Seven Great John Williams Scores That Aren’t from Star Wars or Spielberg Films
The great composer has more to his repertoire than his most well-known themes.
As far as I’m concerned, John Williams is the greatest film composer in cinema history. Sadly, he is also the last of his kind; a tower of genius and one of the few remaining that work with real orchestras.
Williams is steeped in the musical traditions and lore of classic Hollywood, building on the legacies of greats like Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alex North, and Bernard Herrmann. His contemporaries — from Jerry Goldsmith to James Horner, Ennio Morricone, and John Barry — are sadly no longer with us. But Williams remains, and I for one hope he turns out to be immortal, as the idea of living in a world without the man who scored my childhood feels too much to bear.
Such depressing thoughts aside, here are ten of his greatest scores that aren’t from a Star Wars or Spielberg film. I’ll write about these iconic scores — Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Schindler’s List, and so on — in the future, but for now I’ve excluded them purely to give a clearer picture of Williams’s extraordinary body of work. Some of these titles are also iconic, but shutting out Spielberg and Star Wars at least provides a chance for his…
