John Williams

LONDON

I am remembering London so well from the late 1960s and early 1970s when my friend Andre Previn
was principal conductor of the LSO.

MAURICE MURPHY – Star Wars his first engagement

Legend has that! That he came out ot Denham, and we started by putting the fanfare to Star Wars
up, and he shocked the world with that high C that he picked off! I loved him ever since, he was a
dream. Our hope and wish was to play some golf together and I’m so sorry that he left us. Way too
soon. His playing was so exciting.

HE HAD ALMOST A RAW QUALITY TO HIS TOP NOTES

Yes. Can I put it this way: perfect for the kind of action films that we were doing. Exactly the kind of
heroic and extrovert sound that we needed.

Vienna

I had never conducted publicly in Europe. Ever. And I never really intended to. It always seemed to
me a long way away from California. And conducting in public has never been my real career in spite
of my years doiong the Boston Pops. A lot of wonderful invitations have always come from Europe
and I always said no, but when this last invitation came from Vieena I thought well if I ever aim to
conduct in Europe in this lifetime I had better get on with it, and I thought well Vieena is a great
place to start and what a great honour. So I thought, just this once I WILL MAKE THE TRIP.

I ENJOYED IT ENORMOUSLY. I love Europe and of course the UK greatly.

When you walked in to the Musikveriein did you feel the ghosts of all those great Austro-Germans –
Mahler and Bruckner and .

Absolutely! It’s a spiritual trip for any musician. I have been very romantic in my mind about Vienna,
when one thinks of Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, \Schubert, Brahms and Mahler, it’s as much of a
Meccas as we musicians have. I had been there years before asa tourist with my young wife and I
think we were in Vieena for 2 days but I don’t think we saw much of Vienna. We were only looking at
each other at that point.

So just to breathe the air of Haydn was more than I could resist. I felt I needed to do that. I felt so
honoured that a composer of my type, let’s say, mostly having done commercial and film work all my
life , that this orchestra would welcome me as a guest. I can’t think of a higher honour
HAD THE ORCHESTRA PLAYED YOUR MUSIC BEFORE?

I DON’T THINK SO., I was actually a little bit concerned about the orchestra before I got there – the
style of their playing. I know they have a fabulous romantic sound, and 19 th century coloration that
they can do seemingly more genuinely than any other orchestra, and the hall@s acoustics. But I had
concerns about the rotary valve trumpets and so on. So much of my music has been of necessity
brassy, so to speak, and I worried about so much upper-register work for the trumpets without the
valve-pistons we use in. But they were fabulous: the pitching and coloration and the power of it
were all wonderful,. So they came up to that challenge brilliantly. It was a great experience for me. I
hope to go back in February if the coronavirus will let us.

I’ve written a fanfare for them. They asked me to do something for the Philharmonic Ball which takes
place in January. Since 1924 they’ve had a fanfare from Richard Strauss, and so they wanted to have
a new one so I’ve done it in the same instrumentation as the Strauss.

DOES IT PICK UP ANY OF STRAUSS’S THEMES

I suppose some might hear a similar interval here and there, but I don’t’t think so!. It’s certainly loud.
Strauss had eight horns and six trumpets.

And I loved being a tourist in Vienna. I went to the various historic houses and libraries. Anne-Sophie
Mutter showed me around the town and I fell in love with the whole place. It was like history coming
alive for me. An American tourist with a particular liking for music history.

WHICH OF TYHOSE GREAT VIENNESE COMPOSERS WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO HAVE MET AND HAVE
A LONG CHAT WITH?

Of course Beethoven, though he would obviously be a hard person to converse with, except by
writing in his conversation books. He was interested in theatre certainly, and I think he might have
been interested in film if he’d lived 200 years later. I think he would have been horrified if I could
have explained to him the challenges we face playing the music at the same time as hearing the
noise of spaceships flying past/ I don’t think he would have been happy about that.

TOO UNCOMPROMISING PROBABLY

Haydn has always been such a particular favourite of mine. I think he was one of the purest musical
talents in the whole of history. Instinctive musicianship! We wouldn’t have had Mozart without
Haydn, and Beethoven too for that matter. There’s a wit and a rhythmic lilt. It appears to me that he
wrote music as easily as Mozart did. Before him, the people I rever e are Bach and Handel of course,
and Schutz before that. But the tradition in music in Ger many and Austria has never been
surpassed.
Your tastes changed?

Very much so. When I was a youngster, the first serious music that interested me was the Soviets –
Shotstakovich and Prokofiev, Bartok too. This was very modern at that time, but I have to say that
studying piano that interested me even more than Beehoven was Chopin – the lyricism and
romanticism of it. And now of course, as you’ve probably guessed, the older I’ve got the more I’ve
mlost interetsin hyper-complexity in music. I so admire Beethoven, and Haydn. I just read their
scores for the pleasure of what I hear in my head, and the beauty I find in the craftsmanship – and
the occasional naughty delight in discovering a parallel minor 7 th tucked away in Beethoven, and ther
way he glosses over it with such conviction that it becomes very right!

I was also very interdssted in jazz, but the world of jazz I knew and its practitioners have pretty much
all gone. Now a pop world that I know next to nothing about. One of the ironies of my life is that I
conducted the Boston Pops Orchestra for years knowing next to nothing about contemporary pop.
We were playing Suppe overtures and Richard Rodgers waltzes.

