One time he got irritated was when I arranged ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ ‘Write your own music,’ he said.” Benny was a famously irascible character, but in later years he was always very encouraging to me. ‘Old Man Williams isn’t afraid to break the head,’ he’d say. Williams père worked several times with Bernard Herrmann, perhaps the greatest American film composer, celebrated for his scores for “ Citizen Kane,” “Vertigo,” “Psycho,” and “Taxi Driver.” Williams, who sometimes joined his father at rehearsals, told me, “Benny liked the way my father played the timpani.
STAR WARS COMPOSER MOVIE
He was, in a sense, born into the business his father, Johnny Williams, was a percussionist who played in the Raymond Scott Quintette and later performed on movie soundtracks. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, when Williams formed links to the young blockbuster directors Spielberg and Lucas, he was already well established in Hollywood. I was not a youngster when I started, and I feel, in retrospect, enormously fortunate to have had the energy to be able to finish it-put a bow on it, as it were.” Start on it, spend forty years on it, see where you get’? Mercifully, I had no idea it was going to be forty years. “How do you understand forty years? I mean, if someone said to you, ‘Alex, here’s a project. “Thinking about it, and trying to speak about it, connects us with the idea of trying to understand time,” he said. He is a tall man, still physically vigorous, his face framed by a trim, vaguely clerical white beard. Williams poured himself a glass of water in the bungalow kitchenette, settled into a chair in front of his desk, and addressed the topic of the “Star Wars” cycle.
At a tribute, in 2012, Spielberg said, “John Williams has been the single most significant contributor to my success as a filmmaker.” It is, however, “Star Wars” that anchors the composer’s fame. The two men first worked together on “The Sugarland Express,” in 1974, and have collaborated on twenty-eight films to date-all but four of Spielberg’s features. In February, I visited Williams in his bungalow office on the Universal Studios back lot-part of an adobe-style complex belonging to Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg’s production company.
In the coronavirus period, he has been at home, on the west side of Los Angeles, focussing on a new concert work-a concerto, for the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, which will have its première next year. He is well aware of the extraordinary worldwide impact of his “Star Wars” music-not to mention his scores for “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.,” the “Indiana Jones” movies, the “Harry Potter” movies, the “Jurassic Park” movies, and dozens of other blockbusters-but he makes no extravagant claims for his music, even if he allows that some of it could be considered “quite good.” A lifelong workhorse, he resists looking back and immerses himself in the next task. Williams is a courtly, soft-voiced, inveterately self-effacing man of eighty-eight. When, earlier this year, Williams made his début conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, several musicians asked him for autographs. The “Star Wars” scores have entered the repertories of the most venerable orchestras around the world. He developed a library of dozens of distinct motifs, many of them instantly recognizable to a billion or more people. Williams composed more than twenty hours of music for the cycle, working with five different directors. Williams scored every film in the series, and there is no achievement quite like it in movie history, or, for that matter, in musical history. More than forty-two years later, on November 21, 2019, Williams presided over the final recording session for “The Rise of Skywalker,” the ninth and ostensibly last installment of the main “Star Wars” saga. On January 10, 1977, during the final days of the Ford Administration, John Williams began writing music for “Star Wars,” a forthcoming sci-fi adventure film created by George Lucas.
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