Read on to discover how John Williams' stunning soundtrack played a hugely important part in the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws...
Steven Spielberg's Jaws... a terrifying opening with terrifying music
The setting sun illuminates the rippling waves of a dark and fathomless ocean. A young woman confidently swims out from the shore to where a buoy bobs up and down serenely. ‘Come on in the water!’ she shouts joyfully to her male companion, who has collapsed drunkenly on the sand, unable to remove his shoes.
As the woman treads water, a low, rumbling semitone from E to F starts up in the film’s accompanying soundtrack. Gradually, as the camera moves from the depths below towards the woman on the surface, this two-note ostinato, played by basses and cellos, becomes louder, faster and more urgent, until a sudden, shrieking chord sounds, as she’s jerked down by an unseen force. As the attack takes place, the soundtrack erupts into violent dissonance – followed by near-total silence, punctuated by the gentle bell of the buoy, as the woman finally disappears beneath the waves.
Trouble in the water...
So begins Jaws, based on the novel by Peter Benchley – the film that made a star of its young director Steven Spielberg and coined the phrase ‘blockbuster’ upon its release in 1975, 50 years ago this month. Principal shooting on the open seas was notoriously difficult, down in no small part to the movie’s mechanical ‘star’ – the shark that terrorises the small, tight-knit community of the fictional Amity Island.
Affectionately named ‘Bruce’ after Spielberg’s lawyer, the model shark (in fact, three prototypes constructed from steel and polyurethane) suffered constant malfunctions, causing shooting to balloon from 55 to 159 days. Thus, one of the most joyously frightening films of all time might have become the ultimate damp squib were it not for its soundtrack, composed by one John Williams.
Jaws... and ingenious John Williams soundtrack
It was Williams’s ingenious musical method of signifying the shark’s presence that lent a feeling of menace to many of the film’s earlier scenes – without even a glimpse of its antagonist. Indeed, we only finally see the shark in its full glory one hour and 21 minutes into the two-hour film – and ‘Bruce’ himself gets just four minutes of screen time. To this day, the importance of the soundtrack is not lost on Spielberg, as he revealed in a recent documentary for Disney: ‘I had a shark that didn’t work, but thankfully John’s musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark. I think that his score is responsible for half the success of the film.’
It’s fair to say, however, that Spielberg’s initial impression of Williams’s music was less than enthusiastic. The two had previously worked together on Spielberg’s first theatrical release, The Sugarland Express (1974). Williams, by this time in his 40s, already had a long list of television and film credits to his name, and the young Spielberg had fallen in love with his musical language upon hearing the soundtrack to the 1969 Steve McQueen vehicle The Reivers. Their experience together on Sugarland was wholly positive, leaving Spielberg determined ‘to use John on every film I would ever make’.
Initial impressions: 'Dun-dun, dun-dun... I thought he was joking!'
It was therefore with great anticipation that Spielberg visited Williams to hear his first ideas for Jaws, performed on the composer’s own piano. ‘I had this esoteric idea of what the score should be, and I had temp-tracked the picture with John’s own score from Robert Altman’s Images,’ remembers Spielberg. ‘John called me after he had seen the rough cut of Jaws, and he was laughing about my temp music. He said, “Oh no. Sweetie, this is a pirate movie. It’s primal, but it’s also fun and entertaining. Don’t worry, I’m going to come up with something.”
‘So, when he finally played the music for me on the piano, I expected to hear something weird and melodic, tonal but eerie and of another world – like outer space, but inner space, under the water. What he played for me instead, with two fingers on the lower piano keys, was the two-note theme. Dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun. I thought he was joking! But he kept asking me to listen again, and I started to see the brilliance of his motif. The best ideas can be simplest ones, and John had found a signature for the entire score.’
An insistent thematic pulse to signify a primal menace
When it came to recording the score with orchestra – on the 20th Century Fox Studio Scoring Stage in Los Angeles on 3, 4 and 10 March 1975 – the genius of this signature was revealed with even greater potency. ‘I thought that altering the speed and volume of the theme, from very slow to very fast, from very soft to very loud, would indicate the mindless attacks of the shark,’ explained Williams in his booklet notes for the soundtrack’s 25th anniversary release. Hence that low ostinato was used to indicate not only the presence of the shark, but the level of danger. There are even moments where the absence of this signature to accompany an apparent sighting of the beast gives the audience a subconscious clue that this is a false alarm.
But more than this, the insistent thematic pulse was a way to characterise an ancient monster – perhaps even, it has been suggested by several academics, its heartbeat. Like Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho, whose screeching musical theme had signified violence and terror before it, Jaws was tapping into a primal menace against which all reason and intellect is no protection.
The Jaws soundtrack... so much more than two notes
Of course, the Jaws soundtrack is much more than its signature ostinato. That rumbling main theme also features a chromatic tuba motif, written in a far higher register than is comfortable for the instrument. When tuba player Tommy Johnson questioned Williams about the range, the composer responded that he felt that discomfort would be ‘more threatening’.
