The Jaws soundtrack (officially Jaws: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the music composed and conducted by John Williams and performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony for Steven Spielberg's 1975 film Jaws. The soundtrack is particularly notable for the 2-note ostinato which represents the shark, a theme so simple that Spielberg initially thought it was a joke by the composer.
The film score was recorded in March 1975 at 20th Century Fox Studios and Universal. Williams then expanded and rearranged the cues for the commercial release to provide a more cohesive listening experience. The soundtrack album was released on LP by MCA in 1975, reaching number 32 on the Billboard charts in September 1975. There have been several other re-releases, including re-recordings and anniversary expanded editions featuring alternate takes and source material.
The soundtrack was critically well received, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Score, the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. In addition, it was ranked the sixth greatest score by the American Film Institute. The score has been the subject of scholarly discussion in relation to the tradition of classical Hollywood scoring, and its role in creating space in the film.
Development
John Williams had previously scored Steven Spielberg's debut feature, The Sugarland Express, and he would go on to collaborate with the director on almost all of his subsequent films. Spielberg had used Williams' title theme from Robert Altman's 1972 psychological horror film Images as a temp track during the editing of Jaws. When Williams first demonstrated his idea to Spielberg, playing just the two notes on a piano, Spielberg was said to have laughed, thinking that it was a joke as he was expecting a more "melodic" tune. Williams responded, explaining "the sophisticated approach you would like me to take isn't the approach you took with the film I just experienced." After hearing the notes played again and at different speeds, Spielberg agreed, saying that "sometimes the best ideas are the most simple ones" and that the composer "had found a signature for the entire score." The main "shark" theme is an ostinato, a simple alternating pattern between E and F,Some sources cite that the notes are E/F (; ; ), while another argues that the notes are between "F and F sharp" () with an ascending minor second in the low strings.
The ostinato became a classic piece of suspense music, synonymous with approaching danger (see leading-tone). Williams described the theme as "grinding away at you, just as a shark would do, instinctual, relentless, unstoppable." Elaborating on the simplicity, Williams said that he felt that the motif should be "brainless... like the shark." Williams recognised the "primal, but fun and entertaining" similarities between Jaws and pirate movies, which inspired him to evoke "pirate music" within the score. The primal opening notes are developed from the opening foreboding tone of Ravel's La valse. Calling for rapid, percussive string playing, the score also contains echoes of Debussy's La mer, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and the opening of the 4th movement of Dvořák's New World Symphony.
Recording
Recording the film score for Jaws started on March 3, 1975. A large stage was required to accommodate a full orchestra; as Universal's stages were unavailable, the first two days were recorded at the Fox Scoring Stage in Los Angeles. The film's producer, Richard D. Zanuck secretly watched a recording session from the sidelines. Grammy-award winning Theodore Keep was the sound engineer, and musicians included guitarist Tommy Tedesco, trumpet player Malcolm McNab and percussionists Shelly Manne and Emil Richards. The main ostinato was performed by tuba player Tommy Johnson. When asked by Johnson why the melody was written in such a high register and not played by the more appropriate French horn, Williams explained that he wanted it to sound "a little more threatening".
On March 5, recording moved to Stage 10 at Universal Studios because it was more appropriate for "stringless" (percussion, tuba, and brass, etc.) recording for the diegetic music played by the Amity marching band early in the film, including tunes by Scott Joplin, Johann Strauss II alongside original compositions by Williams. Because the town band was meant to sound like amateur musicians, Spielberg himself was enlisted to play clarinet slightly out of tune to give an amateur feel.
When test audiences commended the music on comment cards at the previews of the film in Dallas, Texas and Long Beach, California (on March 26 and 28 respectively), it was decided to produce a soundtrack album. As with Williams' usual preference for rearranging and re-recording his soundtracks for a commercial album release, he developed some of the Jaws cues to "make a more cohesive listening experience, so... he expanded and rearranged the highlights of the Jaws score for album presentation." Those tracks were recorded on April 17–18, 1975 at The Burbank Studios in California. In the booklet supplied with the 50th anniversary release, Mike Matessino outlines the differences between the two recordings, such as combining cues to create a symphonic piece, and bringing the End Title to a more "satisfying ending". For example, the music in the beach montage sequence lasts for 1:30 in the film, whereas it is expanded to 2:46 on the soundtrack album.
Reception
Reviews
The original soundtrack album reached number 32 on the Billboard chart in September 1975. Writing for Empire, Ian Freer called the short length of the original 1975 soundtrack album ("a paltry 35 minutes") as "one of the most heinous crimes in the history of motion picture soundtrack albums." In a five-star review of the 2000 Decca Records release, Freer highlights the inclusion of previously unreleased material, the liner notes from Spielberg and Williams, commending this collector's edition as "the last word in Jaws musicology."
