Capturing the Life of a Musical Giant
An interview with biographer Tim Greiving, author of 'John Williams: A Composer's Life'
I am always looking for windows into the personal lives of great composers to inform my research and writing on the family life of J.S. Bach. Recently, this inspired me to write a Substack post on the life and music of the film composer John Williams, a man who, like Bach, has created countless musical masterpieces while preserving a remarkably stable family life.
While researching for that article, I was delighted to see that the first serious biography of this living legend is set to be published this fall by Oxford University Press. Then I saw that
, the author of the upcoming Williams biography, was writing a wonderful Substack series about his writing process! I reached out, and Tim graciously agreed to let me pick his brain over Zoom.You can read about Tim’s impressive work as a journalist, author, and film music evangelist on his website, and I will get right to our interview!
Warm-Up Questions
Alex: You mentioned somewhere that you were homeschooled. That was my background, too, and I feel like homeschooling offered a lot of freedom for me to pursue passion projects from an early age. Did you have a similar experience?
Tim: Yeah, very much so. I loved my experience being homeschooled. It was a perfect blend of structured curriculum, meeting certain objectives, and getting us ready for higher education. It was solid in that way, but there was a lot of freedom and free time for exploring what interested us, so I gravitated towards writing and creative stuff and, you know, movies and music. I think I learned good time management skills from being homeschooled. I’m a freelance journalist, and my brother one time joked that I basically turned homeschooling into a career, like I’m a professional homeschooler.
Alex: What’s your favorite biography of a musician?
Tim: Well, Williams gave me this Charles Ives biography by Swafford, and I really liked it. I didn’t know much about his life, that he was like an insurance salesman for most of his career. So it was really informative, but also just like a joy to read. Although let me caveat that and say the biography of Bernard Herrmann by Stephen C. Smith—it’s called A Heart at Fire’s Center—okay, that was the book I read, and 15 years ago made me think I should start writing biographies. So I’m going to amend my choice and say that.
Alex: Well, I can check out both of those! I loved learning about Hermann in film music classes at CMU, and I need to look into Ives anyway because he has some cool fatherhood connections with some of the songs he wrote for his adopted daughter. Alright, how about an underrated John Williams score?
Tim: I can think of a million, but I’ll go with my favorite score, A.I., which is definitely underrated. It’s the best, but very much overlooked.
Alex: How about a favorite non-Williams movie score?
Tim: Hmm. We’ll go with Hoosiers by Jerry Goldsmith. Love it. I think Jerry Goldsmith was as talented as John Williams in most ways, just didn’t get the same kind of choice collaborators in movies. And I think he had a prickly personality that probably made him harder to work with, but he was great.
Why Does the Personal Life Matter?
Alex: There’s this musicologist who begins all his biographies of the Bachs saying it’s okay that we can’t find much documentation on their actual lives because the most interesting thing about any musician is their music. You seem to have taken a different approach with your biography of John Williams, valuing the personal side very highly alongside the music. So, why does the personal life of a composer or musician matter?
Tim: Well, I agree that the music is what matters most. I think most composers reveal a lot about themselves through their music, and sometimes they reveal more about themselves through their music than even in their private conversations with people or their letters. So, I think that’s an extremely valid way to start investigating a composer.
But I think what shapes us at our core—how we grew up, what our parents were like, what time we lived in, what town we lived in, what community, the most important relationships in our life—all of those go into the cake that makes up who we are. So on one level, you can appreciate someone’s music completely devoid of all that background, and that’s fine. But I think most of us are curious about who was this person that came up with this melody or this symphony or whatever that I love so much. And I think the more you learn about them and their personal life, the more it enhances and enriches how much you appreciate their music.
Privacy
Alex: I think for a lot of creative individuals, getting to a place where someone would want to chronicle and commemorate our lives through a biography would be a big honor. Meanwhile, you’ve had a whole journey trying to get John Williams to sign on with your project. And it sounds like he tried to talk them out of doing the Disney+ documentary. Why do you think some great figures like Williams prefer to remain private?
Tim: Well, I think it differs from person to person. In his case, well, I’ve tried to figure this out. Like, why is he so private? And I peg it to a couple of things. I think the death of his first wife really rocked his whole universe, and I think he kind of went internal even more after that and put up some guardrails. His daughter told me that he’s just a very sensitive person, and sensitive people need to protect themselves. He faced a lot of criticism when he first became super famous in the 70s, mostly from like classical, elite people that like all his music is just knock-off Holst and Stravinsky and things. And his brothers said that’s maybe one reason he’s so guarded, because he’s been kind of under attack from certain critics for a long time. And I think maybe partly it’s just his personality. Some people are just private people. He comes from an era before, obviously social media, but also just any kind of sharing of our lives that is so normal for us. I think I kind of admire that about John Williams, that he’s like, I don’t need to share everything that’s going on inside my head or my family or whatever. That’s for us. That’s for me.
