A Long Road to Musicological Legitimacy with Williams’ Film Music

Jessica Stookey | University of North Carolina at Greensboro

This study builds upon historical musicology and recent film music studies to argue that the disparity between John Williams’s popular reception and the reception from music critics and scholars may be due to the biases of the nineteenth-century Romanticism. These biases outline the nature of the composer, the scores, and the relationship between classical music and pop culture.