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John Williams is currently writing the score for his fifth Indiana Jones movie, ”Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” coming this summer to eager, hit-starved theaters near you. Meantime, he just scored a new football theme, roughly three and a half triumphal minutes long, which premiered Monday night on the ESPN broadcast for the Georgia-TCU game.
I’m no musicologist, but I love what the right composer can do to intensify images on a screen. News of a theme celebrating the College Football Playoff National Championship, brought to you by the crazily prolific earworm wizard who gave us “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and, for the record, music for a 1954 film funded by the tourism office of Newfoundland — well. News, certainly. Worth a listen?
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Indeed. The piece is titled “Of Grit and Glory,” and we’ll all be hearing it in countless high school and college football stadiums for decades to come. It’s good.
The simple 21-note intro of the theme, which was designed to accompany an incredibly slick video overture to the Georgia-TCU matchup, couldn’t help but recall elements of various Williams rousers past. I mean, you try writing 117 and counting different film scores across eight decades.
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Williams has written football music before, notably the martial wallop “Wide Receiver” for NBC Sunday Night Football. On first hearing, in a very pleasing way, “Of Grit and Glory” sounds a bit like the patriotic, nostalgic answer to that earlier theme. Put ‘em together, with variations, and there it is: music from the full-length football drama Williams never got to score.
“Of Grit and Glory” was just reflective enough in its quieter passages to effectively underscore the memories of great college football giants, looking back for the purposes of pumping us up for the big game. The music comes with the melodic stickiness of all Williams’ most hummable achievements.
It comes from a sincere place of populist mastery.
“Intercollegiate football,” the composer told Variety, “has been at the heart and soul of our nation’s life for so long that the opportunity to musically salute this great tradition has been a particularly meaningful joy for me … (championship games) always raise the collective spirit and, in the end, the competition brings us all closer to a place where the concept of winners and losers dissolves into mutual respect and admiration.”
Sure, it was a promo job. Not so different in intent, perhaps, than that Newfoundland tourism board film Williams scored 69 years ago. But some commercial artists transcend their times, and many of their own movies, if they’re film composers. Their work may become dangerously familiar to us over time. But for good reason.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
