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Information about Williams' background:
John Towner Williams was born in the Flushing section of Queens, in New
York City, on February 8, 1932, the oldest of Esther and Johnny Williams.
His father, a jazz drummer, had been one of the original members of the
Raymond Scott Quintet and later was a percussionist with the CBS Radio
Orchestra and NBC's "Your Hit Parade". Music played an important part in
the lives of John, his brothers Jerry and Don, and his sister Joan. From
the age of seven he studied piano, and he also learned to play the
trombone, the trumpet, and the clarinet. In 1948 the family moved to Los
Angeles, where the father free-lanced with film studio orchestras. After
graduating in 1950 from North Hollywood High School, where he played,
arranged, and composed for the school band, Williams took courses in piano and
composition at UCLA and studied privately with pianist-arranger Bobby Van
Eps. He composed his first serious work, a piano sonata, as a
nineteen-year-old student and later a wind quintet never finished or
performed.
Drafted in 1952, Williams was assigned to the United States
Air Force, and as a part of his tour of duty he conducted and arranged
music for service bands. After his discharge in 1954, he spent a year at
the Julliard School of Music as a piano student of Rosina Lhevinne.
During his stay in New York he worked at various nightclubs as a jazz
pianist. Later he was accompanist and conductor for singer Vic Damone,
played for composer Alfred Newman at Twentieth Century-Fox, and was
engaged as a pianist with Morris Stoloff's Columbia Pictures staff
orchestra in Hollywood, of which his father was then a member. His talent
for orchestration was soon recognized and encouraged by the studio
composers. Meanwhile, he continued his serious music studies in Hollywood
with Arthur Olaf Anderson and with the noted Italian composer Mario
Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
Beginning with his first screen credit, for Because They're Young in 1960, Williams' career as a composer of film scores gathered steady momentum. Prized for his versatility, he wrote music for jazz combos, dance bands, and symphony ensembles. Beginning on the late 1950's, Williams was also involved in television. He appeared as a jazz pianist in the Detective series Johnny Staccato, and he both composed and conducted for such shows as "M-Squad", "Wagon Train", and "Chrysler Theatre". In 1974, a young Steven Spielberg came to John Williams after being moved by his score to The Rievers to score his new movie, Sugarland Express. After his string of highly popular disaster film scores for The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, Black Sunday, and The Fury, critical notice of the scores, although often perfunctory in film reviewing, at times recognized the music's important contribution of the success of the films. Recognition also came through the Academy Award nominations (over 35 to date) he garnered for music he wrote or arranged, including those for several songs in the 1960's.
Through the 1980's and 1990's, and into the 2000's, Williams has poured out more wonderful scores, none of which need mentioning by name. Williams began conducting orchestras for the soundtrack recordings of all of his own works (with the exeption of a few early scores), and over the years he has also undertaken assignments for conducting light classical music with the symphony orchestras of such cities as Atlanta, Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. In 1980, the Boston Symphony management announced that it had concluded a three-year contract with John Williams to become the nineteenth conductor of the Boston Pops. Although it was generally agreed that no one could totally replace the revered Arthur Fiedler, the choice of Williams was greeted with enthusiasm.
