The Poppies of Terra #42 - Music for a Lifetime

Music producer, multi-instrumentalist and popular pundit Rick Beato a few months back posted a video titled “The MOST Well-Known Musical Artist In History?... It's Not Even Close.” I’ll spoil the reveal. Answer: the legendary composer John Williams. More people around the globe are familiar with Williams’ memorable movie themes than they are with the compositions of any other musician in history. 

Laurent Bouzereau (Faye, Five Came Back, Becoming Hitchcock) has now directed a feature-length documentary, Music by John Williams, trying to encompass the incredibly fecund career of the long-lived Williams, at present ninety-two years old. Bouzereau’s approach is unobtrusive: short chronological notes for context, mostly in Williams’ own voice, praise for Williams by a high-profile roster of filmmakers and musicians–including Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Frank Mashall, Alan Silvestri, Thomas Newman, David Newman, Bradford Marsalis, Yo-Yo Ma, Gustavo Dudamel, and others–, and sound excerpts hitting the high notes, or at least the most popularly beloved ones, of Williams’ vast filmography. Bouzereau’s documentary is unabashedly celebratory, for which, considering the quality of the work of his subject, he can hardly be faulted. The music speaks–or really, in this case, sings–for itself.

Williams, we learn, was born in 1932 in Flushing, Queens, NY into what was clearly a musical family. His father was a professional drummer and percussionist, who went on to work in radio and film as a recording artist, eventually introducing Williams to the entertainment world, while his mother had a classical music background. It may be impossible to tease out the strands of nature vs. nurture in the family’s evolution, but it seems clear that musicality ran deep in the wellspring: besides John Williams being the towering figure that he is, his two brothers are also musicians, and his sister was a piano teacher, while Williams’ own two sons, Mark and Joe, are also highly visible musicians in their own rights. (His daughter, Jennifer, married Jay Grushka. Amusing to note that the composer for the series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997) is the son-in-law of John Williams, whose score for Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) remains one of his most iconic and uplifting).

When he was fifteen the family moved to California. Williams learned musical discipline early on: he used to practice piano five to six hours a day, including on weekends. He still writes out his scores by hand today. While his father was working for various Hollywood studios, Williams became intrigued by film scores, his interest piqued by works like Elmer Bernstein’s music for On the Waterfront (1954). He then served in the Air Force, and passed through a phase of fascination with jazz, even releasing several albums. Work for television and on musicals led to film scoring, and his efforts for The Reivers (1969) and The Cowboys (1972) caught the ear of a soundtrack aficionado and up-and-coming filmmaker named Steven Spielberg, who sought out Williams.

I find it fascinating that by the time this meeting happened, in 1972, Williams was already forty years old. His output was considerable, to be sure, and he was attracting attention, but all of the masterpieces for which he’d become feted worldwide, and with which listeners tend to associate him today, were still in the future. The Sugarland Express (1974) was the first Spielberg-Williams collaboration; the next one, Jaws (1975), was, remarkably, temp tracked by Spielberg with Williams’ own work on Images (1972). Williams had some ideas on how to simplify the music and maximize the effect. We all know what happened next.

From the illustrious partnership that followed a plethora of indelible pieces flowed. Alex Ross, the brilliant critic, notes that Williams is a master of many musical languages, and that the whole spectrum of 20th century music is contained in the score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). That gamut includes, of course, an unforgettable sequence of five notes, whose power Williams partly explains in terms of grammatical analogy. I do wish the documentary contained more beats like that, allowing Williams to expound on technical elements of his work.  

As the hits and blockbusters rolled on, Williams also continued to score more intimate pictures, working across a wide range of budgets and genres, switching flawlessly, say from Alan J. Pakula’s Presumed Innocence (1990) to Spielberg’s Hook (1991) to Oliver Stone’s JFK (also 1991) and then to Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992), or, the following year, even more impressively writing the music for both Jurassic Park (1993) and Schindler’s List (1993) back-to-back. Though not known as being terribly fond of sequels, when Williams sinks his teeth into a series, they leave a mark: he’s scored nine Star Wars films, five Indiana Jones movies, three Harry Potter entries, two Jurassic Park adventures, two Home Alone escapades, and two Jaws pictures. None of these are imaginable today without his signature musical contributions. In parallel to the over one hundred film scores he’d go on to craft, Williams was also the Conductor of the Boston Symphony Pops, wrote music for the Olympics, and composed a number of concert stage pieces for virtuosos of various instruments, including the aforementioned Yo-Yo Ma, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and Judith LeClair, then principal bassoonist of the New York Philharmonic. Of all his works, this enduring champion of orchestral music seems most completely satisfied with the finale of his Cello concerto and the second movement of the First Violin concerto.

A few years ago we were graced with a documentary, in which Williams himself appeared, about another giant of modern music, Ennio Morricone. Ennio: The Maestro (2021), directed by the acclaimed Giuseppe Tornatore, was about two and a half hours long, yet never felt excessive. By comparison, Music by John Williams, about an hour and forty-five minutes long, seems skimpy. It begins with answers and works its way back to prefabricated questions, leaving little room for surprises along the way. Williams’ discography is too extensive to cover thoroughly, but why not use this opportunity to draw people’s attention to some of his lesser-known works, like The Rare Breed (1966), Jane Eyre (1970), Tom Sawyer (1973), The Missouri Breaks (1976), Dracula (1978), Monsignor (1982), The River (1984), Stanley & Iris (1990), or even Sleepers (1996), many of which were nominated for awards? He’s only ever scored one animated feature film, The Adventures of Tintin (2011)–is there a particular reason? What was it like working on A. I. (in its double-disc presentation my all-time favorite Williams album) which uniquely was handed down from Stanley Kubrick to Spielberg in 1995? Couldn’t we have other film composers of renown, whether tenured, like Hans Zimmer or Alexandre Desplat, or more recently visible, like Ludwig Göransson or Hildur Guðnadóttir, add fresh perspectives? How about the composers who wrote sequels in series that Williams kicked off, like Don Davis with Jurassic Park III and Michael Giacchino (who also composed the music for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), or John Powell (Solo: A Star Wars Story), or Patrick Doyle and Nicholas Hooper from the Harry Potter franchise (along with Desplat)? Did Williams ever feel like a particular project defeated him? Has he turned work down because he thought a different composer would be better-suited to the task? And so on and so forth. 

Bouzereau’s portrayal of John Williams, despite its limitations, is enjoyable, essential and rousing–but it's just a beginning, with plenty more left to explore. “I was filled with the love of music,” says Williams. As are we, of his.