John Williams Discography

John Williams Biography

John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career that has spanned seven decades, he has composed some of the most popular, recognizable and critically acclaimed film scores in cinema history. Williams has won 25 Grammy Awards, five Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. With 53 Academy Award nominations, he is the second-most nominated person, after Walt Disney. His compositions are often considered the epitome of orchestral film music and he is considered among the greatest composers in the history of cinema. Williams is known for his collaborations with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and has worked with such diverse directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, Chris Columbus, Oliver Stone, Richard Donner, Irvin Kershner, Sydney Pollack, Mark Rydell, Mark Robson, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and J. J. Abrams. He has a very distinct sound that mixes romanticism, impressionism and atonal music with complex orchestration.His early work as a film composer includes The Killers (1964), How to Steal a Million (1966), Valley of the Dolls (1967), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969) and Altman's Images (1972) and The Long Goodbye (1973). Williams has been associated with Spielberg since his 1974 film The Sugarland Express, composing music for all but five of his feature films. Spielberg recommended him to Lucas, who hired him to score Star Wars. His first Academy Award was for Best Scoring: Adaptation and Original Song Score for Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Four more Academy Awards, for Best Original Score, followed, for his work on Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (1982), and Schindler's List (1993). Other memorable film scores from his collaboration with Spielberg include Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Hook (1991),...