Javier C. Hernández, John Williams, Hollywood’s Maestro, Looks Beyond the Movies, NYTimes, Feb. 8, 2022.
The pandemic gave him relief from film composing, and he plans to give up movie projects.
In his next phase, he plans to focus more intensely on another passion: writing concert works, of which he has already produced several dozen. He has visions of another piece for a longtime collaborator, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and he is planning his first proper piano concerto.
“I’m much happier, as I have been during this Covid time, working with an artist and making the music the best you can possibly make it in your hands,” he said.
Yet the legacy of his more than 100 film scores — the “Star Wars,” “Jaws” and “Harry Potter” franchises among them — looms large, to say nothing of his fanfares, themes and celebratory anthems for the likes of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Sunday Night Football,” the Olympics and the Statue of Liberty’s centennial.
“He has written the soundtrack of our lives,” said the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, a friend. “When we listen to a melody of John’s, we go back to a time, to a taste, to a smell. All our senses go back to a moment.”
The end of an era?
Williams — a fixture in the industry since the 1950s, with 52 Academy Award nominations, second only to Walt Disney, and five Oscars — recognizes that he might be the last of a certain type of Hollywood composer. Grandiose, complex orchestral scores, rooted in European Romanticism, are increasingly rare. At many film studios, synthesized music is the rage.
“I feel like I’m sort of sitting on an edge of something,” he said, “and change is happening.”
Discovered by Spielberg:
In the 1970s, Williams’s work caught the attention of Steven Spielberg, then an aspiring filmmaker searching for someone who could write like a previous generation of Hollywood composers: Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Herrmann.
“He knew how to write a tune, and he knew how to support that tune with compelling and complex arrangements,” Spielberg recalled in an interview. “I hadn’t heard anything of the likes since the old greats.”
America's greatest composer?
The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter said she was disappointed that there had been skepticism about his music.
“Everything he writes is art,” said Mutter, for whom Williams wrote his second violin concerto, which premiered last year. “His music, in its diversity, has greatly contributed to the survival of so-called classical music.”
And his peers say he has helped establish, beyond doubt, the legitimacy of film music. Zimmer, who wrote the music for “Dune,” said he is “the greatest composer America has had, end of story.” Danny Elfman, another film composer, called him “the godfather, the master.” Dudamel drew comparisons to Beethoven.
There's more at the link.
On Dudamel’s comparison to Beethoven, see Chapter 2 of Ezra Pound’s A B C of Reading, where he lists six categories of writers:
When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:
1 Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
2 The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.
3 The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.
Beethoven was the first. Perhaps Williams is the second.
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On classical music, see my recent post, I discuss the decline of classical music @ 3QD, and this, Roll over Beethoven: Where’d classical music go?.
What happened to classical music? Audiences identified it with music of the common practice period, which ended roughly at the beginning of the 20th century. For whatever reason they were unwilling to follow composers to new modes. But common practice music found a home in films, where it has been thriving ever since.
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