Publications and Presentations on John Williams
Day of Wrath: Structural and Semantic Features of the Dies irae in the Music of John Williams
Émergences. Son, musique et médias audiovisuels Number 2 (December 2025)
The Dies irae is a pervasive trope in film music, yet few composers have subjected it to transformations as intricate and imaginative as those found in the work of John Williams. This article examines the syntactic and semantic features of seven distinct Dies irae variants that appear in a number of Williams scores. These variants operate as complex signifiers that evoke a constellation of overlapping ideas—apocalypse, guilt, and punishment—all of which resonate with the original source: Thomas of Celano’s medieval hymn “Day of Wrath,” a vision of divine judgment at the end of time. Williams’ sophisticated deployment of the Dies irae exemplifies his multidimensional engagement with deeply embedded cultural codes in the service of musicodramatic narrative.
Out of Darkness: John Williams’ Violin Concerto
John Williams. Music for Films, Television, and the Concert Stage. Emilio Audissino, ed. Turnhout: Brepols , 2018
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.
"Sweet Fulfillment: Allusion and Teleological Genesis in John Williams’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
The Musical Quarterly, Volume 97, Issue 1, Spring 2014, Pages 98–131, 2014
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).
