Art by Matthew Fleming.
This episode was written & produced by Casey Emmerling.
John Williams has written some of the most famous film scores ever, from Star Wars to Indiana Jones to Jurassic Park. But before the blockbuster success, there was a kid growing up around jazz musicians in New York, and a young composer trying to find his voice. In this episode, journalist Tim Greiving takes us through John’s early life and career, from his years as a session player to the meeting with Steven Spielberg that changed everything. Along the way, we unpack the stories behind John’s early iconic scores, including the two-note terror of Jaws, the symphonic world of Star Wars, and the mysteries of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Jay Taylor - Slowly, Like an Aching
Roy Edwin Williams - Steamtown Shuffle
United States Marine Band - Stars and Stripes Forever
Beethoven - Piano Sonata no. 8 III
Jo Wandrini - Rise of an Empire
Arthur Benson - Behind You
Ruiqi Zhao - Bygones
Kikoru - Thoughts Revoked
Martin Klem - Drop a Dime
Jon Wandrini - Infinity and Beyond
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.
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View Transcript ▶︎
[20K sonic logo]
[music in: Jay Taylor - Slowly, Like an Aching]
When it comes to film composers, there are a few names that stand out above the rest... people like Ludwig Göransson, Danny Elfman, and Hans Zimmer. But the most well known film composer in history has to be John Williams. Incredibly, he's been scoring movies since the 1950s, and he's still working today at ninety four years old.
Over the last seventy years, he's scored over a hundred films, including many of the biggest blockbusters of all time... like Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, ET, Home Alone, Jurassic Park, and Saving Private Ryan. He's won twenty seven Grammys, three Emmys, and five Academy Awards. And he's toured the globe conducting world-class orchestras.
But despite all of that success, the story of John Williams' life has rarely been told. Because, while John has done lots of interviews, he doesn't talk much about his personal history. But in 2025, the first official biography of John was published. It's called John Williams: A Composer's Life, by Tim Greiving.
Tim: My name is Tim Greiving. I am a film music journalist and historian, and I just wrote a book about John Williams, who is my favorite artist of all time.
Working on the book gave Tim a unique window into the life and work of this musical icon.
[music out]
[1930s New York city sounds in]
Tim: John Williams was born in 1932, which means he's older than Elvis Presley. He grew up in Queens, New York, during The Depression. But his family was comfortable because his dad was always busy.
[New York city sounds out]
[music in: Raymond Scott Quintette - Powerhouse]
John's father Johnny Williams was a successful jazz percussionist. For a few years, he played with the Raymond Scott Quintette, who had multiple hits. This is a song that Johnny played on called Powerhouse, which later appeared in Looney Tunes, Ren and Stimpy, and The Simpsons.
[Raymond Scott up, then under]
Tim: The Raymond Scott Quintet were contracted by Fox to come out to Hollywood. And so when John was five years old, he found himself playing on the Fox lot with Shirley Temple and things like that.
[clip: Shirley Temple - On the Good Ship Lollipop]
Tim: So he was always surrounded by show business and musicians. And he started learning music as a kid from all these great teachers that his dad played with.
[music in: Roy Edwin Williams - Steamtown Shuffle]
Here's John talking about his childhood in an interview with Variety.
John Williams: Music has been with me all my life. It was there when I became conscious when I woke up as a child, and it was what adults do in their profession, 'cause my father's friends were all musicians.
Specifically, John and his three siblings all learned to play piano. Here he is in the Disney documentary Music By John Williams.
John Williams: My practicing had to be done in proportion to playing baseball. If I played baseball for an hour, I must have to practice the piano for a half an hour.
Tim: He moved to LA with his family when he was 15, and went to high school out here.
By then, he was already writing his own music.
Tim: Even when he was a teenager, he was arranging music for different ensembles, like little friend groups, or jazz combos, or whatever. So he was inventing music in his own way.
[music out]
After high school, John enlisted in the US Air Force. He was eventually stationed at a base in Newfoundland, where he played piano and bass for an Air Force band.
[music in: Stars and Stripes Forever]
Tim: So he was playing flag raising ceremonies, and also at society dances and stuff like that. But he was an arranger, too, so he'd do a lot of arrangements of tunes and marches and whatever Air Force bands play.
[music fade under]
Tim: He also scored his first film, quote unquote, in the Air Force. He scored a travelogue for Newfoundland.
