John Williams: a defining American composer that goes beyond the silver screen

00:00:00

John Banther: I am John Banther, and this is Classical Breakdown. From WETA Classical in Washington, we are your guide to classical music. In this episode, I'm joined by WETA Classical's, Evan Keely, and we are talking about one of the world's most recognizable composers, John Williams.

We take you back in time to his early life and career. Like his first score for a film while he was in the military, and how he met Steven Spielberg. We show you what sets him apart from other film composers, aspects of his process, what to listen for, and we dive into his non- film music too, some of which might surprise you.

Okay. Evan, as we start off this episode on John Williams, I thought, " What better way to start than with a tune I think everyone will recognize." Oh, wait, Evan, does not everyone know the 1981 Andy Kaufman sci- fi comedy film about two robots who fall in love called Heartbeeps? Are we unfamiliar with that?

00:01:00

Evan Keely: It's a classic, John, everybody's favorite movie. I never heard of it in all the days of my life until you brought it up in this conversation.

00:01:08

John Banther: I had not heard of it either. I think it's the only one that could technically be considered a flop. I think it's got a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Andy Kaufman said he would refund everyone who saw it. And I saw a quote from a kid who said, " Even at nine years old, I felt sad leaving the theater because even at that age, I had understood I had lost 90 minutes of my life that I would not get back."

But of course, we love John Williams and he has become his own entity today, and we are going to dive into all of that. So Evan, what was the first movie with his music that you truly remembered and loved? For me, it was Jurassic Park. Thinking of the kitchen scene with the Velociraptors, I watched that again. The way he uses winds, piano, and percussion, oh my gosh, that was absolutely traumatizing when I was a kid. And then the trumpet playing in the opening tune is just one of the most soaring lines. I freaked out once when I found a passage in an etude book from 200 years ago that was very similar to that tune.

00:02:13

Evan Keely: His music is so effective at evoking those emotions. I was a little too young for a scary movie like Jaws when it came out in 1975. Yes, I'm a few years older than you John, but even I knew the famous minor second motif, dum, dum, dum, everybody knows that. My first John Williams films score was two years later with Star Wars, or serious Star Wars fans would call it Episode Four: A New Hope. But in those days, it was just Star Wars. So much to say about Star Wars. We'll get into that at least a little bit in our conversation today.

I'll certainly have a lot to say about it. I was still in elementary school when the first film in the Indiana Jones franchise came out in the summer of '81; Raiders Of The Lost Ark. So, it's not an exaggeration to say that I grew up with the music of John Williams. I'll even go a step further and say that if you're an American and a Gen- Xer, like I am, we all grew up with John Williams.

00:03:08

John Banther: Absolutely. And if I had to guess at who was the most heard and recognized composer today, it is John Williams.

00:03:15

Evan Keely: I think so.

00:03:16

John Banther: Just describing his prominence or his influence, it feels a little silly. This was a composer you knew before you knew his name. Think of all the awards, he's got them except the Tony, whatever.

00:03:28

Evan Keely: Not yet anyway.

00:03:29

John Banther: Not yet. Not yet anyway. But this is a composer who actually, there's a lot of stuff I did not know. So, I hope for everyone listening, there's going to be a lot of discovery too. So, let's get into some of his early life, Evan. He was born February 8th, 1932 in Flushing, Queens in New York City. His father was Johnny Williams, a jazz drummer and percussionist. I think he also played in the CBS Radio Orchestra a bit. And his mother was from Boston.

Then at age 16, in 1948, the family moves to L. A., Los Angeles, and he graduates in 1950 from the famous now North Hollywood High School. They have hundreds of notable alumni. I could not find a lot of information about who he was studying with as a child at this time. I read maybe Bobby Van Eps in L. A., but he eventually graduates, and then he studies composition at UCLA with Mario Castelnuovo- Tedesco. I did not know that. I would not have guessed that.

00:04:26

Evan Keely: Yeah, I did not know this either. So, as you and I were diving into this, I learned a lot too. Castelnuovo- Tedesco, an Italian composer, had a Jewish ancestry. He was a generation older than John Williams, and he was one of the many composers and artists and creative people who fled Europe as fascism rose there, the race laws under Mussolini. He came to the United States.

Eventually found himself in Hollywood as a film composer, and he was also a composer whose music is infused with a love of great literature, ancient epics. He turns to the Bible, or Aeschylus, or Shakespeare. And I have to wonder about the extent to which that informed his teaching with John Williams and the approach to composing film music. So, this music is so much a part of the storytelling around these time- honored themes. You see these films that Williams has composed music for, and they have these great epic themes a lot of them.

Williams as a composer, doesn't shy away from these heroes journey types of stories. And I think one of the most attractive qualities of his music is how it expresses the emotions connected to narratives of heroic struggle. And I even wonder if one of the reasons Heartbeeps wasn't a commercial and critical success, I don't know. I haven't seen it. I can't say with much confidence, but I wonder if one of the reasons it didn't succeed is because maybe John Williams isn't the best composer for something lighthearted and quirky and weird like that. Although, of course his music certainly shows a fine sense of humor among many of the things.

00:06:06

John Banther: And I'll put the trailer to Heartbeeps on the show notes page. You can hear some of his music. And honestly, I did not even finish the trailer. I looked at the comments and some people also said, " I didn't even get through the trailer."

So, he is studying, he is playing piano and he's especially enveloped in jazz. And then in 1951, so just a little bit later, he joins the US Air Force and he does work with the US Air Force Band playing piano, also bass. He's arranging music, and then he's stationed in St. John's, Newfoundland.

