Here’s a lesson in humility: protean film composer John Williams, 84, who has been nominated for an Academy Award a staggering 50 times, winning five, for adapting Fiddler on the Roof, and scoring Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. and Schindler’s List, said his “Star Wars scores are not very memorable,” adding, “I look at Mozart and I look at Beethoven and Bach, the greatest organizers of sound that we’ve ever had, and you need to be humble when the shoulders that we stand on are so great. “
Speaking to The Mirror, Williams said he hasn’t watched the Star Wars films:
I let it go. I have not looked at the Star Wars films and that’s absolutely true. When I’m finished with a film, I’ve been living with it; we’ve been dubbing it, recording to it, and so on. You walk out of the studio and, “Ah, it’s finished.” Now I don’t have an impulse to go to the theater and look at it. Maybe some people find that weird, or listen to recordings of my music very, very rarely. I’m not particularly proud of that, I have to say, but it’s also part of the fact that I finished Star Wars now and I’m already working on Spielberg’s new film and I don’t want to listen to music or see films.
Of course, the score to Star Wars owes a great deal to Gustav Holsts’ The Planets, as well as Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, but in the great majority of cases, film composers are enjoined to imitate music put on the scratch track that editors use, which is often classical music.
Williams continued that his work could always be better:
I don’t know. A lot of them are not very memorable and so on. It’s probably the most popular music that I’ve done. People will ask me what’s your favorite score and this and that. I’ve done concertos and symphonies and other things that are some good, some not so good. Some are played and many are rightfully forgotten. But I think we’re all the same in this sense that you look at your work or listen to your work and it’s children. You have three children. You love them and they’re beautiful, but you wish this could have been better here and maybe as parents, we don’t want to reflect that to the children. But the sense is whatever we do, it can always be better.
Then he spoke of the composers he venerated:
So I’m a composer of music and I look at Mozart and I look at Beethoven and Bach, the greatest organizers of sound that we’ve ever had, and you need to be humble when the shoulders that we stand on are so great. You hope that you’ve gotten 90% of it or as close to it as you can. But at least with me, and I think with most writers of any kind, you really don’t say “Eureka! This is it!” It’s work on this, come the next week and reshape it and do it–like honing away at it. I’m not so brilliant that I can sit down and write a melody or a theme or a whole scene or a whole work as Mozart might have done.
He concluded he still writes music the old-fashioned way: “Writing music is very, very hard work and for orchestra particularly. So it’s a labor-intensive thing. I have to be in a room alone all the time because that’s the life that it is. It’s hard work; it’s lonely work; it’s labor-intensive. I still use a pencil and paper. I don’t have a computer.”
“I’m not so brilliant that I can sit down and write a melody or a theme or a whole scene or a whole work as Mozart might have done.”
John Williams
Williams acknowledging his debt to famous classical composers is in the vein of film composer Dmitri Tiomkin’s acceptance speech in 1955, when he won an Oscar for The High and the Mighty, saying, “I would like to thank my colleagues: Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Richard Strauss.”