The Only Symphonic Track on Total Request Live
In 1999, something genuinely inexplicable happened on MTV. Between the boy bands and the nu-metal, between Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit, Carson Daly's Total Request Live aired a music video featuring an 88-piece adult chorus chanting in Sanskrit, a five-note brass motif building toward apocalyptic fury, and the London Symphony Orchestra sawing through pages dense with eighth notes. The track was "Duel of the Fates," composed by a sixty-seven-year-old man who had never once been mistaken for a pop star. It remains the only symphonic composition ever to appear on TRL. The video's CGI lightsaber duel was window dressing. What made it stick — what made teenagers phone in their votes alongside requests for "...Baby One More Time" — was the music itself: a piece so viscerally propulsive that it transcended every demographic category the entertainment industry had spent decades constructing.
This is, in miniature, the improbability of John Williams. Not just the longevity — seven decades of professional composition, more than 150 film and television scores — but the reach. A classical orchestral composer who became, by any meaningful metric, one of the most widely heard musicians in human history. A man who revived a dead art form — the full symphonic film score — at the precise historical moment when Hollywood had abandoned it, when pop-song soundtracks and synthesizer beds were ascendant, when the very idea of a hundred musicians playing together in service of a motion picture seemed like an anachronism from the age of silent film. He did not merely survive that cultural headwind. He reversed it, permanently.
The paradox deepens the closer you look. Williams is, by temperament and self-presentation, the opposite of the myth his music creates. Where his scores are maximalist, emotionally uninhibited, operatic in their ambition, the man himself is unfailingly modest, almost pathologically self-effacing — a composer who, in his nineties, still describes himself as a student. "If you asked him that question," the documentarian Laurent Bouzereau has said, "I think he would say he's still studying." This is not false humility but something more interesting: a genuine bewilderment at his own trajectory, a refusal to totalize the narrative of his life into the triumphant arc his music so effortlessly conjures for fictional heroes. The man who gave Luke Skywalker his yearning, the shark its menace, Indiana Jones his swagger, and Schindler's List its grief does not appear to believe he has cracked any code. He just kept writing. For seventy years. And the world, improbably, kept listening.
By the Numbers
The Sound of a Century
150+Film and television scores composed
54Academy Award nominations
5Oscar wins
7Decades of professional composition
55Distinct leitmotifs catalogued in Star Wars alone
92Age at the time of his most recent scored film
1Symphonic tracks ever aired on MTV's TRL
A Drummer's Son in the Radio Age
The origin is auditory, not visual. John Towner Williams was born on February 8, 1932, in Floral Park, New York, into a household where the radio was not background noise but a professional instrument. His father, John Sr., was a jazz drummer — not famous, not obscure, but working — and the boy's earliest education in composition came not from formal instruction but from listening to live radio broadcasts with an unusual specificity of attention, trying to pick out his father's playing from among the ensemble. This is a particular kind of training: not learning what music sounds like, but learning to disaggregate it, to hear the individual voices inside the mass. It is, in essence, the skill of an orchestrator — someone who thinks not in melody alone but in the combinatorial possibilities of timbre, rhythm, and texture layered simultaneously.
The family moved to Los Angeles when John was sixteen, and the geography matters. This was not a conservatory kid shipped off to European capitals. This was a working-class musician's son dropped into the center of the American entertainment industry at the precise moment when that industry was the most powerful cultural engine on earth. Williams studied piano seriously, working through his teenage years under teachers who were colleagues of his father — a network of professional musicians, not academic theorists. He studied briefly with Rosina Lhévinne at Juilliard in New York in the early-to-mid 1950s. Lhévinne was a towering figure in American piano pedagogy, a Russian émigré who had studied at the Moscow Conservatory and whose students would go on to include Van Cliburn. The Juilliard period was short. Williams returned to Los Angeles, studied composition at UCLA — Royce Hall, the campus's landmark performance venue, would become a place he'd return to for decades, recording film scores with
Steven Spielberg, working with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. He also studied privately with the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a Jewish émigré who had fled Mussolini's racial laws in 1939 and became one of Hollywood's most prolific composition teachers. Castelnuovo-Tedesco's other students included Henry Mancini, André Previn, and Jerry Goldsmith — an entire generation of film composers emerged from one man's living room in Beverly Hills.
Then came the Air Force. Then came Hollywood.
