In the rolling-boulder scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the music must be loud, aggressive and immediate in order to cut through the din. Williams, “How do you write music for rolling boulders?” and he offered a playful one-word answer: “Hard!” Scoring action set pieces - the chases, escapes and fights - is extraordinarily difficult in a compositional sense.

In 1997 the film critic Gene Shalit asked Mr. Williams’s musical progress through the five “Indiana Jones” films has been a quest to find ever more innovative techniques for writing memorable music that will barely be heard. But to fully appreciate it, you have to turn off the visuals and just listen. At its best, it stands equally with not just the feats of directing and cinematography but also the greatest classical compositions. Composing for movies, often mischaracterized as auxiliary to the primary work of filmmaking, is an art form in its own right. I’ve come to see this classification as profoundly anti-music. Filmmakers and theorists extol a soundtrack’s so-called invisibility and inaudibility - the ability to augment the onscreen visuals without being intrusive. Traditionally, musicologists have tended to draw boundaries between the purist ideals of the classical canon and the functional world of the movie score. Yet the music, with its tonal range and depth of expression, enthralled me as completely as Dvorak or Stravinsky or Bach. The album was filled with intriguing-sounding titles like “Adventures on Earth” and “The Forest Battle.” I’d seen none of the films they came from.

I’ve been fascinated with film music since elementary school, when I got a cassette tape called “Kid Stuff: An Afternoon at the Movies,” which featured Mr.

You can probably whistle some of his famous anthems from memory: the heraldic fanfare from “Star Wars,” the soaring theme from “E.T.,” the gutsy (and slightly impertinent) march from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” But these melodies are just a small fraction of his contribution to audiences’ experiences of those films - and only hint at the complexity of writing music for the screen. He’s definitely the world’s most celebrated living film composer. John Williams may be America’s most famous living composer. Lehman is an associate professor of music at Tufts University.

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