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Notes on the Program
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator, The Leni and Peter May Chair
J
ohn Williams has been the pre-eminent
composer of Hollywood film music 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, he 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 CastelnuovoTedesco 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 emotional states. A
selective list of his scores for more than 20
Spielberg films includes “must-hear” entries
such as: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Jurassic
Park (1993), Schindler’s List (1993), Saving
Private Ryan (1998), and Lincoln (2012).
Williams concurrently maintained close
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
John Williams
Born: February 8, 1932, in Flushing, Queens, New York
Resides: Los Angeles, California
Work composed: 1982
World premiere: Universal Pictures’s public release date for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was
June 11, 1982
New York Philharmonic premiere: selection from E.T. first performed February 10, 2004, in a
program of music by John Williams,
conducted by the composer; these
performances mark the New York
Premiere of the complete score
Most recent New York Philharmonic
performance: selections from E.T.,
most recently performed May 24, 2016,
David Newman, conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 115 minutes
Elliott (Henry Thomas) discovering one
of his new friend’s powers
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working relationships with other leading
Hollywood directors. For George Lucas he
provided the memorable musical underpinnings for Star Wars (1977); Star Wars, the
Phantom Menace (1999); and 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 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, Williams has now completed
a hundred, not counting television movies,
shorts, or adaptations. Star Wars: The Last
Jedi, scheduled for release this coming December, will be No. 101. He has been recognized with an impressive succession of
honors, among them five Academy Awards
(including for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), four
Golden Globes (again including E.T.), three
Emmys, and 23 Grammys (including, yes,
E.T.), in addition to induction into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame (in 2000), a
Kennedy Center Honor (in 2004), and the
National Medal of Arts (2009). In 2016 he became the first composer to receive the AFI
Life Achievement Award.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was an extraordinary blockbuster. It overtook Star Wars as
the top-grossing film and occupied that
niche for 11 years, until it was surpassed in
turn by Jurassic Park. (All three of those
In the Composer’s Words
One of the experiences in my work with Steven Spielberg on E.T. that’s most clear in my mind had to
do with the end of the movie. … That sequence involved a lot of specific musical cues: an accent for
each speed bump of the bicycle; a very dramatic accent for the police car; a special lift for the bicycles taking off …. So you can imagine in the space of that 15 minutes of film how many precise
musical accents are needed and how each one
has to be exactly in the right place. I wrote the
music mathematically to configure with each of
those occurrences and worked it all out. Then
when the orchestra assembled and I had the film
in front of me, I … was never able to get a perfect
recording that felt right musically and emotionally. I kept trying over and over again and finally,
I said to Steven, “I don’t think I can get this right.
Maybe I need to do something else.” And he said,
“Why don’t you take the movie off? Don’t look at
it. Forget the movie and conduct the orchestra
the way you would want to conduct it in a concert so that the performance is just completely
uninhibited by any considerations of mathematics and measurement.” And I did that and all of
us agreed that the music felt better. Then Steven
re-edited slightly the last part of the film to configure with the musical performance that I felt
was more powerful emotionally.
— John Williams
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boast scores by Williams.) E.T. has now spent
35 years moving children to tears (not in a
bad way, ultimately) along with many of their
parents. A fable about friendship and the sacrifice it may entail, E.T. stands at 14th place
on the American Film Institute’s 2005 ranking of the 25 finest film scores. Other
Williams scores have stood at No. 1 (Star
Wars) and No. 6 (Jaws), making him the only
composer to appear thrice on the list.
Williams has also composed numerous
orchestral concert pieces, including a fullfledged symphony and a series of 15 concertos, including The Five Sacred Trees, written
for New York Philharmonic Principal Bassoon Judith LeClair and premiered by the orchestra in 1995 as part of its 150th Anniversary
commissions; he 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.
Instrumentation: three flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes (one doubling English horn), three clarinets (one doubling
E-flat clarinet and one doubling bass
clarinet), three bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets,
three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion,
harp, piano (doubling celeste), organ,
and strings.
Views and Reviews
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was an instant hit upon its release in 1982, but the film’s impact resonates
more than three decades later. The late film critic Roger Ebert put it this way:
This movie made my heart glad. It is filled with innocence, hope, and good cheer. It is also
wickedly funny and exciting as hell. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a movie like The Wizard of Oz that
you can grow up with and grow old with, and it won’t let you down. It tells a story about friendship and love …. It works as science fiction, it’s sometimes as scary as a monster movie, and at
the end, when the lights go up, there’s not a dry eye in the house … E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a
reminder of what movies are for.
Most movies are not for any one
thing, of course. Some are to
make us think, some to make us
feel, some to take us away from
our problems, some to help us examine them. What is enchanting
about E.T. is that, in some measure, it does all of those things.
— The Editors
Drew Barrymore, as Gertie, and E.T.
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