John Williams
John Towner Williams is an American composer and conductor. Over his seven-decade career, he has composed many of the best known scores in film history. His compositional style blends romanticism, impressionism, and atonal music with complex orchestration. Best known for his collaborations with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, he has received numerous accolades, including 26 Grammy Awards, five Academy Awards, seven BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. With a total of 54 Academy Award nominations, he is the second-most nominated person in the award's history, after Walt Disney. He is also the oldest Academy Award nominee in any category, receiving a nomination at 91 years old.
Williams's early work as a film composer includes None but the Brave, Valley of the Dolls, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Images and The Cowboys, The Long Goodbye and The Towering Inferno. He has collaborated with Spielberg since The Sugarland Express, composing music for all but five of his feature films. He received five Academy Awards for Best Score/Best Score Adaptation for Fiddler on the Roof, Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Schindler's List. Other memorable collaborations with Spielberg include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Indiana Jones franchise, Hook, Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can, War Horse, Lincoln, and The Fabelmans. He also scored Superman and two of its sequels, the first two Home Alone films, and the first three Harry Potter films. Outside of his long-term collaborations with Spielberg and Lucas, Williams has composed the scores for films directed by William Wyler, Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, John Badham, George Miller, Oliver Stone, Chris Columbus, Ron Howard, Barry Levinson, John Singleton, Alan Parker, Alfonso Cuarón, and Rob Marshall.
Williams has also composed numerous classical concertos and other works for orchestral ensembles and solo instruments. He served as the Boston Pops' principal conductor from 1980 to 1993 and is its laureate conductor. Other works by Williams include theme music for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games; NBC Sunday Night Football; "The Mission" theme ; PBS's Great Performances and the television series Lost in Space, Land of the Giants and Amazing Stories.
Williams received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2004, the National Medal of the Arts in 2009, and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2016. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1998, the Hollywood Bowl's Hall of Fame in 2000 and the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 2004. He has composed the scores for nine of the top 25 highest-grossing films at the U.S. box office. In 2022, Williams was awarded an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, "for services to film music". In 2005, the American Film Institute placed Williams' score to Star Wars first on its list AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores; his scores for Jaws and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial also made the list. The Library of Congress entered the Star Wars soundtrack into the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Early life
John Towner Williams was born on February 8, 1932, in Queens, New York, to Esther and Johnny Williams, a jazz drummer and percussionist who played with the Raymond Scott Quintet. He has an older sister, Joan, and two younger brothers, Jerry and Don, who play on his film scores. Williams said of his lineage: "My father was a Maine man—we were very close. My mother was from Boston. My father's parents ran a department store in Bangor, Maine, and my mother's father was a cabinetmaker." John Williams collaborated with Bernard Herrmann, and his son sometimes joined him in rehearsals. Like his father, he was also known as Johnny Williams into his young adult life, but he later went by John Williams.In 1948, the Williams family moved to Los Angeles. John attended North Hollywood High School and graduated in 1950. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied composition privately with the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Williams also attended Los Angeles City College for one semester to play for the school's studio jazz band.
In 1951, Williams joined the U.S. Air Force, where he played the piano and bass, as well as conducted and arranged music for the U.S. Air Force Band. In March 1952, he was assigned to the Northeast Air Command 596th Air Force Band and was stationed at Pepperrell Air Force Base in St. John's, Newfoundland. He also attended music courses at the University of Arizona during his service.
In 1955, following his service, Williams moved to New York City and was accepted into Juilliard, where he studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne. He originally planned on becoming a concert pianist, but after hearing contemporary pianists like John Browning and Van Cliburn perform, he switched his focus to composition, recalling that he "could write better than could play." During his studies, Williams found work in many of the city's jazz clubs as a pianist.
Career
Early career
Following his studies at Juilliard and the Eastman School of Music, Williams moved to Los Angeles, where he began working as an orchestrator at film studios. During this period, Williams worked with such composers as Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman, and with fellow orchestrators Conrad Salinger and Bob Franklyn.Williams was also a studio pianist and session musician, performing scores by Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein and Henry Mancini. One of his first jobs was working under mentor Alfred Newman with an uncredited orchestral role for Carousel, which coincidentally starred his soon-to-be wife Barbara Ruick.
With Mancini, he recorded the scores of Peter Gunn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Days of Wine and Roses and Charade, and played the piano part of the guitar-piano ostinato in Mancini's Peter Gunn title theme. With Elmer Bernstein, he performed the scores for Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success and Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird. Williams was also the pianist of Billy Wilder's The Apartment, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's West Side Story and Blake Edwards's The Great Race.
He released several jazz albums under the name Johnny Williams, including Jazz Beginnings, World on a String and The John Towner Touch. Williams also served as music arranger and bandleader for a series of popular music albums alongside Ray Vasquez and Frankie Laine.
Film and television scoring
Rise to prominence
In 1952, Williams wrote his first film composition while stationed at Pepperrell Air Force Base for You Are Welcome, a promotional film created for the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador tourist information office. Williams' first feature film composition was for Daddy-O, followed two years later by Because They're Young. Williams also composed music for television, including Bachelor Father, the Kraft Suspense Theatre, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants, the latter three created by producer Irwin Allen. He also worked on several episodes of M Squad and Checkmate and the pilot episode of Gilligan's Island.The American-Japanese anti-war epic None ''but the Brave marked the beginning of Williams' full transition from television to major Hollywood film composing, and shaped his style for future blockbusters. A Variety reviewer highlighted his score for providing "excellent background". The film was also Williams' first collaboration with Frank Sinatra, who directed and starred in it. He later conducted for Sinatra at venues such as a Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center gala.
Williams called William Wyler's How to Steal a Million "the first film ever did for a major, super-talent director". He received his first Academy Award nomination for his score for Valley of the Dolls, and was once again nominated for Goodbye, Mr. Chips. His first Oscar was for Best Scoring: Adaptation and Original Song Score for Fiddler on the Roof. He scored Robert Altman's psychological thriller Images and his neo-noir The Long Goodbye. Of the latter, Pauline Kael wrote, "Williams' music is a parody of the movies' frequent overuse of a theme, and a demonstration of how adaptable a theme can be." Altman, known for giving actors free rein, had a similar approach to Williams, telling him to "do whatever you want. Do something you haven't done before."
His prominence grew in the early 1970s thanks to his work for Irwin Allen's disaster films, such as The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake. Williams named his Images score as a favorite; he recalls "the score used all kinds of effects for piano, percussion, and strings... if I had never written film scores, if I had proceeded writing concert music, it might have been in this vein". As it happened, Williams' scores for The Reivers and The Cowboys'' shaped the direction of his career.
Collaborations with Steven Spielberg
Williams' scores for The Reivers and The Cowboys impressed a young Steven Spielberg, who was getting ready to direct his feature debut, The Sugarland Express, and requested Williams. Williams recalled, "I met what looked to be this seventeen-year-old kid, this very sweet boy, who knew more about film music than I did—every Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin score. We had a meeting in a fancy Beverly Hills restaurant, arranged by executives. It was very cute—you had the feeling Steven had never been in a restaurant like that before. It was like having lunch with a teenage kid, but a brilliant one". They reunited a year later for Jaws. Spielberg used Williams' theme for Images as a temp track while editing Jaws. When Williams played his main theme for Jaws, based on the alternation of two notes, Spielberg initially thought it was a joke. Williams explained in reply, "the sophisticated approach you would like me to take isn't the approach you took with the film I just experienced". After hearing variations on the theme, Spielberg agreed: "sometimes the best ideas are the most simple ones". The score earned Williams his second Academy Award, his first for Best Original Score. Its ominous two-note ostinato has become a shorthand for approaching danger.Shortly thereafter, Spielberg and Williams began a two-year collaboration on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. They crafted the distinctive five-note motif that functions both in the score and in the story as the communications signal of the film's extraterrestrials. Darryn King writes: "One moment in that film captures some of Spielberg and Williams' alchemy: the musical dialogue between the humans and the otherworldly visitors, itself an artistic collaboration of sorts". Pauline Kael wrote of the scene in The New Yorker: "the earthlings are ready with a console, and they greet the great craft with an oboe solo variation on the five-note theme; the craft answers in deep, tuba tones. The dialogue becomes blissfully garrulous... there is a conversational duet: the music of the spheres". Williams says the surprise of the final two notes comes from the fact that the first three notes of the theme are already resolved, adding "I realized that twenty years after the fact".
