[Nils Jacob Holt Hanssen]

That’s correct. I wish I remembered the year. I know it was the late 90s. Alas, my Yahoo Mail doesn’t go back further than 2014, although I’ve used it since the mid 90s (I think the older e-mails have all been deleted from cyberspace). Do you still have the magazine with your letter?

Yes, I do. It was issue 6/1997.

Wasn’t it some guy called Arne Svingen who had that “soundtrack column” (if you could even call it that) in the magazine? I think he later became an author. I do, however, remember kinda hating him a bit for his dismissive and ignorant remarks the few times he DID actually review a score album.

It was Svingen, yes. One of the things that prompted my letter was his “review” of THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK in the previous issue, which he gave 1 out of 6 stars. Here it is in its (very short) entirety:

“John Williams writes a lot of film music in Hollywood. That’s because he writes music with the same superficial emotions that many directors employ in their movies. Simple, pompous dramatic formulas and clichéd teary-eyed music. One thing’s for certain: You don’t watch The Lost World to listen to the music.”

Um, well, mister, some of us actually did. In my letter I claimed that it was him that was being superficial, and I mentioned all the variation you could find in Williams’ work, if you cared to look. He had a rebuttal to my letter in the same issue, where he again claimed that no, Williams is “wallowing in the most well-trodden and pompous film music clichés”, and that he “absolutely focuses mostly on big Hollywood action movies”. So I wrote a second letter, listing all the movies Williams had scored in the 90s up to that point, to try to make him understand that “big Hollywood action movies” was actually a pretty small percentage of what Williams had done so far in the decade. There was no rebuttal to that one.