ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, July 19, 1996 TAG: 9607190068
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LONDON
SOURCE: MATT WOLF ASSOCIATED PRESS
John Williams supplied the grand, heroic music for ``Superman,'' ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'' and ``Star Wars.'' So when it comes to providing a theme for the summer Olympics, the man knows whereof he composes.
``The music has to be heraldic; it's got to provide a spiritual function,'' the 64-year-old Williams said in a recent interview.
Williams had spent the previous evening in Watford north of London conducting the local Pro Arte Orchestra in a performance of ``Summon the Heroes,'' the six-minute piece which will open the summer games in Atlanta tonight.
He will be conducting the Boston Pops Orchestra, which he led for 14 years until 1993 when he was named conductor laureate. (``I told them all I'm too young for that,'' he smiled, ``but I accepted it nonetheless.'')
In conversation, smartly dressed in a turtleneck and jacket, a beard rounding his kindly face, Williams' appearance suggests an amiable professor, not the most rousing of all film composers.
Williams has written Olympic themes before - in 1984 and 1988 - and views the task as both pragmatic and symbolic. ``You've got to provide a melodic identification for what I like to call the oneness of the Olympics across national boundaries of demarcation.''
Commercial considerations play a part, too.
``The Olympics have become the biggest TV event in the world,'' Williams said of an event estimated to be seen by 3 billion people. ``The result is an encroaching commercialism that worries some ... but I certainly think it's worth that trade-off.''
His aim was to tap into the collective memory of the Olympics.
``We remember the meaning of the trumpets and the conch shells and the shofars being blown to bring regiments together,'' Williams continued. ``The interval of the musical fifth we use to celebrate has been with us thousands of years.''
No mere jingoist, Williams is an astute musicologist, and he readily, if modestly, places ``Summon the Heroes'' on a continuum.
``We stand on some very broad shoulders, indeed; these pieces are in a great tradition,'' said the composer, citing by way of example English composer William Walton's 1931 oratorio ``Belshazzar's Feast.''
``It has the extra brass mine did, [though] I would never compare my work to that great man.''
Looking further back, Williams invoked Handel, whose prolific output included numerous celebratory pieces.
Williams is used to his work finding an audience. The soundtrack for ``Star Wars'' has sold more than any non-pop album in history.
Other blockbusters bearing Williams' populist touch include ``Jurassic Park,'' ``Home Alone,'' and ``Jaws,'' the last with its famously pulsating - and scary - opening theme.
Williams' quieter side is evinced in ``Sabrina'' and ``Nixon,'' the films that this year brought him three more Academy Award nominations. (Williams has five Oscars, and 35 nominations.)
Having scored Oliver Stone's ``JFK,'' Williams said it was ``very, very hard'' writing the music for ``Nixon.''
``What can you do musically about Richard Nixon other than his Quaker origins in Whittier?'' said Williams, referring to the 37th president's California birthplace.
``You have to invent something Shakerlike or Quakerlike - an atmosphere of austere religiosity [for] a wonderful, mad paranoiac, almost Learlike in character.''
``Sabrina'' is about the ``inner life of a girl who is miscast in life.''
Referring to Sydney Pollack's poorly received remake of the Billy Wilder original, the composer called it ``a love story but [one] without passion or overt sexuality or any kind of physical expression or feeling.''
Such films have kept the composer from being typecast.
``For every `Star Wars' I've done, there's been a `Sabrina' or an `Accidental Tourist' or a `Jane Eyre' that has given me an opportunity to write something more gentle,'' he said.
LENGTH: Medium: 80 linesby CNB