And this was a surprise to me, Evan, because I did not know his first film score, if we can call it that, came at this time when he was 20 for the 1952, You Are Welcome. A promotional film for the Newfoundland Tourist Information Office. I don't know what Newfoundland is doing today, but I would absolutely be bragging. Here's our informational video scored by John Williams.

00:07:02

Evan Keely: Makes me want to go visit there.

00:07:06

John Banther: I'll also put that on the show notes page. It is something to see, and it's incredible to hear his music, his first with moving pictures, just really something special. Then in 1955, he finishes his service with the US Air Force, he goes to New York City and he studies at Juilliard.

Now, Evan, he went to several different schools, but I don't think he ever actually graduated from a particular university. That's not too uncommon, especially in those decades wandering from school to school, teacher to teacher.

00:07:40

Evan Keely: Studying and not taking a degree, that's certainly an honorable way to learn.

00:07:45

John Banther: There's a reason why you see so- and- so attended Berkeley, not graduated Berkeley, for example. But he studies it at Juilliard with Rosina Lhévinne, or Lhévinne, I think is how you pronounce her name. A pianist who was born in 1880 and one of the most sought after piano teachers of this time ever, and John Williams is in her studio.

From what I read, Evan, he was also at this time, wanting to be a concert pianist and a reason why he was studying with that pianist. I also heard that just being in that studio granted you a level of cache or whatever, but he realized it would not work out for him. He said he could write better than he could play. But just imagine for a second, you're playing piano and you're playing jazz as well, and you're playing in clubs in the 1950s. That sounds incredibly exciting.

00:08:34

Evan Keely: Yeah, New York City in the 1950s is a pretty exciting place musically, especially in the jazz scene. But obviously, here's John Williams going Julliard and thinking about being a concert pianist. He's already had some experience as a film composer, so he's really dipping his toe into a lot of different waters and finding out who he is as a musician.

00:08:53

John Banther: So, after popping around a few schools playing in jazz clubs, he eventually makes his way back to L. A. And in 1958, he gets his first feature film, it's called Daddy- O. It did not have a huge budget, and when you watch it, you see that. It was $ 100,000 in 1958, which sounds like a lot of money back then, but studios were already putting out $ 1. 72 million movies.

And this one, I like the music. It reminds me a bit of Catch Me If You Can, some of the jazz- inspired elements too. And now in his thirties, Evan, he gets what might not be called a big break, but he gets what he says was, " The first film I ever did for a major super- talent director, William Wyler, How To Steal A Million." And that was in 1966. And then the following year he received an Oscar nomination for Valley Of The Dolls.

00:10:03

Evan Keely: But here he is already in his mid- thirties, he's already getting a lot of experience in the industry.

00:10:09

John Banther: Now, 1972 comes and the movie Images by Robert Altman is, well, that's when it's premiered. It's produced a year or two before that, and John Williams writes the score. This is very different music of John Williams. He was inspired by Shakuhachi flute playing, a Japanese instrument.

And he said this, " The score used all kinds of effects for piano, percussion and strings. It had a debt to Varèse," another composer, " Whose music enormously interested me. If I had never written film scores, if I had proceeded writing concert music, it might have been in this vein. I think I would've enjoyed it. I might have been fairly good at it, but my path did not go that way."

00:10:52

Evan Keely: Yeah. I'm not familiar with this film, John, but you brought it to my attention. I listened to some of the music. My first guess would not have been John Williams wrote this music, but you definitely hear some of the elements of his more familiar style, even in this 1971 score. It's quite different, maybe edgier, maybe more, quote unquote, " modern", both in terms of the jazz influence. And he talks about an influence like Varèse, maybe be more of that experimental vein.

The Japanese composer and percussionist, Stomu Yamashita, was also featured in that score. In fact, I'm not even sure which composer wrote what for this film. Clearly a very creative collaboration there. And you talked about the other Japanese influences there, very creative music. It's a horror film, I'm not familiar with the film. Definitely has that spine tingling, this very evocative, very chilling, very absorbing music and really interesting stuff.

00:11:57

John Banther: Yeah. Almost, I don't know if it's right, Hitchcock- like as well.

00:12:02

Evan Keely: Yeah. Psychological thriller might be the genre, I'm not sure. But yeah.

00:12:09

John Banther: So, after this, he makes a score for the movie Cowboys in 1972. And it's after seeing this movie that Steven Spielberg, who requests to meet Williams and actually have him score some of his stuff. Spielberg was very young. He was in his twenties and he was about to make his directorial debut with The Sugarland Express.

And Williams described meeting him like, " He seemed like a young teenager. He had never been to a fancy restaurant before. He didn't know what to do when we were meeting, but he knew more about film music than I ever did." He said, " He just knew everything, all the composers, just everything."

00:12:50

Evan Keely: Here is Spielberg in his mid- twenties, he sees this movie Cowboys and he's like, " Who wrote this music? I got to get this person." Clearly an eye and an ear for talent.

00:13:00

John Banther: Yes, that is a meeting that has had-

00:13:04

Evan Keely: Hugely consequential for world culture.

00:13:07

John Banther: Yes. So, what sets John Williams apart? What makes him successful? I think a big part of it was that he was able to create unforgettable motifs and ideas with so few notes. Take the next movie he did with Spielberg after Sugarland. Just hearing those notes, you know. There's a lot of people of a certain generation, I think they didn't even want to swim in pools because of that.

00:13:34

Evan Keely: Oh, yeah.

00:13:35

John Banther: Now what sets him apart? This is what sets him apart. When Spielberg made Jaws, he made the movie, he filmed it and everything. He used the score to Images, that psychological horror movie, as a temp track, which is a completely different sound. So, a temp track in this instance is when a director will use music that matches the tone, the energy, the orchestration. It matches what they want, but they don't have the music yet. So, then someone else comes along and either puts in better music, writes a musical or whatever, it gets replaced.

