John Williams

John Williams
(b New York, 8 Feb 1932). American composer, arranger, conductor and pianist. He learnt the piano from the age of eight and, after moving to Los Angeles with his family in 1948, studied with the pianist-arranger Bobby Van Eps.

He served in the US Air Force (1951–4), orchestrating for and conducting service bands, then moved back to New York, where he studied for a year with Rosina Lhévinne at the Juilliard School, and played in jazz clubs and recording studios. Returning to the West Coast he enrolled at UCLA and took up private composition studies with Arthur Olaf Andersen and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, among others. From 1956 Williams was a studio pianist in Hollywood, and two years later began arranging and composing music for television, contributing the main title to Checkmate (1960; see Thomas and Burlingame). Through the mid-1960s he composed for several series, and worked for Columbia Records as a pianist, arranger and conductor; he also made a number of albums with André Previn. During this period Williams began scoring feature films, with many of his earliest scores for comedies, such as John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1964) and How to Steal a Million (1966). He also worked on more serious projects with major directors, including Robert Altman (Images, 1972, and The Long Goodbye, 1973). Williams briefly became typecast as a disaster-film specialist, owing to his successful score for The Poseidon Adventure (1972); it contained one of his few popular song hits, ‘The Morning After’, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman. Indicative of his talent at this time are the Americana of The Reivers (1969), the heartfelt English lyricism of Jane Eyre (1971) and the rousing Western style of The Cowboys (1972). Williams later arranged music from each of these three films into popular concert works.