John Williams Trivia
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50 free John Williams trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This John Williams trivia quiz covers the composer of the most famous film scores in history, from his jazz-drummer father in Queens to his honorary knighthood at 90. The early questions deal with his Air Force years, his piano lessons at Juilliard, his session work for Mancini and Bernstein, his television themes for Lost in Space and Gilligan's Island, and the disaster movies that made his name in the early 1970s. The heart of the quiz is the great collaborations: the lunch with a 'seventeen-year-old kid' named Spielberg, the two notes that made Spielberg laugh, the five-note signal of Close Encounters, the Raiders March, E.T., Jurassic Park and the score he thought he was not good enough to write for Schindler's List; then Star Wars and its Holst and Korngold roots, the Imperial March, Superman's three-note motif, Hedwig's Theme, NBC's 'The Mission' and the Olympic fanfares. The last questions cover the Boston Pops, the concertos for Yo-Yo Ma and Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Obama inauguration piece, the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic debuts, and the awards, including 54 Oscar nominations, second only to Walt Disney. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Williams and his best-known scores.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01John Williams calls himself 'a dinosaur' partly because he writes every film score how?
With pencil and paper
With pencil and paper, the old-fashioned way: unlike younger colleagues he uses no software and records no keyboard demos for his directors to hear.
Q 02Bernard Herrmann said John Williams's father 'isn't afraid to break the head' of what?
Drums
Drums: his father was a jazz drummer in the Raymond Scott Quintette who later played timpani for Herrmann, and the young Williams sometimes joined him at rehearsals.
Q 03Williams earned Oscar nominations for the score and the carol-like song 'Somewhere in My Memory' from which Christmas comedy?
Home Alone
Home Alone let the composer of Jaws swap menace for joyful carols; the score and its song, with words by Leslie Bricusse, were each nominated for an Academy Award.
Q 04Which fellow student, a future Tchaikovsky Competition winner, made Williams think he'd 'better be a composer'?
Van Cliburn
Van Cliburn and John Browning shared his New York teacher, Rosina Lhévinne; hearing them around the place, he thought, 'If that's the competition, I think I'd better be a composer!'
Q 05Williams played the piano riff in Henry Mancini's famous title theme for which television detective series?
Peter Gunn
Peter Gunn's driving riff was played by a jobbing studio pianist named Williams, who was also at the keyboard on the soundtrack of the film West Side Story.
Q 06Under what first name was Williams credited on his early jazz albums and television scores?
Johnny
Johnny Williams was his professional name until the late 1960s, and it stuck with friends: Steven Spielberg in 2009 and producer Kathleen Kennedy in 2016 both called him Johnny in interviews.
Q 07Williams scored Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel for which producer, later Hollywood's 'Master of Disaster'?
Irwin Allen
Irwin Allen moved from sci-fi television to disaster films and Williams went with him: his scores for The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno both earned Oscar nominations.
Q 08Williams's first Academy Award nomination came for which 1967 film?
Valley of the Dolls
Valley of the Dolls put him on the Oscar ballot as an adapter, not a composer: the category was for scoring other people's music, here the songs of André and Dory Previn.
Q 09Williams's first Oscar was for adapting the score of which 1971 musical?
Fiddler on the Roof
Fiddler on the Roof won him the adaptation Oscar for bringing Jerry Bock's Broadway songs to the screen, which irritated the composer Bernard Herrmann: 'Write your own music,' he told him.
Q 10Which film, released the year before Jaws, was Williams's first with the director he recalled as 'this seventeen-year-old kid'?
The Sugarland Express
The Sugarland Express began with a studio-arranged lunch in a fancy Beverly Hills restaurant, where Williams found that the young Steven Spielberg 'knew more about film music than I did'.
Q 11How did Spielberg react when Williams first played him the two-note Jaws theme on the piano?
He thought it was a joke
He thought it was a joke when two notes were picked out on a piano. He later credited the score with half of the film's success.
Q 12Why does music stand in for the shark through much of Jaws?
The model kept failing
The model kept failing: the mechanical shark broke down so often that Spielberg mostly suggested the beast and let Williams's two notes announce it.
Q 13Which 1972 Robert Altman thriller did Williams score with eerie avant-garde effects for piano, percussion and strings?
Images
Q 21Which music producer scored and co-produced The Color Purple, one of the few Spielberg features Williams did not score?
