E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a highly acclaimed science fiction film that is regarded as one of Steven Spielberg's greatest tearjerkers. The film follows Elliot (Henry Thomas), a little boy who discovers a funny looking alien in his backyard. While government agents close in on him and seek to take him away to be studied, E.T. is hidden by Elliot and his siblings as he tries to find a way home. The film's iconic flying bicycle scene and emotionally dramatic conclusion helped cement its status as an all-time classic. This is supported by its box office performance, which saw it surpass Star Wars (1977) as the highest-grossing film of all time, a record that would not be broken until the early 1990s, when another Spielberg film, Jurassic Park, was released. The picture received nine Academy Award nominations and won four. Three of them were for sound and music, while the other was for visual effects. In his sixth collaboration with Steven Spielberg, the score for the film was composed by John Williams. While E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial has won many awards for its score, it has been overshadowed by many of John William’s other popular scores. One thing that is often gone unnoticed is how E.T.’s soundtrack manages to brilliantly shape what the audience sees and feels throughout the film.
The score of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was done by the famous American composer and conductor John Williams, who has scored more than one hundred films; nearly thirty of those being directed by Steven Spielberg. John Williams, a Juilliard alumni, worked as a jazz pianist and studio musician before turning to television and cinema composition. In the 1970s, his career took off. Williams has received a record-breaking number of nominations and has won five Academy Awards. On February 8, 1932, he was born in the Flushing district of Queens, New York. Williams began taking piano lessons at a young age as his father was a musician (Kettler 2014). In 1948, Williams and his family moved to Los Angeles, California. He briefly attended the University of California at Los Angeles, before being drafted into the United States Air Force in 1951. He returned to New York City after three years in the military, where he worked as a jazz pianist. In pursuit of his dream of becoming a concert pianist, he also studied at the Juilliard School with renowned teacher Rosina Lhevinne. However, in a 2012 interview with NPR, Williams confessed that at Juilliard he heard "players like John Browning and Van Cliburn around the place, who were also students of Rosina's, and I thought to myself, 'If that's the competition, I think I'd better be a composer!'" (Kettler 2014). Williams composed some of the most iconic music in film history over the course of his extensive career, including the scores and iconic theme songs for nine Star Wars films and the first three Harry Potter films. He also composed themes for the 1984, 1988, 1996, and 2002 Olympic Games, as well as for some of the NBC network's newscasts (Eldridge 2022). Williams is well-known for his magnificent soundtracks, which frequently incorporate recurring musical motives. He has also served as music director and laureate conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, one of the USA’s most cherished musical institutions, and he has thriving artistic relationships with many of the world's great orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. As well, he has received honorary degrees from twenty-one universities in the United States. The genres of films and media Williams scores is mostly a variety, but his modern classical style typically remains consistent throughout his work.
The music genre of E.T.’s soundtrack can be best described as contemporary classical music. It has a more modern approach to classical music. A full orchestra is featured in the theme, as well as in the credits. The main theme, with soaring strings, majestic horns, and poignant woodwind interludes, is one of Williams' most memorable, utilizing the orchestral palette to create an appealing underscore to a heartbreaking story (Lawson and MacDonald 2018). Strings and woodwind instruments are heard mainly throughout the score, but during its more dark and scary moments, threatening organ sounds are played. As well, belligerent and jumpy percussion hits add to the suspense of these scenes in the movie. Those startling noises aid in the audience’s perception of what is happening– typically when the music changes to something more eerie, viewers are able to anticipate that something dramatic is about to happen, and Williams is clever at utilizing this technique. Essentially, the score exemplifies Williams's neoclassical or neoromantic approach to quite a high degree (Lawson and MacDonald 2018).
