The reigning maestro of movie music receives his first-ever biography

Los Angeles-based arts journalist Tim Greiving has written John Williams: A Composer’s Life, the first biography of composer John Williams, published Sept. 4 by Oxford University Press. He spent five years on the project; traveled to Boston, London and Japan during the research, and interviewed 175 people, including the Oscar-winning legend himself. But, as the author discusses in the following Q&A, it wasn’t easy getting the notoriously private composer to talk about his life.

Later this season, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Steven Reineke, will present “A Musical Tribute to John Williams & Steven Spielberg” on June 23. Individual tickets for this CSO Featured Concert will go on sale later this season (but are available now to subscribers).

Q. Why did you want to write about John Williams?

Tim Greiving: I’ve loved his music since I was 9. I first became aware of him with the “Jurassic Park” score. He became my favorite artist when I was a kid, and it never changed. I’ve just been obsessed with his music my whole life. And that obsession led me into being interested in film music as a whole, which led me to wanting to write about it, interview composers and do everything I do. So he’s kind of at the center of my whole being, my whole life, really.

Q. Why has there never been a biography of this famous composer?

T.G.: Well, because he never wanted one. Many people tried to write one, or asked permission to write one, or sought his blessing or his participation, and he turned everybody down, including me.

Q. So how did you persuade him to cooperate with a book on his life?

T.G.: Good question. I foolishly, just brazenly, decided to do it once Oxford University Press expressed interest and said that his participation wasn’t a deal-breaker for them. I just started working on it, interviewing people. I think the persistence, the fact that the ball was already rolling, put a little pressure on him to get involved. I think turning 90 made him more reflective and introspective, and softened his approach about this. And then, right around the same time that he agreed to start meeting with me, Steven Spielberg was basically forcing him to let him do a documentary about him. So I think the combination of all those things cracked the door open for me.

Q. When did he say “yes” to you?

T.G.: I was almost done with the book. I had a draft almost done. My original deadline to turn the book in was December 2022, so I was almost at the end when he summoned me to his office. I ended up getting between 20 and 25 hours of interviews over the course of about 18 months.

Q. How did he handle what must have been difficult questions, or even ones that he’d never been asked?

T.G.: Gracefully, I would say. It was a delicate dance for me. I didn’t ask certain things, but I delicately asked other things, some things about his personal life. The death of his first wife was very sensitive — he didn’t go into great detail, but he gave me a few comments that were revealing.

Clearly, he has his guard up on certain things. So it was just finding the right tone of the conversation. I wasn’t there to make him cry or ask him really hard-hitting questions, but there were certain things I knew I had to ask him about. And I don’t think he’s really been pressed on some of this stuff in interviews. So I know it made him uncomfortable. At one point, he was being interviewed by [documentary filmmaker] Laurent Bouzereau at the same time, sometimes back to back. At one point, he said that he and Laurent had an easier colloquy than he and I did. But Laurent told me that he specifically made a point to not ever ask him about his personal life, and that’s what I was doing. So I think he just wasn’t used to that.

Q. Is it possible to say what the big surprises were, either that you discovered during your research, or something he may have said to you?

T.G.: One of my big discoveries was that his biological grandfather was a man named Thomas Nagle; Williams was an adopted name. And Thomas Nagle, who abandoned John’s father when he was a baby, was a musician himself. And he ended up arranging music to go with silent movies in Canada. He was an early film music creator of some kind. He wasn’t writing music, but he was arranging and selecting and then conducting orchestras to go with silent movies. And John did not know this man existed or what his career was. It was kind of this amazing mystical connection that we made. He said later that was the deus ex machina that led him to continuing to participate in the book. I think this knowledge about his ancestry was really special to him.

Q. Williams’ dad was a pretty famous jazz drummer.

T.G.: Yeah, his dad was very important to him. I mean, you can see the lineage leading to him into the film industry because his dad was playing in radio orchestras, and then film studio orchestras. But he said he owes his dad most of his musical knowledge. His dad taught him how to read music. His dad set him up with all these teachers who were amazing musicians. They were very close. I think his dad kind of held him to a really high standard and sort of inspired John to excel in music — to please his dad, but also because he was inspired by his dad. So he is a hugely important figure in his life.

Q. You interviewed him in Los Angeles, Japan and Tanglewood. How was he in Tanglewood? I know he loves being there, the summer home of the Boston Symphony.

T.G.: He loved Tanglewood, and he made it clear to me that I needed to spend some time there to really understand him. I’d been there once before, but I hadn’t spent much time there. So just to get a sense of the grounds, his relationship to that place, these sculptures that he’s commissioned of Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky. And so yeah, sitting with him in this building called Highwood, where he used to go with Leonard Bernstein and others to have meals after concerts; they have this whole story about Bernstein thinking there was a ghost upstairs, was very special.

Q. Williams conducted the Boston Pops for 14 years. How important was that tenure to his career?

T.G.: Hugely important. Just having access to that level of musicianship every summer, getting to hear his music played by them, basically having his own orchestra, made him a better composer. It made him much more visible. It put him on this national podium because the concerts were televised around the country on PBS, and it sort of positioned him as America’s composer. And I think when he became the Boston Pops conductor, it started this project for him of elevating film music in the eyes of the classical world. It was a slow, gradual process, but I think he achieved that ultimately.

Q. What other luminaries did you interview?

T.G.: Directors like Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson and Alfonso Cuaron. I talked to other composers like Howard Shore and Hans Zimmer and David Shire. I talked to musicians like Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, all the soloists he’s written concert pieces for. And I even talked to some actors like Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfuss.

Q. Williams has also written a great deal of concert music that’s not often discussed. Where do you think John Williams’ heart really lies? Is it with the movie music that’s so popular, or with his more personal works for the concert hall?

T.G.: I think my answer would probably differ from his, because he talks about the films just being assignments, just jobs. And he wasn’t pouring his heart out in most of these scores. He said he felt a lot of personal resonance with "Schindler’s List" and things like that. He might say his heart is more in his classical pieces, and I just think it’s in both. I think it’s evenly distributed. I think when you hear profound emotion in his film scores, even if it’s for a scene in “The Patriot” or even “Star Wars,” I think you’re hearing the real John Williams and his real feelings.

Q. How did Williams change the film-music landscape?

T.G.: The way I see it is, he perfected the old way of doing it with an orchestra, with character themes, the kind of classic Hollywood way of scoring films. He made it viable again for new generations. You’ll hear a lot of today’s composers talk about what a hero he is to them. And I think at their best, some modern film scores aspire to be like his music in some ways, whether it’s a catchy character theme or something with the orchestration. He does have some successors, but he really represents an ancient art that is not really valued anymore and no one’s really aspiring to the mastery that he had of it. He had a huge influence on it, but it’s hard to say where we are now with it.

Q. What’s Williams’ place in the history of film music?

T.G.: If you look at different statistics, if you look at just how ubiquitous he has been for so long, other great film composers had their moment and then their moment ended for whatever reason. His never ended from 50 years ago till today. So in terms of popularity, in terms of just omnipresence, I think he is the greatest. He perfected the art form of telling a film story with music in a way that perfectly serves the movie and also works well on its own. I don’t think he has any equals in that.