"Main Theme" from Jaws

The piece opens low in the orchestra, with basses and bassoons alternating between two notes, quiet at first, like a heartbeat starting to race. Williams keeps the pattern simple on purpose, so the ear locks onto it immediately. As the theme repeats, he raises the volume and adds more instruments, brass and strings piling on top of the pulsing bass line, and speeds up the tempo bit by bit, so the same two notes feel more urgent each time they return. This is the moment audiences wait for: the slow, mechanical crawl of that figure suggesting something approaching, unseen, from below. Partway through, the music breaks into a busier, more chaotic middle section, with jagged brass fanfares and scurrying woodwinds standing in for panic and attack. Then the opening pulse returns, now at full orchestral force, before the piece cuts off or winds down abruptly, mirroring the sudden, unresolved violence of the film's shark attacks. Listeners familiar with the movie will recognize this as the music that plays under the opening night swim, but in the concert hall, stripped of images, the theme works purely as an exercise in tension built from almost nothing: two notes, a rising volume, and a quickening pace.

Williams wrote this theme for Steven Spielberg's 1975 film Jaws, about a great white shark terrorizing a New England beach town. Spielberg has said that when he first heard Williams play the simple alternating two-note figure on piano, he assumed it was a joke, expecting something more elaborate, but came to see its effectiveness at suggesting an unseen predator. The score won Williams the Academy Award for best original score and helped establish the two-note motif as one of the most widely recognized pieces of film music. Since the movie's release, the theme has become a fixture of film-music and pops concerts, arranged for full orchestra as a standalone concert piece separate from its role underscoring the movie.