It is no longer necessary to identify him as “Star Wars composer John Williams” or even “film composer John Williams”: After a seventy-year career both in Hollywood and at the concert hall, John Williams is one of the most recognizable figures in American music. Perhaps the greatest tribute to his success is the modern ubiquity of film music concerts with live orchestra, a kind of program that he pioneered in the 1980s as the music director of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Programs of movie scores—presented in concert or accompanying a screening of the actual picture—are now regular features on the seasons of every major North American orchestra, and have largely supplanted the older tradition of the “pops concert” as it existed only a few decades ago (a program of Strauss waltzes, operetta excerpts, Suppé, Lehár . . .) Not many other musicians can claim to have invented a new concert format as well as to have supplied so much of the music for it.
Film music already had a rich history before Williams began composing, with major scores by internationally famous composers of concert music (Aaron Copland, Sergei Prokofiev, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton) as well as the many composers who came to specialize in film scoring (Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman). Williams’s rise to prominence in the early 1970s helped to revitalize this tradition of orchestral film music, especially through his many collaborations with Steven Spielberg; Williams has written music for almost the entire Spielberg filmography, from The Sugarland Express in 1974 through The Fabelmans in 2022. But those who know Williams only as the composer of brassy marches for Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark often underrate his musical sophistication. Williams is capable of writing in an avant-garde idiom influenced by Ligeti (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or a Sixties jazz style (Catch Me If You Can) as well as a more traditional late-Romantic style often compared to Holst, Strauss, or Elgar. His scores are marked by the great care that Williams takes with the small details: getting the idiom of the orchestration just right, finding a memorable and musically substantial idea for even a three-second cue, developing an interlinked array of quasi-Wagnerian musical motifs to represent the characters and places of the story. In his large catalogue of concert music—more rarely heard, but encompassing a long series of orchestral works, including one of the most widely performed concerti for solo tuba—his language becomes more harmonically adventurous and dissonant, showing him to be a composer who kept abreast even of the more rebarbative styles of musical modernism.
This imposing new biography of Williams will no doubt be the definitive study of his body of work for the foreseeable future, and it seems also to represent the fulfillment of a cherished dream for its author, a lifelong John Williams fan (in the acknowledgments, Tim Greiving tells us that the research for the book began when he started an account at JWFan.com in 2003). Now a journalist and a scholar of film music history, Greiving loyally accumulated a mass of research material about a composer who emphatically did not want to have a biography written about him. Williams saw himself as a “simple musician” in comparison to the great composers of the past, and felt that admirers of his scores would be better off knowing as little as possible about the ordinary person behind the music. But in late 2022, the year he turned ninety, the composer relented and agreed to collaborate in the process, sitting for many hours of interviews over a period of almost two years.
The six hundred pages that follow are a record of astonishing musical accomplishment, coupled with an equally astonishing capacity for self-effacement. It is hard to imagine any living musician who could equal Williams’s record of compositional productivity along with his eminence as a respected conductor and colleague. Yet Williams seems to have remained uncertain of the value of his own work, an uncertainty that shows not only his retiring and unemphatic temperament but also a genuine struggle with self-doubt. A mild-mannered figure incapable of severity, Williams cultivated a calm and efficient manner markedly different from the fiery temperament of the stereotypical orchestral conductor, relying upon the professionalism of his collaborators to keep order (in the recording studio, his friend Lionel Newman would run out of the sound booth and swear at the session musicians if the discipline of the orchestra ever broke down). In an uncharacteristically impulsive gesture, Williams abruptly resigned as conductor of the Boston Pops in 1984, citing scheduling issues with his film composing career. The real reason, the Boston newspapers soon reported, was that a few players in the famously unruly orchestra had hissed during a reading of one of Williams’s new arrangements.
These accumulated details show John Williams as relentlessly self-critical and exquisitely sensitive, frequently revising his past works in search of greater polish. (Perhaps the possibility of revising and re-orchestrating a completed work is one of the things that Williams appreciated most in writing for the concert hall, something that is impossible with a finished film score; once the movie is released, you can’t revise its music unless the studio gives the green light for a sequel.) It is oddly touching to read of the world-famous composer cautiously approaching performers for future collaborations, as though expecting rejection. Cathy Basrak, the principal violist of the Boston Symphony, reports that Williams invited her to his cottage at Tanglewood and presented her with the score of a newly completed concerto for viola and orchestra, telling her, “We don’t need to do anything about it. I just wanted you to have it. It’s something that I did.” One imagines that unless Basrak had followed up with him to say that she liked the piece and wanted to perform it, Williams might have let the work go unperformed without mentioning it again.