For nearly a decade, beginning in the late 1950s, Williams toiled as a studio pianist and an increasingly frequent composer of television and film music. The work was relentless, anonymous, and educational. He was not yet John Williams; he was Johnny Williams, a credit he used deliberately to signal his availability for any job, in any genre. The distinction between "Johnny" and "John" was not cosmetic. It was strategic — a rebranding from versatile hired hand to serious compositional voice. The shift happened gradually, as Williams moved from workaday television assignments toward more ambitious orchestral writing, pushing against the limits of what studio executives expected and what budgets allowed. Bouzereau describes this period as "that of a really hard-, hardworking student. You can already sense the talent, but it's in certain films or television series that are not as memorable as the music perhaps."
What matters about these years is not the obscurity but the volume. Williams was composing constantly — not waiting for inspiration but generating material under deadline, across genres, for projects he had no particular emotional investment in. This is the forge. The romantic myth of the artist seized by vision has no place here. What Williams was building, methodically and without fanfare, was craft: the ability to solve any musical problem, in any style, on any schedule. It would take him until his forties to break through. The culture that now mythologizes instant success might find this timeline discouraging. Bouzereau sees it differently: "For someone wanting to be a musician, or an actor, a director, or a writer, seeing that someone like John Williams took his time to get there is mega inspiring in a world where you feel that your career and your life can be as quick as a swipe on an Instagram page."
The Elegy Before the Crescendo
In 1956, Williams married Barbara Ruick, a singer and actress best known for her role as Carrie Pipperidge in the film adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel. She was vivid, talented, musically literate — a partner who understood the world Williams inhabited from the inside. They had three children. The marriage was, by all accounts available, a genuine creative and emotional partnership, the kind that sustains a working artist through the anonymous years.
Then Barbara died.
The details are spare in the public record — Williams is notoriously, fiercely private about his personal life — but the timeline is devastating. Just as Williams was beginning to emerge from decades of anonymous studio work, just as the critical recognition was arriving (he won his first Academy Award in 1972, for the score to Fiddler on the Roof), his personal life collapsed into grief. He was a widower in his early forties with three teenage children. The documentary Music by John Williams, directed by Bouzereau, explores this period with the care that the composer's reticence demands. "We could talk, John and I, about the intimate and about the ups and downs," Bouzereau explains, "but my approach to those moments was through music. That, to me, was a key to making him feel comfortable. It was always done as an entry point into a musical phrase, almost."
The phrase "entry point into a musical phrase" is revealing. For Williams, music is not a metaphor for emotional experience. It is the emotional experience — the medium through which grief, joy, longing, and terror can be expressed with a precision that language cannot reach. The years between Barbara's death and the Jaws score in 1975 represent the hinge of his life: a period of private devastation that preceded, and perhaps enabled, the most explosive creative eruption in the history of film music. Whether the shattering of his domestic life deepened the emotional range of his work is the kind of question that responsible biography can only pose, not answer. What can be said is that the man who emerged on the other side — the man who wrote the two-note shark motif, the twin-suns theme, the "Raiders March" — was not the same man who had been grinding through television assignments as Johnny Williams. Something had broken open.
Two Notes That Changed Everything
The story of Jaws has been told so often that its essential strangeness has been worn smooth. Steven Spielberg, twenty-seven years old, was directing a troubled production plagued by a malfunctioning mechanical shark. The film's survival depended on the audience's willingness to be terrified by something they could not see. Williams's solution was two alternating notes — E and F — played on low strings, accelerating in tempo. The motif is so simple that Spielberg reportedly laughed when Williams first played it for him, thinking it was a joke. It was not a joke. It was an act of radical reduction: the entire dread of an unseen predator compressed into a interval of a half-step, the smallest distance in Western music. The genius lies not in the notes themselves but in what they don't do — they refuse to resolve, refuse to develop into a theme, refuse to offer the listener any harmonic comfort. They simply accelerate. The shark is coming.
Spielberg — born in Cincinnati in 1946, raised in suburban Arizona, a prodigy of visual storytelling who had directed his first theatrical feature at twenty-seven — would become the most important professional relationship of Williams's life. Their collaboration, which now spans more than five decades and nearly every Spielberg film, is one of the defining creative partnerships in the history of American popular art, rivaled only by the relationships between directors and composers in the opera house. Spielberg's gift for visual narrative found its sonic equivalent in Williams's ability to write themes that are simultaneously specific and universal — melodies that belong indelibly to a particular character or moment but carry emotional resonances far beyond their narrative context.
