Composer John Williams says he ‘never liked film music very much’

Just casually being a legend to pay the bills.

I was half expecting it to be a clickbait headline and that he followed it up with "so I set out to fix it", but I actually get what he's saying.

I've played lots of film music pieces in wind band, including some of his works. And it's fun to play these pieces, and fun to listen to them, but when you pick them apart in band rehearsal, you do notice that they're fairly simplistic.

In particular the title songs are in many ways like pop music. They have high production value, so there are lots of layers to them. But the chorus is always repeated with no variation, to really drive home that this is the iconic melody you need to memorize. And the chorus gets repeated a lot, too, with just short verses in between.

I can certainly see that this is just routine work for a composer like Williams.