Conductor Nicholas Buc: "I'm Hooked On John Williams"

Conductor Nicholas Buc vividly remembers the first time he heard the music of film composer John Williams. "I was an avid skier growing up, and when I was about 10-years-old, I remember finding this cassette at a ski lodge," he recalls. "It was an untitled tape, that just had 'Film Music' written on it in pen. I was already a bit interested in film music at the time - just very loosely - and I thought, 'Why not, I'll give it a go.' So, I put it in my little Walkman to listen to on the journey back to Melbourne. As it happens, it was the entire score to The Empire Strikes Back. By the end of that five-hour drive home from Mt Hotham, I was completely hooked."

And Buc isn't alone in his addiction to Williams. Over a career that has spanned more than half a century, the celebrated, multi-award-winning composer has earned a global stature and millions of fans. Having penned some of the most - if not, the most - iconic film soundtracks of all time, his back-catalogue includes the scores for Jaws, all four of the Indiana Jones films, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Schindler's List and ET. While he has worked with an impressive number of major Hollywood auteurs, his greatest collaborations have been with two directors in particular; Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the latter being the creator of the juggernaut space opera super-franchise, Star Wars.

Unlike other multi-movie sagas, which Williams has scored in part, the composer has been responsible for every fanfare, death march, cantina banger and Ewok Nub Yub victory song heard in all seven films released thus far in the main Star Wars canon (the Star Wars spin-off, Rouge One, was scored by Michael Giacchino). His most recent addition to the Star Wars oeuvre, the score for first non-Lucas directed episode, The Force Awakens, is arguably the most important of his Star Wars scores since Return of the Jedi in 1983. Not only does The Force Awakens introduce a number of crucial musical themes, including motifs for new protagonists like fledgling Jedi Rey and villainous heavy-breather Kylo Ren, it also acts as a galvanising bridge for the new instalment, as the franchise has changed hands between Lucasfilm and its new custodian, Disney.

But while Williams is inextricably aligned with the world of movie music, his is a creative practice as rigorous and accomplished as any of the great classical composers. As such, he occupies a unique duality, as a creative figure that is as much a stalwart of pop culture as he is a bastion of tradition. "Williams is a truly masterful musician, but his music is able to channel something of the great Romantic and early twentieth-century composers in a way that doesn't alienate an audience that might only be very casual appreciators of classical music," Buc explains. "Beneath that accessibility is some seriously impressive technique. He's an incredible orchestrator. He's able to craft earworm melodies and weave them into the fabric of the music in all kinds of ingenious ways. There's an incredible amount of colour and variety and inventiveness that really makes it a joy to listen to. And it's also a joy to play. Musicians love playing Williams, because it's so well conceived; it sits well, it's idiomatic. It's just bloody well-written music. And you don't always find that in film scores."

A recent admission by Williams hints at how much of a musician's musician the composer really is, far from being a mere slave to the screen. In an interview with the UK newspaper The Mirror in 2016, the 85-year-old confessed that he had never fully watched the final cuts of any of the Star Wars episodes: "I've not looked at the finished films, that's absolutely true. When I'm finished with a film, I've been living with it, we've been dubbing it, recording to it, and so on. You walk out of the studio and, 'Ah, it's finished.' Now I don't have an impulse to go to the theatre and look at it. Maybe some people find that weird," adding that he also rarely listens to recordings of his own music.

Fortunately for Buc and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Williams nonchalance with his finished scores is not mirrored by the cinema and concert-going public. In fact, the huge popularity of orchestral performances of Williams' scores has offered a unique opportunity for major symphony orchestras, who can program music of true integrity, that showcases the extraordinary skills of their players, while also being a barnstorming success at the box office.

But Williams may be the one of the last in an almost extinct breed of film composer, dedicated to the depth and richness of the orchestral canvas, and the rigour of classical virtuosity. "He's the real pinnacle of that style of music, and as directors and music tastes change, you're now getting people who do film music who don't have a shred of classical background," Buc notes. "That's absolutely fine, and the music they produce is fantastic - sensibilities evolve, and that's as it should be. But there's something so impressive about a composer like Williams. He still uses pencil and paper to write his scores, sat at the piano. He doesn't even own a computer - not many people would, or even could do that in this day and age with film."

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra presents Star Wars: The Force Awakens In Concert 8 — 10 Dec at the Palais Theatre