Quincy Jones
Quincy Jones, the producer behind Michael Jackson's Thriller, made his film-producing debut here as well as scoring it; the film went to the Oscars with eleven nominations, one for his score, and won none.
Q 22Williams wrote his Schindler's List score in the same year as which blockbuster for the same director?
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park and Schindler's List both reached cinemas in 1993, so within months he went from soaring dinosaur fanfares to a grieving violin theme; the two scores, one guide says, couldn't be more different.
Q 23Which theme did Williams introduce in The Empire Strikes Back for Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire?
Images is the score he brought up when asked in 2020 for a lesser-known favourite: had he never worked in film, he said, his concert music 'might have been in this vein'.
Q 14How many notes make up the famous alien communication motif in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?
Five
Five notes and no more, the director insisted, because a longer phrase would be a melody and not a signal; Williams wrote more than 300 candidates before the two settled on one.
Q 15What did Williams call the theme he wrote for Indiana Jones in the hero's first film?
The Raiders March
The Raiders March is really two tunes: Williams played Spielberg two candidate themes, the director asked for both, and one became the main theme and the other its bridge.
Q 16Spielberg so liked Williams's music for E.T.'s final chase that he did what?
Re-edited the film to match the score
Re-edited the film to match the score, as Williams tells it; Spielberg has said he will sometimes run to the editing room to adjust a cut to the music. E.T. won Williams his fourth Oscar.
Q 17When Williams said Spielberg needed 'a better composer' for Schindler's List, what did Spielberg reply?
'I know, but they're all dead'
'I know, but they're all dead' was said very sweetly, Williams recalls: the rough cut had left him too choked up to speak, and he paced the room for minutes before suggesting someone better.
Q 18Which violinist performs the main theme of Schindler's List?
Itzhak Perlman
Itzhak Perlman was the soloist Williams hired for the film's heartbreakingly simple theme, at the director's suggestion by one account; the score brought the composer his fifth Oscar.
Q 19For which Spielberg film did Williams write a national anthem for the fictional country of Krakozhia?
The Terminal
The Terminal strands Tom Hanks's traveller in a New York airport after a coup back home in Krakozhia voids his passport; Williams gave the invented nation a suitably pompous anthem.
Q 20Which animated feature was the first one Williams scored?
The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin was a first in animation for composer and director alike; Steven Spielberg had come to the comics only after a review compared his first Indiana Jones film to them.
The Imperial March
The Imperial March is nowhere in the 1977 original: Williams did not think of it until he was scoring the sequel, so Darth Vader spent his whole first film without his famous tune.
Q 24In his Rise of Skywalker cameo, Williams plays a bartender whose name is an anagram of what?
Maestro
Maestro, rearranged, gives Oma Tres, the name the credits give the silent barman of Kijimi, played by the composer behind a mechanical eyepatch; the shelves behind him are dressed with nods to his earlier films.
Q 25Which ensemble recorded Williams's score for George Lucas's original 1977 space opera?
The London Symphony Orchestra
The London Symphony Orchestra's trumpeter Maurice Murphy joined on the first day of recording, and the first thing he played was the opening fanfare's high C; the players roared when he hit it.
Q 26Richard Donner said the three-note motif in the theme of his 1978 Man of Steel epic evoked what?
The word 'Superman'
The word 'Superman' fits the fanfare's three punched notes, SU-per-MAN; asked decades later whether there was anything in the director's theory, Williams replied, 'There's everything to that.'
Q 27Williams scored which 1976 caper about a fake psychic hunting a missing heir, Alfred Hitchcock's final film?
Family Plot
Family Plot came a year after Jaws; when Williams remarked that gloomy music seemed right for a murder, Hitchcock replied, 'Mr. Williams, murder can be fun.'
Q 28Which American news programme took Williams's orchestral suite The Mission as its theme in 1985?
NBC Nightly News
NBC Nightly News first played it on 9 September 1985, and other movements went to Today and Meet the Press; the network wanted an orchestral sound to stand apart from the synthesised news themes of the day.
Q 29Williams scored only the first three films of which series?
Harry Potter
Harry Potter kept his music long after he left: Hedwig's Theme, written for the first film, runs through all eight, reworked by the three composers who followed him.
Q 30Hedwig's Theme opens on which bell-like instrument, playing alone before the orchestra joins?
Celesta
Celesta carries the tune by itself at the start; Williams wrote the theme as promotional music before he was hired, the studio's test of whether he suited the film.