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Essay about john williams
John Williams essay
Essay about john williams
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Having scored over 100 films, awarded in the highest regards, and one of the most financially successful composers in United States history, John Williams is arguably the most popular film composer of the modern era. Williams has composed some of the most prominent scores of motion picture history, many of which have often been directed by the legendary Steven Spielberg. John Williams was born John Towner Williams in Queens, New York on February 8, 1932. Brought up in New York, Williams comes from a musical family as John’s father was a percussionist in the CBS radio orchestra. John’s music life began when he was a young child and the first instruments he learned were the piano, trumpet, trombone, and clarinet. Also, John started to compose …show more content…
Williams found work playing clubs and working in recording sessions as a jazz pianist. After John’s time in New York, he moved back to California and worked in Hollywood as a studio pianist. In Hollywood, John got to work as a studio pianist for notable films such as 1959’s Some Like it Hot, 1961’s West Side Story, and 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Williams’s work in Hollywood as a studio pianist and composer also made its way into television. As for his work in Hollywood television, Williams wrote songs for shows such as Gilligan’s Island and Wagon …show more content…
Williams’s musical themes in movies help make them what they are as he improves the storytelling of movies. For example, in Jaws, Williams helped make the water a frightful place to be in. Williams forced suspense onto the viewer and helped create the tension, fear, and anxiety that came with watching Jaws. Also in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Williams helped the alien and young boy soar into the sky with touching pieces of music. Williams generated the intense emotions that fill the viewer throughout the film as exemplified in the E.T departure scene. In Star Wars, Williams gave an extraordinary amount of power to the dark side. The iconic Imperial scores made the audience feel the strength, intensity, and evil of the dark side. For example, when the Imperial scores are heard in the early Star Wars films, it can be expected that Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers would soon appear marching in the scene. With all of Williams’s motion picture compositions, the audience can identify which scene is associated with each score. The fact that a viewer can pinpoint the scene of a movie through Williams’s music is remarkable in itself. Williams’s movie scores are so impactful; they create their own stories within the movies they are placed
Winning 117 awards and being nominated for another 225, it is no surprise that his name is common in households across America. Williams’ music style is very classical, having been influenced by composers like Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. In this film, Williams uses the perfect amount of brass and strings to create fanfares and marches that are unsurprisingly still in the audience’s head, hours after they are heard. Not only are they catchy, but they also provide another dimension for the film, evoking emotions and setting the mood, to pull every audience member into each scene and develop the action in the film. Majority of the music in this film is non-diegetic with a few rare occurrences of diegetic music. One of these instances is a scene where Marion kisses Sallah, Indiana Jones’s colleague, and he starts singing. The only other time it is diegetic is when Indiana Jones is in the bar meeting with Belloq, a rival of Indiana
In this film, John Williams revived the technique of using leitmotif –a recurring musical theme or melody associated with a particular person, place, object, or idea that is “characterized by a single harmonic or rhythmic trait” (Brown 15). In films, leitmotifs are melodies or musical phrases inserted into a specific character’s music background specified. It was originally developed by Richard Wagner and commonly used in his¬¬ operas during the Golden Age. These are used by film music composers
Finally, as the mentioned examples show us: composers becoming immersed with a filmmaker at an early stage of their careers can end up to be one of the most natural, harmonic and fruitful artistic relationships for both of them. Hopefully in future more composers can become a more active part in the storytelling as a co-author of the film, while remaining a versatile and original author of music, in other words a great composer.
In class, Jonathan studied the theatre of Bertolt Brecht and Peter Brook. Among his musical influences were JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, the Beatles, Prince, and the Police, but the writer he admired most was Stephen Sondheim, to whom he wrote during his last year in college. The distinguished composer-lyricist answered him and became an adviser to the young songwriter.
He also infused humor into his work. Williams dissected the traditional American family, and he penned many stories about dysfunctional and volatile families. In the journalist Bruce Smith's memoir on Tennessee Williams entitled Costly Performances, Tennessee is quoted reminding his readers, "I have had a life of required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before...." (Smith, 6) Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in his maternal grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911.
