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NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator
The Leni and Peter May Chair
A John Williams Celebration
J
ohn Williams is the pre-eminent composer
of Hollywood film music and has been for
more than four decades. The son of a film studio musician, he grew up studying first piano
and then trombone, trumpet, and clarinet.
When his family moved to Los Angeles, in 1948,
Williams began working with the jazz pianist
and arranger Bobby Van Eps. During the early
1950s he did a stint in the Air Force (conducting and orchestrating for bands) and studied
piano at Juilliard for a year with Rosina
Lhévinne. Later that decade, he studied composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and
Arthur Olaf Andersen.
Williams orchestrated numerous feature films
in the 1960s and by the 1970s emerged as an important film-score composer in his own right.
Ronald Neame’s The Poseidon Adventure (1973)
marked one of his first incontrovertible successes as a film composer, but his great breakthrough came two years later with Steven
Spielberg’s aquatic thriller, Jaws. Spielberg went
on to deliver Hollywood classics of widely diverse character, and Williams became the composer of choice for music that would mirror,
support, and advance their action and their
emotional states. A selective list of Williams’s
scores for more than 20 ensuing Spielberg films
includes many “must hear” entries, including
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders
of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(1984), Empire of the Sun (1987), Indiana Jones
and the Last Crusade (1989), Jurassic Park (1993),
Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), The Lost
World (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch
Me If You Can (2002), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), War of the Worlds (2005),
Munich (2005), and Lincoln (2012).
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But Williams’s scores were not limited to
Spielberg hits. He concurrently maintained close
working relationships with other leading Hollywood directors. For George Lucas he provided
the memorable musical underpinnings for Star
Wars (1977); Star Wars: Episode I — the Phantom
Menace (1999); and Episode II — Attack of the
Clones (2002). For Oliver Stone he supplied
scores for Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK
(1991), and Nixon (1995). He composed music for
Alfred Hitchcock’s A Family Plot (1976), for Irvin
IN SHORT
Born: February 8, 1932, in Flushing, Queens,
New York City
Resides: Los Angeles, California
Works composed and premiered: For New
York, composed in 1988; premiered August 28,
1988, at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, with the composer conducting the
Boston Symphony Orchestra. Jane Eyre, composed in 1970; the made-for-TV movie first aired
in December 1970 in Great Britain. Schindler’s
List, composed in 1993; the film opened on
February 4, 1994. Music for additional films
composed in the year of their premieres: Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, opened on
December 25, 1977; Memoirs of a Geisha,
on December 23, 2005; Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer’s Stone, on November 16, 2001;
Jaws, on June 20, 1975; Born on the Fourth of
July, on January 5, 1990; Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade, on May 24, 1989; Star Wars
Episode VII: The Force Awakens, on December
16, 2015; Star Wars (later renamed Star Wars:
Episode IV — A New Hope), on May 25, 1977
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Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back (1980), for
Richard Marquand’s Return of the Jedi (1983), for
Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone (2001), for Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a
Geisha (2005), and for J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars:
Episode VII — The Force Awakens (2015). Often
working at a pace of about two film scores per
year, he has now completed almost 80, and in
the course of doing so he has been recognized
with an impressive succession of honors, among
them five Academy Awards (including for Jaws,
Star Wars, and Schindler’s List), four Golden
Globes (including for Jaws, Star Wars, and Memoirs of a Geisha), three Emmys (including one for
Jane Eyre), and 22 Grammys, in addition to induction into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame
(in 2000) and a Kennedy Center Honor (in 2004).
Williams has arranged selections from many
of his film scores into stand-alone concert
suites, which he has conducted not only with
the Boston Pops Orchestra (which he served as
music director from 1980 to 1993, after which
he became its laureate conductor) but also
with many of the leading symphony orchestras
that he visits regularly as a guest conductor. He
also remains active as a composer of orchestral
concert pieces not connected to films, including
a full-fledged symphony and a series of concertos, for flute, violin, clarinet, cello, bassoon
Angels and Muses
For New York, the three-minute curtain-raiser that
opens this program, was first heard under a different
title: To Lenny! To Lenny! John Williams composed it
for the 70th-birthday celebration for Leonard Bernstein
that the Boston Symphony Orchestra mounted in August 1988 at the Tanglewood Music Center, where
Bernstein taught conducting students, hobnobbed
with budding composers, and coached the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. At the final event of the
four-day celebration, Seiji Ozawa conducted A Bernstein Birthday Bouquet, Eight Variations on a Theme
by Leonard Bernstein. The theme was “New York, New
York,” from Bernstein’s 1944 musical On the Town, and
the variations were composed by (in the order presented) Luciano Berio, Leon Kirchner, Jacob Druckman, Lukas Foss, John Corigliano, Williams, Toru
Takemitsu, and William Schuman. At the time Williams
served as music director of the BSO’s sibling orchestra, the Boston Pops. Covering the event for The New
York Times, critic John Rockwell wrote:
The variations … tended to quote other works by
Mr. Bernstein or notable symphonic works he has
conducted. A goodly number also managed to work
in “Happy Birthday.”
Williams’s variation, which Rockwell described as
“feathery and flashy,” meets up with “New York, New
York,” but it also incorporates allusions to “America”
from West Side Story, “Lonely Town” from On the
Town, and — yes — just a dollop of “Happy Birthday.”
In the Composer’s Words
For most of us, the ominous, two-note shark theme is synonymous with the film score of Jaws. And while
its composer has described the line as “grinding away at you, just as a shark would do, instinctual, relentless, unstoppable,” John Williams has also cited his own preference for the swashbuckling moments of “The
Barrel Chase”:
My own favorite cue in the film has always been the
barrel chase sequence, where the shark approaches the boat and the three heroes think they
have captured it. The music accelerates and becomes very exciting and heroic. Suddenly, as the
shark overpowers them and eventually escapes,
the music deflates with a little sea-chant called
“Spanish Lady.” The score musically illustrates and
punctuates all of this dramatic outline.
— The Editors
Encounter at sea, in a scene from Jaws
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(commissioned by the New York Philharmonic),
trumpet, horn, viola, harp, and oboe. Philharmonic Principal Tuba Alan Baer will make his
solo debut with the Orchestra in performances
of Williams’s Tuba Concerto this week.
The listening public has grown to appreciate John Williams as an indispensable voice of
our time. Although his scores cover a broad
emotional range — the tragic, the comedic, the
epic, the intimate — music lovers probably
cherish him most for the heroic optimism that
often pervades his music. It seems perfectly
natural that he should have been tapped to
provide fanfares and theme music for the most
festive and hopeful of occasions, right up to
several of the Olympic Games.
Sources and Inspirations
Throughout his collaborations with various directors,
including his decades-long association with Steven
Spielberg, John Williams has made it his practice to not
read film scripts, but to begin working out score ideas
to the film footage, which helps give him a sense of
the setting and mood. At a 2009 concert at Boston’s
Symphony Hall (at which Spielberg was also in attendance), Williams told the audience that he was flabbergasted when he saw a rough cut of Schindler’s List:
I had to walk around the room for four or five minutes to catch my breath. I said to Steven, “I really
think you need a better composer than I am for
this film.” And he very sweetly said, “I know, but
they’re all dead.”
A scene from Schindler’s List
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