So, he does this and John Williams sees this with the Images music. And then he tells Spielberg, " I think you're completely wrong on this. It's not the high shrieking violins and everything." And then he actually, when he met with him for this music, he played the two note motif on the piano, and Spielberg thought he was joking.

Just played it on the piano, it's like, " What? What is this?" And Williams said to him, " No, just trust me. It's going to be scary." And then he said, " Even the softer you play it, the scarier it is." It's that primordial fear that he was able to just strike in all of us. But also just tell Spielberg, " No, I think you're wrong. I don't think it's this at all. I think it's the opposite of that."

00:14:50

Evan Keely: And there's even a sense, I think I read somewhere that Williams was saying that because the shark is in the depths, that you want something low. The high strings of the Images soundtrack is this whole other dimension of terror, where you have this threat from below you, you want this low music and it sounds like a joke. Are you serious? And yet we all know now that one of the most effective musical gestures in any film ever.

00:15:19

John Banther: Yes. And it has a fantastic tuba solo in the opening too. And actually, John Williams has done more for the tuba than any composer, I think, alive right now. Maybe we'll talk about that in a bit. But this is the time Evan, I think he becomes unstoppable. He becomes the John Williams we know, because he had already done over two dozen films. He had a couple of nominations, he was successful, but there's plenty of other successful people doing this in Hollywood.

And I think this is what it means to be in the right place in the right time. He's in Hollywood where money and studios are dumping money and producing a ton of things. And he's at the right time in his career. He's in his early forties, he's done some movies. He has experience, and I think now he was at the top of his game, I guess.

00:16:06

Evan Keely: And if you look at the history of cinema, I'm certainly no expert, but Jaws really changed the way people experience movies. The idea of the super blockbuster. Jaws as really a turning point in the development of that cultural phenomenon. And John Williams, what's the first thing you think of when you think of that movie?

You see the shark in your mind, but you hear that music, it's just such an integral part of the experience. And there he is in his mid- forties and he's part of this incredible cultural phenomenon. And just from there, of course, it's just he keeps ascending to higher heights of success.

00:16:46

John Banther: He ascends with the next film especially, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. This was one I also saw as a kid. A bunch of his movies, I don't know where, I should find out where it was, but there was a couple of TV channels that would play old movies just nonstop. So, back in the day, you'd watch a movie, but you'd have to just watch it wherever you picked it up at. You couldn't rewind or something. But Close Encounters came out in 1977. Again, a famous motif that says so much with so few notes.

00:17:17

Audio: If everything is ready here on the Dark Side of the Moon, play the five tones.

00:17:28

John Banther: There's five notes, and we can actually shorten it to just the first three notes and it resolves. If you think of NBC, the theme, the little three note tune to NBC, you can have three notes that resolve. But by adding those two other notes that are diatonic, they're within the key, and then ending on the dominant, it creates a completely different sound. You are left in suspense, what comes next? Maybe not scary, I don't know what, but something comes next.

00:18:00

Evan Keely: And this is, like you said, John, this is a characteristic of Williams's style. He takes these very simple musical gestures, and yet somehow he has this genius that's able to identify a way of making that, this unforgettable sound. 1977, of course the fall of '77 is Close Encounters. In the summer of that same year, you have Star Wars.

A lot of that music too, the main theme is basically just a triad with some stepwise motion in it. Very, very simple melodies. The rhythms are not necessarily very complicated. The melodic material isn't filled with weird chromatic jumps. We talked about Shostakovich recently, who is the opposite. You have these strange intervals and things that you don't expect, and that's what keeps that music exciting.

What makes Williams's music exciting is how he's able to take things that are so familiar and straightforward, and yet somehow turn them into something that you can't get out of your head. And it's just right for what he's trying to express, the emotion that he's trying to capture, and how it fits with the scene or the character. And he just has this extraordinary gift to create that extraordinarily irresistibly compelling musical gesture over and over again.

00:19:12

John Banther: What John Williams also does, he can take these things to their nth degree. This moment, it turns into a two- minute- long tuba and oboe duet. If I was directing a movie, the aliens come down, here's where they land. We're all at this airstrip or whatever, and there's these huge lights everywhere, the aliens are coming down. What are we going to do for the music? I was thinking of two- minute tuba and oboe duet.

00:19:41

Evan Keely: Well, once again, are you joking? But Williams knows what he's doing and it really works.

00:19:49

John Banther: Yeah. I would just tell somebody, don't bring him back here, just get rid of him.

00:19:53

Evan Keely: Where'd you find this guy?

00:19:55

John Banther: But he does it and it's just-

00:19:58

Evan Keely: It's just right.

00:19:58

John Banther: It's just right. So, I grew up with these movies in the '90s and 2000s, and as you did as well, it shaped what we thought a movie or a film score even was.

00:20:09

Evan Keely: Yeah. I don't think it's completely absurd to splice the history of film music into BW and AW before Williams and after Williams. Whether you love John Williams, his music or don't care for it, do what you like. But as a film composer, Williams cannot be ignored. He is too consequential on so many levels.

00:20:32

John Banther: The other thing that sets him apart from other film composers is his use of leitmotif. A leitmotif, it's when you have a theme that represents an idea, a person, a place, anything. It can be very short, it can be a couple of intervals or something. But this reoccurs in the movie as his representation, and it can also evolve and change.

Sometimes it's in a fragment, sometimes it's in the background, sometimes it's foreshadowing. He was not the first to do this in movies, but how he did it in Star Wars and how we continued it through the series is really like none other. Just hearing now Leia's Theme, it's a familiar sound that we know. There is a document that we'll link on the show notes page that is a complete catalog and breakdown of the Star Wars leitmotifs. It's over 100 pages long.