Kaplan, Jon. "Dumped!: Famous and Not-So-Famous Rejected Film Music." Film Score Monthly 8.9 (2003): 24-31. IIMP. Web. 6 Dec. 2010.
Kind of Blue is a phenomenal album recorded by the Jazz artist Miles Davis in 1959. This album was instrumental in introduced the modal style of Jazz that Miles helped to pioneer. The songs and sounds that come from this album are some of his best works, and they can be compared to some of the greatest recordings by other Jazz greats. The lineup of musicians features some of the best Jazz musicians on their respective instruments. One of the reasons for this is the mixture of Davis and Coltrane. Together they are an unstoppable force for musical perfection. Kind of Blue is a though provoking, entertaining and generally awe inspiring as a body of musical work.
Later in their careers, Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams gained fame from their unique creativity and modern expression, but the young composers began their careers drawing on influences from family and music exposures. The pre-World War I compositions of Holst and Vaughan Williams evolve as the composers collect life experiences and these influences can be heard in this early music. Yet, the music of both young Holst and young Vaughan Williams also present very original aspects that presage the genius of their later works. Although both musicians were heavily influenced by their upbringings, popular composers, and even each other, it was those very same influences that ultimately led to their distinctive individualities.
Thomas Newman is the composer of The Green Mile, who has had the distinct honor of collecting his first two Academy Award nominations for Best Dramatic Score in the same year. He competed against himself as the only double nominee in 1994 for both The Shawshank Redemption and Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women. He received a third Oscar nod for his work on Diane Keaton’s “Unstrung Heroes,” and also earned Grammy nominations for “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Unstrung Heroes.”
After listening to all four movements of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, I have suddenly been awakened to the tremendous influence that the Classical Form of music has had on modern day works, especially in the area of the film industry which it is used to create drama, tension, and joy. History owes a debt of gratitude to composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, who build upon the legacy of pioneers such as Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to create his own unique blend of symphonic compositions which will be revered throughout generations because of their continued appeal to the
Ford directed more than two hundred movies throughout his career. Following in his brother’s foot steps; Ford produced, directed, and wrote many films. Throughout his career, which spanned nearly fifty years, he worked for such studios as Universal, Fox Film Corporation, RKO, United Artists, 20th Century Fox, Republic Pictures, and Warner Brothers. John Ford was born to Irish immigrants on February 1, 1894 or 1895, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. His birth name was Sean Aloysius O’Fearna (Feeney). He changed his name when he began his career in the film industry. John’s brother, Frances Ford took him under his wing and showed him the ropes. He started out in Hollywood by doing stunt work, camera work, and film editing. In addition, Ford performed in such movies as Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery (1914), The Mysterious Rose (1914), The Broken Coin (1915), The Hidden City (1915), The Bandit’s Wager (1916), The Lumber Yard Gang (1916), and Chicken-Hearted Jim (1916). He even pl...
Director Chris Columbus chose John Williams to compose the music for a promotional reel (John Williams). After Columbus heard the song for the promotional reel, he knew they had to have Williams compose the entire movie (John Williams). Williams created an entire score for the movie and called it “The Harry Potter Suite.” “The Harry Potter Suite” has a song for each important event that happened throughout the film. John Williams adds magic and tells the story of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone through his composed music.
William Williams' "Spring and All" The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American-born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought about by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines?
Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer is a one-act play with a cast of colourful characters ranging from the eccentric Violet to the troubled Catherine. One individual, George Holly, is more minor than others, and as such might get overlooked. However, the Fictional World method of analysis uncovers new insight into his nature. By analysing George’s character in the Social World of the play specifically, we get a better understanding of how traumatic and powerful the climax really is.
Freer, Justin. "The Importance of Music in Film." Los Angeles Brass Ensemble RSS. Los Angeles Brass Ensemble, n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.