From the early 17th century to the early 20th, serious Western music underwent transformations that are remarkable to contemplate, with the ornateness and dignity of the baroque giving way to the elegance and drama of the classical, which, in turn, yielded to romanticism, with its emphasis on emotion and melody. To a considerable extent, these changes came in response to popular tastes. The great composers, from Haydn to Mozart to Liszt to Chopin, were all superstars whose music the general public knew and loved.
The great divide came with the arrival of the modern era, during which many of the creators of serious music—like many of the poets and painters and architects of the day—gave less thought than their predecessors to the preferences of mass audiences. Yes, some serious new music was relatively accessible to ordinary listeners, but much of it, especially that which is considered postmodern rather than modern, could be challenging, off-putting, and (at first blush, anyway) downright ugly—deliberately designed, it seemed, to drive away the hoi polloi. So it was that in the last century serious music became largely the private domain of cultural elites, while the masses flocked to buy records by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and (excuse the expression) Taylor Swift.
Yet in one field with a vast audience, the serious Western musical tradition endured. The arrival of talkies in 1927 gave birth to a new medium, the film score, whose creators were students of that tradition, especially of the romantic era—Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Brahms. And the most accomplished of these motion-picture composers produced magnificent scores, by turns poignant and electrifying, that, decades later, can still conjure vivid images in the minds of cinemagoers. Think of Gone with the Wind (Max Steiner), High Noon (Dimitri Tiomkin), The Big Country (Jerome Moross), Spartacus (Alex North), Lawrence of Arabia (Maurice Jarre), and To Kill a Mockingbird (Elmer Bernstein).
But the legacy of one man beats them all. John Williams, who will turn 94 in February, and who is the subject of a delightful and definitive new biography by Tim Greiving, is by far the towering figure in his profession. He’s also one of the most prolific. Although he’s most famous for his long partnership with Steven Spielberg, by the time the two began working together in 1974, Williams had already scored some 40-odd feature films (including the likes of Gidget Goes to Rome) as well as several TV series. He has received 54 Oscar nominations (more than anyone else except Walt Disney), won armfuls of Emmys and Grammys, been awarded honorary degrees and an honorary knighthood, been inducted into various halls of fame, and been a Kennedy Center honoree.
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It all began in Southern California, where Williams, the son of a studio musician, played trombone in the high school band and became a skilled arranger. At age 21, struck by Victor Young’s music for John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), he first entertained the thought of scoring pictures. He studied under Rosina Lhévinne at Juilliard, became steeped in the classical repertoire, and fell in love with Brahms and Beethoven. But he would never look down on the music he’d grown up on—Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin. He was touring as a pianist for Vic Damone when the latter decided to record “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from the forthcoming Broadway musical My Fair Lady. Williams persuaded Damone to do “On the Street Where You Live” instead, even though it had been dropped from the show. Damone’s smash hit led to the song being reinstated. Rather than spend eternity buried in some archive, it became a standard.
Soon Williams was scoring films. André Previn, who would be a lifelong friend, served as a sort of mentor to him, but there was one major difference between the two men: Previn looked down on Hollywood, while Williams embraced it. Indeed, Williams was never a musical snob or, for that matter, like many composers of his generation, a rebel. “John,” writes Greiving, “did not burst onto the scene with a youthful hunger to reinvent or rebel against tradition.” Essentially a conservative soul, he was devoted to family and possessed a “pure love of country and respect for the military.” He had his first taste of the Sixties rock revolution on a day in February 1964 when, trying to leave the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, he found himself blocked by “a sea of humanity.” He was told that a British foursome he’d never heard of, who were booked on the Ed Sullivan Show that night, were staying across Fifth Avenue at the Plaza. Williams would come to respect the Beatles, but he listened to them rarely and would never let the musical tides of the Age of Aquarius influence him. Similarly, after squalid offerings like Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Easy Rider (1969) burst onto the scene, he continued to favor “family fare” with conventional stories, admirable heroes, and uplifting messages.
Enter Steven Spielberg. From the start—they began collaborating when Spielberg was 25 and Williams was 40—they were a perfect match. “I was a traditionalist in terms of music,” Spielberg says. “I wanted the scores to make my movies bigger than I had made them. And Johnny made all my movies bigger.” Like Williams, Spielberg was, where music was concerned, an outlier in the New Hollywood: “I’ve always felt that music was…an integral part of movies. And I think in the 1960s people got away from that. They began to equate realism with…the absence of music. And those were the days of the social commentary, when young filmmakers were afraid to be too theatrical or too sentimental.”