Film music is known for the way it offers an interpretivist approach for such audiovisuals; furthermore, it can be seen as a second source of emotion aside from the film on its own: it contours audience's comprehension not only of a character's actions, feelings, and motives by framing "visual meanings," but also of moral judgments, general evaluations, and plot anticipations or by generating expectations (Ansani 2020). In E.T., the music is gentle and enigmatic towards the start of the film, when E.T. and his fellow aliens explore plant life on Earth, with slow-moving strings playing glissandi and pitch bends. There is no actual melody of note here. When E.T. is left behind, the music shifts to grief for a brief moment before the lovable alien gets his first glimpse of Los Angeles from atop a mountain. The spaceship returns for E.T. in the film's finale, which is set in a similar place in the woods, and he says his famous farewell to Elliot. The chase sequence that precedes this is possibly the greatest music ever written for such a scene, with the score growing in emotion until the almost unbearably tragic moment when E.T. departs. It's difficult to think of another scenario in a film where the music and image work so well together that no one leaves the theater dry-eyed. It is indeed a moment in which Spielberg and Williams combine their abilities to create a work of art in cinematic expression (Lawson and MacDonald 2018). The choice of the solo flute to portray E.T. provides the alien figure a charm and favorability that was vital to the film's success, and it offers an emotional connection to the character and his situation maybe as effectively as the elegance of the full orchestra.
One of the most acclaimed songs on the soundtrack is the “Flying Theme”, which can be heard in the scene where E.T. and Elliott take their first flight. The music's pace is set right away, with motor rhythms in the strings symbolizing the pair taking off. Flute notes float through the air, bringing a touch of magic to the music. Following the introduction, the violins begin a lush ascending melody that increases by a fifth, an octave, and finally a minor sixth. These different intervals add a shine to the music's harmony while also honoring Williams' romantic writing style (Burns 2019). “Flying” begins in C major, and while it continues in that key, Williams uses some unexpected keys, such as B major, to highlight transitions. The strings flourish with their romantic motif, while the horns give the music a sense of energy and strength. The use of tuned percussion by Williams lends a sense of magic to the song, with the xylophone ringing especially clean here. The outro section entails the flight's conclusion. The harp and xylophone keep the magic alive, while additional bells lend a sense of purpose. Before a strong finish lead by the upper brass and horns, the main motif is repeated by a variety of instruments. At the end of this fantastic piece of underscoring, the percussion uses timpani, bass drum, cymbals, and triangles to create a dramatic effect (Burns 2019). All of these instrumental elements help to guide the audience into feeling what the characters are feeling. The music does an excellent job of portraying those emotions that aren’t able to be accentuated by acting or cinematography alone.
Moreover, Williams completely captured the emotional atmosphere of each scene in the film, a talent that was demonstrated without a doubt during the creation of the album's concluding score piece, “Escape / Chase / Saying Goodbye”. When Spielberg noticed that Williams was having trouble hitting all of the cues for the scenes with the musical swells and so during recording sessions, he approached Williams and told him that he would take the film off the screen and allow Williams to "play the music with the orchestra, with its natural phrasing, the way it ebbs and flows in its own way," and then he would edit the film to fit the better musical performance (Quarterman 2017). This is not a standard practice amongst film composers and directors, which is why E.T.’s score is so elegant. According to Roger A. Kendall in his research on experimental semiotics applied to visual, sound and musical structures, the audience's impression of the composer's and film maker's/intent editor's will be dynamic, not set in psychophysical isomorphism. Simply put, culture (for example, shared explicit and implicit knowledge) influences the communication process. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is a great example of these processes in action. The music in the bicycle chase sequence maintains syntactical congruence (with an opening 3/4 + 3/8 metre to maintain connection to the cyclists' pedalling) and includes pitch contours that iconically follow the bicycles' movements. The music is a pitch arch that follows the cyclists over the top of the hill, making it distinctive in relation to the visual motion. These symbols enhance and bring attention to the main activity (Kendall 2010). Essentially, the score was fabricated in such a detailed way that it may go unnoticed for a general audience, but it subconsciously plays an important role in their understanding of the film and its intent in each scene.