00:21:28

Evan Keely: Wow.

00:21:29

John Banther: It's like a full- on dissertation, I think.

00:21:32

Evan Keely: Well, it gives you a sense, I was talking earlier about John Williams is really skilled at taking simple musical material and making it very effective. But that doesn't mean his music is simple. There's actually a lot of sophistication, and on an intellectual level, this is actually a really thoughtful composer.

00:21:50

John Banther: So, an example of this leitmotif idea is, well, you hear now, The Imperial March, also known as Darth Vader's Theme. But in the prequel, The Phantom Menace, which yes, came out later, but Anakin's Theme when he's a young child, you can actually hear part of the Darth Vader theme within that, well before any of that stuff happens. He does it in sometimes very obvious ways, like we hear there, sometimes less obvious ways. But I never find that he's trying to really obscure it to be super secretive, like the thousands of instances in Wagner, for example.

00:22:31

Evan Keely: Yeah. So, a lot's been said about Wagner and John Williams. I don't think I have anything particularly sophisticated to add to it. I will say on a personal level, 1983 was the year Return Of The Jedi was first released in movie theaters. That same year, public television stations all over the United States were broadcasting a film of the 1980 video shoot of The Jahrhundertring, the 100th anniversary of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth between 1976 and 1980.

Patrice Chéreau directed, Pierre Boulez was the conductor. Very controversial at the time. It was a big deal. And I watched this on my local PBS television station in 1983. Thank you, WNET Channel 13. I'm a kid, I'm just finishing middle school at that point. I'm watching Wagner on TV, and then I go to the movies. I love Star Wars, I go to see Return Of The Jedi with my friend. And I kid you not John, I'm sitting there in the movie theater watching this movie for the first time just up to my eyebrows and learning about Wagner. I'm very excited about the Ring cycle.

Sure enough, I hear The Imperial March and I say to myself, " Hey, wait a minute. This is like a leitmotif, like Wagner does in the Ring." Oh, wow. My mind is blown. So, yes, even at that age, I was a music nerd and fiercely proud of it. But even as a teenager, on the cusp of adolescence, I could appreciate the sophistication and the effectiveness with which John Williams uses these leitmotifs to express these ideas and characters in these films. And how they're so much a part of a really powerful art of dramatic storytelling.

00:24:19

John Banther: So, then the question becomes, well, how do you put all this together? How does John Williams put a score together for a film? How does that happen? Now in that document that we will link about the leitmotifs, it's just fun to look at. It was done by a music scholar, Frank Lehman, actually. And he also included some things he found on cue sheets, not something you usually ever see outside of a studio.

And on the cue sheet he has listed who orchestrated which parts of the music or those specific points. And you might think, " Well, wait, didn't John Williams write the music?" Yes, he did write the music. But in film, you often have assistants, and especially orchestrators. Now, John Williams, he's writing all the themes. He's writing the instruments that are supposed to be used for solos. He's not writing really just a skeleton score of maybe two lines, a theme, and then accompanying line two then extrapolate on.

But rather, he's writing in six to 12 staves, six to 12 parts of the music. Now, I had actually thought that Evan, this meant he got about 80% of the work done. He roughed it in, as we would call, roughing it in, and then an orchestrator would come in and finish it. But apparently that's not exactly the case with John Williams.

There was an interview with Conrad Pope, one of his orchestrators, and he called working with Williams, a 2% job, because Williams already did 98% of the work, and he was more like a copyist who was just occasionally writing in a dynamic or an articulation. And from what I hear, John Williams is one of the last of his kind in this way. There are a lot of film composers who have a lot of people doing a lot of heavy lifting in a way that John Williams wasn't doing.

00:26:06

Evan Keely: Yeah. It's really much more of a team effort in terms of film music nowadays. And John Williams, I think was this last of his kind idea. I've read that also. And the idea that he would just do all the work himself pretty much is, I think you might say dying breed or whatever.

00:26:26

John Banther: But how he would actually jump into the films. I read that he said, " I have no idea what I'm doing. I sit at the piano, maybe more than my professor would want me to, and I'm just improvising, noodling around, messing around. And then slowly something coalesces after a week or two." And then he is on that journey to create a 98% score for one of his orchestrators.

00:26:46

Evan Keely: There's no question, orchestration is key with Williams. We've talked about melodic things, and the harmonic language he uses is generally pretty straightforward. Not exactly the most adventurous in a lot of the films, but very, very effective. But it's unsurprising that we would learn this about John Williams, that he's very meticulous about the instrumentation of his music and not just melodic and harmonic aspects of it.

You think about the trumpet theme in the Main Theme in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. We talked about The Force in Star Wars, it's very often a solo horn. These are core elements of Williams's style, how the instrumentation expresses the musical ideas, and he can be quite imaginative with instrumentation. We were talking about the piccolo tuba duet in Close Encounters.

00:27:41

John Banther: The oboe. Yes.

00:27:42

Evan Keely: Yeah. There's very unusual things that he's quite capable of doing. He'd be very creative with that. But many times his most effective strokes are actually fairly simple, and you might say traditional. Contrast that with our conversation season five, we talked about Ottorino Respighi and the Pines of Rome. He's evoking this ancient Roman marching on the Appian Way, and he has these bucine. The buccina is this Roman instrument that we have to usually use the flugelhorn, these strange instruments that come into that orchestration.

