The most underrated music from Jaws

Today I'm going to break down a cue from Jaws. Don't go in the water. Because you're about to be attacked by another edition of Keith Horn's Chord of the Week. The score to Jaws by John Williams is a masterclass of cinematic scoring. We don't even see the shark until after an hour into the movie. For the first hour, the score is the shark. Of course, everyone knows the two-note motive that represents the shark. And the music that supports the terror experienced by all the characters is brilliant throughout the film. But I want to focus on a cue called Father and Son, where Chief Brody and his son are at the dining room table. The chief is clearly exhausted, and his son is being sweet and playful, mimicking his dad's every move. Just to be silly. Here's the scene. Spielberg is the king of visual storytelling. And the scene has no dialogue, and it allows the actors and the cinematography to tell the story. But in my view, the score is the main supporting character of this scene. Notice how it plays the sweetness of the father and son with this circular G Lydian phrase. And it almost seems to kind of float through the scene. But underneath it all, is this low C that just lurks under the surface. And C has nothing to do with G Lydian. It's reminding us that this moment of relief is only temporary. We see how stressed the father and son are. And by this point in the story, he has the weight of the world on his shoulders, wondering if he can keep people safe on the island. And John Williams uses a simple, unrelated pedal to support the story. It's so simple. I've covered John Williams in other videos, and this is just one of his many harmonic tricks. The use of a static pedal point to set up a type of bitonality to establish a feeling of unease. You can hear it in the opening of E.T. This is an A major triad over C. An unrelated pedal point. And you can hear it here in the end of War of the Worlds. Here again, over a low C pedal, we have D minor, D flat minor, F sharp major, A Lydian, and B. It finally comes here. Right? So in all three of these examples, he's using a low C pedal, and he's doing something unrelated to that C, whether it's A over C, whether it's G Lydian over C, or where it's just walking down unrelated keys. And by doing this, he's creating a not-so-subtle dissonance, where you have something very tonal happening. Over an unrelated pedal. Pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, push! But this scene from Jaws is one of my favorite uses of this technique because of how it complements a scene of family connection, in the context of the larger story about a terrifying threat. It's just brilliant. So let's take the father and son chord, or chords, through some exercises. Since this video is more about an appreciation for a scoring technique than about a specific chord, I only have one exercise. It's G Lydian over C. I'll take it through the ascending diminished cycle. It sounds like this. Son of a bitch. He did it. So that's a quick study of what I consider an unsung cue from the catalog of the great John Williams. So thank you for watching, thanks for listening, and happy practicing. Yeah. Who this? This piece. Yeah, who this? Who this?