Movies - John Williams

Home > Listing Index > Movies > John Williams

	Movies - John Williams

John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is one of the most widely recognized composers of film scores. As of 2006, he has received 45 Academy Award nominations, an accomplishment surpassed only by Walt Disney.

Williams is best known for heroic, rousing themes to adventure and fantasy films. This includes some of the highest grossing films of all time, such as Star Wars, Superman
, Jaws
, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
, Raiders of the Lost Ark
, Jurassic Park
, and the first three Harry Potter movies. His richly thematic and highly popular 1977 score to the first Star Wars film was selected by the American Film Institute as the greatest American movie score of all time. So far, five of his film scores have won Oscars.

His long career has also included many sensitive dramatic scores (such as Schindler's List
and Saving Private Ryan
) and more experimental concert works. As of March 2006, his latest work was the score for the recent movie Munich
.

While skilled in a variety of 20th century compositional idioms, his most familiar style may be described as a form of neoromanticism, informed by the large-scale orchestral music of the late 19th century and that of Williams's film-composing predecessors. The influence of Korngold and other Hollywood Golden Age composers is strong in much of Williams' most famous work.

Early life

John Williams was born in Floral Park, New York. In 1948, John Williams and his family moved to Los Angeles, California, where he attended UCLA and USC. He also studied composition privately with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who also taught another famous film score composer, Jerry Goldsmith.

In 1952, Williams was drafted and entered the United States Air Force, where he conducted and arranged music for Air Force bands. When discharged in 1954, he returned to New York. There, he went to Juilliard, the alma mater of musicians including the composer Philip Glass and violinist Itzhak Perlman (with whom Williams released an album, Cinema Serenade, in 1997). He studied piano at the school with Rosina Lhevinne. In New York, he worked as a jazz pianist. He also played with noted composer Henry Mancini and even performed on the recording of the famous Peter Gunn theme. In the early 1960s, he served as arranger/bandleader on a series of popular albums with singing great Frankie Laine.

Film scoring

Williams later returned to Los Angeles, where he started working in the film studios. There he worked with some of the finest film score composers of that time: Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, and Alfred Newman. He began his career composing TV scores for series including Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space, and The Time Tunnel.

In the early 1970s, he established himself as a composer for big-budget disaster films with scores for The Towering Inferno, Earthquake
, and The Poseidon Adventure
. In 1974, Williams was approached by a young Steven Spielberg to write the music for his feature debut, The Sugarland Express
. They re-teamed for the director's second film, Jaws, featuring an ominous two-note motif representing the shark. Spielberg's friendship with director George Lucas led to Williams's composing for the Star Wars movies. Over thirty years later, the Williams-Spielberg collaboration has proven to be one of Hollywood's most enduring and fruitful. To date, Williams has composed the music to all but one of Spielberg's movies (Quincy Jones was composer for 1985's The Color Purple).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for John Williams ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article John Williams; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Movies - John Williams

Early life

Film scoring

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay