A young pianist at Juilliard listens to his peers and realizes he will never be the best performer in the room, so he pivots to composition and ends up engineering the emotional life of modern cinema. This episode follows John Towner Williams from his 1932 birth in New York as the son of jazz percussionist Johnny Williams, through UCLA, a 1951 stint in the United States Air Force arranging for military bands from Arizona to Newfoundland, and his very first film score, a 1952 Newfoundland tourist video. It then traces his apprenticeship as a Los Angeles session pianist and orchestrator under Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini, including playing piano on West Side Story and the Peter Gunn theme.

The conversation explores his first Academy Award for adapting Fiddler on the Roof, his disaster-movie scores, the Beverly Hills lunch where a very young Steven Spielberg hummed obscure film themes, and the two-note ostinato for Jaws that Spielberg initially thought was a prank. It covers the five-note conversation in Close Encounters, the Wagnerian leitmotifs that anchored Star Wars in 1977 against the synthesizer trends of the decade, his decade leading the Boston Pops, Olympic and news themes, concertos for cello, violin and tuba, and the solo violin of Schindler’s List, which he felt required a greater composer until Spielberg reminded him they were all dead. It closes with his reversed 2022 retirement, a planned thirtieth Spielberg collaboration, 54 Oscar nominations and an honorary knighthood.

• How arranging for tired soldiers under tight deadlines became a boot camp for functional creativity
• Why a session pianist’s seat was the ultimate postgraduate course in cinematic psychology
• How the Jaws theme mimics a heartbeat to bypass the brain and trigger the nervous system
• Why an unresolved final note let humans and aliens hold a conversation in Close Encounters
• How Williams carried the symphonic tradition into the 21st century for billions who never entered a concert hall