CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

JOHN WILLIAMS

Rating:

Original Review: Heralded by many as one of the classic scores of all time, I personally feel that Close Encounters is a little over-rated. Then again, I was only 2 when the movie was released, and only having seen it on TV I suppose it never had the impact on me it could have done. The score is based in part around the now legendary five note scale (duh-dah dah-duh daaaah) which forms the signal received from the alien mother ship. This is featured most prominently in the strange but intriguing 'The Conversation', in which sections of the orchestra compete with the synthesised spaceship in playing little bursts of music, and in the almost religious, awe-inspiring finale - my favourite piece on the whole album, and probably the most famous. This one track lightens the rest of the album and reaches a wonderfully emotional crescendo, although I do feel that the oft-compared Cocoon finale by James Horner is better. Of the rest of the music, in the main part it is quite dark and mysterious, quite a change for people used to Williams' uptempo marches and scherzos. 'Nocturnal Pursuit' features a racing violin solo; 'The Abduction of Barry' is quite possibly the most disturbing cue Williams has ever written, with disembodied voices rising in pitch over a sustained chord and lots of banging and clanging; and 'The Appearance of the Visitors' is another gorgeous, awesome, operatic cue which inexplicably features a section of When You Wish Upon A Star, the Disney theme song first heard in Pinocchio. The one and only let down is the terrible, horrible, awful, almost sacrilegious disco version of the Main Theme done by Rick Chertoff - this must have been all the rage in the late seventies, as I seem to remember they did the same thing with the Star Wars theme too.

Track Listing: Running Time: 40 minutes 47 seconds

Arista Records (1978)

Music composed and conducted by John Williams. Orchestrations by Herbert W. Spencer. Contains extracts from "When You Wish Upon A Star" written by Ned Washington and Leigh Harline. Recorded and mixed by John Neal. Edited by Ken Wannberg. Theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind" produced by Rick Chertoff. Album produced by John Williams.


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These web pages were designed and maintained by Jonathan Broxton copyright 1997. All opinions and views expressed on these pages are my own and are in no way intended to reflect those of my employer, the Trent Institute for Health Services Research, or those of the University of Sheffield.