John Williams at 90!
- Anastasia Stanmeyer
- Aug 16, 2022
- 14 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
THE PROLIFIC COMPOSER'S WORK IS THE SOUNDTRACK TO OUR LIVES
By Anastasia Stanmeyer and Joshua Sherman, M.D.
From the pages of our August 2022 Issue.
For young and old, musicians and moviegoers, stars and storytellers, the name, “John Williams” is part of America’s vernacular. To repeat a phrase that has been used more than a few times, “He’s the soundtrack to our lives,” says Tony Fogg, who has worked closely with Williams since Fogg became artistic administrator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1994. Williams has written more than 100 film scores, many of which are the most recognizable and critically acclaimed soundtracks of all time—Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Indiana Jones, Superman, Schindler’s List, and Harry Potter.
Born and raised in New York, Williams moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1948, where he studied composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. After service in the Air Force, he returned to New York to attend the Juilliard School, where he studied piano with Rosina Lhevinne. While in New York, he also worked as a jazz pianist, both in nightclubs and on recordings. He returned to Los Angeles and began his career in the film industry.
“When John became active in Hollywood, he reintroduced the orchestra to film scoring,” says Fogg. “He reintroduced the glories of the full orchestra that were in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—Waxman, Korngold, Herrmann. They had a certain tradition, and he took up that tradition again. What resulted is a whole new generation of film scorers and composers. We owe John a great debt.”
Williams has composed numerous works for cultural and commemorative events, as well as symphonies and concertos for flute, violin, clarinet, viola, trumpet, cello, oboe, and tuba. His career spans seven decades, garnering him 25 Grammy® Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, five Academy Awards®, three Emmys®, and four Golden Globes. He has said that The Fabelmans (his 29th film collaboration with Steven Spielberg) and the fifth Indiana Jones are the last two films he will score before retirement. Next, he plans to write a piano concerto for pianist Emanuel Ax.
Williams has been a great friend of Tanglewood through the years, starting with the Boston Pops, in which he was named 19th conductor, succeeding the legendary Arthur Fiedler. He led for 14 seasons beginning in January 1980 and has been a significant presence at Tanglewood ever since.
His heart and soul are there, in Tanglewood, where he says he has a spiritual connection to the great figures that represent its history. Most summers, Williams can be found wandering the grounds, deep in thought, most likely composing in his head, as Fogg puts it. Williams quietly came up with the idea and pushed forward a project to immortalize the key individuals at Tanglewood. New England artist Penelope Jencks sculpted the busts of Serge Koussevitzky, who founded the music festival in 1937; Leonard Bernstein, who led the BSO in many memorable performances and was a conducting fellow in the first class of Tanglewood Music Center (TMC); and composer Aaron Copland, who taught at the first summer of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood and continued until 1965. All the sculptures are found on Tanglewood’s grounds.
Nobody would argue against the notion that Williams himself is among these greats. He crossed into his 90th year on February 8, and the birthday celebrations have been ongoing. Washington’s Kennedy Center fêted Williams with a series of performances in June. Tanglewood will host its own birthday event on August 20, with special guests including James Taylor, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Branford Marsalis, and others. This celebration will be extra-special because it will welcome a much larger audience than at Symphony Hall, says Fogg. The Los Angeles Philharmonic will celebrate Williams’s 90th at its Annual Gala Concert on September 27.
On August 2, a very special Tanglewood on Parade also is planned. This annual day is one of the highlights of the season, offering free kids’ activities and TMC performances throughout the afternoon. Later, Williams will join conductors Thomas Adès, Stefan Asbury, JoAnn Falletta, and Thomas Wilkins for the 8 p.m. concert with music from the BSO, Boston Pops, and TMC Orchestra.
Williams opened up a different world to Tanglewood by bringing great artists across many different genres and art forms, says Fogg. “He enriched the offerings we have and brought a certain notoriety to the festival. There is this sense of dignity he has that just brings another dimension to what do here.”
That dignity is no more apparent than when Williams is in conversation. We connected with Williams by phone from his home in Los Angeles. The talk, which follows, reveals his incredible kindness and humility that old friends and new acquaintances alike say about him.
What does Tanglewood mean to you, and what are your most memorable moments? I’ve had so many that it will be hard to list them. I am a member of the army of people, past and present, who love the Berkshires and its magic and its particular spiritual quality. When I started to go to Tanglewood, Seiji Ozawa was our music director for all of those many years, nearly 30 years.
I have wonderful memories of Seiji and all the marvelous people who performed with us. My mind runs very quickly to people like Jessye Norman, who came and sang with us, and, of course, Yo-Yo Ma, who played with me and with other wonderful artists coming in. It’s been just the most magnificent and memorable experience every year. I’m just a person who loves the place and everything about it, and I’m a little jealous of all of you who live up there.
How would you say Tanglewood has changed since you first have come here? I don’t sense any changes. The level of quality and expertise of the young people who come in as students has always been extremely high. It’s always been a benchmark for graduate study, particularly in the student orchestra, which is the part of the program that I know the best. I don’t sense a lot of great change from year to year. It seems to me like classic Tanglewood and Massachusetts and the Northeastern part of the country. It’s delightful.