The Jaws score earned Williams his second Academy Award. Two years later, in 1977, Star Wars earned him his third. And bingo — right there, as the Vanity Fair writer Bruce Handy put it, you have arguably the two most recognizable scores in Hollywood history, composed back-to-back by a man who had spent the previous two decades in relative anonymity. The acceleration was not gradual. It was a phase change.
It was not music that might describe terra incognita but the opposite of that, music that would put us in touch with very familiar and remembered emotions, which for me as a musician translated into the use of a nineteenth-century operatic idiom, if you like, Wagner and this sort of thing.
The Gaseous Planet Wagner
George Lucas wanted something specific for his space opera, and the specificity was counterintuitive. He did not want futuristic music. He did not want electronic textures, alien sonorities, or avant-garde experimentation. He wanted the opposite: music that sounded old, familiar, emotionally legible — a Romantic, swashbuckling backdrop against which his deliberately archetypal narrative could unfold. Williams understood the assignment instantly and responded with a method that the film-music scholar Frank Lehman would later catalogue with academic rigor: the leitmotif.
Lehman — an assistant professor at Tufts University who works with a speed that suggests either profound scholarly devotion or a healthy obsession — updated his "Complete Catalogue of the Motivic Material in 'Star Wars,' Episodes I-VIII" within a day of each new film's release. By the time of
The Last Jedi, the catalogue included fifty-five distinct leitmotifs and forty-three "incidental motifs" that, in Lehman's careful phrasing, "do not meet criteria for proper leitmotifs" but possess dramatic significance. The catalogue was eventually published in
John Williams: Music for Films, Television, and the Concert Stage, a scholarly volume that represents the growing academic attention to Williams's work — attention that would have seemed absurd to the self-styled serious music types who spent decades dismissing him.
The word "leitmotif" carries baggage. It was coined not by Wagner himself but by Hans von Wolzogen, one of the intellectual sycophants who surrounded the composer in his final years. Wolzogen, who lived long enough to hail Hitler in the pages of the Bayreuther Blätter — the dismal Wagner fanzine he edited for decades — treated leitmotifs as purely dramatic devices, labels pinned to characters and objects. Wagner objected. He had spoken of "melodic moments" and "ground-motifs," and he criticized Wolzogen for neglecting their internal musical logic. The leitmotif, in Wagner's more nuanced understanding, was not a tag but a living cell — something that could develop, mutate, contradict its original meaning, and accumulate significance through transformation.
Williams's use of the technique in Star Wars operates at both levels simultaneously. At the surface, the motifs are identifying tags: robust, rag-tag heroic themes for the Rebels, monumental and ominous music for the Empire. This has, as the New Yorker critic Alex Ross observed, "a playful obviousness, a knowing air" that conforms to the grinning naïveté of Lucas's film. But something deeper happens in the celebrated scene where Luke Skywalker gazes toward a horizon lit by twin setting suns, dreaming of a life beyond Tatooine. Williams writes a melancholy, expansive G-minor theme for solo horn, soon taken up by full strings. The theme represents not only Luke but also the Force — and, crucially, it is heard before the Force has been explained. In classic Wagnerian fashion, it foreshadows the not-yet-known. The scholar James Buhler identifies this as the moment when Star Wars steps out of the adolescent-adventure arena and into the realm of modern myth. The music does not illustrate what we see. It tells us what we do not yet know.
This is the difference between Williams and the silent-film accompanists who first imported Wagner's method into the cinema. Those early practitioners relied on fixed libraries of stock themes — "The Ride of the Valkyries" for battles and galloping horses, trotted out most notoriously to accompany the ride of the Ku Klux Klan in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Williams, by contrast, composes original material that functions the way Wagner's motifs do at their most sophisticated: not as labels but as arguments, capable of irony, subversion, and emotional complexity that exceeds the narrative they accompany.
The Cross-Cultural Mythology
Consider the range. Jaws (1975). Star Wars (1977). Superman (1978). Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Schindler's List (1993). Jurassic Park (1993). Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001). These are not just film scores. They are the dominant melodic signatures of late-twentieth-century popular culture, a body of work so pervasive that it functions as a shared musical vocabulary across generations, nations, and languages. The journalist Howard Stringer, then chairman of the American Film Institute's board of trustees, said it plainly when Williams was named the 44th recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2015 — the first time in the institute's history that the honor went to a composer: "John Williams has written the soundtrack to our lives."
