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What track never fails to rekindle your appetite for John Williams?


BLUMENKOHL

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If you're anything like me, your musical tastes sort of ebb and flow throughout the year, meandering through different genres, or composers. Occasionally it can be weeks until I listen to John Williams.

Others of you may have dull, mundane lives and you listen to the same 5 soundtracks every day, and you have been for the last decade. In which case you should probably not bother replying, because we'd all be quite bored reading it.

For some reason the Imperial March (any performance to be honest) without fail rekindles my appetite for John Williams. It's one of those tracks that doesn't get old, no matter how comical and overused it's gotten. The Star Wars Main Titles don't do much for me anymore, unless I actively force my brain to find something meaningful in it. But the Imperial March? Over thirty years since I fell in love with it, and I still get the urge to stand in attention like a good little Stormtrooper. Maybe it's the mystical power of the minor key. Maybe it's the effortless, driving simplicity of the music. Or maybe it's the greatness that it exudes, reflective of the Maestro's own greatness? Who knows, but it works, without fail.

What's yours?

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Adventure on Earth

You know that bridge section of the Flying Theme around 6 minutes in during the bicycle chase when they split up and regroup at the bottom of the hill?

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The concert piece from JFK, and, incidentally, the version of that piece on the new Schindler's List Camber collection is phenomenal.

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Lately it's The Mecha World

Before that The Lost World

I get addicted to pieces sometimes that I just want to play all the time that reinforce for me how Williams is better than all the rest

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Attack of the Clones. That haunting choir from 1:15-1:49, the leadup to and then greatest statement of the Imperial March, the Across the Stars finale - in my opinion, it's the best-scored finale of any film (shame it's for such a crappy movie). I just wish they'd left the Emperor's Theme statement on the album.

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Another excellent one Sharky! Fantastic atmosphere in that piece.

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For some reason the Imperial March (any performance to be honest) without fail rekindles my appetite for John Williams. It's one of those tracks that doesn't get old, no matter how comical and overused it's gotten.

There's a great new book on music perception called On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (2014) that might in part explain why this is true for so many people. The author refers to several scientific studies on how listeners reach a "satiation point" with music, or in other words become bored with it. Basically, these studies conclude that more complex pieces take a longer time to reach a satiation point upon repeated listenings. But more specifically, the author adds that

repeated listenings engage listeners with the stimulus at different levels, connecting them with new aspects of the same sound. Very simple stimuli don't offer enough at either end of the hierarchy--timbral richness, or large-scale structure--to reward new perspectives. Understood in this light, it's not a piece of music's familiarity, per se, that is rewarding, but rather the kind of involvement that familiarity affords. (pp. 97-98)

In relation to the Imperial March and Williams' music in general, my hunch is that it so much detail in the way of melody, harmony, rhythm, orchestration, musical meaning, and so forth, that repeated listenings allow us to re-hear it in all kinds of different ways and still be richly rewarded for it.

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I work by phases.
I'm currently in a John Williams phase (guess what, I was previously in a Charles Aznavour phase) :D
What made me relapse, this time?

The discovery of an interpretation of the Star Wars Main Theme by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (on the album called 'Vienna Philharmonic's Summer Night Concert 2010').
So I guess, this time, it was the Star Wars Main Theme. ;)
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Yes the whole Suite including that piece is simply fantastic reworking of the score's ideas. :)

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