[Newfoundland promo in]
Here's a clip of that film, which is basically a 22 minute tourism promo. For the music, John wove in melodies from Newfoundland folk songs that he found in the library. For instance, this melody...
[Newfoundland promo up, then out]
...is based on a folk song called Lots of Fish in Bonavist Harbor.
[clip: Ken Peacock - Lots of Fish in Bonavist' Harbor]
John had gotten his first taste of film scoring... But it wasn't what he wanted to pursue.
[music in: Beethoven - Piano Sonata no. 8 III]
Tim: He never really had aims to be a film composer, even though he was in that world a lot since he was a kid. But he wanted to be a classical pianist, so he was studying and practicing the piano really intensely in his teenage years. And as he got outta the Air Force, he went and studied with the best teacher in the country at Juilliard.
[music out]
Now, John didn't attend Juilliard. But he took private lessons from a renowned piano teacher at the school, Rosina Lhévinne. At the time, two of her other students were John Browning and Van Cliburn, who would both become really successful pianists.
[music in: Van Cliburn - Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2]
This is Van Cliburn playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number 2 with the Chicago Symphony.
[Van Cliburn up, then under]
In an interview with NPR, John said that when he heard these players...
John Williams: I thought to myself, "If that's the competition, I think I better be a composer."
And his teacher agreed.
Tim: She recognized that he wasn't destined to be like a concert piano player, but she saw that he had a gift for composing and arranging, and she really encouraged him in that direction.
So, he started pursuing composition, while still playing piano under the name Johnny, like his father.
Tim: He was a session pianist here in Hollywood, played on a bunch of film scores, including The Big Country...
[clip: The Big Country - Main Theme]
Tim: …the original West Side Story.
[clip: West Side Story - Maria]
Tim: He also played on albums for Frank Sinatra.
[clip: Frank Sinatra - Gone with the Wind]
Tim: Harry Belafonte...
[Harry Belafonte - Cotton Fields]
But as time went on, John found playing other people's arrangements less fulfilling.
[music in: Jo Wandrini - Rise of an Empire]
Tim: I think it was him sitting in the sessions for other composers in Hollywood where he was playing the piano, he was kind of bored doing that. And he realized he could do what the composers were doing, maybe even better than they did.
But those experiences taught him how to get the best from these musicians in his own work. As he told NPR...
John Williams: The instrumentalists at that time, as now, were outstanding world-class players, and my advantage was that I'd been playing with them for three or four or five years as a colleague in the orchestra.
John Williams: I would go over to a horn player and say, "Have I got this too high?" Or "Is this trill a little awkward?" "Would you rather play it here or there?" Just from one friend to another, without any particular professional pressure. And they'd all say, "No, put it here," or "put it there."
[music out]
In 1956, John got married to Barbara Ruik, who he had known since high school. By this time, Barbara was an actress and singer. The year they married, she starred in the film adaptation of the musical Carousel.
[Carousel up, then under]
About a year later, John and Barbara had their first of three children… a daughter who they named Jennifer, or Jenny. In an interview with composer André Previn, John described this as the event that really pushed him into film scoring.
John Williams: And the event was the birth of a little girl. And the birth of a little girl caused the need to earn some money, which everyone in the audience will understand. I had to go to work.
So, he threw himself into composing. He also started going by John instead of Johnny, which he thought would seem more professional.
[music sneaks in: None But the Brave - Main Theme]
One of his early scores was for the anti-war film None But the Brave, which starred, and was directed by Frank Sinatra.
[None But the Brave up, then under]
He also did a lot of television work, and composed the music for sci-fi shows like Land of the Giants...
[clip: Land of the Giants theme]
…and Lost in Space.
[clip: Lost in Space theme]
It was an exciting time for John and his family. Here's John's daughter Jenny Williams describing her childhood in the Disney documentary.
Jenny Williams: My parents were very glamorous, and they went out a lot. They threw parties. I remember that my father played a lot of show tunes. He and my mother would rehearse, and have fun together, and play songs. And we were able to entertain each other, and make each other laugh, and have so much fun together.
By the early 70s, there was a new crop of adventurous young filmmakers in Hollywood. This included people like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, and Robert Altman. And many of their films were moving away from the sweeping orchestral scores that most classic films had. Instead, they wanted music that felt more modern and avant-garde. And it turned out that John could do that, too.
Tim: He'd kind of been on this interesting jag where he was working with Robert Altman, who was a much more experimental adult kind of filmmaker. They'd done two pictures together.
[music in: Images - The House]
Tim: One was called Images...
Tim: …which was this crazy score for like… sounds, like these sculptures that you bang on, and you know, throwing a rock into a piano, and groaning, and all this weird, modern stuff.
The movie is about an isolated woman who starts seeing a double of herself, and loses her grip on reality. And John's score reflects that paranoia.
[music fades under]
Tim: And it's kind of this "what if" situation of this is the kind of path John Williams could have gone down if he'd stuck with people like Robert Altman, where it's like, "Let's do unconventional break-the-mould kind of stuff."
Tim: But he meets Spielberg right around this time, and I kind of see this as a fork in the road of his career. Obviously, he chose Spielberg, and these more kinda family-oriented, popcorn, blockbuster kind of projects, and I think for the better. But it was this interesting moment in his career where he could have gone one way, he chose to go another.
[music in: Arthur Benson - Behind You]
It was in late 1972 that the stars aligned for John Williams to meet Steven Spielberg. Here's John describing that meeting to Stephen Colbert, who interviewed him and Spielberg together.
John Williams: Somebody set up a meeting, a lunch meeting for us in some fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills. And the head waiter came and he said, "I'll bring you to Mr. Spielberg," and I saw this… a teenager, I thought. You gotta forgive me Steven, I tell this story.
Steven Spielberg: I'm not even here. Tell the story.
John Williams: So I thought, "Maybe that's Mr. Spielberg's son. Where's Spielberg?" You know?
Tim: It's important to remember that John Williams was 40, almost 41 when he met Steven Spielberg, and Spielberg was only 25. So John Williams had already lived this kind of first phase of life, and been pretty successful, and was kind of a veteran. And Spielberg was just a kid getting his first shot at directing a feature film.
Despite their age gap, the two men connected instantly.
[music fades under]
John Williams: Within a minute or two, I realized this is somebody very, very special, with a keen and bristling, dazzling intellect who remembered everything I'd ever written.
Tim: Spielberg was a soundtrack nerd who collected film scores.
[music sneaks in: The Reivers - Main Theme]
Tim: And he collected this score by John Williams for a film called The Reivers, and loved the music.
[The Reivers up, then under]
As Spielberg told Colbert...
Steven Spielberg: When I heard John's score for The Reivers, I said to myself, "If I ever get a chance to direct movies, I want this guy to score all of them."
Tim: Spielberg loved old fashioned orchestral kind of... the kind of film music he grew up listening to, as well as like great classical music, and that's the kind of music he wanted in his movies. So that's why he reached out to this older, more experienced composer to try to hire him for his first film, which was The Sugarland Express.
[music in: Sugarland Express - Main Theme]
The Sugarland Express is a crime drama about a Texan couple trying to get their son back before he's put in foster care. Steven Spielberg imagined scoring it with an eighty piece orchestra. But after John saw the rough cut, he convinced him to pair it down, saying quote, "It's a very simple story. The music should be soft. Just a few violins, a small orchestra, maybe a harmonica." This is the title theme that John composed for it.
[Sugarland Express up, then under]
A few weeks before the movie was released, John's wife Barbara traveled to Nevada to shoot her first movie in over a decade. It was a Robert Altman film called California Split. But while she was there, Barbara suffered a brain aneurysm, and died suddenly at only forty one years old.
[music in: Ruiqi Zhao - Bygones]
Tim: It was this horrible tragedy of losing his wife, his childhood sweetheart, the mother of his three children who are now teenagers. It was this really cataclysmic, disruptive thing.
Here's John in the Disney documentary.
John Williams: It was an unbelievable event. A perfectly healthy, gorgeous young woman suddenly gone from an aneurysm that we couldn't have predicted. I was suddenly in my early forties with three teenage children to deal with this very tough situation… sometimes very difficult to talk about.
[music transition into: John Williams - Violin Concerto No. 1]
Barbara's father had been a violinist, and she always loved the violin. So after she died, John composed a violin concerto in her memory. This is the second movement of that concerto, performed years later by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
[Violin Concerto up, then under]
After taking some time to grieve, John re-immersed himself in his work.
Tim: The death of his wife really shook his world, and he became much more kind of just all about the music. And that—that's maybe the biggest change that happened in his life.
