The Phenomenon of Star Wars Music

You're listening twentyw thousand cats The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds I'm Dallas Taylor When it comes to film composers, there are a few names that stand out above the rest Pe like Ludvig Gorinson, Danny Elfman, and Han Zimmer The most well known film composer in history has to be John Williams Incredibly, he's been scoring movies since the nineteen fifties, and he's still working today at ninety four years old Over the last seventy years, he scored over a hundred films, including many of the biggest blockbusters of all time, like Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, ET, Home Alone, Jurassic Park, and Saving Private Riot He's won twenty seven Grammys, three Emmys, and five Academy awwards, and he's toured the globe conducting world class orchestras desespite all of that success, the story of John Williams life has rarely been told Because while John has done lots of interviews, he doesn't talk much about his personal history But in twenty twenty five, the first official biography of John was published. It's called John Williams, A Composer's Life by Tim Greving My name is Tim Greving. I am a film music journalist and historian, and I just wrote a book about John Williams, who is my favorite artist of all time working on the book gave Tim a unique window into the life and work of this musical icon Joom Williams was born in nineteen thirty two, which means he's older than Elvis Presley. He grew up in Queens, New York during the Depression, but his family was comfortable because his dad was always busy. John's father, Johnny Williams, was a successful jazz percussionist. For a few years, he played with the Raymond Scott Quintet, who had multiple hits. This is a song that Johnny played on called Powerhouse, which later appeared in Loononey Tunes, Rin and Stimpy, and The Simpsons. Rayond Scott quQuintet were contracted by Fox to come out to Hollywood. And so when John was five years old, he found himself playing on the Fx lotot with Shirley Temple and things like that. Llowly pop is a great trip So he was always surrounded by show business and musicians, and he started learning music as a kid from all these great teachers that his dad played with Here's John talking about his childhood in an interview with Variety. Music has been with me all my life. It was there when I became conscious when I woke up as a child. And it was what Adults do in their profession because my father's friends were all musicians. Specifically, John and his three siblings all learned to play piano. Here he is in the Disney documentary, Music by John Williams. My practicing had to be done in proportion to playing baseball. If I played baseball for an hour, I must have to practice the piano for half an hour He moved to LA with his family when he was fifteen and went to high school out here By then, he was already writing his own music Even when he was a teenager, he was arranging music for different ensembles, like little friend groups or jazz combos or whatever. So he was inventing music in his own way After high school, John enlisted in the US Air Force. He was eventually stationed at a base in Newfoundland, where he played piano and bass for an Air Force band So he was playing flag raising ceremonies and also at society dances and stuff like that. But he was an arranger too. So he'd do a lot of arrangements of tunes and marches and whatever Air Force bands play He also scored his first film, quote unquote in the Air Force. He scored a travelogue for Newfoundland Here's a clip of that film, which is basically a twenty two minute tourism promo. For the music, John woveven melodies from Newfoundland folk songs that he found in the library. For instance, this melody is based on a folk song called Lots of Fish in Bonivest Harbor. There's lots of fish in Bonivest Harbor, lots of fish riding around here. Bys and girls are fishing together forty five from carboners John had gotten his first taste of film scoring, but it wasn't what he wanted to pursue He never really had aims to be a film composer, even though he was in that world a lot since he was a kid, but he wanted to be a classical pianist. So he was studying and practicing the piano Really intensely in his teenage years. and as he got out of the air Force, he went and studied with the best teacher in the country at Jillard John didn't attend Juilliard, but he took private lessons from a renowned piano teacher at the school, Rosina Levine At the time, two of her other students were John Browning and Van Cburn, who would both become really successful pianists. This is Van Cleburn playing Rockmaninov's piano cononcerto number two with the Chicago Symphony. In an interview with NPR, John said that when he heard these players, I thought to myself, If that's the competition, I think I better be a composer And his teacher agreed She recognized that he wasn't destined to be like a concert piano player, but she saw that he had a gift for composing and arranging, and she really encouraged him in that direction. So he started pursuing composition while still playing piano under the name Johnny, like his father. He was a session pianist here in Hollywood, played on a bunch of film scores, including The Big Country. The original Westide story. He also played on albums for Frank Sinatra. But now all is gone Harry Beafonte ever since began was always But as time went on, John found playing other people's arrangements less fulfilling I think it was him sitting in the sessions for other composers in Hollywood where he's playing the piano. He was kind of bored doing that. and he realized he could do what the composers were doing maybe even better than they did. But those experiences taught him how to get the best from these musicians in his own work, as he told NPR. The instrumentalists at that time as now, were outstanding world class players. and my advantage was that I'd been playing with them for three or four or five years as a colleague in the orchestra. I would go to a horn player and say, have I got this too high or is this trill awk I'd rather play it here or there, just from one friend to another without any particular professional pressure And they'd also say, o, put it here, put it there In nineteen fifty six, John got married to Barbara Ruick, who he had known since high school By this time, Barbara was an actress and singer The year they married, she starred in the film adaptation of the musical Carousel. . About a year later, John and Barbara had their first of three children, a daughter who they named Jennifer or Jenny. In an interview with composer Andre Previn, John described this is the event that really pushed him into film scoring. And the event was the birth of a little girl birth of a little girl caused the need to earn some money, which everyone in the audience will understand. I had to go to work So he threw himself into composing. He also started going by John instead of Johnny, which he thought would seem more professional One of his early scores was for the anti war film None but the Brave, which starred and was directed by Frank Sinatra. He also did a lot of television work and composed the music for sci fi shows like Land of the Giants and lost in space. It was an exciting time for John and his family. Here's John's daughter, Jenny Williams, describing her childhood in the Disney documentary My parents were very glamorous and they went out a lot They through parties I remember that my father played a lot of show tunes. He and my mother would rehearse and have fun together and play songs And we were able to entertain each other and make each other laugh. and have so much fun together By the early seventies, there was a new crop of adventurous young filmmakers in Hollywood. This included people like Martin Scorsesee, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, and Robert Altman and many of their films were moving away from the sweeping orchestral scores that most classic films had. Instead, they wanted music that felt more modern and avant garde And it turned out that John could do that too He kind of been on this interesting jag where he was working with Robert Altman, who was a much more experimental adult kind of filmmaker. They'd done two pictures together One was called images which was this crazy score for like sounds, like these sculptures that you bang on and you know, throwing a rock into a piano and groaning and all this weird modern stuff. The movie is about an isolated woman who starts seeing a double of herself and loses her grip on reality And John's score reflects that paranoia And it's kind of this what if situation of this is the kind of path John Williams could have gone down if he'd stuck with people like Robert Altman, where it's like, let's do unconventional break the mold kind of stuff. But he meets Spielberg right around this time. And I kind of see this as a fork in the road of his career. Obviously, he chose Spielberg and these more kind of family oriented corn blockbuster kind of projects, and I think for the better. But it was this interesting moment in his career where he could have gone one way, chose to go another It was in late nineteen seventy two that the stars aligned for John Williams to meet Stehven Spielberg. Here's John describing that meeting to Stephen Colbert, who interviewed him and Spielberg together Somebody set up a meeting, a lunch meeting for us in some fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills. and head Waiter came and he said, I was bringing it to Mr. Spielberg and I saw this A teenager, I thought, you gott to forgive me, Ste tell the story. I'm not even here.. I thought maybe that's mrter Spielberg's son. Where's Spielberg It's important to remember that John Williams was forty almost forty one when he met Steven Spielberg and Spielberg was only twenty five. So John Williams had already lived this kind of first phase of life and been pretty successful and was kind of a veteran. and Spielberg was just a kid getting his first shot at directing a feature film Despite their age gap, the two men connected instantly Within a minute or two, I realized this somebody very, very special with a keen and Firstling, dazzling intellect. remembered everything I'd ever written. Spielberg was a soundtrack nerd who collected film scores. And he collected this score by John Williams for sil called The Reavers and Loved the music As Spielberg told Colbert, when I heard John's score for the Reavers, I said, to myself if I ever get a chance to direct movies I want this guy to score all of him. Spielberg loved old fashioned orchestral kind of the kind of film music he grew up listening to as well as like great classical music. And that's the kind of music he wanted in his movies. So that's why he reached out to this older, more experienced composer to try to hire him for his first film, which was the Sugarland Express The Sugarland Express is a crime drama about a Texan couple trying to get their son back before he's put in foster care Steven Spielberg imagines scoring it with an eighty piece orchestra After John saw the rough cut, he convinced him to pair it down, saying, quote, It's a very simple story. The music should be soft. just a few violins, a small orchestra, maybe a harmonica This is the title theme that John composed for it A few weeks before the movie was released, John's wife Barbara traveled to Nevada to shoot her first movie in over a decade It was a Robert Altman film called California Split But while she was there, Barbara suffered a brain aneurysm and died suddenly at only forty one years old. It was this horrible tragedy. of losing his wife, his childhood sweetheart, the mother of his three children who were now teenagers. It was this really Cataclysmic disruptive thing Here's John in the Disney documentary It was An unbelievable event, a perfectly healthy, gorgeous young woman suddenly gone from an aneurysm that we couldn't have predicted I was suddenly in my early forties with three teenage children to deal with this very tough situation Sometimes very difficult to talk about Barbara's father had been a violinist, and she always loved the violin So after she died, John composed a violin concerto in her memory. This is the second movement of that concerto, performed years later by the Boston Symphony Orchestra After taking some time to grieve, John reimersed himself in his work The death of his wife really shook his world and he became much more kind of J all about the music. and that's maybe the biggest change that happened in his life Here's their daughter, Jenny again, followed by John After she died, there was some kind of feeling that he had that she was by his side I felt like she was helping me It was just a funny kind of feeling that I had And I still have it And John would need all the help he could get, because he was about to begin one of the most legendary runs of any film composer in history. It started with a little film about a big fish advertiser you advanceced the thought that the shock is there just by hearing the music. And it took him to a galaxy far, far away. 