Obviously, Respighi, a great orchestrator, but Williams is also, and I think he's maybe less anxious about innovation and having this cutting edge attitude toward orchestration compared to somebody like Respighi. But both Respighi and Williams are composers who really know orchestral color. They really know how to get just the right sound out of the ensemble.

Talked about the Imperial March. You have these trumpets and trombones blaring out this theme, the percussion is doing things that you would expect in march music. It's not vastly different from a John Philip Sousa March, for example. Is this innovation? Is this the most wild, adventurous, creative thing in terms of it being novel? No, perhaps not. But heavy brass for the bad guys music in a movie maybe is maybe not the most daring stroke of originality.

What it is about Williams, it never seems trite. It never seems heavy- handed. It never seems dull. He knows how to write well for instruments. He knows how to create straightforward, melodic material expressed in effective, but often unsurprising, harmonic language, conveying ideas and feelings with clarity and power. And I can't help, but feel that Williams rejects the idea that something has to be entirely unprecedented artistically in order to be interesting.

00:29:42

John Banther: I love that, Evan. As you were describing that, it reminded me of crayons. You imagine I got to make a beautiful piece of artwork on a canvas or something. I need to do it with crayons. I want 150 pack of crayons with every single color I can imagine. And then John Williams is also there, and he needs to make something as well. And he picks up a four pack of crayons, of four colors.

00:30:06

Evan Keely: Yeah. The primary colors, and does something really straightforward, but really exciting.

00:30:11

John Banther: But then he turns to you and says, " Oh, did you need this color too? I only need three actually." There's a great quote from a Norwegian composer, Marcus Paus, who said that, " Williams has a satisfying way of embodying dissonance and avant- garde techniques within a larger tonal framework." I read that to mean that he's able to do things that feelings maybe seem avant- garde, but it is just within a specific tonal and structural framework that we know. This makes him one of the greatest composers of the century.

I am a big believer, Evan, in just doing something and just keep doing it. And if you can do it with someone else along the way, that's even better. Because when you can just do something and improve 0. 3% a day, that adds up over time. And I think that's what we find with Williams and Spielberg. This partnership comes together in a way that you can't just do otherwise, I think. And it creates incredible things in the music and then in the movie.

So, if we take the end of E. T., the final eight to 10 minutes is filled with music that has to match the screen. And John Williams said that there's tons of cuts. There's nearly every second, there is a cut on screen and there's something in the music that has to match with it. In over eight to 10 minutes, it's just impossible, they were struggling.

And then Spielberg told him, turn off the video, forget about the movie. Record the music, you wrote what we need. We will edit the movie to the music, the final huge scene of it. And I watched it yesterday. Oh, my gosh, I love it.

00:32:02

Evan Keely: Yeah. But that's an unusual stroke for a film director to say, " We're going to edit the film to the music," rather than the other way around.

00:32:09

John Banther: But that's something that you can get when you have this partnership. When he told him with Jaws, " No, that's the wrong style that you're thinking of, and maybe it should be this."

00:32:18

Evan Keely: Think of the level of trust between these two geniuses for Spielberg to be able to just say, " Go ahead and make your music. I will adjust to you." Neither of these guys is maybe known for the, well, I think Williams maybe has a certain humility. Spielberg, perhaps less so, and I don't say that as a criticism or an insult. But to just put his own ego aside and say, " I'm going to trust your creativity and follow your lead." That's quite remarkable. And as you said, John, you watch that scene, it is just extraordinarily effective.

00:32:50

John Banther: I imagine Spielberg, the studio, they have money, but it is still extremely expensive to just record those 10 minutes and then go and try to figure it out. And then if you have to go back, that is a huge expense. So, we are going to get into some of his non- film music here in just a moment. But maybe, Evan, there is a movie that you saw that you didn't know John Williams wrote the music for.

00:33:15

Evan Keely: Well, you mentioned Catch Me If You Can, which I remember I was not aware as I'm watching the film, or maybe I forgot that this is one of his many film scores.

00:33:25

John Banther: It's one of the, not neglected, but it's one of the underplayed.

00:33:30

Evan Keely: Yeah. It's not the first thing people think of him when they think of a John Williams film score. So, that escaped my attention as I was watching the film years ago. I was aware, however, that he was the composer for Lincoln, which is about 10 years later, 2012. That's another characteristic Williams score. And again, he's able to tap into that vein of the heroic, the larger than life, the grandeur. And there's something very American about his sound. I don't even know what I mean by that. And yet, I feel it more than I think it.

00:34:10

John Banther: For me, the movie that I did not know he had written the music for was Poseidon, or I called it Poseidon, I now know it's The Poseidon Adventure. And actually, when I was a kid, I didn't know what it was called. All I knew was there was this movie that would come on the TV and it was terrifying with this cruise ship flipping upside down. I was traumatized, but I could not look away. I had no idea Williams wrote the music for that until the other day.

00:34:36

Evan Keely: Well, you talk about growing up with John Williams. We've both been attesting to this as so many people can. And as I said, I was on the cusp between childhood and adolescence when Raiders Of The Lost Ark came out in 1981. A lot going on in the world at that time. I'm just at that age where I'm starting to really understand there's a world outside of my own imagination. I'm just starting to pay attention.

You think about the late seventies, the Camp David Accords and the hostage crisis in Iran. I was aware of these things, and then in the early eighties, you look at what's going on in Poland with the Solidarity movement, and Lech Wałęsa and these people who are changing the world. And you may wonder, well, what's this got to do with John Williams?

I'm seeing these exciting things happening in the world, this struggle and people yearning for freedom and trying to change the world. And I'm also hearing this music in my head that I've seen Harrison Ford cavorting around on the screen. The trumpet is playing that very familiar tune, and there's a sense of adventure. There's that sense of struggle. There's that sense of the heroic.

