Composer John Williams turned 90 on February 8. He could be the most successful, most recognized, and most influential film music composer in our time. In his 70-year career, he has scored more than a hundred films. His musical soundtracks are attached to some of the most popular movies of all time, including the “Star Wars,” “Jurassic Park,” “Indiana Jones,” and “Harry Potter” franchises, “E.T.,” “Jaws,” “Superman,” “Schindler’s List,” and many more. During his birthday week, his recent album with the Berlin Philharmonic entitled “The Berlin Concert” topped the charts in Germany as the number one best-selling record. WABE film music contributor Dr. Scott Stewart joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes to salute John Williams at 90.
Dr. Stewart extolled, “There are few composers that we can name, even from the Austro-Germanic canon, that have music that is so universally recognized and stored in our individual and long-term collective memories as John’s.” The evolving industry of original film music, Stewart said, “has done so under the light of this true North Star.”
The fluency and flexibility of John Williams’ work:
“I’ve heard John say in interviews that he doesn’t think he has a style, but I think there are… musical characteristics in his film scores and his classical music that emerge, at least, as common threads and recognizable patterns,” said Stewart. “His large-scale narrative film scores reference the Golden Age, that large Hollywood orchestra that hearkens back to Korngold and Steiner and Newman, and those composers, of course, largely immigrated from Europe where they grew up during the late Romantic era of music, and they were listening to the music of Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.”
“A style that we would assign to John Williams… is that I think he writes to picture. That is, his music has such a high degree of correspondence to the narrative content that references characters; it checks out the emotional tone of the entire movie environment it reflects what’s going on in terms of dialogue and action. So John Williams is the master of spinning out these super-expressive and memorable hummable melodies, which attach themselves to emotion and to mood and to character.”
