Composer
John Williams
The composer who brought the Late Romantic orchestral sound to the multiplex.
John Williams is, by a wide margin, the most widely heard living composer working in the classical orchestral tradition — his film scores have introduced the sound of the full symphony orchestra to a far larger audience than the concert hall alone ever could. His music draws directly on the Late Romantic orchestral language of Wagner and Richard Strauss, including the leitmotif technique — short recurring themes tied to specific characters or ideas — which he uses extensively across his best-known scores.
His score for Star Wars is probably the most famous piece of orchestral music written in the last half century, complete with a full set of leitmotifs (the Force theme, the Imperial March, Princess Leia's theme) that carry real dramatic weight across an entire film series. Jaws demonstrates the opposite mode — a spare, two-note motif generating almost unbearable tension — while his score for Schindler's List shows a quieter, more elegiac side built around a solo violin.
Williams's career is a direct, living link between the 19th-century orchestral tradition and mainstream 21st-century popular culture, proving that tradition never stopped being usable.
Where to start listening: the Star Wars main title theme is the obvious entry point; the Schindler's List theme shows an entirely different, more restrained register of his writing.