John Williams (b. 1932)

John Williams was born in 1932 in New York City. He showed early promise as a pianist, and he had already developed an interest in harmony and musical structure when the family relocated to Los Angeles after World War II. In L.A., he continued his studies with the pianist and arranger Bobby Epps. After serving in the US Air Force, mostly as a bandmaster, he enrolled at Juilliard. He was a diligent student by day, and at night he played jazz piano on recordings and in the clubs and cafes of Greenwich Village.

Returning to Los Angeles in 1956, his life became extremely busy. He worked as a studio pianist, and assisted two of the great masters of film music, Bernard Hermann (most famous for his work with Hitchcock) and Franz Waxman (who created the music for Sunset Boulevard and dozens of other classics). He also began writing music for television, composed the music for several TV series, and became an arranger, conductor and pianist for Columbia Records. He was mastering his craft.

During the sixties, Williams began to work exclusively in film, and scored a string of low-budget comedies. In 1966, he composed his first score for a major hit movie: William Wyler’s comedy-thriller How to Steal a Million, starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. Over the next few years, he demonstrated his range. The Reivers (1969) was a slice of American Gothic; Jane Eyre (1971) exhibited his gift for dramatic lyricism and sounded authentically “English”; The Cowboys (1972) gave Williams the opportunity to explore epic and elegiac modes; The Poseidon Adventure (1972) was a large-scale disaster movie and owed a great debt to Williams’s effects of tension and suspense. He also developed a relationship with the great independent filmmaker, Robert Altman: Williams provided a delicate counterpoint to the Bergmanesque psychological drama Images (1972), and a beautifully-crafted pastiche film noir score for his thriller The Long Goodbye (1973).

Williams’s long association with Steven Spielberg began in 1974, with The Sugarland Express, and continued with Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). These, along with his epic score for George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), established Williams’s music as the sound of the new generation of American blockbuster. His use of a full symphony orchestra contrasted with the rock scores of the sixties and early seventies, and his music achieved a characteristic grandeur that matched the huge special effects. He has continued to collaborate with both Spielberg and Lucas.

His collaboration with Oliver Stone has made demands of an altogether different sort on Williams’s talents. A filmmaker of fiercely independent spirit, Stone characteristically bombards his screen with fragmentary images, and often rejects conventional narrative in favor of collage. Williams’s scores for Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991), and Nixon (1995) show an extraordinary empathy with Stone’s often maverick visions.

Williams’s output is as astonishing as the sheer variety of his work. In recent years he has provided scores for the Harry Potter movies, plumbed the depths of despair in Angela’s Ashes (1999), and gave an appropriately oddball sixties feel to Catch Me If You Can (2002). His brooding, atmospheric score for Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) is a masterpiece. He is the winner of five Oscars.

Williams has composed a number of concert works, both for chamber groups and full orchestra. In 1980 he succeeded Arthur Fiedler as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and he is a frequent guest conductor with major orchestras in the United States and around the world.

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