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Initially, Spielberg wanted something similar to what John did for the Robert Altman movie, Images. Spielberg had it in his head that Jws needed a strange avant garde score like images and he put images music on the rough cut of jaws as a reference for John Williams. And John Williams said, this is all wrong This is not some cerebral intellectual drama. This is a popcorn movie is what he said So he came up with that simple repeating Brainless motor. for the theme for the shark Here's John on the Late Sh. I was thinking, what could be the simplest possible thing It has to be low because the shark is very deep It has to be something that When it's approaching you, It is completely unstoppable With this theme, John proved that two simple notes can be a lot more malleable than you might expect You can speed it up or slow it down to indicate that it's getting closer to you or it's retreating from you. It was a really effective psychological and dramatic device that then he explored throughout the rest of the score But at first, Spielberg didn't get it Here he is on the late show. I thought it was a joke when Johnny played that for me on the piano at his house and he takes a couple of fingers, not all ten, just a couple. He didn't need all ten. and he goes D and Godot on, Godot on. Tied on tied on tod on D d I started laughing. I started laughing. Johnny said, I'm serious, I'm serious. John was confident that once they tried it with the orrchestra, it would work. and of course, he was right While filming jaws, the mechanical shark kept breaking down. Because of this, there are lots of scenes that were supposed to include the shark, but don't But even when you can't see it, the music tells you when the shark is close and builds that sense of dread Here' Spielberg on the Late showow again Johnny sort of saved the movie because he became the shark and the music substituted for the absent shark whichich made it scarier and more suspenseful than had I had the shark working perfectly. With the release of Jaws, John became the John Williams Jazz was the biggest hit of all time when it came out. and the music made it as scary and powerful as it was. The two really fed off each other. So Spielberg and John Williams rocket to global fame at the same time. They become kind of the hottest d overnight and everybody knows who John Williams is. So even though John Williams had been working and was somewhat successful for quite a while before Jhs, this is the score that really pushes him to being like the top composer in Hollywood. It really changes his career. Amid the success of Jaws, Spielberg introduced John to a friend of his, a fellow director named George Lucas Lucas was in the middle of an ambitious project. It combined elements of Flash Gordon serials, Westerns, samurai films, and World War two aviation movies into a big sci fi spectacle At the time, it was called the Star Wars. Lucas was looking for kind of old fashioned orchestral, classical type music for his film. and Spielberg said, I know just the guy. This is the greatest composer. He's basically like the resurrection of old Hollywood composers. But John took a little convincing. He almost turned it down, partly because it seemed like just a kids movie, a clunky kids movie, whichich if you ever look at Star Wars with the music out of it, it is kind of silly looking and the dialogue's kind of funny and there's a guy walking around with a big dog costume on and, you know Look, your worshipfulness, let's get one thing straight. I take orders from just one person, me. So W day iss still alive? Will somebody get this big walking carpet out of my way? So you can imagine John Williams screening this and being like, I think I might be better served doing a drama for adults or something, but he decides to do it One interesting thing behind that score. is George Lucas was thinking about doing something similar to what Stanley Kubrick did in two thousand one and just using existing classical pieces two thousand one, A Space Odyssey included music like The Blue Dan Yube by Johann Strauss And so the temp track, the temporary soundtrack for Star Wars was full of The Ride of Spring and Gustav holds the planet familiar classical pieces And John Williams basically convinced Lucas, No, I'll give you original themes, original melodies and make it all sound of a piece while kind of referencing or paying homage to these classical pieces. This fit in perfectly with Lucas's vision for the story, which begins with a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away The idea was that this was a futuristic, unfamiliar world and characters, but George Lucas wanted it to feel like a long time ago. He wanted it to feel lived in and ancient and familiar, Here's John describing the music of Star Wars to composer Andre Previn And a simple idea is this Behind this unfamiliarity of terrain and of character, will'll place something that's emotionally very familiar What's that going to be? It's going to be a symphony orrchra playing, if you like, almost nineteenth century like tunes For instance, here's the ending of the First Movement of the Planets by Gustav Holst And