A Musical Analysis
John Williams
and His Music for
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
How a score became the soul of a film
I. Composer Profile
The Making of a Master
John Towner Williams was born on February 8, 1932 in New York, the son of a percussionist who played with the CBS Radio Orchestra and the Raymond Scott Quintette. A gifted multi-instrumentalist, Williams ultimately committed to the piano and dreamt of a career as a concert pianist, studying under Rosina Lhevinne at Juilliard — where Van Cliburn was his classmate — while simultaneously playing jazz in New York clubs.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1956, he joined the Columbia Pictures orchestra as a pianist, working alongside giants including Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, and Jerry Goldsmith. His 1969 score for The Reivers caught the ear of a young Steven Spielberg, who vowed to have Williams write music for all his films. Beginning with Sugarland Express in 1974, the collaboration proved to be the greatest director-composer partnership in cinema history.
"While E.T.'s powers may have lifted the bicycle into the sky, the magic of John Williams' music made it soar."
Nominations
Won
Won
Scored
Williams is credited with resurrecting the symphonic tradition of Hollywood's Golden Age after studios had abandoned it in favor of popular music. His score for Star Wars (1977) proved that Romantic-era orchestral storytelling remained deeply potent — and made him the dominant voice in film music for decades.
II. The Film
E.T. — An Intimate Universe
Released on June 11, 1982, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is widely considered Spielberg's most personal film. The script, by Melissa Mathison, grew from Spielberg's own feelings of loneliness on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark — he imagined what it would be like to have an imaginary alien friend as a child. The result became the highest-grossing film up to that point, earning $11.8 million on its opening weekend alone.
Where Close Encounters of the Third Kind depicted alien contact on a planetary scale, E.T. narrows the lens to a single suburban bedroom — one boy, one alien, and the fierce love that forms between them. Spielberg's deliberate choice to hide adult faces throughout much of the film keeps the story anchored in a child's perspective, with Keys (Peter Coyote) remaining faceless until he physically invades the children's world.
Award Sweep
One of only six scores to win all four major awards
- Academy Award
- Golden Globe
- BAFTA
- Grammy
- 7 Total Awards
- #14 AFI Film Scores
The music was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with orchestrations by Williams' long-time collaborator Herbert W. Spencer. The score won Williams his fourth Academy Award and stands as one of the finest achievements in the genre.
III. Leitmotifs
The Language of Themes
Williams structures the entire score around a web of leitmotifs that guide the audience's emotional understanding. Since much of the film contains minimal dialogue, the music bears the weight of communicating characters' inner lives. Three unifying characteristics bind the thematic material together:
Theme I
E.T.'s Theme
Written in the Lydian mode with a raised 4th scale degree that conjures mystery and wonder. Gentle, childlike, and searching — as quiet and strange as E.T. himself.
Solo PiccoloTheme II
Aliens' Theme
A long, wandering melody played across multiple octaves with a gently shifting bass. Large leaps and unrelated harmonic shifts create the music's otherworldly character.
Strings, Winds, Horns, OrganTheme III
Keys' Theme
Menacing and rhythmically propulsive, reminiscent of the Imperial March. A G minor to E♭ minor mediant shift marks the arrival of danger into the children's world.
Bassoons & Bass ClarinetsTheme IV
Friendship Theme
Developing organically from E.T.'s Theme, this leitmotif blooms when Elliot and E.T. first genuinely connect. Its sparse orchestration mirrors the intimacy of their bond.
Solo Harp or CelestaTheme V
The Flying Theme
The score's crown jewel. Planted as a mere four-bar fragment early in the film, it grows cue by cue until the bicycle lifts into the moonlit sky and the full orchestra delivers its transcendent declaration.
Full Orchestra — ABA FormTheme VI
Bicycle Theme(s)
Two contrasting figures: Theme 1 is energetic and syncopated in 6/8, capturing the thrill of childhood movement. Theme 2 is lyrical and yearning, full of large leaps and Lydian color.
