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Tag: John Williams

John Williams: Oscar Record & Retirement?

More than anyone else in history, John Williams has had the pleasure of scoring the highest-grossing motion picture of the year. Those films remain among the most-successful of all time.

Now, with his 53rd Oscar nomination, announced today, Williams sets another record, as the oldest person ever to be nominated for an Academy Award. The oldest person ever to win an Oscar is James Ivory who, at 89, was recognized in 2018 for his screenplay to “Call Me by Your Name.”

Williams is already the second most-nominated person ever – a record he breaks every time he’s nominated – behind only Walt Disney (with 59). He has earned five statuettes, for his work on “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” and “Schindler’s List.” However, it has been 30 years since his last win.

What are the odds of this year bringing Williams more Oscar gold? Rather slim, I’m afraid. His work on “The Fabelmans,” while certainly effective and wholly appropriate for one of Steven Spielberg’s most intimate projects, is fairly understated and supplemented by a lot of classical music, including works by Kuhlau, Clementi, Bach, and Haydn. (Spielberg’s mom was a pianist.) The soundtrack album in only 31 minutes long, and at least one of the themes flirts with Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 3.”

That said, somebody should campaign for an honorary Oscar for this guy already. For 60 years, the movies would have been so much poorer without him. Not that he’ll be crying himself to sleep for lack of recognition. What a charmed career he’s had!

At least since “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” in 2019, Williams has teased his retirement from film scoring several times. Most recently, he stated that “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” due this summer, would be his last score. Now, however, he intimates that that might not be entirely true.

“I’ll stick around for a while,” Williams told Entertainment Weekly. “I can’t retire from music.” Which should be fairly obvious, when seemingly not a week goes by that he’s not conducting one of the world’s great orchestras, in between work on his long-anticipated Piano Concerto and fulfilling smaller commissions for occasional works and television themes.

John Williams will be 91 on February 8.

This year’s nominees for Best Original Score: “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (Son Lux), “Babylon” (Justin Hurwitz), “Banshees of Inisherin” (Carter Burwell), “All Quiet on the Western Front” (Volker Bertelmann), and “The Fabelmans” (John Williams).

More details about William’s latest world record here:

https://deadline.com/2023/01/john-williams-record-for-oldest-oscar-nominee-judd-hirsch-acting-nominee-longest-gap-1235238744/

A full list of this year’s nominations:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/oscar-nominations-2023-nominees-list-1235307974/

For your consideration: “The Fabelmans”

January 24, 2023
John Williams Of Grit and Glory ESPN College Football

Just finally got around to watching the video for John Williams’ “Of Grit and Glory.” The new piece, composed for ESPN’s College Football Playoff National Championship, was heard for the first time on Monday, during the sports channel’s broadcast of the TCU-Georgia game at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, CA. Watch it now, or save it for when you need an inspiring three minutes. Williams will be 91 on February 8.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmEcJjnY_1w

January 14, 2023
Dystopian Visions in Film Scores

If you think the world is in rough shape now, consider tomorrow.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” gaze into the crystal ball for an hour of dystopian visions – glimpses of a bleak future rendered hopeful, in large part, through music.

“Fahrenheit 451” (1966), based on the Ray Bradbury novel, presents a society in which books are outlawed by the state and burned as a means to control the masses. The title refers to the temperature at which paper will ignite. Oskar Werner and Julie Christie star in this Francois Truffaut-directed film. Composer Bernard Herrmann finds the heart at fire’s center.

A robot is left behind to clean up a long-abandoned Planet Earth, in “WALL-E” (2008), one of Pixar’s finely-crafted entertainments. This one has a serious subtext, about rampant consumerism and its impact on an earth made uninhabitable by the sheer volume of garbage. But there’s also a love story, as WALL-E pursues another robot into outer space, with fate-changing consequences. The inventive score is by Thomas Newman.

As dystopias go, Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” (2001) is a little more unpleasant than most. “A.I.” grew out of an incomplete project of Stanley Kubrick. Based on Brian Aldiss’s short story, “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” the film stars Haley Joel Osment as a child-like android programmed to love, only to be rejected by his adopted family. Abrasive blood sport, unpleasant visions of a debauched city, and human extinction ensue. A great time is had by all!