So, in my mind, the music of John Williams is a soundtrack to that period of history. Those themes of courage and daring and exploration and fearlessness in the face of danger and death. Whether it's Indiana Jones trying to run out of the cave before the traps get him, or these Polish dock workers demanding more rights. Those got blended in my mind, a sense of the heroic struggle of life.

And John Williams's music is a part of that. A sense of my worldview is forming at the beginning of adolescence. I think so many of those film scores of John Williams are so well- crafted. A lot of these movies would've been really terrific with some other composer, I'm sure. But can you imagine Star Wars without that music?

00:36:33

John Banther: I don't know. It would probably sound like Heartbeeps.

00:36:35

Evan Keely: Yeah. Some other very gifted composer could have done something. But many years after that, those films came out. I played a video game that was based on the Star Wars story, and it had all of the John Williams music with the London Symphony, that soundtrack that I grew up with. It's a really fun game. I'm not a big video gamer, but I play a little bit.

But the music really was so much a part of the experience. And a lot of video games, you can turn off the music, and I tried that once. Wow. Totally different experience. Really boring. The music made the experience much more exciting, and that gave me a whole new appreciation for Williams.

John, you and I had a conversation last season about Korngold. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, another composer, composed a lot for film in an earlier era. And as long as that medium, the medium of cinema has been in existence, there have been endless discussions and questions about things like whether or not film music is art, or if it's high art, or if it's not? And why?

Even in the silent film era, before films had sound, you'd have live musicians very often in a movie theater accompanying the film. And even those musicians often had to fight for respect. Were they really good musicians or were they just seen as they're just music hall, they're just a bunch of hacks?

So, here I am talking about video games, which is also a huge opportunity for composers nowadays. Very lucrative for a lot of composers, and you get your music heard that way. But again, there's this question, is that really art? And there are bound to be those who want to draw a line between real music of the concert hall and the other things, like film and video games, don't count as real music, and I don't find those distinctions very helpful.

I think Williams writes film music in a way that's timeless, but in another way it's old- fashioned. I don't say that disparagingly. I'm not really interested in labels like neo- romantic or whatever. I guess, you could make a case for something like that. But many of the films that are most successful, John Williams, also I think quite intentionally have that old- fashioned quality.

The Star Wars, Indiana Jones are very intentionally drawing on earlier eras as films. There's a old- fashioned quality that they have, I think very deliberately. It's part of what makes them fun. And I have to believe that the choice of John Williams as the composer for those films is part of that intention to evoke this earlier era of the movie, the movie short, the movie reel, the serials of the 1940s and so forth that are part of that cultural milieu. But at the same time, I think John Williams's music is never stodgy. It doesn't sound old- fashioned in a pejorative way. It always seems fresh and engaging.

00:39:31

John Banther: And we're going to get into his non- film music right after this. So, one of the kinds of music that John Williams has composed the most besides film music, are concertos. He's written a concerto for nearly every instrument of the orchestra, I think, pretty much all of them. And he said that he would approach these concertos as a time to discover a sense of renewal or get away from an assignment.

He's recording two to four film scores or more a year. He's in the studio all day every day, so this was his escape from that. And he's also very humble about them. I think he said, " Dvořák's Cello Concerto, mine is not going to usurp his anytime soon." But he's written some incredible ones. His tuba concerto is fantastic, one of my favorites. It is just one of the most exciting to play, to listen to, and he did more for the tuba than anyone.

There's the Concerto, the Close Encounter solos, the Jabba the Hutt tuba solo that happens in all of his music. But his concertos are really one to listen to. One specifically, Evan, that I think is one of his most extraordinary is his most recent, the 2021 work. His Violin Concerto No. 2 that he wrote for Anne- Sophie Mutter and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This feels like he is almost more himself in the music, as if he did not write film music. I was really taken by this piece.

00:41:08

Evan Keely: Yeah. It's a really fine piece. I hadn't really been aware of it until you and I started this conversation, John. It's a very exciting and interesting concerto.

00:41:19

John Banther: And it opens with a prologue and it has an epilogue with two movements in between. And I've seen in some of his other concertos and non- film works, there's a prologue written in as well. I think something movie- esque where I'm reading into it when I see prologue, epilogue added like that. But I love the opening movement's improvisatory feeling here.

The cadenza section is just wonderful. The third movement, Dactyls, is one I really, really like, because I love it when composers use grammar or things in literature. So, a dactyl in poetry is when you have a long stressed symbol followed by two unstressed syllables, so like the word bicycle. So, I find it interesting when composers use things like this to turn groups of notes that might be a melody or motif into more of a single gesture. It's not bicycle, that's something else. It's bicycle.

00:42:12

Evan Keely: Yeah. This is a concerto he wrote for Anne- Sophie Mutter, as you said. This was 2021 was the year it was first performed. The two of them had collaborated before. He wrote his piece, Markings, for Anne- Sophie Mutter in 2017. It's a work for solo violin and string orchestra and harp.

The Violin Concerto No. 2 is definitely quite different stylistically in many ways from his more familiar film scores, as we were saying. Here's a quote from Williams about this concerto. He said, " I can only think of this piece as being about Anne- Sophie Mutter. With so much great music already written for the instrument, much of it recently for Anne-Sophie, I wondered what further contribution I could possibly make. But I took my inspiration and energy directly from this great artist herself." So, he's really writing it for her.

She's of course this global phenomenon, as well she should be, incredibly talented violinist. And there, I think neither of them is new to the world of music, but he's really writing it with her style in mind. It's really her piece, and you listen to her performing it, you really get that sense. You mentioned Dactyls, the Third Movement. So, there is that poetic grandeur about it.

The sense that, yes, it's not film music, it's very different from his film music, but even in this absolute music, there's no program, there's no symphonic poem going on here. It's a concerto. And yet even there, there's a sense of narrative. This is a composer who is a storyteller. And it has me thinking about his old teacher, Castelnuovo- Tedesco and his love of literature and poetry.

And while this doesn't sound a lot like the film music of Williams that's more familiar to us, there's definitely that dramatic flair. There's this cadenza- like passage for the solo violin with lots of double stops and other technical pyrotechnics toward the end of that movement. And there's almost an operatic quality about it. It's this dramatic monologue experience.

I find the fourth and last movement especially moving. There's this Mahler- esque ending, which maybe it's a feeling of resignation or maybe a feeling of acceptance. Reminded me a little bit of the ending of Das Lied von der Erde.

00:44:33

John Banther: There are so many things you find in his music. When we talked about Korngold, you'll hear very sudden instances of, is this a reference, a quote, a homage or something else? And well, what do we do with these concertos then? What I recommend as an assignment, a homework assignment, if you will, is take your favorite instrument in the orchestra, the instrument you love that you would take with you to a desert island. Go and listen to John Williams's concerto for that instrument.

Now, think of an instrument that you don't like, maybe one you hate. I hate to use that word, but maybe think of one you don't like, and go and see if John Williams wrote a concerto for it, he probably did in the orchestra, and listen to that one. Because I want people to hear something they really like and hear what John Williams does with it, but also something they think they don't like. Maybe John Williams will change their mind, or at least show them the instrument is probably different than what they had thought it was before.

Unfortunately, Evan, we get an example here that is maybe more unfortunate for us and those listening, because John Williams wrote a symphony. He actually wrote a symphony. There's a score to it. We've never seen it. It's unpublished. It's not been recorded. So, it almost feels like now it's our turn to never hear a work written during our time by a great composer, only for someone else to find it 100, 200 years in the future. So, maybe they're enjoying it right now, but for us, we don't get it.

00:46:10

Evan Keely: I think he composed that work maybe in the 1960s. I'd love to hear it. But somebody's got to dig that score out and perform it and maybe record it.

00:46:20

John Banther: I think we may long gone, unfortunately, when that happens. But we can compare the sound of his second violin concerto, for example, to I think the composer we mentioned earlier, Edgard Varèse, who lived from 1883 to 1965 and taught a lot in the US. His piece, Amériques, if I can say that right. I hear some similarities within this to Varèse, which is a composer I had not heard him mention before.

But now we can talk about maybe some of the composers that have influenced John Williams. Because there's a funny thing now where enough time has passed where it works in the opposite direction. Because I heard and grew up with John Williams way before I knew Korngold and Wagner, way before. So, when I heard Korngold for the first time, it's like, he sounds like John Williams. Why is he copying John Williams? Not knowing that guy died a long time ago.

But it's funny to see it work in that way, but when we examine it, there is that Wagner connection that you mentioned. It's easy, maybe overdone at times. I think both composers had that unique rare opportunity to create those leitmotifs in content that spans 15 hours. That's not a usual thing a composer gets to do, right?

00:47:38

Evan Keely: Yeah.

00:47:39

John Banther: Also, Holst. The Planets is one people hear-

00:47:42

Evan Keely: Gustav Holst, yes.

00:47:42

John Banther: ... with Mars and some of the moments in his music. I actually, listening to it again, I thought there's some voice harmonies, vocal harmonies at the end of Neptune that come close to moments in Close Encounters, and that's something I had not really heard before.

00:48:02

Evan Keely: I also wonder about just a general English influence on John Williams. I'm not sure about it, but you mentioned Holst. I think Ralph Vaughan Williams might be another one. And one of the reasons I say that is I was driving my car once years ago, when my kids were young. They were sitting in the back seat, and I had music on. I was listening to one of the symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams, I don't remember which one.

And one of my kids, who was a Star Wars fan, spoke up and said, " Hey, dad, this sounds like," and he made some comparison to John Williams. And I'm listening to this Vaughan Williams symphony that I know well and I'm thinking, " Gosh, I never noticed," but he's right. And I said to him, " Well, John Williams is a very skilled composer and musician, and I'm sure he knows the music of this earlier composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams."

So, I don't know where the influences are exactly, but I think that John Williams has had a thorough education and a very keen ear and is quite knowledgeable. And you hear that in his music.

00:49:08

John Banther: He is extremely, extremely knowledgeable. It's clear that he has read, listened to, and studied all of these composers in the 20th century and the 19th century, also into the 18th century, I'm sure. And it also speaks to the aspect of it's a job. It's almost like a trade. Technically, I went to a trade school. That's how it was designated, music conservatory trade school. And so for John Williams, he has to pump out the music whether he wants to or not. Meaning whether you were divinely inspired or not. No, you have to write.

00:49:43

Evan Keely: Yeah, he works hard. He does not have a cushy life.

00:49:46

John Banther: And so we can actually talk about how he's everywhere at once now. He is a fabric of our society, in all of the movies, all of the stuff that's the news, the Olympics, and so forth. He is a fabric of our culture at this point. And this is something I also did not know. It wasn't always this way that we knew John Williams's face and everything.

When he joined the Boston Pops in 1980, he held that conductor job until 1993. One of the things he mentioned in the 1983 NPR interview was that he had rarely or maybe never conducted in public. His entire past 25 years, where every single day in a studio recording the music everyone knew and loved, and then you could just walk out the door.

00:50:33

Evan Keely: Nobody could recognize him.