All of these anecdotes make Williams seem like a hopeless neurotic, the stereotype of the solitary Romantic composer, in a way that is hard to reconcile with the bold, extroverted music that he is known for. But perhaps what saved him from the prospect of neurotic inhibition was the communal working environment of the film business, which forced him constantly to shape his musical ideas to cohere with the vision of collaborators. The uprising by the Boston Pops musicians stands out in his biography because it is a rare occasion where his collaborators were actively uncooperative; for the most part, Williams’s career has been marked by an admiring and even adulatory reception from those who have worked most closely with him. The relaxed and avuncular persona that Williams presents in filmed interviews seems to be genuine, and his kind demeanor gives some insight into the respect and esteem that he commands from the many music and film luminaries that have helped to advance his career. The conductor Stéphane Denève, a frequent collaborator, has observed that Williams’s entire mature output was written for others: either to feature a particular colleague as soloist, in his orchestral concertos, or to accompany a director’s vision for a film.
It is a credit to Greiving’s skill and thoroughness as a biographer that this vivid portrait of the composer’s human personality comes through in the midst of a sometimes overwhelming quantity of technical detail. Giving an account of Williams’s career means taking readers through the creation of one hundred twenty-four movie scores dating back to the 1950s and describing how the old midcentury Hollywood culture has transformed through to the present day. There is much more that could be said about each of the individual film scores—each one gets two or three pages—but it is hard to imagine how this presentation could be bettered simply as a synoptic overview of complex biographical material.
In Greiving’s narrative, the story of Williams’s career is the story of the coming of age of the film score as a serious musical genre. Once scorned by elite conductors and arrogant musicologists as simplistic entertainment music unworthy of serious study, film music is now established in the concert hall and in the academy as a serious repertoire worthy of performance and study, largely thanks to the example of John Williams’s scores and to his advocacy as a conductor who programmed film music so successfully in the concert hall. All of this is undoubtedly true, but the book sometimes becomes overly emphatic in pushing its case. Greiving eagerly quotes dozens of negative reviews of Williams’s scores in order to shoot them down; the same criticisms appear again and again (“superficial,” “derivative,” “sentimental”), and Greiving goes bravely into battle against them each time, but not much is gained from the repetition. The reader comes away with the impression that all of this critical discourse has been included not because of its long-term relevance to its subject’s life but because it provides another opportunity to make the case for the value of film music studies as an academic discipline.
What is sometimes obscured by Greiving’s evangelistic zeal for the legitimacy of film music, however, is Williams’s own occasional ambivalence about the artistic limitations of the form. This is not to say that Williams was ever convinced by the naysayers who thought that film scores were not “real music.” Throughout his life, mentors such as André Previn tried to convince him to give up Hollywood and devote himself fully to concert music, and he tried to turn the tables on them by convincing them that they would learn something by writing more film scores themselves. There is no question that John Williams saw his work as a film composer as a fulfilling art requiring real creative integrity; he took his work seriously and knew how much his music contributed to the films and how much it was loved by listeners. The ambivalence that Williams sometimes expresses in interviews is not about the legitimacy of film music as such but about the frenetic schedule of working in Hollywood; he often wished to have more opportunity to write music that was “thoughtful” (a favorite adjective), in an environment that allowed for “time and breathing room.” And once in a while, he expresses rueful annoyance about a certain sameness in the films he is asked to score. After writing music for the first three Harry Potter films, Williams told a friend, “I just don’t think I can do any more kid flying movies.”
These more unexpected and surprising anecdotes do appear in this biography, but they tend to be passed over in silence. There is sometimes a strange incuriosity in the way that Greiving reports an intriguing or uncharacteristic utterance by his subject without attempting to interpret it, as though afraid to tug too hard on a loose thread. (Perhaps this is simply the inevitable disadvantage of being an authorized biographer, too close to his subject to put pressure on accepted narratives.) Williams tells us at one point that his Violin Concerto No. 1 was “the best music I’ve written . . . about the closest I’ve been able to come to a genuine, idiosyncratic expression.” This is an extraordinary claim to make for a rarely performed concert piece that is known only to his most dedicated fans, and all the more astonishing when we learn that this violin concerto was written in 1974, around the time he began work on Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind—scores that most listeners would class as among Williams’s most distinctive and memorable. What was it that created a “genuine, idiosyncratic expression” in the violin concerto that was lacking in those two very different film scores? Perhaps Williams was unwilling to say; Greiving reports his remark but offers no commentary.