Celebrating Art and Artists You Love
Alex: In my research on Bach, I see a lot of entitlement among Bach enthusiasts, which can show up as frustrations with him and his life: that he didn’t write or preserve more letters, or even that he didn’t live a more interesting or scandalous life to give us more material. In one of your articles, you said, “I only want to write things that celebrate artists and art that I love.” What does it look like to celebrate an artist that you love through biography? And why is that a valid approach to getting the story right? As opposed to this more entitled or critical perspective.
Tim: Yeah, I think partly that’s just my personality. At the shallowest level, I want people to like me. But at a deeper level, I don’t want to be a big, curmudgeonly, critical, snarky, cynical person. So that’s just the way I lean. When you’re a professional writer, you can be that; you could be a film critic or a music critic, and just kind of tear down things that you hate. But I think doing that professionally and publicly is just not how I want to spend my energy. When I pitch stories to newspapers or magazines, I just pitch the stuff that I’m excited about, that I want to share with people.
For biography, I think it’s valid to maybe come at it from a critical standpoint, but even if you’re writing about someone who’s kind of obviously a bad person or a very morally compromised person, you still have to have some kind of empathy for them. Otherwise, it’s just kind of poisonous, you know, hate that you’re writing. And I don’t know that I really want to write a biography about someone who was just really a bad person. Fortunately, with John Williams, I didn’t discover some horrible thing about him that I had to then deal with. He’s a very upstanding person.
From the beginning, I thought of this book as a love letter to him. It’s like, this is why I love your music so much. But I also thought about it as a book I was writing for my dad, who doesn’t care about music; he’s not a musician. So that kind of guided me in terms of, I want him to be able to comprehend this and it not be completely over his head, so that it doesn’t go nerdy musicological. I don’t have that skill set really anyway, but I definitely was shooting for a layperson audience like my dad, and, in a way, explaining to my dad and my family: this is why I’m obsessed with John Williams. This book is the explanation. So that’s what was sort of the, yeah, the guiding force.
Alex: I’m so glad that that type of approach kind of did eventually land the authorized kind of status. Your website says you’re like a film music “evangelist.” People love Bach. People love John Williams. Why do we need to write books that nitpick and find what we can trash about them? Why not cultivate that love?
The Humble Craftsman’s Studio
Alex: So the first time you met Williams in person, you said you glanced around his studio, and you wrote, “This was not the flashy trophy room of an egomaniac. This was a cobbler’s workshop, a humble craftsman’s studio and library.” As someone who’s had plenty of violin lessons in those trophy rooms of egomaniacs, I love this image you paint there of the humble craftsman’s studio. And it resonates with the image I get of Bach’s house from his will, with all of the instruments and books and other belongings he passed down. So what do you think the interplay is between this humble approach and the greatness of the work?
Tim: Well, that’s a good question. I think John Williams doesn’t think that highly of himself, and yet he’s extremely talented and hardworking. And I think that freed him to be as great as he is. I think if he had a bigger ego, if it was more about him impressing people, being praised, you know, enforcing his status as the greatest composer of all time or whatever, I think he’d probably be limited in what he could actually do, because his priorities would be different. He opened himself up to just be creative because it’s not really about how great he is; it’s about how much further he can take his talent. That’s one of the things I admire most about him is he continually was trying to grow and learn more and become better and try things he’d never tried before, even in his 70s and 80s. And I think if you have a big ego, you’re not probably as interested in growing and learning.
Bach and Williams
Alex: Did John Williams ever talk about Bach’s life or music in your conversations?
Tim: Probably. He would often mention a composer and how he related to them, or just something about them that was interesting. We talked a lot about Brahms and some about Beethoven. But he’d mention various other people. I don’t remember a specific thing he said about Bach, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did talk about him.
Note: Tim emailed me a few days later after checking the transcripts of his interviews with Williams. He shared several times that Bach came up, including this gold nugget:
When I asked him if he could go back in time, where would he go (we were talking about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), he said: “Certainly Bach is someone that I would have liked to have known.”
Music Shaped By Life
Alex: A big piece of my project has been taking significant family events of Bach’s life and lining them up with the dates of his cantatas dealing with birth, childhood, marriage, fatherhood, and death. Bach wrote this stuff for the church, so it was not just, let me write a piece about fatherhood. It was part of the teaching text or something for that part of the church calendar. Williams was kind of similar because he wrote scores for specific movies, but ended up writing music that touches on all of these family topics. He’s written several father-son themes, from Jaws to all the Star Wars stuff. So, how do you think William’s music was shaped or affected by his life, especially his family life?
