Pencil and Paper: From one Friend to Another

"We had 12 shows a week at Universal that had to be recorded, which meant there were 12 three-hour sessions with an orchestra of some kind on the stage every week," Williams says. "So I filled one or two of those as a composer and conducted my own work also for seven years. So that was, I suppose, a graduate program in, if nothing else, how to get things done."

Williams says he learned much of his craft on soundstages from his colleagues.

"The instrumentalists at that time, as now, were outstanding world-class players," he says. "My advantage was that I'd been playing with them for three or four or five years, as a colleague in the orchestra. I would go over to a horn player and say, 'Have I got this too high?' or 'Is this trill a little awkward? Would you rather play it here or there?' Just from one friend to another, without any particular professional pressure. And they'd all say, 'No, put it here, put it there, do this.' "

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Williams says his process has always been the same: He writes music the old-fashioned way, with pencil and paper, and doesn't begin composing until he's actually seen a rough cut of the film.

"I, over the years, have always felt more comfortable if I could go into a projection room and look at a film and not really know what to expect," Williams says. "If you read the script first, you form all kinds of preconceptions about how things look, what the location's like, what the actors are like. And then you may look at what the director's chosen — it doesn't comport with your conceptions at all. On the other hand, if I have the luxury of going into the dark projection room and being surprised when the audience is surprised and being bored when they're bored, I think that gives me a sense of what my job is: where I can press the accelerator button if I need to, or support an emotion or don't."

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In fact, Williams spent his 80th birthday working on the score for Spielberg's latest. Williams says it takes two to three months on average to compose a film score, going back and forth from his studio to his screening room to make sure everything syncs up properly.

"These days, I probably will get as much as a minute done or a minute and a half done in a day," he says. "It's a good day."

At 80, Williams is having a lot of good days. His energy seems boundless: He's laureate director of the Boston Pops, he's composing new classical work, and his score is filling theaters screening Spielberg's latest, Lincoln.

"I'm happy to be busy," Williams says. "I'm happy to have a wonderful family. And I think also, especially for practicing musicians, age is not so much of a concern because a lifetime is just simply not long enough for the study of music anyway. You're never anywhere near finished. So the idea of retiring or putting it aside is unthinkable. There's too much to learn."

http://tpr.org/post/john-williams-inevitable-themes