Spielberg would come to describe Williams as “the greatest composer who ever lived.” Certainly, Williams
made an incalculable contribution to the younger man’s success. What would Jaws (1975) be without that two-note theme that still conjures images of man-eating sharks? Spielberg would later say that Williams’s Jaws score “was responsible for at least half” of the movie’s success; Richard Dreyfuss said that the music’s impact made him recognize Truffaut’s auteur theory as nonsense—and on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which they appeared together, he told Truffaut as much.
In 1982 came E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, which Greiving describes as “the glowing red heart of the Spielberg-Williams collaboration,” distilling “everything great about their mutual aesthetics into the purest form—an alchemy of childlike simplicity, theatricality, unabashed emotionalism, grandeur, religious parable and, finally, airborne exultation.” Speaking of exultation, Williams provides a superbly detailed account—it’s much too long to quote—of how he musically achieved the feeling of “lift” at the film’s climax that makes it so stirring as the boys’ bicycles take off into the sky.
There were many other Spielberg-Williams efforts, including all three Indiana Jones vehicles and the first-rate Schindler’s List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Catch Me If You Can (2002). Greiving’s own favorite Williams score is the one for Spielberg’s heartbreaking A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). But even during the most prolific period of their partnership, Williams did other work. He scored all nine Star Wars titles and the first three Harry Potter flicks. On Home Alone (1990), he created, in the words of director Chris Columbus, a “linear glue” that melded its slapstick with its sentiment. Everybody involved saw Home Alone as a “small movie,” but at the first screening for Fox executives, recalled Columbus, “all of us were amazed at how much the score actually elevated the movie,” giving it “emotional depth and complexity.” To the studio’s shock, Home Alone opened at No. 1 and stayed there for 12 weeks, eventually becoming “the third-biggest hit in Hollywood history.” At the moment that happened, noted Williams, he achieved the distinction of having written “the scores to all of the top five grossing films” of all time, “and to seven of the top ten.”
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Given that Williams is such a staunch patriot, his fondness for Oliver Stone—with whom he worked on Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991), and Nixon (1995)— seems puzzling. Greiving calls Stone “a gooey romantic at his core”; Williams called him “a patriot” and “a great man.” This is difficult to understand, given Stone’s unabashed love of Communism—as illustrated by his hagiographies about Fidel Castro (Comandante, 2003), Hugo Chávez (Mi amigo Hugo, 2014), and the Brazilian dictator Lula (Lula, 2024)—and his hatred for the American system, which oozes out of his TV documentary series The Untold History of the United States (2012–13). Perhaps equally baffling was Williams’s readiness to score Spielberg’s Munich (2005), which, in good old-fashioned moral-equivalence fashion, portrays the Palestinian terrorists’ murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics as part of what Greiving describes as a “ceaseless cycle of violence.”
Williams’s celluloid celebrity led to other gigs. NBC hired him to write new theme music for the Nightly News. When the Statue of Liberty turned 100, ABC asked him to compose a fanfare. From 1979 to 1995, he wielded the baton for the Boston Pops. Over the years, moreover, he accepted innumerable other concert assignments, one of which led
to a confrontation with Frank Sinatra. In 1984, shortly before the curtain was scheduled to go up on a performance, Old Blue Eyes told Williams, his conductor, to bring one song down a half tone—which would require rewriting 85 separate pieces of sheet music. Williams said the task was impossible. But after Sinatra “looked at me with these assassin eyes,” he managed, with the help of the Metropolitan Orchestra library, to pull it off. Sinatra, Williams later claimed, “couldn’t be sweeter,” but he could also be “terrifying,” filling a room with “a sense of Mafia power…which I think any dolt would pick up.”
Greiving’s book is a long one. The main text consists of 556 pages of small print with very narrow margins. But Williams thoroughly deserves this epic treatment. We’re speaking here, after all, of a composer whose oeuvre—with its distinctly American energy, innocence, and optimism—not only lifted him to the pinnacle of what Greiving rightly characterizes as “Hollywood’s peculiar art form” but also ended up being performed in the world’s most august concert halls. “Just look at the 25 biggest orchestras of the U.S. next season,” wrote the French conductor Stéphane Denève in 2003. “Who plays a piece of Boulez? I bet there is not one. All of them, the 25 orchestras—they will play [the] music of John Williams.” And why do they play it? Because its sheer melodic beauty and dramatic power stir the hearts of music lovers—whether highbrow, middlebrow, or lowbrow—in very much the same way that Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms stirred the hearts of concertgoers in centuries past. Which, I suppose, is just another way of saying that John Williams is an artist for the ages.
Photo: Gerardo Mora/Getty Images for Disney
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