JOHN WILLIAMS: MOVIE MUSIC

John Williams is one of America’s most widely known composers. Born in New York in 1932, he moved with his family when he was sixteen to Los Angeles, where his father was active as a studio musician. After serving in the Air Force, Williams returned to New York in 1954, working there as a jazz pianist in clubs and on recordings while attending The Juilliard School. He subsequently moved back to Los Angeles to enroll at UCLA and study privately with Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco. By the early 1960s, he was composing music for feature films and television, as well as working as a pianist, arranger and conductor for Columbia Records. His music began to receive wide recognition during the 1960s, when he won Emmys for his scores for the television movies Heidi and Jane Eyre.

Williams has since composed music and served as music director for more than 300 movies and television shows, including all of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, Jaws, E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, Home Alone, The Witches of Eastwick, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. His recent projects include the Harry Potter movies, Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich, War of the Worlds, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Adventures of Tin-Tin and Lincoln. He has received fifty Academy Award nominations (the most of any living person and second only to Walt Disney) and won five Oscars, 21 Grammys, four Golden Globes and four Emmys, as well as numerous gold and platinum records. The original soundtrack album from Star Wars has sold nearly five million copies, more than any non-pop album in recording history. 

In addition to his film music, Williams has written many concert pieces, including two symphonies as well as concertos for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, bassoon, tuba, horn and trumpet. For the 350th anniversary of the City of Boston, he composed the Jubilee 350 Fanfare; for the Boston Pops, he wrote the Esplanade Overture and Pops on the March. In 1986, he wrote the Statue of Liberty March for the celebrations marking the centenary of that national monument. He was among the 21 composers who contributed fanfares to the Houston Symphony Orchestra’s celebration of the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986. His additional concert works include the Essay for Strings, the official themes of the 1996 Summer Olympics (Summon the Heroes) and 2002 Winter Olympics (Call of the Champions), and numerous chamber pieces. Williams composed Air and Simple Gifts for Clarinet, Cello and Piano for the inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama as President of the United States on January 20, 2009.

From 1980 to 1993, Williams was Principal Conductor of the Boston Pops. In addition to leading that orchestra in Boston, on tours across the country and abroad, and in many recordings, he has also appeared as guest conductor with major orchestras in London, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Houston, Toronto, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Williams holds twenty honorary degrees, including those from The Juilliard School, Boston College, Northeastern University, Tufts University, Boston University, New England Conservatory, University of Massachusetts, Eastman School and Oberlin College. On June 23, 2000, he was the first person inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. On New Year’s Day 2004, he served as the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade in Pasadena, and the following December he was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor, America’s highest award for artistic achievement. In June 2006, Williams received the prestigious Golden Baton Award for Lifetime Achievement from the League of American Orchestras; in 2010, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts at the White House. 

“I use John Williams to enhance my vision and my thoughts emotionally,” said producer-director Steven Spielberg, who has worked with him on nearly thirty movies over four decades. “Without John, bikes don’t really fly, nor do brooms in Quidditch matches, nor do men in red capes. There is no Force, dinosaurs do not walk the Earth, we do not wonder, we do not weep, we do not believe. John has given movies a musical language that can be spoken and understood in every country on this planet. His is the most common language through which people of all ages communicate and remember to each other why they love movies. Without question, John Williams has been the single most significant contributor to my success as a filmmaker. This nation’s greatest composer and our national treasure is also one of the greatest friends I have ever had in my entire life.”