The Music of John Williams
SPECIAL EVENT
Friday 13 & Saturday 14 June 2025, 7.30pm
Riverside Theatre, Perth Convention & Exhibition Centre
West Australian Symphony Orchestra respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and Elders of Country throughout Western Australia, and the Whadjuk Noongar people on whose lands we work and share music.
How to use your Digital Program
The Music of John Williams
Act 1 (60 mins)
Planet Krypton
Superman: March
Lost in Space: Theme
Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Excerpts
Schindler's List: Theme
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Parade of the Slave Children
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra
Star Wars Suite: Main Title
Interval (20 mins)
Act 2 (60 mins)
Jurassic Park: The Lost World: Theme
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Witches, Wands and Wizards
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: A Window to the Past
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace: Anakin’s Theme
Anakin’s Transformation
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial: Adventures on Earth
Nicholas Buc conductor
Dan Golding host
Andrew Pogson host
Produced in association with Concert Lab.
WASO On Stage
About the Music of John Williams
There is no person who has shaped the way we hear the movies more than John Williams. That means that when we talk about his music, his impact, and his influence, what might for others seem like hyperbole or exaggeration are just plain and simple facts.
Did you know, for example, that Williams is the second-most nominated person at the Academy Awards in any category, with well more than 50 Oscar nominations to his name? He ranks behind only Walt Disney himself in terms of sheer numbers and sustained achievement. His career has witnessed lifetimes of change at the movies.
When John Williams attended his first Academy Awards ceremony as a nominee, The Graduate was up for Best Picture, while the awards for Best Cinematography – one for black and white pictures and one for those in more expensive colour – had been merged into a single category for the first time. Seven decades later, and the movies have seen trends come and go, as well as the epochal events of digital technology and a pandemic – but still, there was John Williams in 2024, breaking his own record as the oldest nominee in any category.
Such a claim seems almost absurd, but there is also a good argument to be made that John Williams may well be the most widely heard composer in history. Though Mozart or Beethoven have a few centuries' head start, what great concert hall composer can compete with the power of the 20th century’s great mass artform, the cinema? John Williams has certainly been its chief musical envoy. Between 1970 and 1990, the yearly box office was topped by a film with music by Williams every second year, an absolute golden run that included Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Home Alone.
Even when adjusted for inflation, a full fifth of the top 100 films of all time at the North American box office have the John Williams touch. All this is simply to say that before you even journey to a concert hall like today, before you put on a CD of his music, before you ever opened Spotify to search for a soundtrack, you and millions like you around the world have already heard a John Williams composition. His music is in the very blood of our popular culture.
It may surprise you to learn, then, that the young John Williams did not have his sights set on the world of Mozart and Beethoven so much as Nat King Cole and Art Tatum. Williams was born to a jazz-loving family – his father was a drummer who played with Raymond Scott – and for a while it looked like Williams might take the jazz world on, first as a member of the US Air Force Band in the 1950s, and then as the pianist-leader of the Johnny Williams big band.
However, after studying piano at Julliard with Rosina Lhévinne, “it became clear that I could write better than I could play,” said Williams, and he moved to Los Angeles to become an orchestrator and session musician for the film studios. He gained an apprenticeship in film scoring in these years spent working for the likes of Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein, and his piano playing can be heard on Peter Gunn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the 1960 film adaptation of West Side Story. He was composing, too, particularly for the television studios where his work for Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space proved invaluable experience.
Williams quickly began to write for the movies, and it would prove to be one of the most fruitful artistic relationships in the history of the medium. Though Williams’ early work is full of eclectic and interesting credits – the jazz of The Long Goodbye (1973) and his klezmer-filled folk of his adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof (1971, his first Oscar) – he quickly found a niche as the musical voice of a prototypical style of blockbuster in the 1970s, films like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), and Earthquake (1974).
A young hotshot director called Steven Spielberg took note, and asked Williams if he might write music for his films. He did – for 29 films. Their second collaboration, Jaws (1975), remains one of the few movies on the planet with a theme tune hummable by almost anyone, anywhere. The very sound of a shark has become entwined with John Williams’ foreboding two-note motif, much in the same way that serial killers or showers have taken on Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking strings from Psycho (1960). Less popularly remembered, though, is the way that Williams also revived the Hollywood Golden Age sound with his music for Jaws: in among the tension and the drama there are little adventure-filled bursts of Korngold’s Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). “I’m a very lucky man,” said Williams. “If it weren’t for the movies, no one would be able to write this kind of music anymore.”
Then came Star Wars (1977), perhaps the most perfect match for John Williams’ nostalgic musical ability across his entire career. In the hands of director George Lucas, Star Wars was a deliberate throwback to the B-movie worlds of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. John Williams gave it music to match, and then some. It was Williams, too, who persuaded Lucas to abandon the idea of classical music, a la Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), for a wholly original soundtrack: “I did not want to hear a piece of Dvořák here, a piece of Tchaikovsky there, and a piece of Holst in another place.”
The melodies that Williams wrote for Star Wars (and its many sequels and prequels) endure even today as among his most beloved. From themes for the force, to Darth Vader, Yoda, and Princess Leia, Williams revived the technique of leitmotif at the movies, a musical melody associated with characters, places, or ideas. In time, he became its master, too.
