I'm now down to the epilogue of John Williams: A Composer's Life. The last subdivision of the last chapter was pretty much a statement of the same conclusion I'd drawn before Greiving had even begun to write this opus: Williams began his film scoring career at a time when the worst thing a critic could say about a serious concert piece would be to call it "film music," at a time when anything written since the 1930s that was even remotely accessible to the general public was loudly disparaged as hack, and at a time when filmmakers had all but abandoned anything resembling what Korngold, Rozsa, Herrmann, and so forth had been doing. And by calmly scoring films with music that was both artistically valid and completely accessible, as well as being in whatever idiom and genre is best suited to the subject matter, and doing the best work he knows how to do, with profound humility and modesty, he has managed to either convert or outlive the overwhelming majority of his critics, and to pave the way for Goldsmith, Horner, and a good many of the people scoring films today.