The claim sounds like ceremony. It is also, unusually for ceremonial language, accurate. Williams's themes have achieved a saturation that transcends their original contexts. You do not need to have seen Jaws to know the shark motif. You do not need to have seen Star Wars to recognize the Force theme. These melodies have detached from their source material and become free-floating cultural referents — as widely known as any pop song, as emotionally immediate as any folk tune, yet composed in the idiom of nineteenth-century orchestral Romanticism. This is what Williams meant by "cross-cultural mythology": music that activates emotional responses so fundamental that they bypass the specific narrative context and reach something older, deeper, more universal.
The mechanism is deceptively simple. Williams writes melodies. Real melodies — hummable, singable, memorable on first hearing. This sounds obvious. It was, in the 1970s, nearly revolutionary. Concert-hall classical music had spent decades pursuing complexity, atonality, and intellectual rigor at the expense of accessibility. "You couldn't hum Schoenberg or Stravinsky," as one commentator noted. Younger generations, craving melody and feeling, had gravitated to jazz, rock, and R&B. The orchestra — that sprawling, fantastic congregation of instruments capable of summoning sounds that are deep, transporting, and emotionally expressive — had become the province of aging, stuffy concert-hall audiences instructed to stifle their applause between movements.
Williams made the orchestra exciting again. He did not do this by dumbing it down. The orchestration in his scores is extraordinarily sophisticated — dense, contrapuntal, full of subtle harmonic motion and timbral variety that rewards repeated listening. What he did was restore melody to its central position: the human voice of the orchestra, the line that the ear follows through the complexity. And he delivered these melodies not in concert halls but in movie theaters, to audiences who had come to see sharks and spaceships and did not know they were being reintroduced to the full expressive power of symphonic music. The cultural consequences were enormous. An entire generation of musicians — composers, performers, conductors — cite Williams as the reason they first became interested in orchestral music. He did not merely score films. He rebuilt the audience for a dying art form.
Adding Paragraphs to a Letter
The creative process, as Williams describes it, reveals a mind that thinks in continuity rather than episodes. "It's a bit like adding paragraphs to a letter that's been going on for a number of years," he told Vanity Fair's Bruce Handy in 2015, discussing his approach to The Force Awakens, his seventh Star Wars score. "Starting with a completely new film, a story that I don't know, characters that I haven't met, my whole approach to writing music is completely different — trying to find an identity, trying to find melodic identifications if that's needed for the characters, and so on. Which I do here, but here it's an extension of something that's been really organic and continually growing."
The letter analogy is more precise than it appears. A letter to a correspondent of many years carries within it the entire history of the correspondence — every previous exchange, every shared reference, every established tone — and each new paragraph both extends and subtly revises what came before. This is exactly how Williams's Star Wars scores function. The Force theme, first heard in that G-minor horn solo over Tatooine's twin suns in 1977, accumulates meaning with each subsequent appearance across nine films. In The Last Jedi (2017), the theme appears in "attenuated, beclouded" form during scenes at a ruined Jedi temple, evoking Luke's embittered renunciation of the Jedi project. As Rey coaxes him back, the theme "stretches out and is unfurled at length." The same melody, the same notes — but transformed by forty years of accumulated narrative and emotional context.
It's a bit like adding paragraphs to a letter that's been going on for a number of years… it's an extension of something that's been really organic and continually growing.
Williams also deploys what might be called musical red herrings — deliberate misdirections that exploit the audience's familiarity with his leitmotivic vocabulary. In The Force Awakens, a vaguely menacing reference to the harmonies of Darth Vader's march surfaces at the film's end, raising the alarming possibility that Luke himself has gone dark. The Last Jedi resolves this differently, but shadowy chords surround the exiled hero for much of the film, sustaining the suspense. When Laura Dern's rebel commander makes a frosty first impression, the music brushes against the "flamboyantly sinister" theme assigned to Kylo Ren — a feint that exists mainly in the imagination of the hotheaded Poe Dameron, who will eventually be forced to reconsider his macho bravado. The music does not lie, exactly. It represents a character's perception — a technique that is purely Wagnerian in its sophistication.
The working relationship with directors, meanwhile, has remained remarkably consistent across decades and collaborators. Williams described his process with both George Lucas and J.J. Abrams in nearly identical terms: spotting sessions to select where music would play, followed by complete creative freedom in the writing. "His latest instruction to me," Williams said of Abrams with evident amusement, "was, 'Just do what you do.'" The trust is not casual. It is earned over decades of demonstrated judgment — the same kind of earned trust that operates in any long partnership where one party's expertise has been validated so many times that supervision becomes redundant.
