‘It’s like being in a cathedral’: Film composer John Williams, who loves Fenway Park, is to be honored there Wednesday
“We just sort of consider him as part of the family,” says Sarah McKenna, the team’s senior vice president and chief experience officer.
Get Starting Point
For Williams, there’s an intrinsic connection between baseball, music, and nostalgia. He has often compared conducting to pitching, and he believes that both the game and music tap into our shared collective memory.
John Williams conducts on the field during a celebration of Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary in 2012.
“Everyone who goes to a game surrenders a part of contemporary life,” Williams mused in 2004. (The composer, 94, was not available for this article.) “Usually nothing much happens right away. A whole hour may go by before anybody hits the ball. The ballpark takes us back to the eras of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, who had a very different sense of time. I believe the days seemed to be longer because the pace was slower.”
He loved baseball so much as a boy that his father used it as a carrot: Johnny Williams Sr. told his son that he couldn’t play ball until he practiced the piano for an hour. “So I began to read music probably around 5 or 6 years old,” Williams said in 2012.
When Williams was growing up in the late 1930s, his father would take him to the old Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, where the New York Giants played. When Williams became a father himself, raising his kids in Los Angeles, he would often take them to Dodger Stadium — although “I think it was about the hot dog more than the baseball,” he said in 2006.
But the Sox, and Fenway, loomed large in his imagination thanks to his mother.
“I heard about Fenway Park all my life from her,” he told the Globe in 2012. Esther Williams (not the famed swimmer) was born in Boston in 1909 and she grew up in a since-razed area that’s now part of the Northeastern University campus — just a few blocks from Symphony Hall, which her father helped construct. Boston is where she met John’s father, who was playing drums in a society band at the Lido-Venice club on Warrenton Street.
“I think when she was a little girl she would not have had the 35 cents to go to Fenway Park, or whatever it might have been in the 1920s,” Williams added. “But there was also an emotional connection in my mind between Boston and Fenway Park and the Red Sox. You think of Boston, you think of Harvard and MIT as being the brains of the city, and Faneuil Hall might be the soul. But I think the beating, pounding heart of the city for Bostonians is Fenway Park. That’s the heart of the town.”
Esther lived to 97, and “insisted that she lived that long because she wanted to see the Red Sox win the World Series again,” Williams said, which they did in 2004. She died two years later.
Before the start of Game One of the World Series at Fenway Park, John Williams and the Boston Pops performed the national anthem on Oct. 24, 2007. After they were done, Williams covered his ears from the noise of the jets buzzing the field in a flyover.Davis, Jim Globe Staff
As conductor of the Pops — which is like being “the mayor of Boston,” Williams told me — he would often attend Sox games with the brass players or with his fellow baseball-loving maestro, Seiji Ozawa. Williams and the late Japanese conductor were an unlikely duo, but they bonded over a love of the game; they were good luck charms in October 1999, overseeing a winning streak at Fenway, and even conducting the national anthem together before a game.
Ozawa often used to tell Williams: “Conduct in the strike zone.”
In September 2023, when Ozawa turned 88, Williams (then 91) made the trek to Japan to visit his dying friend. He brought Red Sox paraphernalia as gifts.
John Williams and Seiji Ozawa led the crowd before Game 3 of the American League Championship Series, between the Yankees and Red Sox, on Oct. 16, 1999.Globe Staff Photo/Barry Chin
For a long time Williams kept up with players in the league; he always liked Wade Boggs and Carl Yastrzemski, and he expressed admiration for David Ortiz and Kevin Youkilis. He also deeply respected Sandy Koufax of the Dodgers, and he was friends with longtime Los Angeles radio announcer Vin Scully.
And he could throw the ball. He mostly gave it up when he was in the Air Force in the 1950s, because he was protecting his piano fingers. But 50 years later, Williams threw out a first pitch at Fenway in May 2003 at a game against the Yankees. “It went pretty well,” he recalled. “I was trying to be a wise guy with catcher Jason Varitek. So as I started walking to the mound, I asked him if he wanted a curveball or a strike. He said, ‘Just get it here.’ And I did.”
In October 2007, Williams debuted an original arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Game 1 of the World Series between the Sox and the Colorado Rockies. Pops members performed the angular piece, and Williams, wrapped in a Boston blue World Series jacket, was announced by the legendary voice of Carl Beane as “the pride of Boston and the epitome of our culture.”
Williams connected his two loves in 2012, writing “Fanfare for Fenway” as a 100th birthday present to the park, which was performed at a game by a double brass ensemble and percussion. His rousing music for the movies (and the Olympics) has also been the soundtrack to many of the team’s ring ceremonies and the unfurling of championship banners.
Williams has often stated his belief that music moves us, and brings certain images and concepts to mind, because it plays upon our — or perhaps even our ancestors’ — memories from the past. Baseball, he said, does the same thing.
“When it’s empty, being in Fenway is like being in a cathedral,” he reflected in 2012. “You can sense all the great performances that have taken place over the decades and the millions of happy people who have sat in those seats. It’s a very inspiring place.”
