Close Encounters of the Third Kind

An unavoidable figure while discussing film music, John Williams is probably the most recognizable name in film music today. His tunes both pervade and transcend the film industry. Just about every living american born before 2000 can recognize at least one theme that John Williams has written, and the tunefulness of the title theme from Close Encounters is no exception. The five-note figure of re, mi, do, do, sol is repeated constantly throughout the film and has the ability to stick with any musical or nonmusical audience member, but in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Williams often deviates a bit from that convention.

One of the unique characteristics this score offers is the use of voices to create a celestial sound. Often, Williams chooses to write high soprano tone clusters on vocalise rather than use words and rhythms. This helps make the human voice provide more of a coloristic effect, rather than it being the focal point of the piece. Despite this being a unique timbre in Williams' repertoire thus far in his career, this was not the first time that choral music had been used in this way for an extra-terrestrial, science-fiction movie.

Stanley Kubrick famously rejected the score created by Alex North for 2001: a Space Odyssey in favor of using concert music from Johann and Ricard Strauss, Aram Kachaturian, and then lesser-known György Ligeti. The music from Ligeti played an interesting role because since 2001 the three main pieces that were used from him have become some of Ligeti's most well-known works. One of those pieces is the Kyrie from his Requiem. It's been a while since I've seen the film, but I believe that the most prominent use of this excerpt is near the beginning when the Great Apes discover the monolith and as a result develop tools. Similarly, at the beginning of Close Encounters we hear Ligeti-isms used by John Williams. Williams writes similar micropolyphonic* textures and large, dissonant tone clusters (both hallmarks of Ligeti's music) to build tension into a triumphant C Major chord that sounds as if it were literally stolen directly from Also Sprach Zarathustra (the title theme from 2001). Unlike most of John William's other scores that I have heard, much of the incidental music in Close Encounters of the Third Kind has a sense of space to the sound. It can be heard as one single entity, and this was another signature of György Ligeti.

It was rumored that Ligeti did not appreciate having his music featured alongside the Strausses, but thank goodness that Stanley Kubrick included these pieces because they helped 2001: a Space Odyssey become the catalyst to the now typical science-fiction blockbuster film. Without this movie to set the stage, John Williams might have therefore lost about half of his film portfolio (Close Encounters, ET, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, etc.). At the very least, John Williams wouldn't have had such rich musical material as inspiration for his cosmic orchestral sounds heard in Close Encounters. Below, I have attached the excerpt from Ligeti's Kyrie used in 2001 along with the entirety of his Lux Aeterna, which was also sampled in 2001.

*Micropolyphony as described by music critic Alex Ross in his book The Rest is Noise: "In the nineteen-sixties, György Ligeti developed a technique of assembling large masses of sound from multiple layers of minute contrapuntal activity, with many different instruments playing the same material at different speeds."