Early in the score, music played by the Amity Marching Band, an amateur ensemble assembled for the fictional town’s parade, was recorded by professional trumpeters Malcolm McNab and Graham Young, alongside Williams on trombone and Spielberg himself on clarinet, deliberately playing slightly out of tune.
Korngold and 'Spanish Ladies'
The film’s three heroes – Brody (Roy Scheider), Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint (Robert Shaw) – who like Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab embark on an exciting nautical quest to hunt their own ‘white whale’, are given several rousing themes to accompany their journey. When their boat, the Orca, sails away from Amity Island, the soundtrack incorporates an old sea shanty called ‘Spanish Ladies’, a favourite tune of Quint’s. And once the chase is on, this musical subject turns intrepid and thrilling, Williams weaving together various musical motifs. ‘It suddenly becomes very Korngoldian,’ noted Williams in a 2012 interview marking the film’s first release on Blu-ray. ‘You expect to see Errol Flynn at the helm of this thing. It gave us a laugh.’
The 'Shark Cage Fugue' and the 'Barrel Chase Sequence'
As the stakes raise, and the men seem to be losing their battle, Williams heightens the sense of drama with a fugue to accompany the building of the shark cage and the subsequent final showdown. It’s an appropriate musical device, illustrating the complexity of the human mind, employing every sophisticated trick in its arsenal against the savage force of nature.
For Williams, those sequences at sea hold the most interest: ‘My favourite cue has always been the barrel chase sequence, where the shark approaches the boat and the three heroes think they have captured it,’ he says. ‘The music accelerates and becomes very exciting and heroic. Suddenly the shark overpowers them and eventually escapes, the music deflates and ends with “Spanish Ladies”. The score illustrates and punctuates all of this dramatic outline.’
An Academy Award and a lasting legacy...
Following the original soundtrack recording, conducted by Williams himself in March 1975, additional music was recorded in April for the commercial soundtrack release on LP by MCA in May of that year. Williams went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score at the 1976 Oscars, having previously won an Oscar in 1972 for Fiddler on the Roof, which he arranged, underscored and conducted. The win for Jaws, however, was the first for his original music, ‘and that was a significant moment for me,’ he’s said.
Subsequent recordings...
Over the years, the soundtrack has continued to inspire fear and exhilaration in equal measure. In 2000, Decca/Universal released a new version to mark the film’s 25th anniversary – the first time the entire 51 minutes of original score had seen the light of day. And in 2015, the soundtrack was reissued again through Intrada Records, this time including the full film score along with alternate takes, source music and a remaster of the 1975 album. Williams also arranged a suite based on the soundtrack to perform live in concert, including his favourite ‘Out to Sea’ segment followed by the ‘Shark Cage Fugue’. The composer has conducted the piece many times for delighted audiences and recorded it with the Boston Pops in 1990.
As Jaws celebrates its 50th anniversary, returning to cinemas around the world, the power of its storytelling – bolstered by top direction, editing, acting and music – is every bit as potent today as during its first terrifying release in 1975. And like its sharp-toothed, 25-foot antagonist, an icon in the pantheon of screen villains, Williams’s soundtrack is set to continue shocking and thrilling audiences for decades to come. Just when we all thought it was safe to go back in the water…
Recording the score
Memories from the soundstage
Richard Kaufman has devoted much of his life to conducting and supervising music for film and television, including 18 years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. He was principal pops conductor of Orange County’s Pacific Symphony for 31 years and has guest conducted orchestras all over the world, including in the music of John Williams. Here he recalls playing on the ‘Jaws’ soundtrack as a violinist early in his career…
‘It was 1975, I had been out of college for a couple of years and had just started playing for the studios when I got the call to play for the Jaws sessions at Fox Studios. I was already a huge fan of John Williams’s music for The Reivers and Goodbye, Mr Chips, so I was really happy to be playing with some of the best musicians in the business on his new soundtrack.
‘As there was no opportunity to see the parts in advance, it was a bit frightening. Jaws is a very challenging score. There’s lots of low, anticipatory music and then, suddenly, all hell breaks loose! In fact, I had never worn reading glasses before those sessions, but afterwards I experienced headaches and had to start wearing them! Having said that, the music is so technically perfect, written with an understanding of every instrument, that you can focus on the emotion.
'We felt we were taking part in something significant'
‘During the sessions, there was a big screen showing the film that John was conducting to. And there was this young guy with a beard running around with an 8mm camera, who we learned was Steven Spielberg, the director! John is always so clear in his conducting. He commands respect, is very calm and straightforward. He knows exactly what to say without wasting any time. As a member of the orchestra, you want to help him bring his vision to life. And during those sessions, we felt we were taking part in something significant and that, particularly musically, this was going to last for a long time.
‘I went on to play on many film scores by John Williams and by other composers, and I can honestly say that many conductors are either not communicative enough, or they can’t stop talking! Sometimes they get frustrated or angry, but not John. He knows all the instruments so well, and he’s equally strong as a composer and a conductor. I’ve never heard a bad word, not a bad syllable, said about him personally or musically. That’s down to the way he treats people.’
