TITLE: Cinema, concert worlds collide
AUTHOR: Joseph Dalton
SOURCE: The Albany Times Union
DATE: 19 August 2003
Before John Williams ever writes a note of music for a Steven Spielberg film, he sits down alone in a private screening room to see the nearly completed movie. Such was the case with the Holocaust drama Schindler's List.
After watching the film through, Williams took a brief walk outdoors to collect himself before returning to talk with Spielberg.
His first comments to the director--with whom he'd already collaborated on such classics as Jaws, ET, and the three Indiana Jones films--was, "Oh, Steven, that's such an amazing film. You really need a better composer than me to write the score."
"I know," Spielberg replied. "But they're all dead."
As Williams's fondness for the story reveals, he's the first to admit that he's not in the ranks of Beethoven and Mahler.
"My professional life is Hollywood," he said in a recent phone conversation from his summer home in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. "(My music) may not be at the level of Brahms, but it was never intended to be."
Whatever his intentions, Williams's resume of more than 100 film scores has made him today's most well-known and widely heard living composer. And he couldn't have gotten there without a thorough grounding in classical music, a world in which he is regularly active as a composer of concert works.
This fall, Williams's compositions will be premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And Williams directed the Boston Symphony Orchestra twice this summer.
"I never thought of myself as a concert composer," said Williams, 71. "I've always written film music, and done concert pieces as a kind of respite from my other work."
It's an indication of the huge quantity of film music that Williams writes that his so-called part-time work as a concert composer has resulted in nine concertos, two symphonies and a slew of what he calls occasional pieces--fanfares, overtures and suites.
An example of the broad appeal of Williams's music is the genesis of his recently completed Horn Concerto. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, seeking to honour its longtime first horn player, Dale Clevenger, decided to commission a piece for him. Clevenger picked Williams as the composer, though the two had never previously worked together.
"He lives in both worlds," said classical composer John Corigliano of Williams's balance between the realms of concert and film, "and that's getting to be more and more the case."
Corigliano also straddles both worlds: He wrote the score to Altered States and won an Academy Award for The Red Violin. As another example of composers with a foot in each realm, Corigliano points to Elliot Goldenthal, who won the Academy Award for Frida and composed the music for SWAT.
Decades ago, composers such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold (whose scores include The Adventures of Robin Hood) would "have to leave the concert world and only write a piece every five years or so," Corigliano said. "Today, the barriers are breaking down--at least I hope so."
As some film composers' careers become more broad, Williams points to a similar cross-pollination amid art-music composers.
"Forty years ago, the only inspiration we had for incidental music for Hollywood was the art music of Europe from the 19th century. And it's reversed now when you have an art-music composer like John Adams, who will seek inspiration not from the music of Europe, but the media racket of his own country. It's an aesthetic that's done a 180."
Adams, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is only the most prominent member of a school of composers--including John Zorn, Julia Wolfe, and Phil Kline--who draw musical and thematic inspiration from the drone of pop culture.
"Whether we like it or not, the future of art music is going to be more and more intimately connected to the future of media and film music," he said. "One of the biggest reasons is this visual addiction that all our children are growing up with."
