PROGRAM NOTES by Joseph and Elizabeth Kahn
April 17 and 18, 2010 "Themes & Screams"
John Williams Celluoid Dreams
JOHN T. WILLIAMS (b.1932)
In the 1930s and 40s the major Hollywood studios hired established classical composers – many of them refugees from Nazi Germany – who went on to develop a language of cinematic music that was as important a factor in controlling viewers’ emotional responses as the acting and cinematography itself. Some of the best-known names are Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill, Miklós Rósza and Marvin Hamlisch.
John Williams was heir to this tradition; since the 1960s he has expanded and deepened that language to become the most important film composer of all time. The industry’s premier directors, especially George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg, have sought him as a partner, and their combined efforts have garnered armloads of awards, with Williams himself receiving as of this date five Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and 21 Grammys. He holds the record for the Oscar nominations.
In addition to his film scores, Williams has also composed extensively for the concert hall. His symphonies, the Violin Concerto, Flute Concerto, Bassoon Concerto and numerous chamber works, have been performed around the world, especially by the Boston Pops, which he conducted between 1980 and 1993.
Williams’s greatest gift is his ability to create music that captures precisely the theme of a film as a whole as well as the mood of the moment. When George Lucas needed a composer to match his grand space epic, Star Wars, Williams produced a grand Wagnerian score with Leitmotifs and all. For Jaws (1975), Williams said it all in two – now iconic – notes. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, (1993) required the sensitivity and delicacy to enable audiences to focus on the individual tragedies on the one hand and the “banality of evil” on the other. Williams had been reluctant to take on the job, telling Spielberg: “You need a better composer than I am,” “I know,” Spielberg countered, “but they are all dead.”
E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982) is considered by many as Steven Spielberg’s best movie. It has been described as: “Both a classic movie for kids and a remarkable portrait of childhood, [it] is a sci-fi adventure that captures that strange moment in youth when the world is a place of mysterious possibilities (some wonderful, some awful), and the universe seems somehow separate from the one inhabited by grown-ups.” Once again, Williams was able to balance the film’s child-like innocence with the musical vocabulary of Science fiction. The film's final chase and farewell sequence is one of the few instance in film history in which the on-screen action was re-edited to conform to the composer's musical interpretation (Sergey Prokofiev’s score to Alexander Nevsky is another one). The score garnered Williams his fourth Academy Award.
Williams’s ability to garner a universal response cuts across genres, media and occasions: From Monday Night Football and the Olympics to President Obama’s inauguration.
2009 www.WordProsMusic.com
