Jaws is not a two-note theme

They recognize it as soon as it starts – on the first note, even, as the reaction of this crowd shows at 16 seconds.

We are talking about John William's main theme for Steven Spielberg's classic film Jaws (1975).

When the thing starts, it already has a certain personality, definite choices in the orchestration, that enable anyone to know what it is. It's like a tutti of the lowest orchestra. The contrabasses and cellos are helped, as the video immediately shows, by a contrabassoon and two bassoons. I think there is no bass clarinet, I can't hear it.

Actually, low strings doubled by bassoons... that's a very common orchestral sound. But I suppose if you know it's Williams, then on the first note you know what this is.

It is a truism that the theme has only two notes. I understand what people mean when they say that. Journalists have said that often when John Williams is interviewed, and he won't correct them, he accepts the number two. He says "yes, and".

But that's wrong. Of course the theme does not have only two notes, nor could it. It's a horror film, therefore it has all twelve notes.

As you probably know, there are normal people, and there are musicians. Normal people haven't counted the pitches. But any composer will – it's not a case of "ackchually", but a necessity for understanding the language and the material.

We have only examined the introduction so far, which is insinuating the theme. When it stops lurking and launches into the fast ostinato, at 40 seconds, two things happen. First, a piano joins the texture, probably to give it a very definite attack. But most importantly, you get the same 2 alternating notes, Mi and Fa – but also a third note in the accents: Re.

So the main idea, the main subject of the film, requires three notes, not two. And Re is the lowest – the note we would hear as the bass of any implied chord there. Re is used in the accents, you couldn't write the actual theme without this third note.

With 3 notes given so far, one could be forgiven for thinking we are probably in the key of D Minor. The composer is now quick to prove that wrong – at 48 seconds the texture becomes more complex. The 4-horn call is incredibly important, contributing only pitches that are a minor second apart from the 3 pitches of the ostinato. This means it could not sound more dissonant in relation to the ostinato, it could not be in a more foreign "key". The pitches are Mi Bemol, Sol Bemol, and Re Bemol.

One can play all the pitches mentioned so far by dropping one's closed hand on a piano, from C# to F#. This fact suggests a kind of dodecaphonic thinking. A composer realizes if you expand that with only one more neighbour note, you get the range of a tritone, and then you can apply dodecaphonic procedures to that, like transposing the whole thing up a tritone to use the rest of the 12-note scale.

But that is not what Williams does here. I would say the thinking is more along the lines of pitch sets, combined with polytonality, because we easily hear the two simultaneous musical events (the ostinato and the horn call) in two different "keys".

So here a public that has already forgotten polytonality (except that jazz never forgot it) is exposed to an advanced instance of it. Darius Milhaud, author of the best polytonal music, "Saudades do Brasil", would be proud.

The accents in the trombones... there is something weird about them, in this recording they sound like La Bemol. This surprised me because, as I started writing this, I was pretty sure it was Si Bemol. This video soon becomes too audio-distorted to remain useful, we must switch to a studio recording now. In the studio recording, the trombone accents are Si Bemol, definitely. (0:30)

This kind of difference is something that always happens with Williams. For his most famous pieces, he always created a Boston Pops version, with a more normal set of instruments, such that it can be played by any orchestra without hiring many extras. Thus the original film music always sounds a bit more "custom" than the orchestral suites made for concerts. But he doesn't stop at orchestration – there are changes in the discourse, in the order of the sections, and in tiny details such as this, the pitch of the trombone accents.

Would you like me to speculate about why he would change B flat to A flat? OK. Both are possible as part of the horn call scale. But B flat sounds much more in harmony with the ostinato. In fact, B flat dangerously undermines the atonality because it "wants" to become the root under the ostinato, which would then become a simple B Flat Major chord (Si bemol, Re, Fa). A flat does not have that problem, being an "ugly" tritone away from the Re.

Now (0:36) the pitches Fa and La Bemol also become a secondary part of the horn call. The end of the horn call has longer notes in this version, while in the Boston Pops version the notes are very short.

Speaking as a composer, the horn call is the actual main theme of this piece. This is because the ostinato is not amenable to development – it is most useful if it remains there doing its thing without change.