YOU HAVE ALWAYS HAVE THE ABILITY TO TAKE FROM THE AVANT-GARDE. ON THE NEW RECORDING
THE OPENING OF CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, IT’S SHADES OF LIGETI AND PENDERECKI

Yes, that’s ture. It makes me want to say that in film there is an opportunity, even a need, to change
texcture and colour to the extent that in a piece like Close Encounters you have Penderecki –like
string clusters combined later in the piece with romantic tunes, the requirements of the film
demanded all of that in one six-minute sequence. As film composers we are asked to do all sorts of
things. I remember my earlier days writing burlesque and vaudeville music for comedies as well as
romantic scores for dramas, all at once! That’s what it’s like for a composer writing for cinema. If you
are going to do more than a couple of films you will run into all sort so f opportunities and
challenges. It’s less challenging for me now, I guess, because I have done over 100 films.

AND NO SUCH THING AS WRITER’S BLOCK

There really can be no such thing as writer’s block, or the drying up of ideas, in film composition. You
are really closer to being a journalist than a novelist. You have a certain number of days to write a
certain number of minutes of music, and you reqally have to get on with it. It’s a job of carpentry, of
manufacture of musical things. I think peopke who are troubled with writing block and can’t get onto
the next page will have trouble doing this kind of work.

SO YOU NEVER HIT A BLANK?

If there’s a section of a scene that I don’t know what to do with, I will just move on and do
something else then come back to it. It usually solves itself.

DO YOU GET ACTUAL MUSICAL IDEAS FROM THE DIRECTOR GIVING YOU THE BROAD OUTLINE OF A
FILM, OR DO YOU WAIT TO SEE WHAT’S ACTUALLY BEEN FILMED?

It’s always better for me to see something. I can respond at a musical level to visual things in a way
probably can’t to verbal instructions. Directors will talk about what they think they want to have. I
listen to them, and it may give me some sense of what is going to work here, but usually when I get
to the piano and start bto work, pretty much those ideas are gone.

And of course there’s a great variety in that species. Some directors are very musical. Others have a
difficult time with it. There are many who are very suspicious of having to use a lot of music in their
films. And Other, suchg as Steven Spielberg, for whom you can’t offer enough music! He’s always
wants more and more. It’s rather touching in it’s way. He will come to a recording session that ends
at a certain hour, the musicians will be packing up, and Stephen will say; “Where are they going?
Why are you stopping? Haven’t you got any more to play?” He loves the process so much. That’s
unusual.

HAVE ORCHS CHANGED MUCH IN THEIR VIRTUOSITY AND APPROACH

Sightreading has gotten amazingly good, although the London orchestras – the LSO in particular –
have always been whizzkids at that. American orchs, most of which I know very well, are relative
youngsters these days. Boston Symhpnoy, they are all the children of the first Boston Symphony I
worked with. What I find is that the young people coming along are technically more brilliant, every
year more briloujant than the previous year’s crop. But there are stylistic mannerisms that have
evaporated over the decades. The use of portamento, that was so fabulous in the right hands.
Unfortunately we don’t have the job opportunities to match the talents. You get an orchestral
vacancy with 100 applicants, nearly all of whom could handle the job superbly.

AND HOLLYWOOD? HAD THAT CHANGED? DO YOU FEEL YOURSELF TO BE A HOLLYWOOD

I keep out of it, but to be perfectly honest I am probably a child of Hollywood. I began, as you
probably know, just playing piano in Hollywood orchestras in the 1940s for Alfred Newman and
waxmann and others, and also Sinatra that I did various kinds of work for, and my father worked
here too., But I have to feel very fortunate about it because the film medium has given me the
opportunity that otherwise I wouldn’t have had. In my generation’s time what has happened is that
these recordings of film music go all other the world and people are now very familiar with film
music in ways they weren’t before.In Newman’s day there were no soundtrack albums.

The contrast with London fascinated me, because the British film music world was always much
more connected to the “serious” concert world in London. You even had Vaughan Williams and
Britten doing film scores. I don’t think there was a film composer community in London comparable
to what we had or have in Los Angeles. I felt it when I came to London initially, I loved it, the
inclusivemennss – that it was all part and parecel of a musician’s life to play a concerft at the Albert
Hall one night and the next morning go out to Denham or Shpperton and put dowm a film score.

WHY PURE MUSIC, WITH YOUR WORKLOAD?

I think I’ve thought of my work outside film as simply part of musical self-education. It seemed to me
to be tinkering, and I enjoyed doing it without the constraints of the film, or having to rely on the
opinions of studio bosses or whoever. It’s always been a kind of relief valve for me. I’ve never takne
it very seriously in the sense that so many composers far greater than I are writing for the concert
stage.

There are large numbers of concertos because in almost every case they were written for a friend or
a musician I much admired, and we had fun doing them togetrher. I’m doing that now, finishing a
concerto for Anne-Sophie that we will do together next year at Tanglewood. Really, it’s just been fun
working with her, and that’s been the case with all of them. It’s been for my own entertainment and
enlightenment. I must say though that even without working, ever, I would always want to write
music. Even as a kid I used to compose just for fun, and when my pals in school could play them with
me that wqas the biggest thrill.And really it’s still the biggest thrill, writing something, having it
played almost immediately by a wonderful orchestra – that’s a pleasure I wish every composer could
have.

The road to being harp-savvy enough to write a harp concerto is a long one.

THE FUTURE

I WILL PRESS ON. Music is our oxygen, if you take it away we are in trouble., Music isn’t a proferssion
it’s a way of breathing.

Nine star wars film – joke in concert.