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 Reivers 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 produced some of
the biggest and most widely recognized blockbuster film scores of a generation,
highlighted by his work in the
Star Wars franchise and for Spielberg,
which included the Indiana Jones films,
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,
Jurassic Park, and
Schindler's List. In the early 2000's, before
he partially retired from film scoring, he provided music to the first three
Harry Potter films. Despite a slowdown in his writing in the late 2000's, his
prolific film music career extended into the 2010's with select projects of his
choice, including a return to the
Star Wars universe in 2015.
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 Andre 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 Bernstein's
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, 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 embarked on
their own musical careers, his daughter Jennifer, and his retired
parents lived there. He is fond of golf, tennis, and of playing chamber
music with his friends.
John Williams conducts during recording sessions of
The Fury in 1978
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