It was years before I thought about who wrote it, and longer before I understood what the job asked of them.
I was eight when I saw Star Wars.
I grew up when radio, television and cinema were simply there — the background of an ordinary childhood, not something anyone studied. Music arrived attached to pictures, constantly. Whatever awareness I developed came from saturation, not instruction.
That film is where I noticed it. Not the music as music. The music doing something to what I was watching.
What took much longer — years — was thinking about the people writing it. And longer still to understand what the job actually asked of them, which I only really grasped when I asked it of myself.
You composed to paper. You could not hear whether what you’d written matched what you’d imagined until real players sat down and tried to play it.
That was the world Williams and the masters before him worked in. A piano. Blank manuscript paper. A shorthand, perhaps, passed to a copyist who turned it into a fully realised full score and parts — also written by hand.
The other thing I didn’t know at eight: none of that sound was invented for cinema.
It was repurposed. Walton, Shostakovich, Bartók — twentieth-century concert repertoire, put to work under a spaceship. The orchestral weight, the brass writing, the rhythmic drive. All of it already existed, in a hall, for an audience sitting still.
That isn’t a criticism. Traditions move. A language gets carried somewhere new and finds different work to do. But it means the “film music sound” isn’t native to film. It’s a borrowed idiom that arrived at the right moment and became, for a generation, the sound of adventure itself. Which is mostly an accident of when you were born and what happened to be playing — as most taste is.
The label outlives the fact. Years later the NHK Symphony Orchestra declined my score for a planetarium centenary programme because they don’t do film music — then agreed, in the next breath, to perform film music by John Williams. The line wasn’t drawn around the music. It was drawn around what my website said I was.
By the time I was writing for the concert hall and the studio, notation software had made a good deal of this easier.
The scale did not change.
One cue of mine typically runs to 40 or 50 individual A3 sheets, across a 70 to 80 piece symphony orchestra. More with a choir. 400 Years of the Telescope had 33 cues. I did all the part preparation and printing from my home studio, and still needed a small army of helpers to get everything proofread, formatted and organised in time for the recording day.
None of which an eight-year-old can see. Not the paper, not the copyists, not the borrowed shelf it all came from.
Worth remembering when that register gets treated as the standard a composer is measured against — including when you’re the one measuring. I was told once that my portfolio didn’t evidence I could write it. Fair, on the evidence. But it was assembled from somewhere else too, by people doing exactly what I was being asked to do: pick up an existing language and put it to new use.
An eight-year-old in a cinema takes it all for the way things are.