John Williams

Abstract

John Williams (b. 1932) is one of the most successful composers to have worked in cinema. His background includes classical education in piano and composition and extensive experience in the 1950s jazz arena and as a pop-song arranger in the 1960s. The eclectic formative years endowed him with a vast command of virtually all musical idioms, and this multifaceted stylistic palette is the key to Williams’s artistic longevity. Williams has also been a prolific concert composer, accruing a rich catalogue of fourteen concerti, celebratory fanfares, chamber music, and symphonic pieces. Parallel to his principal career as a composer, he has also built up a remarkable track record as a concert conductor: he held a fourteen-year tenure as Principal Conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra and also guest-conducted such orchestras as the London Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Wiener Philharmoniker, and the Berliner Philharmoniker, to name only a prominent few. Yet, it is as a film composer that Williams acquired an outstanding fame and reputation. He took the first steps in the film business, in the 1950s, during the twilight days of Hollywood’s old studio system. He helped with the orchestrations of major films (for example, The Guns of Navarone, 1961, music by Dimitri Tiomkin) and played the piano in the studio orchestras of such high-rank film composers as Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman. From 1958, Williams became a staff composer of the Revue/Universal Television Studios and provided a steady musical output for M Squad (1958–1959), Gilligan’s Island (1964–1965), and Lost in Space (1965), among other shows. Composing for television meant to produce the most stylistically diverse scores in the shortest possible time, and this training was essential to further hone Williams’s dramatic instinct and musical versatility. In the mid-1960s he moved to feature-film productions, consolidating his reputation with a set of comedies that already showed a personal voice in addition to the Henry Mancini-influenced leading style of the period—for instance, How to Steal a Million (1966), A Guide for the Married Man (1967), Fitzwilly (1967). In the 1970s, Williams was the go-to name for disaster movies like The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974), The Poseidon Adventure (1972). In the meantime, he also worked in Europe for the period films Heidi (1968), Jane Eyre (1970), and Fiddler on the Roof (1971), the latter bringing him the first of his five Academy Awards. If all these works demonstrate the composer’s versatility, Williams is nevertheless stylistic consistent and recognizable. Trademarks of his personal style are the richly symphonic design of his scores, the colorfully inventive orchestrations, the modal tinges and dissonant embellishments within his diatonic harmonies, the unforgettable melodies associated to characters and situations, and the tight adherence of music to the visual action—a result of the leitmotiv and the Mickey-Mousing techniques he inherited from the past Hollywood masters. These thumbprints came to gain overt salience in the score to Star Wars (1977), a watershed revival of classical Hollywood’s symphonic tradition. Williams has since been a household name, in particular thanks to the multi-decade collaboration with Steven Spielberg. A keen sense of drama, “modernized tradition,” and “versatility cum personality” are the traits that best define the film music of John Williams.