Also, the film doesn’t know when to end. Oh, how I hate this movie.

That said, John Williams gives it his usual best. The voice of soprano Barbara Bonney graces the admittedly gorgeous soundtrack.

One of the landmarks of silent cinema, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927) is an eerily prescient vision of a world divided between the “haves” and “have-nots.” Once seen, the subterranean hell of the workers “hive” is not soon to be forgotten. So much of the film continues to resonate, even as its iconography is shamelessly recycled.

Gottfried Huppertz’s original score already adheres to the Straussian model of Golden Age film scores, with leitmotifs representing the characters and ideas. It’s a concept that became associated with Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and which has had an enormous influence on film composers down through the decades, all the way to John Williams and beyond.

Learn more about the challenges of writing such a complex score – which was performed live, with orchestra, at showings of the movie, even as the film was still being edited right up until its premiere – when listening to tonight’s show.

In the meantime, hang on to your humanity! Join me for these cautionary tales about totalitarian government, corporate control, and technology gone awry, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

January 14, 2023
Milton Babbitt Serial Simplicity

Who cares if you read this?

Milton Babbitt, a staple at Princeton University for many years, was born in Philadelphia on this date in 1916. Babbitt gained widespread notoriety for an essay he wrote for High Fidelity magazine, titled “Who Cares If You Listen?” It turns out the provocative stance was actually the result of an editorial decision, and that Babbitt’s original title had been “The Composer as Specialist” – not likely to generate nearly as much controversy.

While he frequently composed in a serial style, Babbitt’s music is often fairly lucid, without undo congestion and with a minimum of soul-crushing dissonances. On the contrary, he often achieved a paradoxical simplicity under the guise of complexity.

In the 1960s, Babbitt became interested in electronic music, apparently for its rhythmic precision, as opposed to any unusual timbral considerations. I find it endearing that he was also fond of jazz and musical theater and that late in life he enjoyed a friendship of sorts with film composer John Williams. (They bonded over Bernard Herrmann.) His one-time student, Stephen Sondheim characterized him as “a frustrated show composer.”

Babbitt himself was a saxophonist. In 1946, he penned a musical, “Fabulous Voyage,” a retelling of Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

He was the recipient of an honorary Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Babbitt died in Princeton in 2011, at the age of 94.

Listen here for “Penelope’s Night Song” from “Fabulous Voyage”:

https://soundcloud.com/phillipc…/penelopes-night-song-from

“Composition for Twelve Instruments” (1948):

“Reflections” (1974) for piano and synthesized tape:

Milton Babbitt on electronic music:

John Williams talks Babbitt in The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-force-is-still-strong-with-john-williams?fbclid=IwAR1-ndYl2wO4btjBdjgEBam70F8tEE7mLR51ykWmV5VHqb8ZcI5L_SgO5qI

If you’re interested in learning more about Princeton’s important role in the history of computer music and haven’t done so yet, do check out this podcast, produced by the Princeton University Engineering Department.

Composers & Computers, a podcast

I profiled the podcast’s creator, Aaron Nathans, in September for the Princeton weekly U.S. 1.

https://www.communitynews.org/princetoninfo/artsandentertainment/a-good-ear-for-stories-and-electronic-music-inspires-a-princeton-podcast/article_93780110-3384-11ed-93a9-1ba8b9106ed7.html

Happy birthday, Milton Babbitt!

January 10, 2023
John Williams scores ESPN College Football

John Williams “keeps an oar in” with a new theme for ESPN.

Williams has written an original theme for ESPN’s College Football Playoff National Championship, to air Monday evening at 7:30 p.m. EST, prior to the TCU-Georgia game at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, CA.

The new music will be recalled throughout the TCU-Georgia matchup. The composer, who will be 91-years-old on February 8, recorded several takes of the main piece as well as briefer excerpts, “a re-join piece and a vamp, cutdowns and stingers,” shorter pieces that can be useful during the game itself.

“This is believed to be the largest-scale musical commission ever for the sports network. What will happen with the piece after Monday night is not clear.”

Let the royalties negotiations begin!

January 6, 2023

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