These are my top highlights from the book! I always type up my favorite bits to keep the good stuff fresh in my mind. Enjoy!
With each development, he achieved public acclaim and access to new worlds, perpetually growing, ascending.
Antiquity lives in us. It isn’t gone, it’s in our bodies. We remember our experience cutting lumber for a slave ship that we had to row on. I don’t know what it means, but I believe if we get it right musically, and the performance is right, and the listener is in the right frame and has some background, if possible, we complete the triad–the triad being the composer, the interpreter, and the audience. I think when something strikes me, that’s why it strikes me–because I’ve struck something in me that will strike something in you. And’s it’s because our brains are the same thing, the same one.
He wrote music that caused people to “dream backward”.
Some of his crabbier critics confused his work for theft, but in fact it was a very conscious and sophisticated synthesis of past symbols and touchstones, metabolized into a new energy that shot directly into the collective heart and psyche, and always with a personal fingerprint and idiosyncratic passion that transcended mere pastiche.
To drop in on John Williams at almost any point in his life was to watch him silently crouched over a desk or piano, writing music, or else find him in a recording session or a concert, making music.
He never knew his drummer father, but trees can be enchanted and roots are powerful, and he picked up the beat all the same.
On the ground floor there was a dining room, kitchen, pantry, and living room where the Williamses entertained their friends, most of whom were musicians.
Write it down before you forget it, it may be better than you think.
The thing that excited me about working in the studios was that I was playing new music every day. The ink was still wet, so to speak. Some of it was good, some not so good–but when you were finished with one thing, you moved right on to the next.
You see, the club presents all the fun of nightclubbing without the big tab or hangover. The bar serves only soft drinks, the music is by Curly Williams’s North Hollywood high school band, and the floor show talent comes from among those present. The club attracted a “high type of teenager”. The young people are always neat and well behaved. To encourage this, we do not admit boys who wear jeans or other work clothes.
Arranging allows a budding composer “to stretch your wings a little bit”. You can’t chagne the melody and you can’t change the words. But what you can change are the harmonies that go under it, and the colors if you’re using other instruments. That’s one of the ways you find your voice.
Just wait, keep working…stay in love with music…and keep working. Everything will come.
In every film score, there may be a nice little tune or a good turn of phrase. So much creative juice goes flowing into a film score that here and there there are sixteen good measures in the middle of some necessary window dressing or folderol.
The book The White Goddess seriously turned him onto poetry, “word magic” as John called it. The ability to invent music with language, change order, and actually create things that don’t exist by the use of our greatest tool, which is language.
“I think there’s a ground that’s higher than what professionals recognize, and that is that if you get high enough in any kind of work–good enough, put it that way–the issue of style becomes unimportant. You get beyond that.”
John cared very much about what classical critics thought of him: He wanted the legitimacy of being accepted by them.
Oh John’s wife dying – Lionel Newman said to him “Go to your piano.” He was advising John to put it into the music.
“When I was about 40 years old, lost somebody very, very, very close to me unexpectedly. And before that point in my life, I didn’t know what I was doing. But after that point, in my writing, in my approach to music, in everything that I was doing, I felt clear about what it is I was trying to do, and how I could do it with whatever small gift l may have been given. It was a huge emotional turning point in my life-let’s leave it there-but one that resonates with me still, and taught me about who I was, and what I was doing, and what it meant. And this is a deeply emotional thing-and in a way, that was the greatest gift ever given to me, if I can put it that way, by anyone. And so that’s the best answer I can give you. And certainly a pivotal moment in my thinking, in my living of my life, and approaching the blank page absolutely. I immediately knew where to go with this emotionally.”
Right from the start, Spielberg was accused of being overly sentimental. Critics found fault in his compassionate characterization of this would-be Bonnie and Clyde. Critics also found Speilberg manipulative. “Everything is underlined” Stephen Farber sneered in the New York Times. But others, like the influential Pauline Keel, saw the debut of a master.
One reason he and John become unshakably simpatico was that John, too, saw mostly sweetness and nobility in the world. John scored a handful of cynical films in his long career, but he gravitated toward the romantic and the redemptive.
Personal trauma makes or breaks people.
A critic said: “Film composers are not their own masters. They are working for corporations”. It wasn’t just that John would learn to parse his words more carefully and become more diplomatic; he was on the cusp of working for music-loving filmmakers who offered him a freedom he could never have imagined.
Self-plagiarism is actually style.
It wasn’t that he needed another woman to love, in my opinion. He needed more of himself to love, more work to love.
As artists of all kinds respond not just to the world but to each other, borrowing from what came before, we longer can credit anyone with being the inventor of anything.
Ben Burtt, who’s a friend of mine, he’s a talented guy. We had some pretty good, friendly fights.