Spielberg chose Williams to score 1941, and with George Lucas, for Raiders of the Lost Ark. For the latter, Williams wrote "The Raiders March" for the film's hero, Indiana Jones, as well as separate themes to represent the eponymous Ark of the Covenant, Jones's love interest Marion Ravenwood and the Nazi villains. Additional themes were written and featured in his scores for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Spielberg emphasized the importance of Williams' score to the Indiana Jones pictures: "Jones did not perish, but listened carefully to the Raiders score. Its sharp rhythms told him when to run. Its slicing strings told him when to duck. Its several integrated themes told adventurer Jones when to kiss the heroine or smash the enemy. All things considered, Jones listened... and lived." Williams' score for Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial won him a fourth Oscar. Spielberg liked Williams' music for the climactic chase so much that he edited the film to match it.
The Spielberg-Williams collaboration resumed in 1987 with Empire of the Sun and continued with Always, Hook, Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Amistad and Saving Private Ryan. Williams also contributed the theme music for, and scored several episodes of, Spielberg's anthology television series Amazing Stories. Schindler's List proved to be a challenge for Williams; after viewing the rough cut with Spielberg, he was so overcome with emotion that he was hesitant to score the film. He told Spielberg, "I really think you need a better composer than I am for this film". Spielberg replied, "I know, but they're all dead". Williams asked classical violinist Itzhak Perlman to play the main theme for the film. Williams garnered his fourth Oscar for Best Original Score, his fifth overall.
Williams composed the music for the opening logo to the DreamWorks Pictures film studio, which was co-founded by Spielberg. The logo made its debut in DreamWorks Pictures' first release The Peacemaker, released on September 26, 1997. In 2001, Williams scored Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which was based on an unfinished project Stanley Kubrick asked Spielberg to direct. A. O. Scott argued that the movie represented new directions for Williams, writing that Spielberg created "a mood as layered, dissonant and strange as John Williams' unusually restrained, modernist score". Per Kubrick's request, Williams included a quotation of Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier in his score. Williams' jazz-inspired score for Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can alluded to works by Henry Mancini. For The Terminal, Williams wrote a national anthem for the fictional nation of Krakozhia. His score for Spielberg's War of the Worlds took inspiration from scores for classic monster movies. That same year, he scored Spielberg's epic historical drama film Munich.
In 2011, after a three-year hiatus from film scoring, Williams composed the scores for Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse. The former was his first score for an animated film, and he employed various styles, including "1920s, 1930s European jazz" for the opening credits and "pirate music" for the maritime battles. The Oscar nominations were Williams' 46th and 47th, making him the most nominated musician in Academy Award history, previously tied with Alfred Newman's 45 nominations, and the second most nominated overall, behind Walt Disney. Williams won an Annie Award for his score for Tintin. In 2012, he scored Spielberg's Lincoln, for which he received his 48th Academy Award nomination. He was also set to write the score for Bridge of Spies that year, but in March 2015, it was announced that Thomas Newman would score it instead, as Williams' schedule was interrupted by a minor health issue. This was the first Spielberg film since The Color Purple not scored by Williams. Williams composed the scores for Spielberg's fantasy The BFG and his drama The Post.
In 2019, Williams served as music consultant for Spielberg's West Side Story and scored his semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans. In June 2022, Williams announced that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, scheduled for a 2023 release, would likely be his last film score as he planned to retire from film and focus on solely composing concert music. However, he reversed this decision by January 2023, stating that he had at least "10 more years to go. I'll stick around for a while!". He compared the decision to Spielberg's father Arnold, who had worked in his field until he was 100.