New Interview with John Williams reflects on the beginnings of his career, a lifetime in music, and his love for orchestras.

[Jay 39,429]

Feature Story | February 2, 2024
An Interview with John Williams
By Simon Woods

 

https://symphony.org/features/an-interview-with-john-williams/

[ConorPower 151]

What a great interview! Nice having an interviewer asks more questions about his early musical experiences rather than going straight to the usual fair. 
 

Also, love JW’s increasingly poetic descriptions of the importance of music to his life:

 

 I have to write every day for an hour or two at least, to feel like my breathing is right and things are balanced in life. 

[Falstaft 2,172]

28 minutes ago, ConorPower said:

What a great interview! Nice having an interviewer asks more questions about his early musical experiences rather than going straight to the usual fair. 

 

It's really great, isn't it? I know enough about Williams's style of interviewing that a) his responses are often a little rehearsed and massaged and b) this one really does capture his incredible autobiographical memory and poetic sensibility towards his life and art. 

 

Also, I didn't know he remembered that the SW opening title initially began with that tiny run up! Who else remembers first listening to the "secret" track on the ANH Special Edition in 97 and just being blown away?!

[Thor 8,353]

That was indeed a fine interview, thanks for sharing!

 

Little new to us hardcore Williams biographers, but there was one bit -- that he wrote music PRIOR to his piano sonata in 1951, which was always listed as his first composition. I've always suspected as much, but nice to have it confirmed. It remains to be seen what it actually was.

 

Of course, the interview moves in a different, more general direction eventually, but I grasp on to the straws of "early Williams" tidbits, obsessing so strongly about it as I do. Kudos to Mr. Woods. This was miles ahead of the interviews he likes to do with mainstream media, and I expect it to be widely shared on social media in the coming days.

[Loert 2,673]

Trigger warning:

Spoiler

JW uses a musicological term in the interview.

 

[crocodile 8,520]

Really good interview. Glad they avoided every single pitfall that plague his interviews.

 

Karol

[mrbellamy 6,755]

Yeah this one's a breath of fresh air 

[karelm 3,076]

Wow, that was a great interview with lots of new stories (his first performances) and many great quotes!  I loved these:

 

On Star Wars blast: "One thing I can tell you about it is the nature of the attack. It was originally preceded by a scale run-up to the top C in the trumpets, but I removed that, and the result was a chord that required a certain kind of attack from everybody in the top register without having followed some preparatory scale up to it. Maurice Murphy, the principal trumpet of the London Symphony Orchestra, who recorded the original soundtrack, was a great trumpeter. When he hit the top C, it shook the whole world. He just grabbed it without any preparation or pickup for a big sound. It’s like interrupting the swell of a rubato and attacking without any kind of precedent. It was a shock to hear Maurice play that so brilliantly, so in tune, so confidently, at the extreme altissimo end of the trumpet range. It had a resonance. That may explain it or it may not, I don’t know."

 

and

 

"I can only put dots on a paper; it doesn’t become music until it’s interpreted by a great orchestra and has an audience to hear it. Then what’s written on the paper becomes music, becomes a communal act."

[JohnnyD 1,325]

What a nice interview! Always a joy reading interviews with the Maestro.

 

[Datameister 2,279]

A great interview indeed!

[Andy 5,152]

He is so freaking cool. 

[Jurassic Shark 13,158]

5 hours ago, Thor said:

Little new to us hardcore Williams biographers, but there was one bit -- that he wrote music PRIOR to his piano sonata in 1951

 

Of course he did! No composer writes a sonata as their first composition. 

[Davis 2,895]

2 hours ago, Jurassic Shark said:

No composer writes a sonata as their first composition. 

Some do, but they're all dead.

[Marian Schedenig 9,042]

7 hours ago, Loert said:

Trigger warning:

  Reveal hidden contents

JW uses a musicological term in the interview.

 

 

"Simple"?

 

8 hours ago, Falstaft said:

It's really great, isn't it? I know enough about Williams's style of interviewing that a) his responses are often a little rehearsed and massaged and b) this one really does capture his incredible autobiographical memory and poetic sensibility towards his life and art.

 

I wonder if Spielberg's documentary project may have revivified JW's interview muscles.

[mrbellamy 6,755]

Or Tim Greiving's biography 

[Marian Schedenig 9,042]

Right, I almost forgot about that!

[Edmilson 8,920]

I loved this part. John Williams never ceases to amaze me:

 

Quote

In terms of history, as you know, my father was an orchestral musician, and I don’t believe that when he was working in the 1930s and ’40s, orchestral musicians had pension or retirement funds or health plans. So I’ve had great pleasure in being able to do a number of pension fund benefit concerts for orchestras, not asking for a fee, but simply being able to support something for today’s musicians that my father didn’t have. We’ve made great progress, and there’s more to be done. I feel as a composer and a musician that I owe this to my orchestral colleagues. And it’s wonderful that Steven has joined me on any number of occasions. It’s been a great fundraising success whenever we’ve done it. He loves music, by the way.

And this too:

Quote

Let me point out that years ago, the actor and comedian Danny Kaye performed with dozens of American orchestras and contributed his time and raised a lot of money for them. Nobody else in the intervening decades from the Hollywood community and the movie industry dedicated themselves to recognizing and contributing to our orchestras until Steven came along. It’s part of his general philanthropic nature, combined with his love for music: he recognizes what the orchestra is.

As we make films, an orchestra is a partner, like the actors and writers. They contribute in all manner of ways. Tempo and melodic identification, textures of all kinds, and period references and allusions. Steven is perhaps the most senior person in the Hollywood community who’s been an active supporter of symphony orchestras since Danny Kaye. That makes him quite precious in our musical circles.

And I love the fact that JW helps raising money for orchestras because he feels indebted to them, that without the musicians that perform his music it would just be, as he puts it, "dots on a paper".

 

Truly a marvelous human being.

[tomsmoviemadness 3,495]

Love this bit!!

Even after so many years he remains so humble

 

 

"My feeling is that I can only put dots on a paper; it doesn’t become music until it’s interpreted by a great orchestra and has an audience to hear it. Then what’s written on the paper becomes music, becomes a communal act. The orchestra is part of the audience, and the audience surrenders itself to the orchestra for an hour or two or three. As a composer, I feel a great debt to interpreters and performers of my music. They’re partners in the creative process."

[BB-8 3,936]

https://slippedisc.com/2024/02/john-williams-my-dad-played-in-an-orchestra-spielbergs-was-a-subscriber