John Williams

October 29, 2001 at PST

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

19 Tracks

May 2, 2005 at PDT

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

15 Tracks

December 17, 2015 at PST

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The Force is as strong as ever in John Williams’ writing for orchestra. His mix of classical influences hasn’t changed—why mess with film-scoring perfection?—but he’s found new ways to make the melange sing. The marching aggression of brass instruments during “Attack on the Jakku Village” has an appropriately Mahlerian grandeur, while a Debussy-like flute cavorts intriguingly through “The Scavenger.” And when it comes to choreographing battles in space, as with “Scherzo for X-Wings,” Williams’ talent remains unmatched.

23 Tracks

May 24, 1977 at PDT

Star Wars: A New Hope (Original Motion Picture Score)

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.

16 Tracks

December 31, 2012 at PST

Jurassic Park (20th Anniversary)

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 recognizable 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.

20 Tracks

May 24, 2004 at PDT

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)

21 Tracks

August 23, 1971 at PDT

Fiddler on the Roof (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

14 Tracks

December 31, 1979 at PST

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The Skywalker saga continues with its epic sequel. Hear it in Spatial Audio.

17 Tracks

December 14, 2017 at PST

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

John Williams’ score remains as legendary as the franchise itself.

20 Tracks

December 17, 2019 at PST

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

John Williams’ final score in the series brings the Skywalker saga to a close.

19 Tracks

December 31, 1982 at PST

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Relive Luke Skywalker’s final duel with Darth Vader in immersive Spatial Audio.

11 Tracks

November 10, 2002 at PST

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

20 Tracks

December 14, 1993 at PST

Schindler's List (Original Motion Picture Score)

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.

14 Tracks

November 21, 2005 at PST

Memoirs of a Geisha (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

18 Tracks

October 31, 1999 at PST

Greatest Hits 1969-1999

28 Tracks

December 14, 1978 at PST

Superman: The Movie (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture) [Deluxe]

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.

35 Tracks

May 3, 1999 at PDT

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

17 Tracks

April 22, 2002 at PDT

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

13 Tracks

December 31, 1997 at PST

Saving Private Ryan (Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

10 Tracks

May 22, 1989 at PDT

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

19 Tracks

December 31, 1981 at PST

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (The 20th Anniversary)

John Williams’ score for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is not only about exterior action, but also internal emotion. He uses a harp throughout the soundtrack to convey a sense of childlike wonder and pure love. The gentle patience of “I’m Keeping Him” perfectly captures a tone of radiant trepidation, while “Toys” is delicate and heartfelt in ways we barely notice when it’s playing behind a scene. The rippling piano of the end credits instantly conjures the movie’s climactic bicycle ride, leaving us with a lasting sensation of childhood discovery.

21 Tracks

June 19, 1975 at PDT

Jaws (The Collector's Edition Soundtrack)

The importance of John Williams’ score in transforming Steven Spielberg's Jaws from a B-movie about a killer shark into a truly chilling morality tale cannot be overstated. We all know how the principal theme goes—an iconic musical pulse that suggests a stalking evil. And those quickening rhythms, sudden queasy lulls, and sharp musical stabs are used across the entire soundtrack to keep listeners in a state of unease, so that even a relatively chirpy moment like “Out to Sea” quickly becomes undermined by creeping tension.   

20 Tracks

May 24, 1993 at PDT

Jurassic Park (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

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 recognizable 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.

16 Tracks

May 31, 1981 at PDT

Raiders of the Lost Ark (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

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 realize as it passed that it was playing “The Raiders March.” You could get amped by worse.

22 Tracks