00:50:34

John Banther: No, you could just live your life and people didn't know. That's a huge aspect of studio musicians. But now he's got this conducting job and he is in the public's eye and everyone loves him, but the musicians aren't fully in love with it. A terrible thing happened in 1984, musicians started hissing and making noise during a rehearsal of one of his newer works.

He walked out of the rehearsal, told them was going to resign. I would too. But then management, other people came in and were able to smooth it over, get people to apologize. I don't know how much of that was actually public for a while. Buts this points to the issue of film music, is it high art, or is it some cheap kitschy thing for a movie?

Fortunately, this is a attitude that has changed, I think quite a bit in the last 10 years. And I think part of the evidence of that is John Williams conducting and recording with the Berlin Philharmonic recently. That's not something I would've guessed would've happened.

00:51:43

Evan Keely: Maybe this distinction between Pops versus, quote unquote, " more serious" has always been artificial. And you look at great artists, like John Williams is a terrific example. Eric Kunzel, with the Cincinnati Pops for 30 odd years is another great musician, a great orchestra playing great music that people love.

If people like something, why does that diminish it? Yes, sometimes things are popular, because they have an evanescent quality and they lack depth or whatever, but we shouldn't assume that. And certainly with a composer and conductor and musician like John Williams, we certainly should not assume that he lacks depth.

00:52:23

John Banther: No. And musicians, I definitely see a difference in how people think of this music now. There will still be some complaints, but a lot of that rises out of, if I can just say for a moment, orchestra musicians are severely overworked. And so when you have a Pops program, sometimes it's like, " I like this music, but it's also 25 tunes that I need to play, screaming high and loud, and I just came off of this last week, and we've got this next week."

So, sometimes there's that aspect to it. I played with an orchestra earlier this season, not because the tuba player was sick, but because they had three series happening at once. I played thirty- something tunes that week, just playing them, while there's three series happening at once that everyone else is having to also contend with as well. So, that's to say there's been a real change.

He's recorded with the Berlin Phil, he's recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic too, and now he is part of our lives. In 2009, he wrote music for Obama's inauguration. So, what's happening today, Evan? He's 93 years old, but he's still technically not retired. He wrote music for the recent Indiana Jones movie, and he said, " Hey, I'm still open to projects if they interest me."

00:53:42

Evan Keely: Clearly he is willing to work hard.

00:53:44

John Banther: Yeah. He is willing to work hard, and I think his legacy, it's going to last as long as we're listening to music, and his legacy will continue on. He is, of course, he is going to be bequeathing his entire library of his concert music, film scores, sketchbooks, all of that to Juilliard. I think we might be finding him recording things in the future that we did not even know about right now. That would be very fantastic.

Okay, Evan. So, what do we do now? Where do we go? What do we listen to for his non- film music? I personally think there's a lot to be enjoyed in his concertos. I'll put a playlist on the show notes page. But there are some other non- film music that was also not for a particular function, like a centennial. One of those would be American Journey. It was commissioned by the federal government it 1999, and premiered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1999 on New Year's Eve. Quite special for something to happen.

00:54:45

Evan Keely: Yeah. I think President Clinton commissioned that. I like American Journey a lot. Some of it reminds me a little bit of Margaret Bond's Montgomery Variations, maybe a work that a lot of our listeners don't know, deserves to be known. Orchestral music reflecting on the struggle and promise of our country. And here is John Williams, who just has such a gift of expressing that in such a powerful and compelling way.

I really like the Oboe Concerto. You talk about concertos for every instrument. He wrote an Oboe Concerto for oboist, Keisuke Wakao, he played the solo in the work's 2011 premiere. He was the assistant principal oboe of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, also principal oboe of the Boston Pops.

It's a three movement concerto, so there are aspects of that structure, very traditional. The finale is entitled Commedia, and there's definitely a whimsy, theatrical Commedia dell'arte humor about it. Not program music as far as I know, and yet again, there's a theatricality that we associate with John Williams, composer, a storyteller.

00:55:56

John Banther: So, it's a composer who is a fabric of our lives, basically. Someone who is still alive, which means there's a lot of aspects of a life that has not been studied or dug through quite yet. So, we'll be hearing and finding out things in the future. But I imagine we're probably going to get some more music from John Williams before all was said and done, Evan.

00:56:20

Evan Keely: He's not done yet, I think. Even at 93, I think we said he is. He's in his early nineties, he's still working hard and has contributed so much to our lives. I want to conclude with a short personal reflection. Which is to say that I knew a very gifted musician many years ago. I knew him as a church music director. He was also a high school band director. And John, you don't need me to tell you about the intensity of high school marching band, these really intense, high quality competition culture.

So, this musician that I knew was part of that world and very, very skilled, lovely human being. And he was also a passionate, really hardcore Star Wars fan, and had been from childhood. And what he disclosed was that it was John Williams that got him interested in music. He'd hear this thrilling orchestral music in these movies that he loved from childhood, and that got him interested in music.

And there have got to be countless stories like this about how John Williams has affected peoples' lives in this positive way. I think to some extent, it's true for myself, and has to be true for more people than we can count. I think the whole world owes a great debt to this wonderful composer and musician, John Williams.

00:57:40

John Banther: It might still be happening now, but I know in the last 10, 15, 20 years when I was coming up, if you saw Jurassic Park or E. T. fall down on your middle school band music stand, you went bananas. You went bananas. Well, thank you so much, Evan.

00:57:56

Evan Keely: Thank you, John.

00:58:00

John Banther: Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown, your guide to classical music. For more information on this episode, visit the show notes page at classicalbreakdown.org. You can send me comments and episode ideas to classicalbreakdown@ weta. org. And if you enjoyed this episode, leave a review in your podcast app. I'm John Banther. Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown from WETA Classical.