John Williams: How I compose

John Williams: How I compose

main

norman lebrecht

May 06, 2021

Some intriguing insights in a new interview for his piano maker:

(Bernard) Herrmann, he used to say to me, “use a pen when you orchestrate… you’ll think before you write the notes.” And for some years I did actually orchestrate only in pen, not because Benny suggested that I do it, but because the scores looked much better than the pencil ones. The thing about Herrmann was that he was a forceful personality and that force in his personality found its voice in those hammering, repetitive themes of his, which you can’t get out of your ear. He was a fascinating personality and, in many ways, an important musician. Although extremely conservative even in his early days in the 1930s, he conducted the American premieres of some of Schoenberg’s works at CBS, as you may know….

While composing, I’m scribbling with a pen and throwing pages all over the room and it’s very, very primitive. Then I use… what I do is write a 10 or 12 line sketch, which works very well, and they can extract the parts and score from that. It really doesn’t need orchestration. The only time you get into trouble with that is if there’s a lot of percussion or two harps or two harps and a piano, you need a lot of lines for that. So I’ve developed a way to tape those together if the short score is not long enough. But that’s really pretty rare in the kind of work that we do. In films, either it’s a smaller orchestra or, in the case of Star Wars, it’s straightforward, from an orchestration point of view, it’s triple winds and five horns and the usual brass. There’s nothing about it that that’s particularly exotic from an instrumentation point of view. I don’t use any electronics on those scores, in part because I think the idea originally was to make scores as Romantic and late-nineteenth-century, in texture and style, as we could.

 

Read more here.

 

 

Comments

  • Gustavo says:

    He’s gotten 3 Steinways!

    Here’s one:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDC_fppZ1Kg

  • BRUCEB says:

    Tchaikovsky’s answer to the same question:

    “Sitting down.”

  • Herr Doktor says:

    I would have thought his answer would instead be: “First, I pull out whichever Wagner opera that comes to mind. Second, I listen to the opera from start to finish. Third, I sit down and take a crack at writing the score.”

    • Gustavo says:

      I rarely detect Wagner in Williams. It’s sometimes like Prokofiev, Holst, Copland, and maybe Walton and Korngold.

      But we cannot deny the typical Williams style.

      However, like with Tchaikovsky’s symphonies and ballets or Mahler symphonies, you only need to hear a few bars and you can immediately tell from which work / film it is.

      That’s no so easily done with Dvorak and Bruckner symphonies who certainly have their own styles but are less variable/diverse.

      • Herr Doktor says:

        The first time I heard Gotterdammerung, I thought John Williams had written the score.

        • John Borstlap says:

          People who think that Wagner is merely a kind of premature film music, miss the structural and expressive sophistication that went into those scores which goes far, far, very far beyond anything possible in film music, even the best. And then the musical qualities are not even mentioned.

  • Gustavo says:

    It’s strange we never hear much about the roles of Herbert W. Spencer, Conrad Pope and William Ross in the overall compositional process.

    • Sue Sonata Form says:

      Conrad Pope was, one year ago, part of this interesting Zoom ‘Tribute to Conrad Salinger’: this is the first time I’d heard about Pope, but know nothing about his work.

      https://www.facebook.com/asmac.org/videos/221248125978315/

    • Friedhofer H says:

      They do the orchestration, based on John Williams 10-12 line sketch:
      “Then I use… what I do is write a 10 or 12 line sketch, which works very well, and they can extract the parts and score from that. It really doesn’t need orchestration. The only time you get into trouble with that is if there’s a lot of percussion or two harps or two harps and a piano, you need a lot of lines for that.” There’s a clip here with Spencer, second part of the clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rtLJNJPnXFQ
      For his none film music pieces, JW does all the orchestration himself, then he does not have the same strict deadline to deliver the score.

    • Caznac says:

      You’re forgetting about John Neufeld.

    • Caznac says:

      None of JW’s orchestrators have anything to say about his compositional process.

  • Dan says:

    No electronics, “as Romantic as we can”-ideal and calling Bernard Herrmann conservative? Ok…. Jerry Goldsmith had combined synths with orchestra already in Total Recall, if not earlier.

    • Jack_Ewing says:

      Herrmann combined electronic with orchestra way before JG, in The Day The Earth Stood Still in 1951.

    • Monsoon says:

      Goldsmith began using synthesizers in the 1970s, and used them extensively throughout his career.

      Incidentally, he used 12-tone for “Planet of the Apes” — you don’t see that often in major Hollywood movie scores.

  • Sue Sonata Form says:

    Wrong. Bernard Herrmann was a very early champion of Charles Ives and contemporary US music and was anything but ‘conservative’ in his early years.

    “A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann”, Steven C. Smith

  • John Borstlap says:

    Revealing:

    “……. my concert works have been very different, more in the direction that I might’ve gone if I hadn’t done so much commercial work.”

  • Save the MET says:

    When it comes to film music, he starts with the Liebestod from T&I and then works from there. Listen carefully to almost every film these he ever composed….more often than not, it’s there.

  • Gustavo says:

    Laptinek and Jabba’s palace music are full of synths.

    And there is also a short synth call on Dagobah.

  • Barry Guerrero says:

    . . . by ripping off lots of William Walton, with a dash of Korngold here and there. Needless to say, not a fan.

  • MOST READ TODAY: