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 John Williams: You need a better composer than I am for this film. Steven Spielberg: I know. But they're all dead! —Regarding Schindler's List A lifetime is just simply not long enough for the study of music. John Towner Williams (February 8, 1932) is one of the world's most famous and prolific movie composers. Professionally active for six decades, he has been nominated for 47 Oscars (winning five), six Emmy nominations (winning three), 22 Golden Globes (winning four) and 59 Grammys (winning twenty). Only Walt Disney has been nominated for more Academy Awards, and Williams currently holds the record for most nominated living individual.Williams composes music in a Wagnerian style, using 19th-century Romanticism as his milieu. His scores make extremely liberal use of Leitmotif—practically every major character and concept has its own musical motif woven into the score. Williams is also fond of the Fanfare. Despite these stylistic preferences, he seems willing to experiment with every movie, adding different instruments and techniques with each new film. (For example, one piece of the Attack of the Clones score uses an electric guitar. Happy hunting! or just look here .) When a Williams composition is playing, you will generally be in for a good movie. If the movie's not good, well, the music will be.If you are not hearing impaired and have seen a movie in the last thirty years (or even if you haven't), you'll have certainly heard one of Williams' tunes. Most of his themes have become iconic in their own right, such as the famous string sting from Jaws or the theme for Indiana Jones. Williams has long been the go-to composer for Steven Spielberg's films (he even wrote the music for the Amblin and Dreamworks logos).Interestingly, many fans of classical music actually hold Williams in rather low regard, as many elements of his compositions (including some of his most well-known themes and motifs) are borrowed from older pieces of music. Though even they admit he's less guilty of this than others. For most listeners this is one of his strengths; in the words of the founding editor of Film Score Monthly Lukas Kendall (whose all-time favorite score is The Empire Strikes Back): "His themes sound inevitable. They sound like they fell out of his sleeves; they sound like they've always existed. And it's extraordinary how you get just two notes for Jaws or five notes for Close Encounters [of the Third Kind] and have them feel like they've always existed."Among his most famous scores are:
.His work provides examples of:
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