Does anyone else often have "second-listen enlightenment" with JW pieces?

[Will 2,215]

I become a hard-core JW fan within the last year or so, so I'm still discovering new pieces of his music. I've noticed that, quite often, I find a piece forgettable and mediocre the first time I hear it, but by the second or third listen I have it stuck in my head. This actually happened yesterday and today with "Jubilee 350." I had heard it for the first time a few months ago, didn't think it was worth another listen. Yesterday I gave it another try. I thought it was pretty good after that second listen. Today I listened again. After that it was stuck in my head for a while, and I listened several more times. I now love the piece.

 

That's just one example among many. There's also the "Liberty Fanfare," "Call of the Champions," and the "Song for the World Peace," to name a few. I now consider all three of those masterpieces. And I know there are more than that, but I can't call them to mind at this moment. 

 

I've been wondering, does anyone else have this happen, what you might call "second-listen enlightenment" for some JW pieces? Does this happen often for you?

[Dixon Hill 4,234]

This happens to me often with all music.  Some of my favorite pieces or moments are ones that on first, or second, or tenth listen were confounding to me in some way.

[Not Mr. Big 4,639]

This has happened to me too a few times.  Before becoming an official Williams fan, I didn't care for Harry Potter 3's score but now it might be my favorite of the series.

[Romão 2,274]

When it happens, I take it as a sign of great music. 

[Datameister 2,042]

Some scores grab me right away, but others take numerous listens to start appreciating. Scores like TLW and even the unimpeachable Raiders weren't initially favorites of mine. With Williams' recent output, I find that the action music in particular takes me a while to get into - much of "The Falcon" bored me until I'd listened to it repeatedly and gotten to know its rhythms.

 

Repetition is truly a double-edged sword. Multiple listens allow the brain to more effectively predict what's about to happen. A little predictability makes a piece satisfying...too much makes it boring. My most goosebump-inducing listening experiences have all sat right on the boundary between familiarity and freshness.

[Tom 4,653]

everyone of his concertos, and usually on the fourth or fifth listen. 

[Jay 37,352]

Very common.

[Dixon Hill 4,234]

I'm sure this is related to my idea that you can get away with anything as a composer if you're willing to gamble on whether or not anyone is going to listen to it enough to "get" what you put there and accept it rather than rejecting it immediately as pure crapola.  Even a random jumble of notes starts to make sense when you hear it often... so reign it in a bit from total cacophony, include some semblance of familiar musical semantics and form, and there you go. 

[publicist 4,643]

It happens not very frequently with Williams, who tries to be a popular composer at least in his film works, but there are pieces or parts of them that linger longer than i initially thought they had any right to, i. e. from the recent Star Wars'es 'Battle of the Heroes' or 'Jedi Steps' or that long piece from 'Lincoln'.

 

What TWR describes is a well-established pattern here, less so in accepting off-putting stuff after the xth listen but more in elevating perfectly serviceable or idiomatically boring retreads into musical gold touched only by the most precious gods...if you just listen often enough, it will come! Because of this i try never to forget first impressions when writing a review etc.

[KK 3,307]

Happens often, with many composers really. I recently had a similarly cathartic experience with A.I., which eluded me for years.

[Marian Schedenig 8,192]

"Acquired taste" is a very underrated concept, I think. Perhaps because it's not mainstream fashionable to repeatedly listen to something that doesn't at first seem as good as other stuff you could listen to. It happens with all kinds of music - I started out (in the mid 90s, mind you) seriously not liking Goldsmith, and now he's one of my top favourite composers. More recently, the latest Muse album only made a lukewarm impression on me at first, but has grown immensely in my ranking.

 

With Williams, my impressions don't usually change radically anymore, because I've known so much of his music for so long and he's mostly a very consistent composer in his manner and quality of writing. There still are cases where a score at first only seems "quite alright" when it is in fact much more than that. Cases in point: The Adventures of Tintin, which at just rushed when I saw the film, and then at first didn't seem to be much more on CD, yet stuck in my playlist for over a week and has become one of my favourites of Williams' 2000s output, and most recently TFA, which after seeing the film just seemed "good" and now ranks up there with the best SW scores for me.

[Alex 2,835]

I never cared much for War Horse but it really is a beautiful score

[Marian Schedenig 8,192]

...on the other hand (I forgot to mention this above), there are several Williams scores that started out as relatively unremarkable for me, but have become scores that I revisit more frequently than others, without necessarily having the same "highlight factor" as those. Amistad has long been one of these scores, and it seems The River has recently become another one.

