Armed Forces Medley
Arranged by Richard Hayman and James Kessler
Alasdair Neale, Conductor
The music of John Williams, conducted by Stéphane Denève
Superman March
Harry’s Wondrous World from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Theme from Jurassic Park
Raiders March from Raiders of the Lost Ark
Theme from The Book Thief
Theme from Schindler’s List
Jeremy Constant, Violin
Flying Theme from E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial
Main Theme from Star Wars: A New Hope
Armed Forces Medley
arr. Richard Hayman and Jim Kessler
Tonight’s concert begins by paying tribute to service members and veterans. Each of the five divisions of our military is saluted with a medley of their official songs. The rousing Coast Guard’s 1927 song, Semper Paratus, is followed by the popular U.S. Air Force Song (“Off We Go, Into the Wild, Blue Yonder”). Next is the Navy’s 1906 march, Anchors Aweigh, and then to the oldest of the military songs, The Marines’ Hymn (“From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli”), with a theme borrowed from an 1867 Offenbach opera. The medley closes with the U.S. Army’s march, The Caissons Go Rolling Along, written in 1908 by a lieutenant stationed in the Philippines as he awaited the ammunition to arrive over hill, over dale.
The music of John Williams, Conducted by Stéphane Denève
Superman March
Harry’s Wondrous World from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Theme from Jurassic Park
Raiders March from Raiders of the Lost Ark
Theme from The Book Thief
Theme from Schindler’s List
Flying Theme from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Main Theme from Star Wars: A New Hope
John Williams (b. 1932)
The iconic John Williams is the most important, influential, and successful film composer in the nearly 100-year history of the form. He scored his first film, the B-movie Daddy-O, in 1959 (the official credit lists “Johnny Williams” as composer), about 30 years after the film industry began to effectively sync music with visual images on the screen. His latest contribution is the score to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth installment of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones saga, released last month. With over 100 movies in between, Williams has provided us with some of the most evocative music in the current vernacular, most notably in the scores he wrote in close collaborations with Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Film music scholar Martin Marks notes of Williams, “More than any of his contemporaries he has developed the ability to express the dramatic essence of a film in memorable musical ideas; likewise, he is able to shape each score to build climaxes that mirror a particular narrative structure.” Tonight’s program showcases eight of his most memorable scores.
First is the heroic march from Superman (1978, Oscar-nominated for Best Original Score). One hears echoes of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man in Williams’s score—wide-ranging intervals (4ths and 5ths) and leaping octaves in a single bound. The march is a compact dramatic musical setup (and eventual summary) for the ultimate triumph of the hero through the movie’s narrative.
Williams wrote the music for the first three Harry Potter films, masterfully capturing the magical, vaguely mysterious, and often playful tone of J.K. Rowling’s characters and stories. Harry’s Wondrous World is first heard in the first film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001, Oscar nomination), and returns in the second. The lushly orchestrated cue evokes the joyous awe of Harry’s beloved Hogwarts.
Spielberg expressed his own awe at Williams’s achievement with his Jurassic Park (1993) music: “John’s score is reverential and triumphant. His music never makes the dinosaurs seem like monsters or creatures or leviathans. The score gives them all the dignity they’re owed.”
Williams recaptured the heroic tone of Superman (with a side of swashbuckling) in his wildly popular theme for Lucas/Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Oscar nomination). Williams was toying with two separate themes to represent Indy. Spielberg liked them both so much that Williams wove them together to produce the Raiders Theme.
The Book Thief (2013, Oscar nomination) is adapted from the Markus Zusak novel portraying the story—narrated darkly by Death—of a book-loving girl, Liesel Meminger, living in Nazi Germany. Williams loved the novel so much that when he heard it was being adapted, in a rare move, he offered his services to shocked and elated director Brian Percival. The music here is masterfully understated, mirroring the intimate internal portrait of Liesel.
Spielberg’s earlier masterpiece of survival in Nazi Germany, Schindler’s List (1993, Oscar winner), tells the compelling story of German businessman Oskar Schindler trying desperately to save Jews from Nazi death camps by employing them in his factory. Williams’s haunting, heartbreaking music evokes a Yiddish lament, poignantly setting the mood for this powerful film.
The power of music: it is impossible not to imagine Elliot and E.T. soaring across the moonlit forest when we hear the iconic Williams music to the Spielberg classic (1982, Oscar winner). The scene has been called “cinema’s most magical moment,” a charmed confluence of sound and image.
The program closes with what is arguably Williams’s crowning achievement: music written for the original Star Wars film (1977, Oscar winner). The main title music is now part of the global musical lexicon. Williams has said of this music, “…it’s set in the most brilliant register of the trumpets, horns, and trombones so that we’d have a blazingly brilliant fanfare at the opening of the piece. You almost kind of want to stand up and salute when you hear it.”
Program notes by Jon Kochavi