Boyish Worlds: John Williams and Child Gaze

Films whose main characters are children occupy an important place in John Williams’s cinematic oeuvre. From E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), to the Harry Potter series, the composer co-created the audiosphere of movies recognized as classics of children’s cinema. Home Alone (1990), Hook (1991), and Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001) introduce a unique childlike perspective. Child gaze is a mode of representation opposite to the adult gaze. The paper aims to consider whether Williams’s music in Steven Spielberg’s and Chris Columbus’s films corresponds with a tendency to show the world from a child’s perspective. How this music refers to the idea of a child gaze is most easily captured in four complementary spheres: nostalgic connecting, reacting, reducing, and coloring. In order to analyse these spheres, the authors focus on the sound language of children’s films and selected single scenes with Williams’s music and its structural and affective dimensions (primary and secondary musical parameters, according to the terminology of Leonard B. Meyer).