Winds & StringsTheme VII
Farewell Theme
Born in the film's final sequence, this new theme weaves fragments of Bicycle Theme 2 and the Flying Theme into a sweeping farewell — melodic leaps that surge like a 19th-century opera aria.
Strings — CounterpointTheme VIII
Drunken Theme
A comic set piece that shares the Lydian mode and perfect-5th span of the main themes, beginning gently before becoming a lumbering, lurching portrait of growing intoxication.
Winds & Sliding StringsIV. Cue-by-Cue Analysis
Music Meets Narrative
Williams threads the leitmotifs through a continuous dramatic arc. The selected cues below trace the score's emotional journey from mystery and wonder through loss, resurrection, and transcendent farewell.
0:00 – 1:07
"Main Titles"
No traditional music — only the metallic groan of a superball rubbed on a tam-tam. This avant-garde extended technique, rare outside 20th-century concert music, creates an unearthly ambiguity. It sets an intimate, rather than bombastic, opening for a film that is ultimately a small, personal story.
1:09 – 7:52
"Far From Home / E.T. Alone"
Williams introduces four leitmotifs in quick succession: E.T.'s Theme on solo piccolo, the Aliens' Theme as the spaceship comes into view, and Keys' Theme as the government agents invade the forest. Racing strings, blaring brass, and pounding timpani underscore the chase before the ship abandons E.T. and the orchestra reduces back to a solo piccolo — intimate and lonely.
22:46 – 25:17
"The Beginning of a Friendship"
When Elliot rubs his nose and E.T. imitates the gesture, a solo harp begins the Friendship Theme — emerging directly from E.T.'s Theme via the interval of a perfect 5th. Williams captures the gentleness of two beings learning to trust each other with chamber-like restraint; it's not until they grow drowsy that the strings enter, sliding lazily downward in cadential figures that evoke the physical sensation of sleep.
45:59 – 48:47
"E.T. and Elliot Get Drunk"
One of the score's comic masterpieces. The Drunken Theme Mickey-Mouses E.T.'s waddling steps with muted brass and bassoon, while the strings slide lethargically lower each time Elliot — drunk in sympathy — loses his composure. Williams manages to write music that serves the physical comedy frame-by-frame while remaining a cohesive and genuinely funny piece of music in its own right.
1:05:22 – 1:08:12
"The Magic of Halloween" / First Flight
Yoda's Theme — in the Lydian mode and thus a natural fit — bridges into a long modulatory sequence built on the Flying Theme's unstable B-section material. This is Williams at his most architecturally cunning: by making the audience familiar with the fragmentary, searching part of the theme, the eventual arrival of the full A-section by the entire orchestra — as the bicycles lift into the moon — becomes overwhelmingly satisfying.
1:30:07 – 1:32:05
"Losing E.T."
A mournful elegy, reminiscent of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, accompanies the doctors' desperate attempts to revive E.T. When defibrillator shocks jolt E.T.'s body, the low strings drop away entirely — our own hearts skip with the gesture. A solo trumpet carries the melody over the extreme registers of the string section before the music fades to nothing as the doctors declare him dead.
1:38:57 – 1:53:45
"Escape / Chase / Saying Goodbye"
Fifteen minutes of near-continuous music. Williams was unable to sync every hit mechanically while still getting a musically satisfying performance. Spielberg's solution was remarkable: "Forget the movie and conduct the orchestra the way you would want to conduct it in a concert." The final cut of the film was then re-edited to match the music — an almost unheard-of inversion of the normal film-scoring process, and a testament to how completely the music became the scene.
Legacy
The score for E.T. exemplifies Williams' philosophy that music should be a character in the film. The Flying Theme, born as four unremarkable bars heard briefly during a scene with toy cars, became one of the most recognized pieces of music of the 20th century. Its gradual architectural unfolding — hinting, building, withholding, and finally delivering — is a masterclass in dramatic scoring that remains a benchmark for every film composer who followed.