[zoltan_902 141]

I often go through 1-2 week phases with random pieces that I've been relatively indifferent to previously - to the point where I'm constantly listening to, analyzing the tiniest details, and scouring the web for alternative interpretations/covers of the piece. It becomes obsessive. Then, something else catches my attention, and the piece goes back to the 'indifferent' category. The most recent example of this was "Seven Years In Tibet". I haven;t listened to it (no compulsion) since that phase.

[Joni Wiljami 1,206]

I always trust my first expression. I haven't like any of Williams' scores except Heartbeeps. I may try Yes, Giorgio later. But no interest in the rest.

[nightscape94 965]

Empire of the Sun.  Didn't care much for it at first, thought it was relatively unremarkable or uninteresting, especially for a Spielberg/Williams collaboration.  When it was expanded by LLL it gave me a whole new prospective.

[Joni Wiljami 1,206]

EOS was instant love for me. LLL made it deeper though. I didn't like The Sleepers much but many praised it here and I gave it a chance. Now I love it.

[JacksonElmore 69]

yeah, pretty much every track by him. even the ones that i love right off the bat grow on me more and more, and the more i listen to it the more i pick up on little things. For example, a lot of the new force awakens soundtrack album had me honestly pretty bored and disappointed my first listen through. Rey's theme, March of the resistance, jedi steps and the starkiller really stood out to me but out of a 23 track album that's not nearly enough to make it good. It wasn't until maybe my 3rd or even 4th listen for more action oriented tracks like 'attack on the jakku villiage', 'i can fly anything', 'the falcon', and 'scherzo for x-wings' to rise up to be some of my favorites from the album. I was really let down in the beginning, because it all sounded like just almost generic action music, but with a lot of listen i'v come to appreciate it as a solid, good john williams score. same thing happened to me with tintin

[artguy360 1,843]

Generally speaking it usually takes me 2 or 3 listens to understand the form of JW's action cues. Initially they sound like a jumble of musical bits until enough listens bring out the structure.

[Dixon Hill 4,234]

I think this applies not only to music that requires familiarity because of complexity, but also to music that is exceptionally simple in its construction.  To hear simple musical building blocks as more than incomplete thoughts or cliches or in relation to something similar probably takes as much familiarity as it does to decipher the inner logic of some densely written piece.  I'm thinking of minimalism here, and film composers who manage to use very simple gestures without them seeming predictable and cloying, Zimmer being one of the only ones who can do that.  You really have to hear a Reich piece, for example, or what I called the "time" theme from Interstellar, completely on their own terms to fully appreciate them, and familiarity helps.  Then Reich isn't a boring repetitionist, but a supreme crafter of sonic shapes for their own sake, and that Zimmer theme isn't a classic rock staple progression played on a pipe organ, but again, something that has its own indelible meaning.  To write these things off, then, is lazy listening, as writing off complex and hard to penetrate music as nonsense is equally lazy.  But there are thresholds, of course, beyond which music becomes either thoughtless or wankery.

[Joni Wiljami 1,206]

But...Reich is a boring repetitionist. I can understand Zimmer's minimalism with the great movie, fantastic scenery in four dimensional universe.

[Joni Wiljami 1,206]

And I can also understand the lack of the answers. They are all wrong.

I can see the love for Reich, but it aint music. More like happening, a trip with or without drugs, nothing more nothing less.

Pretty untalented stuff. Sorry.

[Dixon Hill 4,234]

Huh?  Nah.  But I forgive you.

[Sharkissimo 1,973]

I think we need an intervention.

[Tom 4,653]

On ‎5‎/‎20‎/‎2016 at 8:26 PM, Bill said:

"Jubilee 350."

It really is a brilliant little celebratory piece. 

[Will 2,215]

12 minutes ago, Tom said:

It really is a brilliant little celebratory piece. 

 

I was just listening to it again about half an hour ago. The whole piece is terrific, but particularly the energetic string portion is just so good. It has this terrific sense of excitement to it. 

[Romão 2,274]

It's probably my favorite of Williams' celebratory pieces

[EdwardHall 30]

Jubilee 350 is a very nice piece, but it is really difficult to determine Williams' most celebratory piece. There's too many. I was just watching "The Towering Inferno" the other day, and I think the Main Titles from that movie is among Williams most bombastic, proud, celebratory music ever.