John Williams

• Born: February 8, 1932
• Place of Birth: Floral Park, Long Island, New York

AMERICAN FILM-SCORE COMPOSER

A celebrated and prolific film scorer, Williams' musical compositions are among the most iconic in film history. His scores, which are influenced by both classical music and jazz, have not only reflected the action on the screen but also tied together plot elements.

The Life

John Towner Williams is the son of John Williams, a jazz drummer and percussionist, and Esther, a homemaker. He studied piano from the age of six, and he learned to play the bassoon, cello, trombone, trumpet, and clarinet. In 1948 his family moved to Los Angeles, where Williams’s father worked in film studio orchestras. At North Hollywood High School, Williams organized a small band, and he discovered that since the clarinet and piano are in different keys, they could not be played from the same music. Consequently, he studied orchestration books, and he learned to transpose music. After graduating from high school, he took courses in piano and composition at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Los Angeles City College. He also studied privately with pianist-arranger Robert Van Epps and Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Williams composed a piano sonata at age nineteen. During the Korean War, Korean War, Williams joined the US Air Force, orchestrating for and conducting military bands. In 1954 he returned to New York, enrolled at the Juilliard School, and studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne. To make money, he played jazz piano in nightclubs and for recording studios. In 1956 he returned to Los Angeles, and he began working as a studio pianist at Columbia and Twentieth Century-Fox, where he met Morris Stoloff and Alfred and Lionel Newman. Working with these composers and others, he became interested in writing for film. Established film scorers, such as Franz Waxman and Bernard Herrmann, observed Williams’s skills in orchestration, and they invited him to orchestrate cues for their music. The composers he worked with also encouraged him to focus on his own composing.

While scoring low-budget films, Williams also worked in television. In addition to playing the piano in Henry Mancini’s theme to the Peter Gunn series, he acted in Johnny Staccato, a detective series, playing a jazz musician. Nonetheless, his primary interest continued to be composing. Under contract to Revue Studios, a division of Universal Studios, he was writing as many as thirty-nine scores a year. Working at the intense pace required to produce fifteen to thirty minutes of original music a week, for shows such as Playhouse 90 and the Kraft Playhouse. This experience introduced him to the same time-intensive process as writing for films. He married Barbara Ruick in 1956, and they had three children. Ruick died in 1974, and he married Samantha Winslow in 1980.

In 1958 Williams scored his first film, Daddy-O. During the 1960s, he scored other films; generally light comedies, such as Bachelor Flat and Gidget Goes to Rome. For television, he wrote the themes to Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space series. He also scripted music for several television films and won an Emmy Award for Heidi and Jane Eyre. Even with this success, the passion of his work was film. In 1968 he was nominated for an Academy Award, and he won his first as a conductor-arranger for Fiddler on the Roof. The Poseidon Adventure demonstrated his mastery of disaster film scoring. It was, however, his work with Steven Spielberg in The Sugarland Express that led to one of the longest director-composer collaborations in Hollywood history. This partnership also had a profound effect on Williams’s success.

During this time, Williams continued to compose classical music, and he had also developed a reputation as a conductor. This led to his selection as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993. He conducted for a number of other orchestras, and in 1993 he was appointed artist in residence at Tanglewood, in Lenox, Massachusetts. He was tasked with teaching young film scorers how to develop their craft.

The Music

Early Works. Most of Williams’s early work was for television. With the increasing number of television shows in the 1950s, he had plenty of opportunities. Williams’s early work in film was as an orchestrator for established film composers, providing cues for films such as The Apartment (1960) and The Guns of Navarone (1961). Composing his own music, he wrote music for comedies (John Goldfarb, Please Come Home), disaster films ( The Towering Inferno), to cowboy dramas (such as The Missouri Breaks), and for Alfred Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot.

It was his work on Spielberg’s film Jaws that cemented his legacy. His score was influenced by Claude Debussy’s La Mer (1905) as well as by Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913). It is from the latter that the theme representing the great white shark was inspired. Years later, just a few notes of this theme are instantly recognized as the Jaws theme. Critic Timothy Scheurer comments that Williams’s score found the emotional core of the film, a mix of romance, mystery, and terror. For Jaws, Williams won his second Academy Award, and it was his first for original composition. Collaborating again with Spielberg—on the mystic, other-worldly Close Encounters of the Third Kind—Williams developed another memorable theme: a distinctive series of five notes, played on a synthesizer.

Star Wars. In addition to working with Spielberg, Williams began working with director George Lucas for the Star Wars series of films. The music for Star Wars has been described as a throwback to the grand style of film music, characterized by the work of Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold in the 1930s. Like Korngold’s work, the score includes both romance and adventure. The score also uses leitmotifs to represent different characters as well as actions. For example, the Princess Leia motif signifies the love between her and Han Solo. Star Wars was one of the first films to utilize a full orchestra. Williams knew his score would not work with a ten-piece orchestra, so he hired the London Symphony Orchestra. Williams’s score gained mainstream popularity, and it helped legitimize symphonic film music on record. The two-disc album was a commercial success, selling more than four million copies, and the film earned Williams another Academy Award.

