John Williams

Seven decades in, John Williams has written more music that people can hum than any other film composer alive. The technique underneath it is less obvious than the tunes suggest: romanticism and impressionism sitting alongside genuinely atonal writing, all of it carried by orchestration dense enough to reward a fiftieth listen.

Two partnerships did most of it. For Steven Spielberg he wrote two notes that emptied beaches, and for George Lucas he wrote a fanfare that made a 1977 space adventure feel as though it had a century of history behind it. The Star Wars scores are the clearest statement of his method, which is leitmotif used the way Wagner used it: a character gets a theme, the theme changes as the character does, and an audience learns to read music it does not know it is reading.

The numbers are absurd. Twenty-seven Grammy Awards, five Academy Awards, seven BAFTAs, three Emmys, four Golden Globes, and fifty-four Oscar nominations, second only to Walt Disney across the history of the award. One of those nominations arrived at ninety-one, making him the oldest nominee in any category.

This page carries both sides of the record: the soundtrack albums, and the long line of documentaries in which he turns up as a talking head explaining, patiently, how it was done.