A simpleton like Hans Zimmer could also compose the ostinato – anyone could. But to make the rest of the texture and the rest of the piece, John Williams' taste, knowledge, creativity and development skill are necessary. Therefore, the value of the piece isn't really in the ostinato, it's in everything else!

One wonders if normal people have heard the rest. I think they have, but they can't talk about it, they don't have the vocabulary for it. So they talk about the two-note theme. It's a sort of musical bikeshedding that happens. If I were to interview Williams, I wouldn't ask him about the same tired old things, I would make a technical interview, a composer's interview.

At 1:00 a huge tutti is building up, the violins carry the melody, and guess what, the melody is based on the horn call. There is still something oscillating in the background in the interval of a minor second (piano?), but that is "drowned" by the rest. It is also two times slower as the oscillation in the ostinato.

At 1:20, on top of a chaotic atonal texture, flutes play some kind of American march fragment. Or maybe it's not a march, maybe it's a children's song. Either way, we are reminded of the general public having fun in the beaches – those that the main character, a reluctant hero, needs to save. This song is again superposed "in a different key" from the rest. The polytonal procedure is important in the language here. It makes sense because these people are unaware of the danger – the dangerous shark and the people having fun are in two different realities.

These are the most interesting things I could say about the Jaws theme. To sum up:

• It's never just 2 notes. In fact, it's 3. In fact, it's a horrible chromatic cluster. In fact, it's polytonal.
• The polytonality is a musical way of expressing two simultaneous, conflicting realities. But it is a latent conflict: we can hear the conflict, but the two individual situations cannot, each being "happy" in its own key.
• Anyone could have composed the ostinato. But only a jazz musician like Williams would have remembered to use polytonality to express the latent conflict.

The entire music of the film is genius of course. Not just the recognizable theme. Witness, for example, the "father and son" scene.

Here, I believe the piano and harp representing the child are in the scale of D Major, but really in G lydian. (The lydian scale is the brightest one available.) The most important thing in the melody is the C# resolving to B natural.

The innocent youth is incapable of understanding the depths of gravity that a responsible adult will have to go through. This scene drives home the simultaneous realities of the youth on vacation and the policeman on whose shoulders the responsibility for the dead girl weighs.

Of course he can only think about his problem, nothing else. What is more insistent than a 2-note ostinato? A single held note. John Williams will not mention the shark musically here, since there is no danger. An even worse alternative would be to invent a theme for the politician. Let's not do those. Not when one note will suffice.

Therefore, polytonality is used again. Guess what note is in the bass? C natural. Why?

• It's the lowest note cellos and contrabasses are able to emit.
• It's right between the C# and B natural I just mentioned, just a semitone apart from both, therefore it maximizes dissonance to the child's melody.

If the shark isn't just 2 notes and actually requires 3... at the same time, John Williams can convey an idea with a single bass note if he wants to. That's amazing!

One character imitating another... that reminds me of another Spielberg movie with another perfect musical score. In that one, the imitation is the very first act that humanizes the hideous deformed monster who, by the end of the movie, will have become your best friend in the entire galaxy and leave you in tears for his absence. But in Jaws, the point is the contrast between their two mindsets, and Williams put that contrast in the music.

Usually film music will seem to be from the point of view of one character. This is a rare example of two POVs, simultaneous, accomplished through bitonality.

When Spielberg first heard the shark theme on the piano, he didn't seem to like it. If memory serves, it went more or less like this: "Really? That's all?" "You have to imagine the orchestra, of course." "Yeah but that simple?" "It's a very primal movie you've made here, Steven."

Williams' accusation that the movie is "primal" is not true. Let us just say his scores have more complexity and truth than his assertions. Or rather, in trying to defend himself, he went for the wrong argument. The correct response would have been, "of course that's not all, that is only the ostinato. On top of that we'll have modernist techniques, an entire orchestra playing in polytonal layers." Because that is what he actually did. The music for Jaws is not based on two notes, that's nonsense.

"Jaws" was a great success, and remains one of the greatest accomplishments in cinema, not because it was primal, but because it is sophisticated. Since all the sequels lack sophistication, they are failures. This sophistication is obviously in the music, but also in the director's technique. Watch this analysis of a single scene to understand how.