Williams recognised that the film is seen through the eyes of a child, which was emphasized by Spielberg's camera angles throughout shooting. He also understood that the film was about an estranged, sad boy and a young alien who was alone on a distant planet. They are both healed as a result of their friendship, and the music needed to reflect this in order for the film to succeed. As a result, Williams chose to score the film using his normal thematic approach (Lysy 2018). He wrote nine themes and two motifs, three of which were for the aliens; E.T.'s Theme serves as his identity and expresses his solitude and longing to reunite with his family. The melody is usually carried by a solo piccolo playing repetitive six-note figures, which feels sensitive and sorrowful. The Alien Theme serves as the Aliens' collective identity. It has a mysterious quality to it, and its structure and articulation are ambient rather than melodic. Williams developed the strange sound by rubbing a super ball over a suspended cymbal and layering celeste and shifting string textures on top of it. The Call Motif is strongly intertwined to the Alien Theme, with which it frequently appears. It expresses E.T.'s longing for his family as well as his homesickness. Its straightforward design has a descending two-note call that starts in the higher register and is answered in the lower (Lysy 2018). The Friendship Theme, which is intimate and gentle, is one of five themes for the Elliot-E.T. friendship. Williams wanted it to have a dreamlike quality to it, including harp, celeste, and shifting string textures. There are many other examples in the film of how the instrumentation reflects the actions taking place. A standout for the score's most terrifying cue is in "Invading Elliott's House." When Mike unlocks the front door, he is startled by the arrival of guys dressed in space suits. The entrance is supported by a fierce, martial timpani and bellicose horns. The Government Theme 2's sparkling style transports an agent to Elliot's bedroom, where it morphs into a hideous crescendo with his entrance and discovery of a defenseless E.T. (Lysy 2018). The music of each track and leitmotif in Williams’s score perfectly encapsulates the tone of the on-screen action, and translates to the audience what they should be feeling in these moments.
Overall, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is one of the most brilliantly scored movies in film history, thanks to its great director and composer relationship between Steven Spielberg and John Williams. Perhaps gone unnoticed by a casual viewer or audience of the film is how its soundtrack is able to cleverly configure what the audience sees and feels throughout the movie, by using instruments and motifs in an intelligent way. It stands out because Spielberg edited the film around the music in certain parts, mainly during the iconic end chase scene. E.T. is a classic, and its soundtrack will remain to be one of the most emblematic parts of it for years to come.
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References:
Ansani, Alessandro et al. “How Soundtracks Shape What We See: Analyzing the Influence of Music on Visual Scenes Through Self-Assessment, Eye Tracking, and Pupillometry.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 11 2242. 7 Oct. 2020, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02242
Burns, Alex. “John Williams 'Flying from E.T.': The Extra-Terrestrial.” Classicalexburns, December 22, 2019. https://classicalexburns.com/2019/12/22/john-williams-flying-from-e-t-the-extra-terrestrial/.
Caps, John. 2003. "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial." Film Comment 39 (6) (Nov): 47. http://ezproxy.lib.ryerson.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/e-t-extra-terrestrial/docview/210274994/se-2?accountid=13631.
Eldridge, A.. "John Williams." Encyclopedia Britannica, February 4, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Williams-American-composer -and-conductor.
Kettler, Sara. “John Williams Biography.” The Biography.com website. A&E Networks Television, May 10, 2021. www.biography.com/musician/john-williams.
Lawson, Matt, and Laurence E. MacDonald. 100 Greatest Film Scores. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
Lysy, Craig. “E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL – John Williams.” MOVIE MUSIC UK, July 30, 2018. moviemusicuk.us/2018/07/30/e-t-the-extra-terrestrial-john-williams/.
Quarterman, James. “E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial – John Williams.” Scores of Scores, March 18, 2017. https://example83813.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/e-t-the-extra-terrestrial-john-williams/.
Roger A. Kendall, "Music in film and animation: experimental semiotics applied to visual, sound and musical structures," Proc. SPIE 7527, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XV, 752703 (22 February 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.849097.
Spielberg, Steven, director. 1982. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Universal Pictures. 1 hr., 55 min. https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0N4MU82F5XSNKXNC8MCN8YO59V/ ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r.
Williams, John. 1982. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Music from the Original Soundtrack. MCA Records.
Williams, John. 2002. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (20th Anniversary) O.S.T. Universal Music Canada.
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