John Williams: A Composer’s Life

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:10)
I'm Dallas Taylor.
When it comes to film composers, there are a few names that stand out above the rest. People like Ludwig Göransson, Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer. But the most well-known film composer in history has to be John Williams.
Incredibly, he's been scoring movies since the 1950s, and he's still working today at 94 years old. Over the last 70 years, he's scored over a 100 films, including many of the biggest blockbusters of all time, like Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, ET., Home Alone, Jurassic Park, and Saving Private Ryan. He's won 27 Grammys, three Emmys, and five Academy Awards, and he's toured the globe conducting world-class orchestras. But despite all of that success, the story of John Williams' life has rarely been told, because while John has done lots of interviews, he doesn't talk much about his personal history. But in 2025, the first official biography of John was published. It's called John Williams, A Composer's Life by Tim Greiving.

**Tim Greiving** (1:18)
My name is Tim Greiving. I am a film music journalist and historian, and I just wrote a book about John Williams, who is my favorite artist of all time.

**Dallas Taylor** (1:27)
Working on the book gave Tim a unique window into the life and work of this musical icon.

**Tim Greiving** (1:39)
John Williams was born in 1932, which means he's older than Elvis Presley. He grew up in Queens, New York during the Depression, but his family was comfortable because his dad was always busy.

**Dallas Taylor** (1:53)
John's father, Johnny Williams, was a successful jazz percussionist. For a few years, he played with the Raymond Scott Quintet, who had multiple hits. This is a song that Johnny played on called Power House, which later appeared in Looney Tunes, Ren and Stimpy, and The Simpsons.

**Tim Greiving** (2:13)
The Raymond Scott Quintet were contracted by Fox to come out to Hollywood. When John was five years old, he found himself playing on the Fox lot with Shirley Temple and things like that.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:23)
On the gold ship, lollypop is a sweet trip to a candy shop.

**Tim Greiving** (2:31)
So he was always surrounded by show business and musicians, and he started learning music as a kid from all these great teachers that his dad played with.

**Dallas Taylor** (2:41)
Here's John talking about his childhood in an interview with Variety.

**John Williams** (2:44)
Music has been with me all my life. It was there when I became conscious when I woke up as a child, and it was what adults do in their profession, because my father's friends were all musicians.

**Dallas Taylor** (2:57)
Specifically, John and his three siblings all learned to play piano. Here he is in the Disney documentary Music by John Williams.

**John Williams** (3:06)
My practicing had to be done in proportion to playing baseball. If I played baseball for an hour, I must have to practice the piano for half an hour.

**Tim Greiving** (3:15)
He moved to LA with his family when he was 15, and went to high school out here.

**Dallas Taylor** (3:21)
By then, he was already writing his own music.

**Tim Greiving** (3:23)
Even when he was a teenager, he was arranging music for different ensembles, like little friend groups or jazz combos or whatever. So he was inventing music in his own way.

**Dallas Taylor** (3:36)
After high school, John enlisted in the US. Air Force. He was eventually stationed at a base in Newfoundland, where he played piano and bass for an Air Force band.

**Tim Greiving** (3:50)
So he was playing flag raising ceremonies and also had society dances and stuff like that. But he was an arranger too, so he'd do a lot of arrangements of tunes and marches and whatever Air Force bands play. He also scored his first film, quote unquote, in the Air Force. He scored a travelogue for Newfoundland.

**Dallas Taylor** (4:09)
Here's a clip of that film, which is basically a 22-minute tourism promo. For the music, John wove in melodies from Newfoundland folk songs that he found in the library. For instance, this melody is based on a folk song called Lots of Fish in Bonavist Harbor.

**SPEAKER_6** (4:29)
There's lots of fish in Bonavist Harbor, Lots of fish right in around here, Boys and girls are fishin together, Forty-five from Carabineer.

**Dallas Taylor** (4:38)
John had gotten his first taste of film scoring, but it wasn't what he wanted to pursue.

**Tim Greiving** (4:44)
He never really had aims to be a film composer, even though he was in that world a lot since he was a kid, but he wanted to be a classical pianist. So he was studying and practicing the piano really intensely in his teenage years, and as he got out of the Air Force, he went and studied with the best teacher in the country at Juilliard.