TITLE: Conductor Williams Pops The Answer
AUTHOR: Daniel Cariaga
SOURCE: The Los Angeles Times
DATE: 28 November 1980
"Mine is a working life," says John Williams, 10 months into his job as conductor of the Boston Pops.
But he loves the work.
"I think we are the source of our own frustrations," Williams told a visitor to his Westwood home recently. "No, I'm not frustrated. I'm very happy."
No one has called the soft-spoken film composer--creator of scores for some 60 films, including Superman, Star Wars, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Empire Strikes Back--a jet-setter yet, but it's bound to happen.
The winner of multiple Oscars, Emmys, and Grammys for his work in films, television, and recordings, Williams accepted the post vacated by the death of Arthur Fiedler last January. By all reports, he survived the grueling, 6-concerts-a-week Pops season (from May to July) sturdily. Now he is at home in California, looking forward to his next film assignment (Raiders of the Lost Ark, to be produced by George Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg) and rewriting his Violin Concerto, which will receive premiere performances this winter.
"In this quiet month of November," Williams says, as serenely as some cloistered monk, "I am planning my boston programs, polishing the Violin Concerto, finishing the new march I wrote for Fiedler, which will open the Pops season in May, and studying my scores."
In any conductor's life, score-study demands great chunks of time. In Williams' case, the demands are even greater.
"In 50 concerts of 12 different programs last spring," he recalls, "there were 168 pieces. Most of them, except for maybe a dozen, were new to me. That's a lot of music. For a long time, I've conducted my own scores for films. But conducting other people's music was new to me. Exhilarating, but new."
It's a happy period in his life, he says.
"Given the opportunity to lead this wonderful orchestra--which is, as you know, the Boston Symphony without the principal players--I could not resist. Of course, it's a tremendous amount of work. But at the same time, it's a challenge which is revivifying me, and giving me new strengths."
Williams' current work schedule, as he predicted when he took the Pops job, includes fewer film assignments than before. Otherwise, he says, the texture of his lifestyle--aside from those hectic 3 months between the end of the symphony season and the beginning of the Boston orchestra's Tanglewood residency--remains the same.
"It's never been my wish to limit the film work," he reiterates. "It's something I know best, after all. But the schedule must be made realistically.
"Fortunately, for me, the act of writing music is not an agony. It's pleasant. I've learned a lot from writing. I'm grateful. It's made me a better musician."
Born in New York and the son of a percussionist, Williams went to high school in North Hollywood and attended UCLA. After military service, he returned to New York to study piano at Juilliard in the class of the late Rosina Lhevinne--a class at that time also attended by John Browing, Van Cliburn, and Daniel Pollack.
"I was very serious about the piano in those days," the bearded composer, now 48, remembers, "but I also played jazz. I could sightread anything, and I composed.
"And, after I got married, I was looking at my oportunities in a different way. Because I was facile, I got studio work as a pianist and, as used to happen, one day someone needed some orchestrating done, and someone else said: 'Hey, the kid at the piano can do it.' And I could."
Before fame and fortune arrived, however, threre was an apprenticeship.
"In the late 1950s, I went to Revue with a contract for 39 scores a year, backgrounds for anthology series like Alcoa Presents. I wrote 20 to 25 minutes of msuic every week for 39 weeks a year. After 5 years, I had a technique."
Williams says he draws no line between his commercial assignments "and the music I write for myself. And the music I write for myself I would never call 'serious', because all professional activity is serious. There can't be a distinction.
"However, in the music I write for myself, I am more free in the use of esoteric devices or atonality--the styles we avoid in commercial music because their descriptive application is limited."
About the Violin Concerto, which Mark Piskunov will introduce with the St Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin conducting, in January, Williams thinks: "It's the best thing I've written, though that's not really for me to say. After all, in recent years, I have gathered more fulfillment for my commercial work than I ever thought I would."
