John Williams, Cinema is Music

A few notes are enough to recognise the shark’s approach in Spielberg’s film. The same is true of the Star Wars fanfare, Indiana Jones’s Raiders March or Harry Potter’s Hedwig’s Theme: music written to accompany images that has since become part of popular culture. On Saturday 31 October 2026, London’s Royal Albert Hall will devote two performances to John Williams with Maestro of the Movies: John Williams. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Stephen Bell, will perform some of the American composer’s best-known film scores. Born in New York in 1932, Williams has written music for more than one hundred films over a career spanning more than sixty years. His name is particularly associated with his long collaboration with Steven Spielberg, which began in the 1970s: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and the Indiana Jones films are among the works that emerged from their partnership. For George Lucas, he composed the scores for the Star Wars saga, while in the early 2000s he wrote the music for the first three Harry Potter films. He has won five Academy Awards, for Fiddler on the Roof, Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. and Schindler’s List. Williams brought the large symphony orchestra back to the centre of American film music, making extensive use of recurring themes associated with characters, places and situations. His writing draws on the European symphonic tradition and classical Hollywood cinema, while also accompanying the development of the blockbuster from the mid-1970s onwards. His scores often function as part of the narrative: anticipating danger, identifying a character or immediately establishing the tone of a scene. His career has also extended beyond film studios. From 1980 to 1993 he conducted the Boston Pops Orchestra and has written concert works as well as music for major public occasions. The longevity of his career is also reflected in his recent Academy Award nominations for The Fabelmans in 2023 and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2024. At the Royal Albert Hall, Williams’s repertoire returns to the form for which it was written: the large symphony orchestra. Without the films on screen, what remains are themes and musical structures that have also occupied a place in concert halls for decades.