“These genuine, simple tunes are the hardest things to uncover, for any composer,” Williams told The New Yorker. Yet Williams has been better at this task than almost anyone else who has tried. For many, it seems impossible to imagine a world without the Star Wars main theme, or without that jaunty little tune for Indiana Jones.
“Without John Williams, bikes don't really fly,” said Spielberg as Williams was inducted in the American Film Institute Hall of Fame in 2016. “Dinosaurs do not walk the earth.”
More than any award or achievement, what Williams has done for the movies across seven decades is perhaps his most insurmountable achievement of all. He has given them belief.
© Dan Golding 2024
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About the Artists
Nicholas Buc
Conductor
Nicholas Buc is an award-winning composer, conductor, and arranger with over 20 years of experience in the music industry. He studied composition at the University of Melbourne, where he received the inaugural Fellowship of Australian Composers Award, and later earned a Master's degree in Scoring for Film and Multimedia from New York University, receiving the Elmer Bernstein Award.
Nicholas’ notable works include his Trumpet Concerto, premiered by the Melbourne Youth Orchestra in 2022, and his 100-minute oratorio, Origins, which debuted at the Melbourne Recital Centre in 2023. His choral work, Starry Sky, premiered with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs in July 2024.
His live animation concert, Daughter of the Inner Stars, premiered with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in August 2024 and will have its North American debut with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in May 2025.
Nicholas has collaborated with renowned artists such as Wynton Marsalis, Nick Cave, and Tina Arena, and has worked on television productions like Junior MasterChef and The Voice Australia. He is also sought after for live film concerts, having conducted premieres of films including Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.
The 2024-2025 season will feature debut performances with the Chicago Symphony, Chicago Lyric Opera, Toronto Symphony, Kansas Symphony, Auckland Symphony, and reappearances with the Seattle Symphony, Grand Rapids Symphony, and all Australian Symphony Orchestras.
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About the Artists
A/Prof. Dan Golding
Host
Associate Professor Dan Golding is Chair of Media and Communication at Swinburne University, the host of Screen Sounds on ABC Classic, and an award-winning composer and writer.
Dan is the author of Star Wars After Lucas (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and the co-author of Game Changers (Affirm Press, 2016). He also created the soundtrack for the BAFTA, DICE, and GDCA winning Untitled Goose Game (2019), which became the first game soundtrack to be nominated for an ARIA award in history.
Other composing includes the soundtracks for Push Me Pull You (2016) and the Frog Detective series, for which his score for The Haunted Island (2018) won the APRA-AMCOS Australian Game Developer award for Best Music. Dan recently composed the theme for the ABC’s flagship podcast, ABC News Daily. Find him on Instagram @dan.golding or online at dangolding.com.
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About the Artists
Andrew Pogson
Host
Andrew Pogson is a producer, director and jazz musician who has worked in the music industry for over 20 years. He is the founder and Creative Director of Concert Lab, a concert producing and production company, and was previously the Head of Presentations at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO).
He has worked with artists such as Sting, Randy Newman, Tim Minchin, Ben Folds, Joe Hisaishi and Studio Ghibli, Kate Miller-Heidke and Flight Facilities, along with creating and producing world premieres with the MSO such as The Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular, Video Games Unplugged, Babe in Concert, Symphonica featuring Armand Van Helden, The Film Music of Nick Cave & Warren Ellis and This Gaming Life with music comedy trio Tripod (where he also hosts their podcast, Perfectly Good Podcast). Find him on Instagram @andrewjpogson or online at concertlab.com.au.
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About the Artists
Art of the Score
Art of the Score is a Melbourne-based podcast that explores, demystifies and celebrates some of the greatest soundtracks of all time from the world of film, TV and video games. In each episode hosts Andrew Pogson, Dan Golding and Nicholas Buc check out a soundtrack they love, break down its main themes, explore what makes the score tick and hopefully impart their love of the world of soundtracks.
Art of the Score has enjoyed time in the iTunes Top 10, 'What’s Hot' and 'New & Noteworthy' lists, and is listened to by soundtrack geeks all around the world. Head on over to artofthescore.com.au for more nerdery and tomfoolery.
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Fri 18 & Sat 19 July 2025
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About WASO
Engage | Excite | Experience | Educate
From the centre of Perth to the furthest corners of the state, we have provided the soundtrack to life in WA since 1928.
As the State Orchestra, Perth’s first and finest, WASO is the largest employer of performing artists in Western Australia and reaches two million people with musical experiences each year on stage, in our community, and online.
From concert stages to classrooms, hospitals to aged care, we bring joy, inspire learning, and nurture participation in our community, because everybody deserves the opportunity to experience live music. Every year, through community and leading industry partnerships, we engage a new generation of young and emerging artists to help secure a bright future for music in Australia.
We celebrate our rich classical music heritage with great artists from all over the world and commission and perform new repertoire to renew and expand it. The Orchestra collaborates widely with major arts companies and independent artists, performing opera to ballet, movies to musicals, jazz to rock.
Asher Fisch is Principal Conductor and Artistic Adviser of our Orchestra. We champion the diversity of music in all its forms, with a team of talented and passionate people who create unforgettable experiences for all West Australians to enjoy.
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