The Timpani on the Salt Flats
The climactic sequence of The Last Jedi represents Williams at the height of his late powers — and it is worth examining in close detail, because it demonstrates how a leitmotivic technique that might seem mechanical in description becomes, in practice, an instrument of devastating emotional precision.
The sequence: a showdown between Kylo Ren and a hooded manifestation of Luke Skywalker on the salt flats of the planet Crait, which turn crimson red when stepped upon. Williams, who is emphatically not a minimalist — his music favors quick harmonic motion, restless development, constant forward momentum — here fixates on a single F-minor chord, with a three-note figure (F, C, A-flat) ricocheting around the orchestra. When Luke inexplicably survives an all-out Imperial barrage, the motif returns, banged out on the timpani. The dramatic soprano Christine Goerke was not the only listener who recognized an echo of the Agamemnon figure in Richard Strauss's Elektra. In that opera, Agamemnon haunts the action from beyond the grave. On Crait, Luke is not actually present — he is appearing by long-distance Force projection. All of that darksome, epic music is swirling not in objective reality but in Kylo Ren's conflicted mind.
This is leitmotivic writing at its most Wagnerian: music that does not describe what we see but reveals what a character feels — and, more subtly, music that deceives us in the same way the character is deceived. We hear the grandeur and the menace because Kylo Ren hears them. The truth — that Luke is elsewhere, that this confrontation is an illusion — is embedded in the music's strange fixation on a single chord, its refusal to develop in the way Williams's music normally develops. The stasis is the clue, for listeners trained to hear it. Most won't catch it on first viewing. It doesn't matter. The emotional truth lands regardless. The intellectual pleasure is there for those who return.
The scene also demonstrates Williams's comic timing — a quality less discussed than his capacity for grandeur but equally essential to his art. When Luke makes his entrance in The Last Jedi, the music builds portentously, swelling toward what promises to be a moment of mythic gravitas. Then it stops. Luke sardonically chucks away his long-lost lightsaber. Williams plays the straight man to Mark Hamill's mischief, and the deflation is perfect — the musical equivalent of a comedian's deadpan.
The Rescue of the Orchestra
By the mid-1960s, the full orchestral film score was dying. Hollywood's Golden Age had been draped in the lush, Romantic sound of composers like Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold — Viennese émigrés who brought the traditions of European concert music to the movie palaces. But by the time Williams was establishing himself, that sound had fallen out of favor. Henry Mancini's pop-orchestral style represented one direction; the jukebox approach — Steppenwolf, Simon & Garfunkel, Harry Nilsson — represented another. Studios wanted songs that could be sold as singles. The orchestra was expensive, old-fashioned, and, in the view of many executives, unnecessary.
Steiner, who had once declared that "if Wagner had lived in this century, he would have been the No. 1 film composer," was by then forgotten by the industry he helped build. (The New Yorker's Alex Ross added the dry observation that because Wagner would have wanted to write and direct films as well, Hollywood might have been a less hospitable place than was King Ludwig's Bavaria.) Korngold, who had composed lush scores for Errol Flynn swashbucklers, had died in 1957, largely ignored. The tradition they represented — the idea that a film's emotional landscape should be created by a full symphony orchestra under the direction of a classically trained composer — seemed as dated as the black-and-white serials that had inspired Lucas's imagination.
Williams reversed this entirely. Jaws and Star Wars did not merely succeed as individual scores; they proved that orchestral music could still be the most commercially powerful sound in the cinema. The box-office dominance of Spielberg's and Lucas's films — accompanied in every case by Williams's music — made it impossible for studios to argue that audiences didn't want symphonic scores. They wanted them desperately. What they hadn't wanted was bad symphonic scores — the kind of uninspired, wall-to-wall orchestral wallpaper that had given the form a reputation for being emotionally manipulative and aesthetically retrograde.
Williams's innovation was not merely technical. It was economic and institutional. By demonstrating that great orchestral film music was a box-office asset rather than an indulgent expense, he ensured the survival of the studio orchestra system, the network of session musicians, the recording infrastructure, and the professional ecosystem that supports large-scale acoustic composition. Hundreds of film composers working today owe their careers, directly or indirectly, to the fact that Williams proved the model viable.
