John Williams: A Composer’s Life, by Tim Greiving (Oxford University Press, 640 pp., $39.99)
The sheer breadth of John Williams’s resume is difficult to soak up. The 93-year-old composer and 54-time Oscar nominee started his profession in the days of Audrey Hepburn and Henry Mancini and completed his final spherical of Star Wars scoring in 2022, writing a brand new theme for Disney Plus’s Obi Wan Kenobi. Tim Greiving’s meticulous biography, John Williams: A Composer’s Life, constructed partly of interviews with Williams himself, supplies the first actually complete take a look at a profession that has formed standard American cinema.
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Greiving argues that Williams, together with “populist” filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, helped resuscitate the lush orchestral sound demoted after the studio system’s collapse in the mid-Sixties. Williams was an important half of Hollywood’s renaissance in the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, digging cinema out of the doldrums after a decade of cultural and political turmoil.
Born right into a musical household in Queens, John Williams grew up watching his father, Johnny Williams, play drums for the Raymond Scott Quintette and later turn into a Hollywood session participant. The youthful Williams, exhibiting a flair for piano, initially studied to turn into a virtuoso. Being drafted into the Air Force disrupted his plans to pursue formal musical training—maybe a lucky detour, Greiving writes, as in any other case Williams might need been indoctrinated into the conservatories’ prevailing anti-populist and anti-melodic traits: serialism and atonalism. Star Wars might need sounded extra like one thing composed by John Cage.
After his army service, Williams adopted in his father’s footsteps to turn into a Hollywood session participant, sitting in on piano for such lighthearted Fifties classics as Funny Face and Some Like it Hot. As his profession gained momentum in the mid-Sixties, he started arranging and composing for movies and tv, together with the bubbly rating for William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million. Williams experimented and steadily constructed his melodic model in the late Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies, scoring such pre-Spielberg catastrophe yarns as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.
At the time, massive orchestral scores have been thought of passé. Long-haired administrators of the New Hollywood motion stipulated that scores needs to be sparse and keep away from “emotional manipulation,” preferring uncooked and naturalistic soundscapes. After Stanley Kubrick used a needle-drop rating of preexisting classical music consisting of Ligeti, Strauss, and Khachaturian for 2001: A Space Odyssey and George Lucas juke-boxed American Graffiti with standard Fifties hits, orchestral composers appeared completely dethroned in Hollywood.
Greiving traces William’s rise to prominence to the interval surrounding the tragic dying of his first spouse and highschool sweetheart, Barbara Ruick, in 1974. Around this time, Williams met the younger Spielberg, who had collected the composer’s movie scores. Their first film collectively, 1975’s Jaws, scored with Williams’s soon-legendary two-note theme, launched the composer into large success and set the stage for his career-defining task: Star Wars.
For George Lucas’s operatic Gesamtkunstwerk, Williams employed Wagnerian leitmotifs for every of the movie’s larger-than-life characters, recalling the lush classical scoring of Erich Korngold. Like Williams, Lucas was impressed by the heroic adventures of outdated Hollywood, by matinee serials equivalent to Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and by the concepts of mythologist Joseph Campbell. Some critics dismissed Williams’s rating for Star Wars as manipulative Mickey Mousing—“overscoring” each second with musical cues and variations on leitmotifs—however the 1977 blockbuster, with its archetypal characters set in an historic society in outer area, proved a sensation.
To at the present time, Greiving argues, classical music elites dismiss Williams as a second-hander cribbing from Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Beethoven, Korngold, and others. Greiving takes a extra balanced view, noting how Williams drew from a range of sources, using sounds and motifs that stir an viewers’s melodic consciousness. Just as Lucas constructed Luke Skywalker’s hero’s quest as a legendary archetype, Williams mined cultural reminiscence to infuse the archetype with a melodic id.
Though Williams would rating the many subsequent Star Wars movies for the relaxation of his profession, his collaboration with Spielberg was arguably extra pivotal, steering standard cinema away from Hollywood’s post-Watergate cynicism with Close Encounters of a Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and Jurassic Park (1993), in addition to extra severe movies like Empire of the Sun (1987), Schindler’s List (1993), and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
Of Williams and Spielberg’s complementary inventive visions, Greiving writes:
the place most of his classmates of the Hollywood New Wave had a bitter outlook, Spielberg discovered sweetness. That taste was saccharine for some filmgoers, however one motive he and John grew to become unshakably simpatico was that John, too, noticed largely sweetness and the Aristocracy in the world. John scored a handful of cynical movies in his lengthy profession, however he gravitated towards the romantic and the redemptive—qualities embodied by the movies of Steven Spielberg.
Much like director Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Hermann, Spielberg and Williams noticed their careers turn into intimately tied. As not too long ago as 2022, Williams offered a humble rating for Spielberg’s semiautobiographical movie, The Fabelmans.
Williams’s success has helped legitimize movie music in live performance halls, Greiving observes, particularly given his lengthy tenure as conductor of the Boston Pops, although the composer was a controversial alternative to guide the orchestra in 1979, when he succeeded Arthur Fiedler. In this position Williams expanded his repertoire, composing live performance items extra modernist in model. These works could not show as enduring as his movie scores, however they yielded collaborations with cellist Yo Yo Ma and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. Greiving exhibits how Williams in the end earned the respect of many classical musicians.
Greiving’s biography affords an in-depth take a look at Williams’s artistic course of and traces his appreciable affect on movie scoring. The prolific composer, he argues, returned optimism and grand symphonic mastery to American cinema. Whatever the critics would possibly say, that’s legacy sufficient for any musician.
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