In addition to working for motion pictures and television, Williams made his mark as a composer of serious music. Whether commissioned to write them or done for other purposes, these include: Prelude and Fugue (1965), his Essay for Strings in 1966 and his Symphony No. 1 written in the same year, dedicated to his long time Hollywood associate André Previn (a second Symphony followed of which not much is known); a Sinfonietta for Wind Instruments (1968); a Nostalgic Jazz Odyssey (1972); Jubilee 350 Fanfare composed for the 350th anniversary of the city of Boston in 1980; Fanfare for a Festive Occasion (1980); Pops on the March (on the request of Arthur Fiedler; but the work was not completed until after his death in 1981); "America, the Dream Goes On" (1982 with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman); Esplanade Overture (1983); Liberty Fanfare composed for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty (1986); Hymn to New England (1987); "We're Lookin' Good!" a march dedicated to the Special Olympics in celebration of the 1987 International Summer Games; Fanfare for Michael Dukakis (1988); To Lenny! To Lenny! for Leonard Bernstein¹s 70th birthday (1988); Winter Games Fanfare written for the 1989 Alpine Ski Championships in Vail, Colorado; Celebrate Discovery for the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America in 1990; Fanfare for Prince Philip (1992); Sound the Bells for the wedding of Crown Princess Masako of Japan (1993); and Variations on Happy Birthday in 1995 for a Tanglewood concert celebrating three birthdays (Seji Ozawa's 60th, Itzhak Perlman's 50th and Yo-Yo Ma's 40th).
His seven concerti are written for flute (1969), violin (1976, dedicated to his late wife Barbara Ruick ), tuba (for the 100th anniversary season of the Boston Pops in 1985), clarinet (for Los Angeles Philharmonic principal clarinetist Michele Zukovsky in 1991), cello (1994 for Yo-Yo Ma), bassoon (inspired by the poetic works of Robert Graves and written in 1995 for the 150th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic for its principal bassoonist, Judith LeClair) and trumpet (in 1996 for the 100th Anniversary of the Cleveland Orchestra). The widely known Olympic Games themes were written by Mr. Williams on three occassions. In 1984 he wrote Olympic Fanfare, and in 1988 he did Olympic Spirit and continued with Summon the Heroes for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and Call of the Champions for the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. He has also written four themes for NBC, most notably the NBC Nightly News theme entitled, "The Mission Theme".
Trimly bearded, tall, and sandy haired, John Williams is familiar to many
as a result of his frequent appearances as an Oscar nominee at the annual
televised Academy Award ceremonies. Widowed when his wife of eighteen
years, Barbara, died in 1974 of a cerebral hemorrhage, Williams was
married a second time, on June 9, 1980, at King's Chapel House in Boston,
to Samantha Winslow, a photographer and interior decorator whom he had known
in Hollywood for about five years. Once making his home in Boston, he
kept his ties with southern California because of his continued interest
in film music, and because his sons Joseph and Mark, who have embarked on
their own musical careers, his daughter Jennifer, most definitely a
doctor by now, and his retired parents live there. It's most probable
that after retiring from the Boston Pops, he moved back to California to
be closer to family and the industry. He is fond of golf and tennis and
of playing chamber music with his friends.
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John Williams is the master of the long-term Hollywood relationship. He
has remained loyal to directors such as Steven Spielberg (scoring all but
a few of his feature films) and Oliver Stone. He is also the master of the
sequel, scoring more sequels for seperate major motion picture series
than any other composer in the history of Hollywood, including sequels to Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Home Alone, Jurassic Park, and Harry Potter. Because of this trend, Williams has also become the master of weaving original
themes from previous films into new efforts, and interpolating the
combination into a thematically impressive suite of new and old music. The most difficult task he has faced has been the continuation of the Star Wars saga into six films, for which Williams must contend with over a dozen themes to weave into each new entry.
Arguably the best single year for any composer in Hollywood's long history, Williams produced Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in 1993, and both became top commercial sellers. After the acclaim he received from these scores (including another Academy Award), he went on
a drought. He took a year off from scoring, and then returned with three
less popular scores for Sabrina, Nixon, and Sleepers. In 1997, though, with re-releases of his Star Wars trilogy (special edition) in theatres, he provided impressive, dramatically eclectic scores for The Lost World, Seven Years in Tibet, and Amistad. Saving Private Ryan in 1998 proved that Williams' hand at heavy drama wavers
none. In between blockbuster scores for the Star Wars prequels and the start of the Harry Potter series, the maestro combined song and score for the beautiful A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001 and paid tribute to Bernard Herrmann in Minority Report the following year.