Williams composed all nine scores for the Star Wars films. What was unprecedented, was that the also composed music for the three prequel films after Star Wars. Williams had to use previous themes and create new ones, refashioning the associations and memories of the earlier films into fresh themes. In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, for example, “Anakin’s Theme” has hints of the earlier “Imperial March.” Of particular note was the theme “Across the Stars,” introduced in Star Wars Episode II: The Attack of the Clones and representing the love of Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith has the most powerfully emotional music of the series, particularly the “Immolation Scene,” Williams’s elegy for a fallen hero. The Star Wars series includes more than twelve hours of music, as much music as Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas. He continued to produce scores for the trilogy of sequel films directed by J. J. Abrams, The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker.

Other Major Films. Over the years, other scores have brought additional awards for Williams as well as countless hours of pleasure for his listeners. Continuing his work with Spielberg, Williams’s score for Raiders of the Lost Ark is reminiscent of music for the early Hollywood Saturday-afternoon film serials, with their close calls for the hero and their musical assertions to underscore the hero vanquishing a villain or a physical obstacle. When Indiana Jones runs from the massive boulder at the beginning of the film and later successfully flees the Nazis, a brassy march theme, signifying Jones’s triumph, is used. Other recurrent themes are a religious-sounding motif, referencing the Ark of the Covenant, and the love theme underscoring the relationship between Jones and Marion. In a different vein, Williams’s rich orchestral score for E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, which resulted in his fourth Academy Award, includes themes reflecting innocence, friendship, and the exhilaration of flight. The final chase and farewell sequence is unusual in film history in that the on-screen action was re-edited to conform to Williams’s music.

Other scores feature specific instruments, such as the elegiac violin solo, played by world-class violinist Itzhak Perlman, for Schindler’s List. For this film, which earned Williams his fifth Academy Award, he wrote a theme reminiscent of a Hebrew lullaby. The theme is introduced halfway into the film, then presented again at certain intervals. Toward the end of the film, the solo piano, played by Williams, reiterates the theme.

In a number of films Williams effectively employs choral music. For Saving Private Ryan, Williams use humming, rather than words, to express emotion.

Classical Works. In addition to writing for film, Williams has written classical music. His Essay for Strings has been widely played. Many works, such as his Sinfonietta for Wind Ensemble, have been recorded. He has written a number of works featuring a specific instrument. In 1994 his Cello Concerto, composed for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, celebrated the opening of Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. His song cycle Seven for Luck, for soprano and orchestra, based on the poetry of Rita Dove, premiered at Tanglewood in 1998, with Williams conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Conductor. In addition to guest-conducting for a number of symphony orchestras, Williams was appointed conductor for the Boston Pops in 1980, following legendary conductor Arthur Fiedler. Williams said one of the reasons for his accepting the position was to “win some respect” for film composers. When Williams left the Boston Pops, he retained his ties to the organization as Laureate Conductor. He conducts Boston Pops concerts each year, and he has used Symphony Hall in Boston to record music.

Musical Legacy

Williams brought symphonic music to film scores. More than previous film composers Steiner and Korngold, Williams contributed to increased respectability for those who compose for film. Not only did he use music to underscore the images on the screen, the dialogue, and the sound effects, but also he brought music forward as a principal ingredient in the film. He used full orchestras, and he highlighted individual instruments. His film music is distinctive for its ability to stand on its own, apart from the film. Consequently, recordings of his scores have been commercially successful.

Although he has composed for a variety of venues, including themes for several Olympics Games and a song for the inauguration of President Barack Obama, it is through his music for film that Williams has made his most significant contribution. His music has reawakened the filmgoing public and studio executives to the value of traditional symphonic music as an important element in a film’s success, contributing to the storytelling and to the emotional content being developed by the director. In 2009 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama, and in 2016 he became the first composer to receive the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award.

In a 2022 interview, Williams, now ninety years old, announced he would be moving away from film scores. Although, before he stepped away, he composed the scores for 2022’s The Fabelmans, a semi-autobiographic film directed by Spielberg, and 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the latest installment in the long-running series. Williams received Oscar nominations for both films, making him the oldest Oscar nominee in film history.

A veteran of more than 100 film score productions, including some of the most iconic music contained in cinema, Williams expressed a desire for a change. Citing the typical six-month work cycle and deadlines required of a typical movie production, Williams professed his desire to focus on writing concert works. He stated a future intention for the types of collaboration he did with Yo-Yo Ma.

Bibliography

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Bond, Jeff. “God Almighty! FSM Finally Talks to John Williams.” Film Score Monthly 8, no. 1 (January, 2003): 10-13.

Darby, William, and Jack Du Bois. “John Williams.” In American Film Music: Major Composers, Techniques, Trends, 1915-1990. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990.

Dyer, Richard. “Latest Star Wars Score Is an Emotional Adventure.” Boston Globe, June 6, 2005, p. B7.

Hernandez, Javier C. "John Williams, Hollywood’s Maestro, Looks Beyond the Movies." The New York Times, 8 Feb. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/arts/music/john-williams-hollywood-film.html. 26 Sept. 2024.

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Ross, Alex. "The Force Is Still Strong with John Williams." The New Yorker, 21 July 2020, www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-force-is-still-strong-with-john-williams. 26 Sept. 2024.

Scheurer, Timothy E. “John Williams and Film Music Since 1971.” Popular Music and Society 21, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 59-72.

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