Tim: It is interesting, some of the father themes in his scores are among the most touching and beautiful. The first one that really pops out is the one from The Cowboys; his theme for John Wayne’s character. That is really beautiful, and it kind of foreshadows the theme he wrote for Jonathan Kent in Superman. And then there’s sort of a similarity in the father theme in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
I mean, I think he would be cautious to correlate too closely, because I said one time, “When you’re writing themes about some feeling or about some kind of aspect of life or maybe a relationship, are you tapping into your own autobiography for that feeling?” And he said, “Not usually.” There are some instances where he did. So it’s not a conscious thing, but I do think there is a subconscious thing. If it’s really moving us and it’s about a father and son or a husband and wife or whatever, son and mother, it’s like, clearly that’s coming from a genuine place in him, even though he’s not necessarily thinking about his own mother while he’s writing this theme.
I think it’s fair to say that any kind of especially deep emotion in any of John Williams’s music is coming from a personal place, even if he wouldn’t necessarily say, yes, I was thinking about my own late wife or my own children. But it’s too real and too universally resonant to be just like, he’s just pulling it out of thin air, and it doesn’t mean anything to him.
Learning from the Master
Alex: When you first shared part of your draft with Williams, you said he started offering critiques and coaching on your writing. It’s definitely sobering if I imagine Bach reading what I’m trying to write about him. I hope he would be pleased that I’m digging into a certain side that might be neglected about his family, or to memorialize his lost children. What thoughts do you have about the creative demands of writing about great artists? And maybe, how does it improve us as writers to try to match our craft to these excellent subjects?
Tim: Yeah, I wasn’t expecting him to tear my writing apart. I thought, I’m a pretty good writer. I mean, I feel confident in that. I thought the biggest concern would be, he doesn’t want me to write about this, or to include that story. But it was the writing itself. From that point on, I just learned that he is a real stickler for specificity, like, mean what you say, use the right word, don’t use a word carelessly, don’t use slang carelessly. Just like a really solid, consistent English teacher.
But also, I learned that excellence matters so much to him. He holds himself to a really high standard of excellence in his work. He holds other people who collaborate with him to the same standard, musicians mostly. And I realized I’m now in this little circle of people that he’s trying to hold to a high standard, and he’s not afraid to critique or call me out if it doesn’t rise to that standard.
Instead of viewing that as a problem, I took that as a challenge. Like, I’m going to try to make this the best biography it can be, and if it’s a biography about him who cares so much about formality and dignity and excellence and all these kinds of things, then the book should have dignity and excellence. I kind of want that for myself anyway, so thanks for the nudge, John, but to be the appropriate book about you, it should be all these things. It shouldn’t be careless and casual, and irreverent and sloppy in any way. It took my aim to a much higher level.
He said someone had told him once when he’s composing to challenge every note. And he said, “That’s the goal for you is to challenge every word.” And so I was like, okay, that’s what I’m going to do; I’m going to challenge every single word in the book. And I think I did. But I mean, first of all, how cool is it that he kind of became my tutor? But two, I’m so grateful to him because I feel like these are life lessons that he instilled in me. Or maybe they’re life lessons that I had in me from before, but it was sort of like, don’t get lazy. Don’t get sloppy. Challenge every word. It’s just good advice to live by for a writer, I think.
Writing the Biography of a Living Legend
Alex: One more. What was it like to write this biography while Williams is 93? And what will the book gain from being published during his lifetime?
Tim: I ended up just like winning the lottery in that he’s still around, and his mind is still so full of memories and sharp details, and he’s incredibly lucid and conversational. I mean, the fact that it’s coming out in his lifetime, that he’s read it, that he had a chance to really influence it and inform it and make it better. It made all the difference in what the book is going to be that he was there taking part, answering questions, and just filling the book up with memories and stories and quotes and all kinds of stuff.
I'm really curious how he’ll respond to the feedback. Like, I know everybody in his world is probably going to read it. Musicians, directors, I hope. A lot of people around him have already said, like, oh, we’ve already pre-ordered several copies. So I think people have been waiting for this book. Regardless of me being the author, this is a book that’s been desired and awaited for a long time. And I’m just curious how he will then navigate the response, but I’m hoping it’s only a good thing. He gets to see people celebrate him and his legacy and his life in his lifetime, which not everybody gets to do.
Alex: Yeah, that’s pretty phenomenal. I was just thinking of how rare of an opportunity that would be for somebody, especially for you to grow up being so impacted by his music, and then for him to stick around long enough that you can get to a place in your career where you’re the guy who writes his biography while he’s still alive. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime, it sounds like.
Tim: It is. It’s an absolute, unbelievable dream come true.
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here on Substack to gain more of the adventure he has had capturing the life of John Williams. You can pre-order the biography from Oxford University Press and join us in counting down to the release date of September 2nd! Check back, as I’ll be reviewing the full book here on !Enjoyed this interview? Here’s another with classical composer and father, Cory Alstad.
“Challenge every note” - wow. This is great advice for performers as well. Great interview!