Composer Spotlight: John Williams

These days, the movie industry creates a place for many composers and musicians to create new music that the whole world will hear. This music is used to tell a story, to set the scene, and to bring up emotional feelings like happiness, sadness and danger for the people who are listening and watching.

John Towner Williams, Jr. was born in 1932. He is a very successful film composer. Today he is considered to be one of the best film composers of all time! He has won 5 Academy Awards, but has been nominated 48 times for the award. The only other person to be nominated more times for this award is Walt Disney. He has also won many other awards.

Mr. Williams is a composer, conductor and a pianist. He has been working as a musician in these ways for over 60 years, and is still composing today. 

Here are just a few of the movies he has written music for:
     Jaws
     Indiana Jones 
     Star Wars
     Superman
     E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial
     Schindler's List
     Harry Potter
     The Adventures of Tintin

He also wrote the theme song for some of the Olympic Games.

Writing music for a movie takes a lot of work! The director of the movie meets with the composer to tell them about the movie and to show them the film. Then the composer must create themes for the movie. Mr. Williams composes these themes on the piano first. Later he will score them for an orchestra to play. Once the orchestra learns the music, Mr. Williams conducts the music while watching parts of the movie so that he can make the film and the music go together. He and the director must work to make sure the music and the video do the best possible job of telling the story of the movie.

Below is a video of John Williams talking about working with director Steven Spielburg on the movie E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. This movie came out in 1982, and today it is considered to be a classic. John Williams won an Academy Award for Best Original Score for this movie.