http://www.douban.com/group/topic/1029416/
Total Film: You've composed hundreds of hours' worth of film music where do you get the ideas?
John Williams: I don't know how to answer that - I really don't want to make it sound like it's easy. I work very hard, and it's not possible for a composer to answer the question: how do I create a melody? The little things that may seem so simple, maybe even obvious, are sometimes the hardest thing to do. When you get something that's so right, you think, "Ah! It has always been there, it's just that now it's right." But if you go back to three drafts before that, before you changed the B-flat to a B-natural, you realize how off it was and how you were still searching for something.
Writing a tune is like sculpting. You get four or five notes, you take one out and move one around, and you do a bit more and eventually, as the sculptor says, "In that rock there is a statue, we have to go find it". There's a story that says it all. Paul Hindemith, the brilliant German composer, was offered the chair at Yale University as the Professor of Composition. He turned it down. Then they offered him the chair of Professor of Music Theory, which he took. So they asked him why, and he said, "I can teach music theory. But only God teaches composition."
Total Film: You've composed hundreds of hours' worth of film music where do you get the ideas?
John Williams: I don't know how to answer that - I really don't want to make it sound like it's easy. I work very hard, and it's not possible for a composer to answer the question: how do I create a melody? The little things that may seem so simple, maybe even obvious, are sometimes the hardest thing to do. When you get something that's so right, you think, "Ah! It has always been there, it's just that now it's right." But if you go back to three drafts before that, before you changed the B-flat to a B-natural, you realize how off it was and how you were still searching for something.
Writing a tune is like sculpting. You get four or five notes, you take one out and move one around, and you do a bit more and eventually, as the sculptor says, "In that rock there is a statue, we have to go find it". There's a story that says it all. Paul Hindemith, the brilliant German composer, was offered the chair at Yale University as the Professor of Composition. He turned it down. Then they offered him the chair of Professor of Music Theory, which he took. So they asked him why, and he said, "I can teach music theory. But only God teaches composition."
