The Music of John Williams

With a career spanning over six decades, John Williams has composed some of the most popular, recognizable, and critically acclaimed film scores in cinematic history, including those of the Star Wars series, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Indiana Jones series, the first two Home Alone films, Hook, the first two Jurassic Park films, Schindler’s List, and the first three Harry Potter films. Williams has won 24 Grammy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, five Academy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards (with 51 Academy Award nominations, Williams is the second most-nominated individual, after Walt Disney). Williams also composed the score for eight of the top 20 highest-grossing films at the U.S. box office (adjusted for inflation). Despite this awesome CV, or perhaps as a contributory factor, Williams has a style and approach almost unlike any other film composer. While skilled in a variety of 20th-century compositional idioms, Williams’s most familiar style may be described as a form of neoromanticism inspired by the late 19th century’s large-scale orchestral music—in the style of Tchaikovsky or Richard Wagner’s compositions and their concept of leitmotif—that inspired his film music predecessors. Williams is associated with a who’s who of history’s greatest film-makers, including Steven Spielberg, for whom Williams composed music for all but three of his feature films. However it is another cinematic legend – George Lucas – for whom he reserved perhaps his greatest achievements in the form of the soundtrack to Star Wars, which was preserved by the Library of Congress into the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.