News about the John Williams project
It's been a while since the last post, and from time to time, I receive messages of people asking questions about The John Williams Compositional Techniques book.
I am glad that the material presented on this blog has helped many composers around the world. The feedback that I received during these last years served me as a fuel to keep it up. From the lack of new posts, some followers may think my studies came to a halt, but actually, the opposite is right.
The deep and ti
The Chaotic Mind of John Williams
One of the most required musical expressions in action film music is chaos. Though less and less used nowadays, chaotic textures provide incomparable richness to the scenes and cannot be taken for granted. “Out of chaos comes order” Friedrich Nietzsche Having this principle in mind we are going to have an opposite approach to it. It means that only with order we can created chaos, in music. John Williams chaotic textures sound so good because he does not follow the common bel
Composing and Orchestrating Through Relative Range
Even though John Williams is mostly known for his big epic orchestral writings, he has also proven to be a fine writer of choral music. In several of his scores he uses vowels and vocal effects to support the orchestra. These have become common usage for film music composers of many generations. However, John has also been using the choir as the main element of his music in many situations and he sometimes uses the relative range technique to create a more dramatic and lyrica
Vision and Purpose
The six first articles of The John Williams Compositional Techniques have been a great success. We wish to thank everyone that got involved with them, hoping that they added value to your knowledge. From now on we are moving to the next step of the project which means that the articles will continue to come, but less frequently. Working on such as project requires a lot of responsibility and preparation and, since we are talking about a great composer, we are committed to del
Williams - The Virtuoso Composer
Becoming a virtuoso composer requires the same amount of practice as becoming a virtuoso instrument player. Composing such music seems to be second nature for John. He has been composing virtuoso music for many movies with such a fluency which is mind-boggling. In the Hook - The Arrival of Tink and the Flight to Neverland there are many interesting textures to be studied. Today we are going to study a short passage written in tempo presto that is particularly good for underst
The Williams Modulating Themes
Williams has composed many memorable themes for movies but the interesting thing is that he possesses one characteristic that is not very common among “tonal” composers - He tends to modulate on the themes. This beautiful resource usually brings to the theme a certain felling of freedom and variation that goes beyond the boundaries of the long exposure to the same tonal center. The criteria for a good modulation are: when, to where and how to modulate without disturbing the f
The John Williams' Harmonic Language
One of the main aspects that defines the personal style of a composer is his harmonic language. In history, many composers have used certain kinds of harmonies and, in many cases, even sequences of chords. Repeated harmonic sequence is particularly evident among film composers. Due to the very limited amount of time they have to write a huge amount of music, composers in film music often use harmonic cliches as a tool. Even though Williams is known for his usage of Lydian mod
Scoring in Jurassic Park Style
I believe Jurassic Park to be one of the finest writings John has ever made. The action cues of this movie are one of the most intriguing in film writing I have ever seen and they can be understood by studying the many principles previously discussed in the article Creation of Texture. After a careful study of each chapter, practicing creating textures and making adjustments to them, now it is time to put our knowledge to test. We will do so by scoring one of the scenes of Ju
Creation of Texture Part II - Applied to Scene
In the first two examples of Creation of Texture, we put into test what we have learned from the previous chapters. These first exercises were meant for pure musical creation and had no connection with the actual happening of the scenes. In order to be more visual oriented, this time we are going to apply the Creation of Texture to a scene. This means, what we will create has to make sense with what’s happening in the scene. This is particularly useful in film music compositi
Creation of Texture Part I
HOW TO BECOME FLUENT IN CREATING GOOD MUSICAL TEXTURE? Creation of Texture is the last chapter of my project which I call The John Williams Compositional Techniques book. Part of it has been quoted here in this blog. I hope you find it useful for the improvement of your compositional abilities. Enjoy! Creation of Texture In the course of my investigations I’ve discovered that John Williams has a great imagination when it comes to creating new rich textures for action cue, as