Williams says a composer must relate to the core of a film ( 320 K/26 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

February 7, 2000
Web posted at: 5:57 p.m. EST (2257 GMT)

Serena Yang
CNN WorldBeat Correspondent

(CNN) -- Not many people can think of the "Star Wars" movies, "Jaws," "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or "Superman," without hearing John Williams' music. His scores have transcended the films and become part of the soundtrack for an entire generation. Williams, who turns 68 on Tuesday, inherited his father's musical ear.

"My father worked in radio orchestras in New York City and also later in California in studio orchestras, which is really how I made my connection to the film scoring world," he says. "I first began to play in Columbia Studio orchestras in the 1950s when that studio had a contract orchestra.

"I would sit at the piano, and if I had a few bars rest, I would look up at the screen and try to figure out how they were matching the action on the screen to the music in the orchestra -- how they were conducting it. It was a wonderful school for me. I really didn't intend to do it, but I found myself as a very young man just out of school sitting in that orchestra playing but also learning."

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In a few year's time, Williams went from playing in the orchestra to conducting his own scores. His body of work now includes scores for nearly 80 films. His world famous music is largely a product of his work with two directors, Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas.

"They are in touch with some part of the child in them, which is where artistic endeavors really kind of live," Williams says. "You can get back to that child state of imagining what can't be. I think we go a long way toward making the first step in good creative and good artistic work."

That imagination has won him 37 Academy Award nominations. He's been awarded five Oscars, 17 Grammys and three Golden Globes. This year, the nominations are mounting again for his most recent score for "Angela's Ashes."

"Musically I loved it," he says. "I didn't use a particularly vernacular Irish idiom in the music but a sort of more general emotional approach."

So what does a composer mean to a film?

"To put it in a sentence," Williams says, "I guess he really attaches himself to the soul of the film, to the core of the characters, to that part of the film that's beyond the language used in it -- maybe even beyond the action that we see, but somewhere close to the center of the spiritual core and soul of the story and the characters."

Williams says he has been lucky to work with Spielberg and Lucas ( 355 K/29 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

Williams has worked tirelessly in the film world, balancing his love of storytelling with 13 years of conducting for the Boston Pops Orchestra.

"So much popular music that's done now around the world is done -- not entirely, but to a great extent -- by synthesizers, which are machines that are very exciting," he says. "And they will produce sound sources that are heretofore unheard of.

"But for me, a symphony orchestra has always been probably one of the great inventions of the mind -- of Western culture.

"The moment when you first play the music with the orchestra with the film, you see the film because we're accompanying it. But having worked in the room for six or eight weeks, writing all the music and then having it suddenly ... brought to life by the orchestra is still, for me, the most exciting moment.

Williams says his career has had its surprises.

"I couldn't possibly have imagined 20, 30 years ago that I would have had the opportunities that I've had to work with the people I've worked with, the orchestras I've been able to conduct," he says. "For me it's a constant challenge every day and ... a challenge to renew it every day.

"I work six days a week at writing or performing, and my objective is just to improve and get better if I can. And that's my job. And I've been rewarded beyond my dreams in it."