JOHN WILLIAMS (b. 1932)Music From The Movies

Today everyone knows John Williams as the composer of some of the most famous and recognizable fi lm music in the world, with music from the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Superman movies being just the tip of the iceberg, but he has composed the music and served as music director for more than 100 fi lms, including Memoirs of a Geisha, War of the Worlds, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Minority Report, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Lost World, Rosewood, Sleep-ers, Nixon, Sabrina, Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, Far and Away, JFK, Hook, Home Alone, Presumed Innocent, Born on the Fourth of July, The Accidental Tourist, Empire of the Sun, The Witches of Eastwick, E.T. (the Extra-Terrestrial), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Mr. Williams has received 45 Academy Award nomina-tions, making him the Academy’s most nominated living person, and has been awarded fi ve Oscars, seven British Academy Awards, twenty Grammys, four Emmys, and four Golden Globes, as well as several gold and platinum records. Born in New York, Mr. Williams attended UCLA, studied composition privately with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and attended the Juilliard School, where he studied piano with Madame Rosina Lhévinne. He worked as a jazz pianist before beginning his career in the fi lm studios, where he worked with such composers as Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, and Franz Waxman. In January 1980 Mr. Williams was named the 19th Conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra since its founding in 1885. He assumed the title of Boston Pops Laureate Conductor following his retirement in December 1993 and at Tanglewood.Forever linked with the characters of the Emperor and his servant Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker’s father and nemesis, the “Imperial March” from the Star Wars movies signals the entrance of villains on the scene more clearly and succinctly than any other theme of its kind. When Steven Spielberg and George Lucas envisioned how they would represent the fi ght between good and evil they decided to paint evil as a faceless, immense, impos-sibly large and powerful empire, with Darth Vader and his master the Emperor at its head; with its searing trumpets and relentless percussion, their March captures perfectly the martial power embodied in their ruthless domination. “Aunt Marge’s Waltz” from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is another story altogether: here John Wil-liams takes a light-hearted dance form, the waltz, and makes it into a caricature of Harry Potter’s Aunt Marge. Stuttering woodwinds and lilting strings, followed by bumbling brass fi gures, render Harry’s growing annoyance with his aunt, who has little interest in magic and less in him.

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