In March 1974, John Williams’ marriage to Barbara Ruick was abruptly cut short by her unexpected death. In response to this tragic event, Williams composed what is arguably his most intense and personal concert work: the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1974-1976). In this chapter, I examine the genesis as well as the performance and reception history of the concerto before providing a structural analysis that focuses on the intricate motivic relationships between its three movements. These motivic links coalesce in the last movement, in which Williams presents an ecstatic transfiguration of the concerto’s elegiac opening theme that serves as a culmination of the work as a whole.

One of the key compositional strategies of John Williams is the use of teleological genesis: the gradual emergence of an extended theme from motivic fragments that gradually concatenate over the course of the film before coalescing into a whole at a climactic juncture of the narrative. In this article, I examine teleological genesis as both a dramatic device and a procedure that assures large-scale formal coherence in Williams' scores for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

This article examines the semantic properties of several characteristic triadic shifts in the film and ceremonial music of John Williams. These shifts result from particular modal inflections in major keys, which include the mixolydian subtonic (associated with the heroic and/or patriotic), and the lydian supertonic (associated with magic, wonder and flight). My aim in examining Williams’ use of modal interchange is both to gain a more precise understanding of one particular aspect of his style, and to place it into the larger context of the musical tradition in Hollywood.