More of John Williams' classic movie scores
January 8th 2012 03:30
The son of a jazz musician, John Williams was born in 1932 and attended UCLA before entering the Air Force, where he conducted and arranged performances by the Air Force Band. He later studied at the Juilliard School in New York City, where he also worked as a jazz pianist.
Returning to Los Angeles, Williams began performing, orchestrating and composing for the film industry in the 1950s. His proficiency in both symphonic and jazz forms led to his working with such noted composers as Alfred Newman, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini (on whose "Peter Gunn" TV theme he performed).
Credit: CBS
Since traditional Westerns went out of fashion in the '70s Williams' gift for Americana did not find much outlet, except for one notable exception: "The Cowboys" (1972), in which John Wayne plays a Montana cattle rancher forced to hire a bunch of kids to drive his herd to South Dakota. This being a movie, the kids grow into young men and wreak vengeance against the cowardly villain Bruce Dern.
The music has an Aaron Copland flavor in its rousing overture that has become a popular concert piece in itself.
The offbeat western "The Missouri Breaks" (1976), starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, benefited from an offbeat score by John Williams - a mix of spaghetti Western-Ennio Morricone with blues, heavy on guitar and harmonica.
Williams' greatest popular success was his grand score for the sci-fi fantasy "Star Wars" (1977). It captured the epic grandeur of Old Hollywood swashbucklers with its Wagnerian motivic approach to scoring: Each character (human or otherwise) had their own musical motif that carried them through the action.
The music also communicated the dreams of the character Luke Skywalker, a farm boy who wishes for adventure far from his dusty planet.
1977 marked a watershed for Williams: In addition to "Star Wars," he also scored the Steven Spielberg science fiction film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Unlike "Star Wars," music played an important role within the film, serving as the common language between Earthlings and the visiting aliens.
Williams and Spielberg went through hundreds of variations of a musical phrase that would serve as the Rosetta Stone of language - for the characters, and for the film's underscoring - until arriving at a five-note combination; the phrase could be heard in different keys throughout.
In 2009 Williams told PBS, "There's a sort of an expectancy created by hanging that unresolved musical phrase up, and it may be one of the reasons why it's inviting. Because you want, you need to resolve it, i.e., you need to hear a bit more."
For "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), a tongue-in-cheek homage to cliffhanger serials of the 1930s and '40s, Williams provided one of his most rousing action scores that also included Amazonian, Oriental and Middle-Eastern inflections as ace archeologist Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) trotted across the globe.
While Spielberg and Williams have collaborated on all manner of film genres and subject matter, "Schindler's List" (1993) was their most emotionally-shattering work. Williams' music, featuring violinist Itzhak Perlman, captured the horror of the Nazis and the glimmers of humanity that those trying to survive the Holocaust hold onto in the midst of war.
CBS
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