John Williams: May the Force be With You!
Yoda Fountain, Lucasfilm Offices, St. Francisco. Photo by Maxence Peniguet. Wikimedia Commons.
What do Star Wars, E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Indiana Jones, the first two Home Alone films, the first two Jurassic Park films, Schindler’s List and the first three Harry Potter films have in common? American composer John Williams composed their iconic film scores! On 8 February 2023, one of the greatest composers in the history of cinema turned ninety-one.
Williams has composed more than 100 film scores. The magic of his powerful music not only makes scary moments scarier, and exciting moments more exciting. His film scores have also become a shared soundtrack of favourite memories, uniting listeners across the globe and across generations. No wonder he has been honoured with 52 Academy Award nominations (only Walt Disney got more) and five Oscars. Here are some intriguing facts about three of his most popular film scores:
Jaws: The Terror of Two Notes
Williams started collaborating with legendary director Stephen Spielberg back in the 1970s, when Spielberg was still a young, aspiring filmmaker. One of their early collaborations was Jaws, a terrifying movie about a man-hunting great white shark. When Williams initially told Spielberg that he had composed a scary theme for the shark using only two notes, Spielberg didn’t believe that this was possible. But Williams proved his point: the tension created by the orchestrated ostinato is almost unbearable, and absolutely blood chilling. Spielberg would later say that William’s music was scarier than the shark.
Star Wars: A Cinematic Opera
Who doesn’t know and love the exhilarating Star Wars theme? But did you know that the Star Wars scores have much in common with opera? Many of the characters are identified by their own themes. We see and hear Luke Skywalker, Yoda, . . . The action of the film is pretty much continuously amplified by the music: the orchestra is constantly playing. In total, the music amounts to about ten hours, with fifteen to twenty major themes.
Schindler’s List
Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is one of the most powerful movies about the Holocaust. After watching the movie for the first time with Spielberg at the director’s private cinema, Williams was so moved that he had to go for a walk. When he returned, he told Spielberg that he needed a better composer than himself for this movie. Spielberg responded that this was true – but all of them were dead (meaning composers like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov).
But Williams is not just one of the greatest composers in the history of cinema. He has also composed many classical works. When film production stopped during the coronavirus pandemic, he used his sudden freedom to compose a violin concerto for Anne-Sophie Mutter. In an interview given to the New York Times around his 90th birthday, Williams said that he was planning on stepping away from film and focusing on writing concert works. May the Force be with him!