The most interesting of these dropped threads from Greiving’s biography is Williams’s lifelong interest in Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. We learn that this was the composer’s favorite book throughout his adult life and that it is the inspiration for much of his music: A 1995 concert piece for solo bassoon called The Five Sacred Trees is inspired by Graves’s account of Celtic mythology, and in the “Duel of the Fates” scene from the Star Wars prequel trilogy Williams has a choir sing words from the dedicatory poem to The White Goddess, translated into Sanskrit. Williams even suggested Close Encounters with the White Goddess as a title for the biography. These are facts that cry out for interpretation.
Graves’s once-famous book gave expression to its author’s later-life theories of poetic creation. For Graves, the true poet must be inspired by the love of a female Muse figure and must sacrifice himself for her. The living woman who inspires the true poet, however, ultimately is an earthly image of the archetypal female deity associated with the moon—the “white goddess” of the title—who represents the pre-rational world of symbol and primitive longing. Graves believed that this lunar goddess was the primordial deity of ancient European pagan religion, arguing that it was a historical disaster that the White Goddess was replaced by the male monotheistic god of Judaism and Christianity. In the tradition of Frazer’s Golden Bough, Graves’s book sought to extrapolate universal patterns of myth from the data of archaeology and comparative religion. Graves’s real interests, however, were literary rather than anthropological; the ideal of devotion to the Muse-Goddess expressed his vision for the role of the poet. This ideal absorbed Graves for the final decades of his life and forms both the theoretical background and the subject matter of his own poetry; many of his late poems are about the Goddess. Few other poets could pass this exacting test of dedication; he told a Paris Review interviewer that only fifteen poets (“I am speaking precisely”) in the history of English literature “were real poets and not playing at it.” He refused to tell the interviewer who those fifteen poets were: “That wouldn’t be polite.”
Modern critics have not been kind to Graves’s theories. The White Goddess has been widely criticized for anthropological and philological errors, and the book is no longer widely read. In its time, though, The White Goddess spoke to a general fascination with myth, magic, and archetype, and its ideas influenced everyone from neopagan revivalists to poets such as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Graves himself, who lived on until 1985 receiving bizarre fan letters from armchair archaeologists describing their historical theories and hippies describing their psychedelic experiences, became increasingly ambivalent about the book, hoping that future generations would sort the wheat from the chaff in his study: “It’s a crazy book and I didn’t mean to write it.”
In a program note to his First Symphony, John Williams suggests that what Graves’s work signified for him was the prospect of a re-enchantment that would undo the deadening effects of modern technocracy: “Since science fails to provide all of modern life’s solutions, I prefer, like Robert Graves, to believe in myths . . . at least where music is concerned.” The expression of the idea is characteristically noncommittal and evasive. A mythopoeic structure that for Graves was a creative necessity is for Williams a preference, and one that might (or might not) be restricted solely to the musical realm. But perhaps this desire for the enchanted world of myth helped to motivate him in scoring so many films with outsized mythic ambitions (Star Wars, Harry Potter, E.T., and even A.I. and Hook). Williams has been unusually tenacious in retaining compositional control over the music in the Star Wars franchise, continuing to compose music for the sequel movies and for the 2018 spinoff Solo: A Star Wars Story long after most other composers would have retired and left the soundtrack of the sequels to some journeyman arranger. His affection for the series can be partially explained by the platform that it gives him to write music for its universe of clearly drawn archetypal heroes and villains: As the quality of the Star Wars films declined with the prequel films of the early 2000s, there was an increasingly notable disconnect between the epic ambitions of the musical score and the lifeless quality of the actual dialogue and characterization.
John Williams’s reminiscences of his career frequently dwell upon musical roads not taken: the more daringly modernistic music he might have written if he had composed more for the concert hall or the more hard-edged style he cultivated briefly in early film scores such as Robert Altman’s 1972 thriller Images. Greiving sometimes seems slightly embarrassed by these wistful passing remarks, as though they implied disdain or regret about his own past work. But Williams is completely free of condescension or resentment about his successful commercial career. What motivates him instead is the desire for greater integration and comprehensiveness, the desire to satisfy his White Goddess with a more complete and artistically coherent harmonization of his life in the film studio and his life at Symphony Hall. But the goddess’s appetite for perfection is never appeased, as Graves expressed in a late poem: “Shall I never hear her whisper softly: / ‘But this is truth written by you only, / And for me only; therefore, love, have done?’”
This quest for organic integration helps to explain the characteristic virtues of Williams’s film scores, now widely emulated: consistency of style within a film, a recurring grammar of themes or motifs, refined use of orchestral color, a quest for musical integrity even in the shortest cues. It has brought him international fame and lasting popularity in the most competitive and ephemeral of musical genres. But still Williams dreams of a more complete musical consummation in which the inevitable unfinished cadences of a long career are fully resolved. In his nineties, Williams is engaged in the Platonic desire and pursuit of the whole.
