Concerto for Tuba and Orchestra
John Williams
J
ohn Williams is the pre-eminent composer
of Hollywood film music and has been for
more than four decades. But he is also a composer of concert music unconnected to films,
including a full-fledged symphony, a sinfonietta for wind ensemble, and a series of concertos, for flute, violin, tuba, clarinet, cello,
bassoon (titled Five Sacred Trees, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic), trumpet, horn, viola, harp, and oboe. Although his
scores cover a broad emotional range — the
tragic, the comedic, the epic, the intimate —
music lovers probably cherish Williams 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, including several Olympic Games.
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 became a composition pupil of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Arthur Olaf Andersen.
He 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, Raiders of
the Lost Ark, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones
and the Last Crusade, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s
List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Munich, and
Lincoln. The next Spielberg-Williams collaboration, The BFG, is slated for release this July.
But Williams’s scores have not been not limited to Spielberg hits. He concurrently maintained close working relationships with other
leading Hollywood directors, including Alfred
Hitchcock (A Family Plot), Brian de Palma (The
Fury), George Lucas (Star Wars), Oliver Stone
(Born on the Fourth of July), Irvin Kershner (The
Empire Strikes Back), Barry Levinson (Sleepers),
Ron Howard (Far and Away), and Rob Marshall
(Memoirs of a Geisha). He has now completed
nearly 80 film scores and has been recognized
with an impressive succession of honors, including five Academy Awards, four Golden
Globes, three Emmys, and 22 Grammys, in ad-
IN SHORT
Born: February 8, 1932, in Flushing, Queens,
New York City
Resides: Los Angeles, California
Work composed: 1984–85, on commission
from the Boston Pops Orchestra
World premiere: May 8, 1985, at Symphony
Hall in Boston, with the composer conducting
the Boston Pops, Chester Schmitz (the work’s
dedicatee), soloist
New York Philharmonic premiere: these
performances
Estimated duration: ca. 15 minutes
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dition 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 he
visits regularly as a guest conductor. He wrote
his Tuba Concerto as a centennial commission
from the Boston Pops. Cast in three connected
movements, the concerto trains the spotlight on
an instrument that is more accustomed to playing a supporting role. Its combination of lyricism,
agility, wit, and emotional drive makes us wonder that this behemoth of the brasses doesn’t
get more concerto outings. The instrument’s
virtuosic possibilities reach a high plane in the
first-movement cadenza, while the second
movement casts the tuba in gentler light, its
mellow timbre emerging out of orchestral writing of mysterious mien. In the finale, a rondo
that includes some brashly jazzy outbursts, the
tuba emerges as an acrobat, bustling along with
the vivacity normally encountered from instruments a fraction of its size.
Instrumentation: three flutes (one doubling
piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, trombone and bass trombone, timpani,
vibraphone, triangle, tambourine, cymbals,
drum set, harp, piano (doubling celeste), and
strings, in addition to the solo tuba.
In the Composer’s Words
The tuba music for which John Williams is most famous must be his characterization of Jabba the Hutt in
Return of the Jedi (1983). But the composer traces his fascination with the instrument to a film score he penned
16 years earlier, in 1967. Explaining his decision to compose a Tuba Concerto, Williams said:
I really don’t know why I wrote it — just an urge and an
instinct. I’ve always liked the tuba and even used to play
it a little. I wrote a big tuba solo for a Dick Van Dyke movie
called Fitzwilly and ever since I’ve kept composing for it —
it’s such an agile instrument, like a huge cornet. I’ve also
put passages in for some of my pets in the orchestra:
solos for the flute and English horn, for the horn quartet
and a trio of trumpets. It’s light and tuneful and I hope it
has enough events in it to make it fun.
The sound track to Fitzwilly, John Williams’s first foray into
writing for the tuba
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