Magic's Wand - John Williams

To those who say that classical music is unpopular, I present this evidence to the contrary: roughly 19,000 people who filled the Hollywood Bowl on September 4th from the pool circle to the top row of benches. They cheered after every song with a fervor that would be inappropriate in a concert hall. They followed along wordlessly with every movement, and they rose to their feet for encore after encore. This being the Hollywood Bowl, they also packed snacks.

In fact, the only difference between the waves of fans at the Bowl and a tailgating crowd in the Forum parking lot before a Ratt concert was the headliner (a big difference, admittedly). At the Bowl it was John Williams, master of the movies.

For the first half of the show, Williams concentrated on his most recent work: The score for the mega-successful Harry Potter series. Actress Lynn Redgrave helped unravel the complex storyline for the more seasoned ticket-holders who haven’t read all seven books or seen all six movies. According to her, the film franchise has earned over one billion dollars at the box office, meaning an entirely new generation has been swept away by John Williams’ music. Just as he did with the scores of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park, Williams has brought classical music to the kiddie masses.

That’s not to say the crowd at the Bowl wasn’t feeling nostalgic. The upper rows were lit like a sci-fi convention by little Jedis and their parents twirling neon red and blue swords to the theme of Star Wars. In the box seats nearest me, a father and son softly clashed sabers to the beat, punctuating the score with a canned sound effect. The father must have been in his seventies; his son in his forties or fifties.

I ended the night thinking that Williams' work, wound so tightly into the scenes he scores, is the perfect gateway to classical music because it is reminiscent of so many greats—Hoist, Shostakovitch, Wagner. And who doesn’t love lightsabers?

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine