‘Star Wars,’ ‘Harry Potter’ composer John Williams says it isn’t easy to craft iconic themes

“Simple as they are, they’re tricky to find,” said the man behind “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and the Harry Potter scores. “When they feel right, they do communicate in a very short time, which is very important in film music. We can feel it.”

When Steven Spielberg wanted five tones for “Close Encounters,” Williams proposed seven – “it’d be more like a melody and two tones would be more like a doorbell.”

Spielberg was insistent and Williams wrote 300 examples. Then, he leveled with the director: “This is probably as far as I can go without starting again with five single notes played with no metric definition between any of them.” The result: “We finally settled on the notes that we have,” Williams said.

Those notes instantly identify the film, just as the ba-dump, ba-dump of “Jaws” signals the dangers that lie ahead.

Want more examples? “Star Wars” wouldn’t be “Star Wars” without his iconic work.

And in the “Harry Potter” films, Williams created specific themes that immediately told the audience it was in Hogwarts. While other composers took over subsequent Potter scores, they had Williams’ template to guide them.

To create the mold, the 90-year-old composer and conductor says he starts with a cup of tea. Then, it’s off to work. “Writing music for me is like sculpting,” he said during a Zoom interview before his “Great Performances” appearance in November. “You start your way with a piece of stone and work your way into it and discover what is there and it reveals itself to you.

“Rarely do I have a theme in my head that I’m rushing to write down. It happens once in a while…usually when I’m walking. I think the additional oxygen when one walks might engender some kind of thinking that is not really conscious but, before that, unconscious things might be subtly revealed.”

A film score evolves, often over days, he added. “There’s a kind of white heat of creativity that can happen frequently…and then you look at it a week later and you realize it might be improved still. This is one of the frustrations in writing for a medium like film. You write the music very quickly, hand it to a copyist, record it with an orchestra and it’s out before an audience.”

Williams likened film composition to journalism: “You may write a piece and think it’s all right and you go back a month later and look at it and say, ‘My god, the prose would have been much better if I had done X and Y.’”

For the Tanglewood appearance featured on PBS, Williams worked a year on a piece for Anne Sophie Mutter “and it gave me some extra time to ruminate about what I wanted to do and refine certain ideas.

“When I’m writing music, I am always thinking about the medium that’s going to be presenting it. I love writing for orchestra but perhaps even more so the personal possibility of working with someone like Anne Sophie and trying to capture what I think are her particular idiosyncratic tendencies.”

When Williams conducts his own work, he said, he often thinks about improvements he might have made. “On the other hand, it’s a particular pleasure to conduct one’s own music when you can conduct it in a way that you think you can get an interpretation through others.

“There are two kinds of conductors: Ones who might disappoint you in their performance of the music and great artists who bring more to one’s music than you thought was there.”

Movies ebb and flow, too. While Williams often hears from fans about their favorite scores, his is the one he did for “E.T.”

“I think the film itself is kind of a masterpiece,” he said. “Even if you look at it now, the performances of the children in that movie are unchanged by time. They are as real and as true and honest now as they were when the film was made. To recall the music and perform it live with an orchestra is something, I must confess, I do enjoy quite a lot.”