here's a section of the Star Wars title theme Now, here's a section of The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky And here's a Star Wars piece called The Desert and the Robot Auction. which leads to people accusing Star Wars and John Williams more broadly of plagiarizing. They're like, hey I hear the thing you're referencing in the Star Wars score. but What I always try to tell people is that was very intentional. It was part of the whole concept for that score. and even when you hear the references to other classical pieces, John Williams transforms it and metamorphosizes it into something original and something he would have come up with But there's one piece in Star Wars that doesn't sound anything like classical music. It's the song played by the alien band in the Cowded Cantina on Tatooine. When they shot that scene, there was no music, just creatures holding instruments and dancing around John had no clue what kind of music to write for it, but as he told NPR in the early eighties, George Lucas had an idea You said just imagine that these four or five little musicians are wandering around this dusty little planet off in that space somewhere and they find under a rock The sheet music for onene of the arrangements of Benny Goodman's great swing band of the nineteen thirties First time. Benny Goodman was a bandleader and clarinet player who was called the King of Swing And they pick up this little sheet music, which they obviously had never heard, and they look at it and they try to play it in their own style And so I said, all, that sounds that's as plausible as any other thing we'd come up with. And that was the kind of genesis of this silly little piece. They rewatched the scene with a click track to figure out the tempo of the dancing aliens. Then, John wrote this jazzy piece The iconic Star Wars theme was actually the last piece of music that John wrote for the movie. He wanted a distilled, heroic theme and spent a long time struggling with it Now, George Lucas had said that with Star Wars, he wanted to evoke the sound of classic film composers like Eric Wolfgang Corngold Here's Korngold's theme for a nineteen forty two movie called Kingss Row. And just like those classical pieces, it's very possible that John had this in mind when crafting the Star Wars theme Here's John Williams on CNN. I finally, in desperation really, worked out this thing which jumps the fifth Domb Beam, Doo Sl,ati, jumping up to Dol again in act of hire. that seemed to me to be a direct, strong, heroic year sonorous sound from the orchestra, and it is a particularly electrifying breath interpretation the great brass section of the London Symphony Star Wars takes John Williams into the stratosphere. The film was a phenomenon. It smashed whatever box office records that Jws had made, which continued to happen. John Williams kept scoring these movies that were the next biggest blockbuster of all time. But Star Wars was on this level that no one had ever seen before. And his music was such an integral part of the phenomenon. Everybody remembered that music, came out of the theater humming that music, wanting to buy the soundtrack There was this two disk LP that came out with like a black cover, the white Star Wars Font on the Front. it became the best selling non pop album of all time So it was a hit. It was a genuine musical hit Later that year, a producer named Miko put out a disco version of the Star Wars music that was also a pretty big hit. So Star Wars just took John Williams into another strata of fame and popularity and success and financial success too, because he owned a piece of the film, thanks to George Lucas giving points to some of his key collaborators Points refer to percentage points of the movie's profits, and another person with Points of Star Wars was Stehven Spielberg. Before it came out, Lucas and Spielberg actually traded points on their upcoming films because Spielberg was working on his own alien movie. It was called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it was also scored by John Williams In the movie, when the Mothership arrives on Earth, it communicates with humanity using music. And they needed a short punchy melody for the aliens to play. John wrote about a hundred options, which he played for Spielberg on the piano Here's the two of them talking about those variations in an interview with Deadline And I remember you and I circle this one And Stehven said, I think that's the best one. And I said, I think so too for some reason Very simple but also very strong interbolically Here it is in the movie As John told Stephen Colbert, he likes how the melody feels unresolved Why those not da That's a finish Da it's over. That's a resolution Now we go no, sl. Sooul is like the word and or but it's a conjunction. So you have an ending and a starting D to bom. you got to do it again. That's a continuing story. Yes, it is. I mean, that is an after the fact rationalization Or but that's what it feels like. At the end of close encounters, Richard Dreyfus's character, Roy boards the mothership to go explore the galaxy And as he does, a melody from a classic movie plays in the score Did you catch that It's when you wish upon a star from Pinocchio aar. He different Wh you are Here's close Encounters again. Listen to the strings over on your right It might seem like a random choice, but it makes thematic sense. Like Pinocchio, Roy dreams of bigger and better things, and the answer to his wish comes from the literal stars. In fact, earlier in the movie, Roy comes across a Pinocchio music box that's playing the same song All this stuff is coming down I to be right L did work Here Spielberg discussing the score in a behind the scenes featurette All that is such a great symphony that John has written. It was almost an opera just a wonderful emotional opera. With a little bit of when you Wish uppon a star a disguise it's inside some of the notes Close encounters wasn't as huge as Star Wars, but it was another big hit, and it wouldn't be John's last iconic score In fact He was just getting started It's coming up next time.