Lecture Date: January 27, 2026
The John and Linda Coker Lecture
John Williams is one of the most important film composers of all time, having almost singlehandedly revived the Hollywood symphonic scoring tradition and helped restore the livelihood of American orchestras through the popularity of film music programming. Williams wrote the memorable scores and hummable themes for a staggering number of popular touchstones across multiple generations—among them Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jaws, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, and Harry Potter—and earned more Oscar nominations than any individual artist in the history of the Motion Picture Academy. In John Williams: A Composer’s Life, the first biography of the composer, author Tim Greiving offers an engaging account of a man whose body of work is well-known but whose personal life has consistently remained very private.
Speaker: Tim Greiving
Tim Greiving is the author of John Williams: A Composer’s Life (Oxford University Press). He is an arts journalist and historian in Los Angeles who specializes in film music; he regularly writes for the Los Angeles Times, and has contributed to NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Criterion, and many other outlets. He has written program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Royal Albert Hall, and liner notes for more than a hundred soundtrack albums.