What do you enjoy most about the Berkshires? The first thing that comes to my mind is music. There isn’t a festival like it anywhere in the United States. Tanglewood is the high mark of American advanced music studies. Also, it’s kind of a mecca. Paul Fromm was a philanthropist from Chicago who contributed so much to Tanglewood, to contemporary music, such as concerts with Gunther Schuller and Leon Fleisher. As is today, the most gifted composers were invited to come. This year, we have Thomas Adès. From a musical point, it’s unique. People who go boating or whatever their vacation thing is, they will speak to that far better than I can. My interest has always been the magnetism of what it does in music education. The Festival of Contemporary Music is like nothing else in the world. There are European equivalents, but it’s fair enough to say it’s the standard of the world in these educational aspects and its mission.
Tony Fogg painted this picture of you walking the grounds of Tanglewood and immersing yourself in the greats who have also walked the campus. Would you say that’s true? That’s absolutely true. There’s a very definite spiritual aspect to that place. Its history is part of it, the luminaries who have been there and contributed so greatly. Like the trees, it’s almost palpable. You can feel the spirit of the place. Its goal seems to be to serve beauty and to serve truth.
On the corporeal, physical side of it, just simply to walk around the campus is, for me, one of the great pleasures. The expansion of the new area, the Linde Center, is a change that isn’t a change. It feels like it’s been there forever. It so belongs from an architectural point of view, from a spiritual point of view, from the point of view of the landscape and so on. I say it all the time: It’s a magical place.
Do you have a certain orchestra like the BSO or the Boston Pops in your mind as you’re creating music? We have so many wonderful orchestras in the country, I can’t say that I write for a particular one. I might write for particular individuals in that orchestra. When writing solo pieces, like Schindler’s List, I knew that the violinist was going to be Itzhak Perlman, so I had his actual sound in my mind, as much as I could conjure such a thing. His beautiful, very highly personal sound. I wrote all of Schindler’s List at Tanglewood, and I had Itzhak very much in my mind as I was writing the pieces.
What are your favorite music scores that you’ve written? E.T. is a particular favorite film of mine, and I continue to think of it as Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece. If you look at the performances of the children in that film, it’s so real, so honest, such a simple and powerful film. The end of the film is fabulously musical in a way. It might not be my favorite score that I’ve written, but it’s my favorite combination of film and score together, audio/visual joining together. As we were making the film and doing the mu- sic, recording it, it just felt like we were joining parts that had been separated forever and needed to be brought together. It was a magical experience for me, and therefore one of my favorite examples of music combined with film.
What were some of your most challenging scores? It’s like asking a baseball player, what was his most challenging game. Every one is tough. They’re starting with a blank page and a blank frame. They all have their difficulties. Things that seem very simple can be thornily difficult, and ones that take great virtuosity from the orchestra, may not be that hard from a conceptual point of view. It’s a very difficult question to answer with any precision.
Do you have a regular schedule? I write pretty much six and a half days a week. At the moment, I’m working on Indiana Jones number five. We’ve been recording with the orchestra this week. I do most of my composing in the morning—these days almost all of it—and the afternoons I read, and I try to walk an hour a day. Referring back to Tony Fogg, when I am at Tanglewood I love to walk the campus once or twice a day if I can, for exercise and for an antidote to the sedentary job of sitting in a chair and writing music. It keeps me moving and exercising to some degree. Evenings, I very often will look at the music I wrote in the morning with a more objective view. I work for 45 minutes or an hour at night, editing what I’ve done in the morning, and I find that’s very helpful, because I have a chance to rethink a little bit what I wrote at speed in the morning.
I believe that you’re also working on something for Emanuel Ax, is that correct? Oh, I will be. I want to write a concerto for Manny, as everyone calls him. He’s one of the world’s greatest pianists and most wonderful people. I just mentioned that I was wanting to write a piano concerto, and he said, “Oh, well, I’d love to do it. Let me have it.” So I told him when I finished with it, I’m going to submit it to him and it will be my greatest honor if he would be willing and have time in his schedule to play it. At the moment, every intention I have is to do it. It probably wouldn’t be ready until next year, because I won’t be finished with what I’m writing now until October. But that will be my next large project. It will take me through probably the early half of next year with Providence ruling and the vagaries of life allowing such a thing. So the short answer is yes, which I look forward greatly to. Any minutes that I can spend with Emanuel Ax are a great joy.
What kind of music do you listen to, and are there any artists out there whom you’d be excited to work with? The answer to the second part of the question is: a lot of people. Professional composers might describe me as someone who listens to music very little. I’m writing all the time, and listening to other people’s music is a distraction. What I do more than listening to music for pleasure is to go to concerts. I will go downtown to Disney Hall and listen to The Los Angeles Philharmonic, usually conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. I miss an awful lot of things that Gustavo does because of my work schedule and the difficulty of getting down there after my working day. For me, it’s mostly writing music, trying to conceive music that’s appropriate for the projects I’m doing.
