Jaws: Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

John Williams's second collaboration with then-wunderkind director Steven Spielberg not only gave Hollywood one of its most indelible musical motifs--the rampaging shark's rhythmic, swelling two-note figure that's long since become a sonic archetype for terror--it won the composer his first scoring Oscar (he'd previously won for adapting Fiddler on the Roof) and arguably made him a film music superstar. Williams's oft-brooding score is one of the key elements of the film's gut-wrenching success, a shrewdly manipulative orchestral underpinning that evokes the idyll of a beach resort one bar, the horrors of being eaten alive the next. There are more motifs than melodies here, but as with Bernard Herrmann they evoke almost subliminal emotional responses, creating a masterfully menacing, brass-heavy concerto of surprising depth. Music for fly-fishing it isn't!