Score by John Williams · Dir. Steven Spielberg · 1975 · Oscar for Best Original Score
The most famous piece of film music ever written asks very little of the person playing it. It alternates two notes, E and F, low down, in a steady pulse. Played as a pair they sit a single semitone apart, the narrowest gap in Western music, and they rub against each other. Hans Zimmer, explaining the theme to Empire, put it like this:
Because these two notes, E and F, are so close together, they sort of clash.
Hans Zimmer, Empire
That is the whole trick, and it is why the music works on someone who has never studied any of it. A semitone is uneasy. Repeat it, give it a heavy, dark instrument (the theme is a tuba ostinato) and you have a sound that feels like machinery with no mind behind it.
The story, repeated in several accounts of the score, is that Williams played Spielberg just the two notes on a piano and Spielberg laughed, assuming it was a gag and expecting something more melodic. On piano it does sound silly. Played low and heavy by an orchestra, it does not. Williams has described the motif as relentless and "brainless", like the animal it stands for, and the idea survived because it did exactly that.
The clever part is not the notes but what Williams does with them. The theme gets faster and louder as the shark gets closer, and Williams has said it could be played very softly to suggest the shark is far away when all you see is water. Write-ups of the score also note that the theme is reserved for when the shark is really there: it is not used for the beach panic caused by a fake fin. The music is not mood. It is information.
Try it. Drag the shark toward the swimmer and listen, or watch, as the pulse climbs. This is a plain synthesizer sketch of the idea, not the recording, and the speeds are illustrative.
Press Sound on to hear it. The picture works without sound.
Move the slider and notice what you are doing: you are reading a distance from a tempo and a volume. That is how the film frightens people while barely showing the shark. The pulse says where it is.
There is a lesson here for anyone who writes music for pictures. A theme can be a gauge instead of a tune. Because the two notes carry no melody to get tired of, the film can bring them back again and again without fatigue, and because they speed up, the audience learns to feel the shark before it arrives. Zimmer called the score timeless, and said you can listen to it as a concert piece.
The recognition was immediate. The score won the Academy Award for Best Original Score at the 48th Academy Awards in March 1976, along with a Grammy and a BAFTA.
Do not stop at the title theme. Zimmer singles out "Shark Cage Fugue", which he describes as almost Bach-like. The complete score has been released several times, from the 1992 MCA selection through a 2000 Decca edition with previously unreleased music to a two-disc set from Intrada in 2015, so there is a cut for casual listeners and one for completists.
The two low notes are also the part that suffers first on small speakers. They live around the bottom of the range, where a phone or a cheap earbud gives up. A pair of closed over-ear headphones with decent bass response lets the pulse land in the chest, which is the idea.
The score is available on CD and from the main music services, although availability varies by country.