Here's their daughter Jenny again, followed by John.
Jenny Williams: After she died, there was some kind of feeling that he had that she was by his side.
John Williams: I felt like she was helping me. It was just a funny kind of feeling that I had, and I still have it.
[music in: Kikoru - Thoughts Revoked]
And John would need all the help he could get. Because he was about to begin one of the most legendary runs of any film composer in history. It started with a little film about a big fish...
John Williams: You advertise or you advance thought that the shark is there just by hearing the music. "Dun dun dun dun dun…"
And it took him to a galaxy far, far away.
John Williams: I finally worked out this thing which jumps a fifth. "Dom beam, da da da dee!"
That's coming up, after the break.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music in: Kikoru - Thoughts Revoked]
In May of 1974, Steven Spielberg started shooting his follow up to The Sugarland Express. The film was based on a bestselling book about a killer shark. It was called Jaws. And John Williams was on-deck to write the score.
[music fade out]
Initially, Spielberg wanted something similar to what John did for the Robert Altman movie, Images.
[music in: Images - Nightwatch Rise]
Tim: Spielberg had it in his head that Jaws needed a strange avant-garde creepy score, like Images, and he put Images' music on the rough cut of Jaws as like a, a reference for John Williams. And John Williams said, "This is all wrong."
[music crashes out]
Tim: "This is not some cerebral, intellectual drama. This is a popcorn movie," is what he said.
[music in: Jaws Theme (piano)]
Tim: So he came up with that simple, repeating, kind of brainless motor for the theme for the shark.
[music up, then fades under]
Here's John on The Late Show.
John Williams: I was thinking what could be the simplest possible thing? It has to be low, because the shark is very deep. It has to be something that, when it's approaching you, it is completely unstoppable.
With this theme, John proved that two simple notes can be a lot more malleable than you might expect.
Tim: You can speed it up or slow it down to indicate that it's getting closer to you or it's retreating from you. It was a really effective psychological and dramatic device that then he explored throughout the rest of the score.
But at first, Spielberg didn't get it. Here he is on The Late Show.
Steven Spielberg: I thought it was a joke when Johnny played that for me on the piano at his house. And he takes a couple of fingers. Not all ten, just a couple. He didn't need all ten. And he goes "Duh duh. Duh duh duh duh. Duh duh duh duh. Dun dun dun dun dun…"
Steven Spielberg: I started laughing. I started laughing. Johnny said, "No, I'm serious. I'm serious."
[music in: Jaws - Main Theme]
John was confident that once they tried it with the orchestra, it would work. And of course, he was right.
[music up, then out]
While filming Jaws, the mechanical shark kept breaking down. Because of this, there are lots of scenes that were supposed to include the shark, but don't. But even when you can't see it, the music tells you when the shark is close, and builds that sense of dread. Here's Spielberg on The Late Show again.
Steven Spielberg: Johnny sort of saved the movie, 'cause he became the shark, and the music substituted for the absent shark, which made it scarier and more suspenseful than had I had the shark working perfectly.
[music in: Martin Klem - Drop a Dime]
With the release of Jaws, John became the John Williams.
Tim: Jaws was the biggest hit of all time when it came out. And the music made it, as scary and… and powerful as it was. The two really fed off each other. So Spielberg and John Williams rocket to global fame at the same time. They become kind of the hottest duo overnight, and everybody knows who John Williams is.
Tim: So even though John Williams had been working, and was somewhat successful for quite a while before Jaws, this is the score that really pushes him to being like the top composer in Hollywood. It really changes his career.
[music out]
Amid the success of Jaws, Spielberg introduced John to a friend of his… a fellow director named George Lucas. Lucas was in the middle of an ambitious project. It combined elements of Flash Gordon serials, Westerns, samurai films, and World War II aviation movies into a big, sci-fi spectacle. At the time, it was called The Star Wars.
Tim: Lucas was looking for kind of old fashioned orchestral, classical type music for his film. And Spielberg said, "I know just the guy. This is the greatest composer. He's basically like the resurrection of old Hollywood composers."
But John took a little convincing.
Tim: He almost turned it down, partly 'cause it seemed like a… just a kids movie, a clunky kids movie. Which, if you ever look at Star Wars with the music out of it, it is kind of silly looking, and the dialogue's kind of funny, and there's a guy walking around with a big dog costume on, you know...
