What’s that old saying? That the greatest composers of musicals are able to create melodies and songs we can hum as we walk out of the theater after the show? By that standard alone, the greatest film music composer of our time—and maybe any time—is John Williams, whose melodies are recognizable and hummable from the moment they’re heard in the movie they’re composed for. Think Jaws. Think Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Jurassic Park. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. ET The Extra-Terrestrial. Raiders of the Lost Ark. For starters.
These melodies and countless others are not just the music of the movies. They’re the music of our lives. We know them by heart because they seem to have been written for our heart, to bind us emotionally to the stories, to the wonder, to the fear and inspiration and fun.
But what’s the story of the man behind the music? Williams is notoriously shy and always, in interviews, self-deprecating. For that reason, the best news of the year for fans of film music is the publication of the new biography, John Williams: A Composer’s Life. Author Tim Greiving is a well-known writer about film scores, and like so many others, myself included, he is a John Williams fan, and he set out to write about the man whose work is so deeply beloved around the world.
Greiving got a lot of people to talk to him. Steven Spielberg. Oliver Stone. Hans Zimmer. Yo-Yo Ma. Musicians. Family members. Friends. He had interviewed Williams on other occasions, but not for a biography—and at first the composer wasn’t interested in participating in one about his own life. But Greiving kept at it, and in time his persistence paid off. In the end, Williams jumped right in.
The result is a stunning achievement that digs deep into the composer’s work and life in a way that’s fascinating and unforgettable. Greiving starts before the beginning, reaching into Williams’s ancestry. Where did he come from? What put the soul of a composer into him? He shows us the young boy and his parents, his early exposures to show business, and then the young man, the arranger, the lover of jazz. Greiving puts us in the scene as Williams becomes a session pianist for, among others, film composer Henry Mancini, and then documents Williams’s move into composing for television and, in time, movies, notably for three disaster movies in the early 1970s (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake) and then for a young director named Spielberg.
From there, Greiving moves back and forth between the movies and the man. More than just a recounting of Williams’s career—he did this, and then he did that—the biography is much more about why Williams did what he did. Where was he, and what did he learn, and who from? Why was that the right place at the right time? How did the scores come about? The best way to get into that is to understand what was going on in the life of the man.
Greiving’s writing is lovely. It’s clear that he loves film music, and Williams’s music in particular. He isn’t a fawning fanboy, but rather a scholar who isn’t afraid to write frankly about the music that doesn’t work as much as he’s willing to write effusively about the music that does. He makes it abundantly clear that Williams isn’t just a composer, but a storyteller—and that, I think, is the man’s genuine gift. There are many wonderful composers who make music that heightens a movie’s action and deepen character or what have you. But Williams has always had a way of making the music work as a storytelling component, more than simply a device. Beyond what the story might need, beyond what the director might want, Williams’s gift is his sense of knowing what the audience needs. A character’s motivation. A subtle reminder of an earlier scene. Not just by giving us a moment of terror or wonder or grief—but by tapping musically into the emotional landscape that brings such things to life. His work doesn’t just augment the film; it elevates it. Without Williams’s contributions, Jaws isn’t Jaws. Raiders of the Lost Ark isn’t Raiders of the Lost Ark. And Harry Potter just isn’t as magical.
Finally, Greiving shares his views about Williams as a contemporary composer beyond his work in movies. Williams himself has said that he sometimes prefers the freedom of music that isn’t constrained by the needs of a film—and his non-film work, while often beautiful, is also sometimes challenging. It doesn’t often have that hummable melody we expect and welcome in his film work, and that sets it apart, bringing the composer a real depth beyond the work most of us know him for.
Throughout the book, Greiving also writes about the ongoing tension between classical music and film music. Williams was instrumental, if I may put it that way, in bringing film music to the concert hall, especially during his years conducting the Boston Pops. Purists were quite vocal about their view that film music had no place in the concert hall, but Williams forged ahead anyway. Today, largely thanks to him, it did and does. People understand that film music is often a fundamental part of their lives because its melodies are not just for the movies but for times they want to remember. They also love film music played live. It’s pretty commonplace now for a symphony orchestras to offer film scores played live to picture, and audiences can’t get enough.
A Composer’s Life is an important work that pulls the curtain away, showing us the man behind the music. It shows us that Williams is a man with great talent and skill who has known triumph as well as tragedy and failure. His experiences imbue his work with something special—and that specialness in his work imbues our lives with something truly and endlessly magical. The life is surely the composer’s, but his work belong to all of us. ◊
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