Latest Release
- Home Alone (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Anniversary Edition] · 1990
- Jurassic Park (20th Anniversary) · 1993
- Home Alone (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Anniversary Edition] · 1990
- Schindler's List (Original Motion Picture Score) · 1993
- Home Alone (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Anniversary Edition] · 1990
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2001
- Home Alone (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Anniversary Edition] · 1990
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 1980
- Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 1999
- Home Alone (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Anniversary Edition] · 1990
Essential Albums
- We can think of only one composer whose deft musical ability can do justice to a story as moving as Schindler's List’s: John Williams. On the plaintive "Immolation (With Our Lives, We Give Life)", the veteran scorer forges gently ahead with a single, mournful melody, and the heartbreaking refrain makes a beeline straight to our hearts. Elsewhere, on stirring tracks like "Making the List" and "I Could Have Done More", Williams collaborates with violinist Itzhak Perlman, whose tremulous strings convey the frailty of hope.
- One aspect of John Williams’ scores that often goes unnoticed is how long they are—in the case of 1993’s Jurassic Park, his work can be heard in nearly an hour and a half of a two-hour movie. It’s not that the music overstays its welcome. If anything, part of what made the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises so successful—and, in turn, made Williams one of the world’s few recognisable film composers—is how much the score drove the movie’s action and sustained its thematic moods. Like his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park is heavy on wonder—a function, in the former, of bearing witness to alien life, and in the latter, to the dinosaurs so miraculously reconstituted on Isla Nublar (“Theme From Jurassic Park”). But it’s also one of Williams’ scariest, most dissonant scores, filled with shrieking strings (“The Raptor Attack”) and roaring brass (“T-Rex Rescue & Finale”) that mirrored sound designer Gary Rydstrom’s uncanny dinosaur sounds. (Not that we know what dinosaurs actually sounded like, but still.) The movie has too much going for it to say that the score carries the action. But where most audiences would understand that the Imperial army of Star Wars or the Nazis of Indiana Jones are bad, the sheer newness of the world Jurassic Park creates left Williams with the tricky responsibility of telling the audience how to feel in a place where we aren’t quite sure what to feel, or when—and whether those awe-inducing dinosaurs see us as strange friends, or just a light snack.
- What’s surprising about listening to John Williams’ 1981 score for Raiders of the Lost Ark outside the context of the movie is hearing just how dark it is. There are still moments of heroism (“The Raiders March”) and romance (“Marion’s Theme”), but for listeners adjusted to the black-and-white epics of Star Wars, Williams’ work on Raiders can feel evasive (“In the Jungle“), dissonant (“Flight From Peru”) and unsettling (“The Miracle of the Ark”). Of course, in a way, that was Williams’ job: While the world of Star Wars was unambiguous and out in the open, Raiders brought its audience into dense jungles, obscure conversations and dark temples set with hidden traps—scenes whose drama derived from their uncertainty. (Williams himself said that part of his goal was to lure the audience into what at first might seem like a beautiful experience, only to turn it into something terrifying—a technique borrowed from opera, but one Williams almost single-handedly assimilated into the vocabulary of modern-day action movies.) Like Williams’ work on Star Wars, though, his score for Raiders managed to percolate both up into the sanctum of proper classical music and out into a world separating after the movie left the theater. Harrison Ford even said he’d once seen a fire truck roaring down the street, only to realise as it passed that it was playing “The Raiders March”. You could get amped by worse.
- John Williams again asserts his mastery of blockbuster scores with the soundtrack to Richard Donner's 1978 hit, Superman: The Movie. Leading the London Symphony Orchestra, he showcases his command of carefully balanced dynamics. Tracks range from the mighty to the modest, with the mammoth brass, timpani and strings of the "Main Title" theme drawing sharp contrast to the delicate legato chime of motifs like "Love Theme from Superman". It all ties together beautifully.
- John Williams said the challenge of scoring 1977’s Star Wars wasn’t just that it had to be big, but that it had to be clear. After all, there would be kids watching this movie—if he couldn’t conjure the menace of Darth Vader within a few bars, he wasn’t doing his job. He’d managed it before, of course: His shark-attack theme for Jaws is one of the most famous in film history—and that was just two notes. This time, though, it wasn’t just crowd panic he had to cut through, but roaring spaceships and blazing laser cannons and the kind of sustained, blockbuster noise that didn’t just threaten his compositional stamina, but the stamina of the orchestra itself. The soundtrack didn’t just become inextricably linked to the reception and understanding of the movie (“Main Theme”, “Imperial Attack”), it helped bring legitimacy to a discipline—film music—often considered to be disposable, or, at the very least, secondary to the cultural primacy of orchestral and so-called “classical” music. (At least, that is, until you get to the “Cantina Band”, which needs legitimacy bestowed by no one.) In 2020, Williams conceded the main theme may have been overwritten; nobody’s complaining.
- The most indelible movie themes embrace more than mere cinematic concerns; they come to evoke entire eras, genres and virtual states of mind. Decades later the menacing locomotive rhythms of John Williams' Jaws theme still manage to do all three in but a few brief bars. As astute film buffs know, Steven Spielberg's career-making blockbuster relied on considerably more than his directorial skills and a trouble-plagued mechanical shark. Verna Field's shrewd, seamless editing and Williams' brooding orchestral score create a tension-wracked masterpiece of terror, one where the composer's brass-savvy writing evokes New England beachfront tranquility one moment, and gut-wrenching aquatic carnage the next. Like Bernard Herrmann's greatest scores, Williams relies more on mood-setting motifs than catchy melodies here, yet the unsettling results scored him the first Oscar of what has long since become one Hollywood's most fabled musical careers.
Artist Playlists
- His dramatic scores have powered some of Hollywood's greatest blockbusters.
- Discovering the ingredients for creating an indelibly epic movie theme.
- The inspired, finely crafted concert works of composer John Williams.
Live Albums
- 2022
About John Williams
The music of John Williams is the sound of pop culture. His vibrant themes are indispensable to the magic of the American blockbuster, from the menacing two-note motif of Jaws, to the stellar pomp of Star Wars, to the poignant violin theme of Schindler’s List. Born in 1932 in New York, Williams studied composition in Los Angeles before returning to his hometown to work as a jazz pianist. His first break came with his 1971 Oscar-winning score for Fiddler on the Roof, rocketing a career that would bring back the epic style of orchestral film music that Erich Korngold had pioneered in Hollywood’s Golden Age. In the 1970s, he began two collaborations that would define his legacy. Williams' decades-long partnership with Steven Spielberg started with the director's theatrical debut, The Sugarland Express, and came to encompass E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Minority Report, among other films. Williams’ other great collaboration, with George Lucas, resulted in the iconic music of Star Wars, whose influence on film composition has been immeasurable. His use of motifs, such as the adventurous outbursts in Jurassic Park and the heroic brass in Raiders of the Lost Ark, makes the music inseparable from the scenes it enlivens. But it's worth exploring Williams' concert music, too: A highlight is the rhapsodic and technically demanding Violin Concerto No. 2 (2021), for soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter.
- HOMETOWN
- New York, United States of America
- BORN
- 1932
- GENRE
- Soundtrack