Although Filmtracks acknowledges the role of the music within the context of the film, and its place in "the history of film music", it is less positive about it in album form. They write, "Jaws is not something you can sit and listen to for any great length of time. Study and admire its constructs and intelligent application, but don't expect it to freely entertain without forcing you into a more contemplative analysis of its purpose."
Awards and accolades
John Williams won several awards for the Jaws soundtrack. In March 1976, he won a GRAMMY, a BAFTA, and the Academy Award for Best Original Score. The score won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score at the 33rd Golden Globe Awards.
In 2005, the American Film Institute ranked Jaws sixth in its 100 Years of Film Scores, a list of the top 25 film scores in American cinema.
Scholarly analysis There are various interpretations of the meaning and effectiveness of the primary music theme, which is widely described as one of the most recognizable cinematic themes of all time. Music scholar Joseph Cancellaro proposes that the two-note expression mimics the shark's heartbeat. According to Alexandre Tylski, the shark theme suggests human respiration, comparable to the themes Bernard Herrmann which wrote for Taxi Driver, North by Northwest and Mysterious Island. Tylski further argues that the score's strongest motif is actually "the split, the rupture"—when it dramatically cuts off, as after Chrissie's death. The relationship between sound and silence is also taken advantage of in the way the audience is conditioned to associate the shark with its theme, which is exploited toward the film's climax when the shark suddenly appears with no musical introduction.
Music scholar Emilio Audissino writes, "Williams came up with the primitive rhythmic simplicity of an ostinato... those three repeated bass notes recall the heartbeat, the primordial rhythm of life. Their seemingly unstoppable constant and mechanical repetition effectively represents the shark." In the film, ostinato represents the shark. Audissino points out that Williams "plays fair" by only using the leitmotif when the shark is genuinely present; for instance, it is not used in the panic sequence on the beach which transpires to have been caused by boys with a fake fin. The leitmotif's adaptable tempo is an example of Mickey Mousing, whereby the music replicates the action on, and in this case off, screen. Audissino also highlights that the score reflects the contrasting worlds of humans and the shark. The humans, "lit by the sun", are represented by melodies with "bright tibres of violins, flutes and trumpets", whereas the shark's music is "low pitched, mechanical, with dark timbre".
Legacy Spielberg later said that without Williams's score the film would have been only half as successful. Similar to the film, the music influenced perceptions of sharks, with some scholars claiming that such perceptions can compromise shark conservation efforts. Film composers including M. M. Keeravani and Anna Meredith have also cited the simplicity of the Jaws theme as an inspiration upon their own work.
Although he had previously won an Academy Award for Fiddler on the Roof, Williams says that the film 'jump-started' his career. Williams went on to work on the film's sequel, Jaws 2. Although the bulk of the score for Jaws 2 was original, Williams retained the shark's motif, which he says is in "the great tradition" for repeating musical themes in Hollywood serials such as Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger. Alan Parker and Michael Small incorporated the main shark theme into both of their scores for Jaws 3-D and Jaws The Revenge respectively, with due credit to Williams. I.Q. Hunter highlights Small's score for Jaws The Revenge as "effective variations on John Williams’ classic theme".
The shark theme has become highly recognizable. As scholar Amanda Howell says, "the widely reproduced and widely recognised leitmotif ... ultimately achieved a life of its own beyond the haunted waters of the film -- and well past the classical score's aesthetic of audibility." It has been used in several other films for comic effect. Spielberg himself used it in a sequence in his comedy 1941, which spoofed the opening scene of Jaws, with actor Susan Backlinie being attacked by a submarine. It is also used in the opening of the comedy Airplane!, when it transpires that what appears to be a shark's fin is the tail fin of an airplane. The Spielberg-produced Back to the Future Part II uses the theme in a sequence set in the then-future 2015, when Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) comes across a cinema showing Jaws 19. The animated films Finding Nemo and Shark Tale both use the music, often as part of a comment, Matthew Lerberg argues, about restoring the negative representation of Great Whites created by Spielberg's film. Characters in Finding Nemo hum the theme for Bruce the shark, while Shark Tale opens with Williams' theme.
Releases The original soundtrack for Jaws was released by MCA Records on LP in 1975, and as a CD in 1992, including roughly a half hour of music that Williams reimagined for the album. In 2000, two versions of the score were released. Decca/Universal reissued the soundtrack album to coincide with the release of the 25th-anniversary DVD, featuring the 51 minutes of the original score with a new stereo mix, derived from the surviving three-track film masters with the application of surround reverb and noise reduction to eliminate defects. Varèse Sarabande also released a rerecording of the score performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Joel McNeely.