half-dozen or so leitmotifs that you can locate in the score,” Lehman said. “It’s a lot more than just the chugging ostinato [a repeating musical pattern or phrase] that we hear at the very beginning of the film.”
Williams wasn’t copying or ripping off his predecessors. Thomas Forrest Kelly, a music professor at Harvard University, said Williams was just working with the same set of notes as everyone else.
“It’s not the material, it’s the way it’s assembled,” Kelly said. He offered an analogy, saying that just because “one building is made out of bricks and another building is made out of bricks ... that doesn’t make them the same building.
“What Williams has created here is a great, big collection of pieces of music that in the 19th century — or the 18th century — would have been called a grand symphony, and I’m happy to call it that myself,” Kelly said.
Guests
- Thomas Forrest Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard University.
- Frank Lehman, associate professor of music at Tufts University.