Han Solo: Look, your worshipfulness, let's get one thing straight. I take orders from just one person. Me!
Princess Leia: Mmm. It's a wonder you're still alive. Will somebody get this big walking carpet outta my way?
Tim: So you can imagine John Williams screening this and being like, "I think I might be better served doing a drama for adults or something." But he decides to do it.
[music in: Johann Strauss II - The Blue Danube]
Tim: One interesting thing behind that score is George Lucas was thinking about doing something similar to what Stanley Kubrick did in 2001, and just using existing classical pieces.
2001 A Space Odyssey included music like The Blue Danube, by Johann Strauss.
[Strauss up, then under]
Tim: And so the temp track, the temporary soundtrack for Star Wars was full of The Rite of Spring...
[clip: Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring]
Tim: And Gustav Holst's The Planets…
[clip: Holst - The Planets - Mars]
Tim: ...familiar classical pieces. And John Williams basically convinced Lucas, "No, I'll give you original themes, original melodies, and make it all sound of a piece, while kind of referencing, or paying homage to these classical pieces."
This fit in perfectly with Lucas' vision for the story, which begins with "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away."
Tim: The idea was that this was a futuristic, unfamiliar world and characters. But George Lucas wanted it to feel like "a long time ago." He wanted it to feel lived-in, and ancient, and familiar.
Here's John describing the music of Star Wars to composer André Previn.
John Williams: And the simple idea is this: that behind this unfamiliarity of terrain, and of character, we'll play something that's emotionally very familiar. What's that gonna be? It's gonna be a symphony orchestra playing, if you'd like, almost 19-century-like tunes.
For instance, here's the ending of the first movement of The Planets, by Gustav Holst.
[clip: Gustav Holst - The Planets - Mars]
And here's a section of the Star Wars title theme.
[clip: Star Wars - Theme]
Now, here's a section of The Rite of Spring, by Igor Stravinsky.
[clip: Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring - Part II Introduction]
And here's a Star Wars piece called The Desert and the Robot Auction.
[clip: Star Wars - The Desert and the Robot Auction]
Tim: …which leads to people accusing Star Wars and John Williams more broadly of plagiarizing. They're like, "Hey, I, I hear the thing you're referencing in the Star Wars score," but what I always try to tell people is, that was very intentional. It was part of the whole concept for that score.
Tim: And even when you hear the references to other classical pieces, John Williams transforms it and metamorphosizes it into something original, and something only he would've come up with.
But there's one piece in Star Wars that doesn't sound anything like classical music. It's the song played by the alien band in the crowded cantina on Tatooine. When they shot that scene, there was no music... just creatures holding instruments and dancing around. John had no clue what kind of music to write for it. But as he told NPR in the early 80s, George Lucas had an idea.
John Williams: He said, "Just imagine that these four or five little musicians are wandering around this dusty little planet off in space somewhere. And they find, under a rock, the sheet music for one of the arrangements of Benny Goodman's great swing band of the 1930s, Earth Time."
Benny Goodman was a bandleader and clarinet player who was called The King of Swing.
[clip: Benny Goodman Sextet - All the Cats Join In]
John Williams: "And they pick up this little sheet music, which they obviously had never heard, and they look at it and they try to play it in their own style." And so I said, "Alright, that sounds... that's as plausible as any other thing we could come up with." And that was the kind of genesis of this silly little piece.
They rewatched the scene with a click track, to figure out the tempo of the dancing aliens. Then, John wrote this jazzy piece.
[clip: Star Wars - Cantina Song]
The iconic Star Wars theme was actually the last piece of music that John wrote for the movie. He wanted a distilled, heroic theme, and spent a long time struggling with it.
Now, George Lucas had said that with Star Wars, he wanted to evoke the sound of classic film composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Here's Korngold's theme for a 1942 movie called King's Row. And just like those classical pieces, it's very possible that John had this in mind when crafting the Star Wars theme.
[clip: King's Row - Main Theme]
Here's John Williams on CNN.
John Williams: I finally, in desperation, really, worked out this thing which jumps a fifth. "Dom beam" do sol [piano notes] "da da da dee," jumping up to do again, an octave higher. That seemed to me to be a direct, strong, heroic, clear, sonorous sound from the orchestra.
[music sneaks in: Star Wars - Main Theme]
John Williams: And it is a particularly electrifying brass interpretation, the great brass section of the London Symphony.
[music up, then under]
Tim: Star Wars takes John Williams into the stratosphere. The film was a phenomenon. It smashed whatever box office records that Jaws had made, which continued to happen. John Williams kept scoring these movies that were the next biggest blockbuster of all time.
Tim: But Star Wars was on this level that no one had ever seen before. And his music was such an integral part of the phenomenon. Everybody remembered that music, came out of the theater humming that music, wanting to buy the soundtrack.
Tim: There was this two-disc LP that came out with like a black cover, the white Star Wars font on the front. It became the bestselling non-pop album of all time. So it was a hit, it was like a genuine musical hit.
Later that year, a producer named Meco put out a disco version of the Star Wars music that was also a pretty big hit.
[clip: Meco - Star Wars]
Tim: So Star Wars just took John Williams into another strata of fame and popularity and success. And financial success too, because he owned a piece of the film, thanks to George Lucas giving points to some of his key collaborators.
Points refer to percentage points of the movie's profits. And another person with points of Star Wars was Steven Spielberg. Before it came out, Lucas and Spielberg actually traded points on their upcoming films. Because Spielberg was working on his own alien movie. It was called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it was also scored by John Williams.
[piano melody 1]
In the movie, when the Mothership arrives on Earth, it communicates with humanity using music.
[piano melody 2]
And they needed a short, punchy melody for the aliens to play.
[piano melody 3]
So John wrote around a hundred options, which he played for Spielberg on the piano.
[piano melody 4]
Here's the two of them talking about those variations in an interview with Deadline.
John Williams: And I remember you and I circled this one. [final melody] And Steven said, "I think that's the best one." And I said, "I think so too, for some reason. Very simple, but also very strong intervallically."
Here it is in the movie.
[clip: Close Encounters of the Third Kind]
As John told Stephen Colbert, he likes how the melody feels unresolved.
John Williams: Why those notes? "Dee da dum." That's a finish. "Dee da dum," it's over. That's a resolution. Now we go "do sol." Sol is like the word "and" or "but," it's a conjunction. So you have an ending, and a starting, "dee da duh dom bom." Now you gotta do it again.
Stephen Colbert: That's a continuing story.
John Williams: Yes, it is. I mean, that is an after the fact rationalization or…
Stephen Colbert: But that's what it feels like to you.
[music sneaks in: Close Encounters - Visitors/Bye/End]
At the end of Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfus' character Roy boards the Mothership to go explore the galaxy. And as he does, a melody from a classic movie plays in the score.
[Close Encounters up, then under]
Did you catch that? It's When You Wish Upon a Star, from Pinocchio.
[clip: Pinocchio - When You Wish Upon a Star]
Here's Close Encounters again. Listen to the strings over on your right.
[clip: Close Encounters - Visitors/End/Bye]
It might seem like a random choice, but it makes thematic sense. Like Pinocchio, Roy dreams of bigger and better things. And the answer to his wish comes from the literal stars. In fact, earlier in the movie, Roy comes across a Pinocchio music box that's playing the same song.
[clip: Close Encounters of the Third Kind]
Roy: All this stuff is coming down. All gonna be like… like it was.
Here's Spielberg discussing this score in a behind-the-scenes featurette.
Steven Spielberg: All that is such a great symphony that John has written. It was almost an opera, just a wonderful emotional opera, with a little bit of "When You Wish Upon a Star" disguised inside some of the notes.
[music sneaks in: Superman - Main Theme]
Close Encounters wasn't as huge as Star Wars... But it was another big hit. And it wouldn't be John's last iconic score. In fact, he was just getting started.
[John Williams montage]
That's coming up, next time.
[music in: Jon Wandrini - Infinity and Beyond]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by my sound agency, Defacto Sound. Hear more at defacto sound dot com, or by following Defacto Sound on Instagram.
Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt.
Thanks to our guest, Tim Greiving. Tim's book is called John Williams: A Composer's Life. You can find it wherever books are sold, and there's also a link in the show notes.
Think of someone out there you know who would love the story of John Williams. Maybe they're a massive Star Wars fan, or just a film buff or musician. Then, tap the Share button on this episode, and send it to them.
Finally, if you'd like to see my face, and follow me around as I explore sound stories around the world, you can also find me on Youtube, Instagram, and Tiktok under the name dallastaylor dot mp3.
Thanks for listening.
[music fade out]