You’ve spoken about your relationship with Steven Spielberg, but when you’re working with a new director, how do you establish that work and that process? Well, it’s an interpersonal relationship. I need to see his or her film and have discussions with that person and begin to write and share the music that I compose with them.
It’s as complicated as any interpersonal relationship between people can be. That’s the best way I can describe something general in a summary way. It’s a matter of personalities and collaborative abilities with people. I don’t know if I can give you a better answer than that. It’s a people question, not a music question. It’s complicated, and it’s always rewarding to meet fascinating people and learn from them and maybe even instruct them a little bit in some of the aspects of what we’re doing. I’m working with a director James Mangold for the first time and am enjoying him very much. He’s a wonderfully good-humored person with a lot of patience and very gifted. He has all the tools to do some very good work. And, of course, it’s a very different relationship than I have with Steven, which is now 50 years old. It’s almost like family.
Do you read the script ahead of time or do you wait for the actual film to inspire you? It’s better to see the film. With any kind of reading, you form preconceptions visually, and it will always be different than what the director might envision. Also from the point of view of storyline, it’s better to have a virginal reaction without any preconceptions at all to the timing of the film, the shape of it, and so on, the rhythmic aspects of the film, when are events surprising, when are events seeming inevitable or not. I think a composer really has to feel the film rhythmically in a way that is impossible to do from reading a script. There’s no sense of timing in a script. You don’t know how long five pages are. It could be 20 seconds of film or a couple of minutes of film. From a timing point of view, at least for me, a script is not helpful.
Is there an example where you actually felt the tempo has been off in an edit and suggested if they change the edit to go longer or shorter, you’d be able to do something with the music to give it some extra energy or to slow it down? Do you tend to make those types of suggestions, or do you tend to work off of what is given to you by the director? Usually we try to work in sync with the director’s cut. There’s a lot of people working on building sound effects when an entire soundtrack is being constructed. To add a few frames for one particular interest, someone who is working on the rain or the car engine noise, I think it’s a good idea to keep the team in sync even just from the point of view of schedule and everyone’s sanity. However, there are a lot of instances where I can say to a director, and I have said so, if something can be extended slightly, I can finish a phrase in a more musical way and give us a little more lift. It does happen, but rarely in complicated action sequences where there are so many tracks involved. Every case is individual, and it has a lot to do with when the composer joins the editing process. When I think of JFK with Oliver Stone, for example, one of his ideas was that there were so many conflicting stories about eyewitness accounts of the assassination of President Kennedy that he wanted to shoot three versions by three different observers. So, I wrote three different pieces of music, to which he planned to edit the three versions. He did, to some extent, do that. That’s an example of where we actually pre-recorded underscore music. It happens from time to time, but not very often.
Do you have a large volume of trunk music that the world has never heard? No, I don’t. (Laughs) I have many large trunks of music I have written over the years. Unused fragments usually go out the door. I haven’t collected those; I’m working along and discarding things every day. I don’t keep them.
What advice do you have for today’s musicians who aspire to be the next John Williams? We need to be very serious about working and very patient about trying to achieve results. Every film that we make, it will be intended to be a masterpiece at its inception, and we can’t always have that, which means that we can't always have the kind of immediate success that we perhaps would like to have. As with anything in life, sustained hard work is better than hard work itself, and give it the time, and make your goal music itself, and things will evolve more positively. That’s the God to serve. Doing that, I think, is going to give the greatest amount of joy for people who work in music, and that’s what we should seek. That’s where the spiritual aspects and rewards all come from. When we think in terms of how much we owe music itself, you and I wouldn’t be talking on the phone now if it weren’t for music. And we all have that debt. If we serve that debt, we will have done the best we can. That’s my thought.
Do you have a natural musical rhythm that you tend to fall into when you hear a piece of music or think of a piece of music? We need to remember that music is probably older than language itself. We would have been beating on logs or blowing reeds or conch shells. Music and the rhythms that are part of it, are part of our physiology, part of our nature that have been with us forever. It’s like oxygen. Music is an element that sustains our life.
How has your process altered over the years as a result of the change with the digital world of music? How has it changed from your first film with Steven Spielberg to now, in terms of your actual writing process and the creation of the music? In my case, it’s changed not at all. I still use a pencil and paper the same way that I’ve always done. Of course, it means that I’m slower than my younger colleagues, because I have to write every note out and every duplication of a different key or whatever. Steven’s technology has changed quite a bit. For many years, he was a hold out and would only work in 35 mm and edit that way and so on. As a composer and with an editor, we use a 35 mm dupe to time everything on what is now a sort of medieval torture instrument. The physical technology is all digitized now. The recording processing that was analog is now all a digital system. Not entirely an improvement—the analog 35 mm recording processes gave us a beautiful string sound, and now they’re a little bit high-end accentuated in some ways. So, there’s been some progress. My younger colleagues all work with synthesizers and add track upon track on the recording processes, something they call “striping” of each musical section by itself and so on. In my case, I write the music and we assemble an orchestra and play it just as one might have done in 1850 instead of 1950. That makes me a dinosaur, but at this point in life, I accept that and I’m happy to work with my antediluvian methodology.
Comments