For five decades, composer John Williams has been providing the sonic backdrop to the movie industry. With another two Oscar nominations this year, Jocelyn Clarke profiles the man with the prodigious talent
ON Sunday, March 5th at the 78th Academy Awards the winner of the best original score will be less of a surprise than the score itself. With two of the five nominations, the smart money is on the 73-year-old veteran film composer John Williams to win - Gustavo Santaolalla's score for Brokeback Mountain is the only other real contender - but less certain is which of his two very different nominated scores will do it, his spare and evocative score for Steven Spielberg's controversial political thriller Munich or his lush neo-romantic score for Rob Marshall's controversial Chinese-cast Japanese love story Memoirs Of a Geisha.
More remarkable than being nominated twice in one year is that Williams holds the record for the most Oscar nominations - along with his early mentor Alfred Newman (The Robe, All About Eve) - with 45 in total. With five Oscars - Jaws, Star Wars, ET: The Extra Terrestrial, Schindler's List and best song for Fiddler On The Roof he also holds the highest number of losses. Over his five-decade long career, however, he has won two Emmy and 18 Grammy awards and has been inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and The Hollywood Bowl Hall Of Fame. In 2004 he received a Kennedy Centre Honor - the American equivalent of a knighthood - and in January, he won his fourth Golden Globe for his score for Memoirs Of A Geisha.
2005 was a vintage year for Williams with four new scores in 12 months, beginning with his box office hits Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith for George Lucas and War Of the Worlds, the first of last year's two collaborations with his long-time collaborator Spielberg - Willams has scored all of his films except The Color Purple. All four scores underline Williams's extraordinary musical inventiveness, which combines the seemingly contradictory impulses of the neo-romantic and the avant-garde, enabling him to move easily between popcorn blockbuster and serious drama. The scores for Munich and Memoirs Of A Geisha both mix ethnic instrumentation and vocal styles with symphonic orchestra, the latter an affectionate homage to the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.
Though he began his career in the early 1960s composing scores for TV series Gilligan's Island, Lost In Space and The Time Tunnel and has written very hummable scores for some of the biggest film franchises of the last 30 years - six Stars Wars, three Indiana Jones, three Jurassic Parks, three Harry Potters, two Jaws and one Superman - Williams has used his own success to popularise film music itself. As principal conductor of the Boston Pops (1979-1992) and now as its laureate conductor, he brought film music into the concert hall with programmes of both his own and his contemporaries' compositions. This helped to give film music a legitimacy it had lacked - it is often dismissed as a strange subgenre - and introduced it to a new audience, successfully bridging the gap between the late Romantic symphonic repertoire and popular music - Williams's early mentors Bernard Herrman, Franz Waxman and Newman were in many ways all late Romantics. It is also interesting to note the number of serious contemporary composers moving into film in the last two decades, such as Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, John Corigliano, Michael Gordon and Osvaldo Golijov.
Today Williams is probably the world's most famous film composer - he has even written the opening themes for the 1984, 1988, 1996, and 2002 Olympic Games. He is also its most commercially successful with his score to Episode III - Revenge of the Sith selling just under a million copies. He still remains, however, remarkably clear sighted and frank about his contributions to the screen.
"One of the biggest mistakes a film composer can make is to assume that his music will have the audience's full attention," he says. "On the screen, there's always something that will compete with it. If it isn't the sound effects or the dialogue, it's someone very attractive undressing. As a result, it's something of a minor miracle if you take any music out of a film and discover that it will stand on its own at all."
Whatever happens on Oscar night, Williams's music will stand beautiful and tall.
