JOHN WILLIAMS

The man behind all those hummable scores.

“Actors may convey love in their facial expressions, or express suffering or panic in their eyes,” Greiving writes about movies, “but the music tells the ultimate truth and provides faith in these make-believe stories. The score—John Williams—is their soul.” In this first major biography of the beloved composer, Greiving, an arts journalist, meticulously traces Williams’ magical career, benefiting from more than 20 hours of interviews with his subject. The Williams family’s move from the East Coast to Los Angeles was life changing: In high school, Williams explored arranging, which laid the foundation for his composing, and in 1956 he secured a position at Columbia Pictures, playing piano on numerous B-movie scores. More orchestration opportunities turned up, including Gidget (1959) and The Guns of Navarone (1961). Live television also called; in 1958 he signed with Revue Studios, writing, orchestrating, and conducting 39 programs a year. Williams scored his first feature film, Daddy-O, in 1959, and later his own series, Checkmate, which led to his first Grammy-nominated album. One of his last studio pianist performances was for West Side Story. “John’s style and craft,” writes Greiving, took “a giant leap into maturity” with Emmy-winning Heidi and Goodbye Mr. Chips, and The Reivers “tapped into one of John’s superpowers: nostalgia.” In 1972 he won his first Academy Award, for Fiddler on the Roof. A year later, he wrote the score for The Sugarland Express, directed by a young new talent: Steven Spielberg. Meeting Spielberg, the composer said, was “one of the luckiest days of my life.” A bounty of successes followed, with Greiving charting the composer’s decades-long collaboration with Spielberg and, of course, George Lucas. The author provides reams of fascinating inside information about several spectacular scores, including the classics Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Schindler’s List.

Fans of Williams’ music will devour this all-encompassing work.