“Music can be so powerful, even though it wafts away and we chase it.” On John Williams’s 90th birthday, revisit alexrossmusic’s 2020 profile of the great American composer.
, with whom they are inextricably associated. Williams leaned back in his chair and smiled ruefully.
“It’s a little bit like how the olfactory system is wired with memory, so that a certain smell makes you remember your grandmother’s cooking,” he said. “A similar thing happens with music. Really, at the root of the question is something about our physiological or neurological setup we don’t understand. It has to do with survival, or protection of group identity, or God knows what. Music can be so powerful, even though it wafts away and we chase it.
After “Star Wars,” Williams emerged as the musical magus of the Hollywood blockbuster, his indelible themes glinting through high-tech spectacle. They were the product of long, solitary labor. “One of the things I have felt, rightly or not, was that these tunes or themes or leitmotifs in film at least need to be pretty—not accessible, but succinct,” he said. “Eighty or ninety per cent of the attention is focussed elsewhere. The music has to cut through this noise of effects. So, O.K.
Early in Williams’s career, film composers received scant attention as creative figures. Now scholars like Lehman specialize in the field, and online fan sites chronicle minutiae. Williams is delighted by that attention, yet he wishes that concert composers also got their due. “I’ve heard a few pieces by a young American composer, Andrew Norman, who is very good,” he said. “Might there not be a bigger audience for his work, too? I would love to see that.
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