In the late 1970s, John Williams restored the preeminence of symphonic film music, which had declined with the rock and pop scores of the 1960s. Working with directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, he played an essential role in the blending of New Hollywood auteurism with nostalgia for Golden Age cinema—resulting in the blockbusters Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. His music is famously poignant and varied, rooted in his background as a jazz pianist, built on an encyclopedic knowledge of classical techniques, and wrapped in the orchestration style of late Romanticism and Modernism.
Williams has also written a substantial body of concert works, as well as pieces for live events that include the Olympics and President Obama’s first inauguration. From 1980 to 1993, he was music director of the Boston Pops and developed a close relationship with Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 2015, he wrote this short concert work, Just Down West Street … on the left, as a 75th-birthday gift for the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, a top summer academy for conservatory students. The piece is a musical trip down West Street, three miles of country road in the Berkshires that connect downtown Lenox, Massachusetts, with the Tanglewood grounds.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned the Cello Concerto at the end of Williams’s tenure with the Pops in 1993, the same year that Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park were released. He composed it for Yo-Yo Ma, who premiered it at the new Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, in 1994. He enjoyed the collaboration with Ma: “Given the broad technical and expressive arsenal available in Yo-Yo’s work, planning the concerto was a joy.” No stranger to concerto writing, Williams had penned five concertos prior to this one for cello, including a beautifully haunting one for violin in honor of his first wife, actress Barbara Ruick.
The four movements of Williams’s Cello Concerto are seamlessly woven together. The composer explains, “I decided to have four fairly extensive movements that would offer as much variety and contrast as possible, but that could be played continuously and without interruption.” The first movement, Theme and Cadenza, allows the soloist to show off straight away. The cellist plays brilliant lines way up in its register to a rich orchestral backdrop. Horns blaze a path forward for him. The short second movement, which Williams calls Blues, shimmers above metallic percussion. Bent glissando notes sway like someone who has had too much to drink at the bar. Sobering up, a sparse and somewhat creepy Scherzo ensues, reminiscent of the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which Stanley Kubrick used in A Clockwork Orange. In Song, the final movement, a gorgeous, intimate lyrical poem, Williams pans a close-up of the cellist, who endures a Pyrrhic victory: He has won the battle—but stands alone.
Williams’s Olympic Fanfare and Theme was written for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The brassy fanfare bridges into a lyrical theme with a distant snare-drum accompaniment. “A wonderful thing about the Olympics is that young athletes strain their guts to find and produce their best efforts,” Williams told The New York Times that year. “The human spirit stretching to prove itself is also typical of what musicians attempt to achieve.” It won a Grammy Award.
The Book Thief (2013) centers on a young girl who learns to love reading during the Second World War in Nazi Germany. “She sees [books] as almost a kind of physical attraction,” Williams explained in an interview. “And we hear this motif that’s associated with just that, the magnetism of the books and what’s in them.” The score won a Grammy and was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.
“Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra,” from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), scores the chase scene where Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and his father (Sean Connery) escape from an Austrian castle, chased by Nazi goons. Scherzo means “joke” in Italian, suggesting an intense but lighthearted musical style, which suits Indy knocking the soldiers one by one off their motorcycles.
“Marion’s Theme” from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) serves a dual purpose, as Marion Ravenwood’s personal identity but also as the love theme for her and Indiana Jones. It reappeared in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and at the very end of the most recent film in the franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. “The Raiders March” is the definitive Indiana Jones cue, channeling the swashbuckling soundtracks of the 1930s and ’40s. “Every time Harrison jumps on the horse or does something heroic, I wanted to pay reference to this theme,” Williams told Empire magazine in 2008. “The sequence of notes has to sound just right so it seems inevitable, like it has always been with us. It was something that I chiseled away at for a few weeks, changing a note here and there, to find the correct musical shape. Those little simplicities are often the hardest things to capture.”
“Princess Leia’s Theme” is first heard six minutes into Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (1977) when Leia (Carrie Fisher) is captured by Imperial stormtroopers, and again when R2-D2 plays her holographic message for Luke Skywalker. It becomes her leitmotif throughout the original and sequel trilogies. This fuller version takes the tune through several different instruments—distant horn, the more romantic flute, and finally lush strings.
“Adventures on Earth,” from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), scores the final 10 minutes of the film, from the bicycle chase and flying sequence to E.T.’s farewell and his spaceship’s departure. Unusual for a scoring session, Spielberg let Williams record this cue freely, not synched to the picture, and then re-edited the sequence to match the music. It won an Academy Award and three Grammys. At a 2016 American Film Institute gala, Spielberg quipped: “Without John Williams, bikes don’t really fly.” It’s now a much-repeated phrase, but it captures the paradoxical truth that music sells the cinematic illusion of reality.
—Benjamin Pesetsky / Aaron Beck
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