The Notoriously Modest Man
There is a temptation, when writing about Williams, to construct the narrative his music seems to demand: the lone hero, obscure origins, a trial by fire, and then the triumphant theme swelling over the credits. Williams himself resists this at every turn. The 2024 documentary Music by John Williams, produced for Disney+, is by all accounts a masterwork of gentle persistence — the director Bouzereau's challenge being to coax personal revelation from a man who deflects attention with the instinct of someone for whom the work, not the worker, is the point.
"Getting the notoriously modest Williams to discuss such personal history in the film was a challenge," the Vanity Fair reporter noted. The modesty is not a performance. It is temperamental, structural, perhaps even philosophical — a belief, held with quiet conviction, that the music speaks for itself and that the biography of the person who wrote it is of secondary importance. Williams has, at various points in his career, described himself as still learning, still studying, still figuring things out. He was ninety-one years old when this language was last reported. Either this is the most sustained act of false humility in the history of American arts, or it reflects a genuine orientation toward craft: the conviction that mastery is asymptotic, that you approach it endlessly without arrival.
This self-effacement coexists with an extraordinary consistency of output. Williams has scored more than 150 films and television shows. He has been nominated for 54 Academy Awards — a record for any living person — and won five. He composed the theme for Great Performances on PBS, winning a 2009 Emmy for Best TV Theme Song. He served as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993, and remains its laureate conductor. He has written concertos, chamber music, and concert works performed by major orchestras worldwide. The range is staggering, and the quality control, across seven decades, is nearly unprecedented. Yet the self-presentation remains that of a diligent student, grateful for the opportunity to work.
There is a sense in society today that you can obtain everything so fast, and by the time you're 25 you'll be so rich you don't even have to work anymore. For someone wanting to be a musician, seeing that someone like John Williams took his time to get there is mega inspiring.
The Shattered Sword
In The Last Jedi, Luke's lightsaber is broken in two. The image, whether Rian Johnson intended it or not, rhymes with the central narrative of Wagner's Ring cycle: Siegfried's task is to forge the shattered sword anew. When the New Yorker's Alex Ross pointed this out on Twitter, Johnson responded with a sword emoji — "suggesting," Ross wrote with characteristic dryness, "that I might not be making much ado about Nothung."
The joke is good. The resonance is real. Williams's entire career has been an act of reforging — taking the shattered tradition of orchestral film music, the fragments left by Steiner and Korngold after decades of neglect, and welding them into something that could serve a new era without pretending the old one hadn't existed. He did not invent leitmotivic scoring. He did not invent the idea of a full orchestra in the cinema. He took what was broken and made it work again, with such brilliance and consistency that the repair became invisible: audiences today assume that great films have always sounded this way, that the orchestra has always been there. It hasn't. There was a gap, a silence, and Williams filled it.
In January 2023, it was widely reported that Williams planned to retire from scoring films after his work on The Fabelmans and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. He walked back those plans almost immediately, admitting he couldn't say no to Spielberg. The inability to stop is not addiction. It is vocation — the thing that the Latin root of the word actually means: a calling, something you are summoned to rather than something you choose. Williams has been summoned every day for seventy years. The music keeps arriving. He keeps writing it down.
As of his most recent public statements, the composer has no confirmed upcoming projects. But the summer of 2025 saw strains of his music animating blockbusters yet again — Jurassic World Rebirth, the new Superman film, a fiftieth-anniversary theatrical re-release of Jaws. The work outlasts the worker. The themes propagate themselves, reappearing in new contexts, accumulating new meanings, teaching new audiences what an orchestra can do. Williams's Force theme, that G-minor horn solo first heard over Tatooine's twin suns in 1977, is now older than most of the people who hear it for the first time. It has become what Williams always intended: not a description of terra incognita, but the opposite — something so familiar it feels remembered, even if you have never heard it before.
On a stage at Royce Hall, UCLA, the room where he first saw Stravinsky conduct, the room where he later recorded film scores with Spielberg and performed with Yo-Yo Ma, John Williams once sat for an interview and was asked when his involvement with music began. "I first began studying music, if I can call it that, in the 1930s as a piano student," he said, still hedging, still qualifying, still a student. Outside, Los Angeles hummed with the sound of a city that his music helped define — a city of manufactured dreams and genuine feeling, of mechanical sharks and twin setting suns, of the two notes that mean something is coming and the one theme that means, always, that there is hope.
