BMI president & CEO Mike O’Neill, honoree John Williams and BMI VP creative Doreen Ringer-Ross onstage at the 34th Annual BMI Film, TV & Visual Media Awards. (Photo: Lester Cohen / Getty Images

Composer John Williams’ acceptance of an inaugural BMI award named in his honor was the high note in an evening of historic proportions as BMI celebrated 79 years of service at the 34th Annual BMI Film, TV & Visual Media Awards. The event drew about 500 attendees to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills Wednesday night, May 9.

Williams took to the stage as members of the audience raised multi-colored light sabers — a nod to the composer’s memorable contributions to the Star Wars film series. Earlier this year Williams earned his 51st Academy Award nomination for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, making him the most Oscar-nominated living person. (He has won five times, for Star Wars, Jaws, E.T., Fiddler on the Roof and Schindler’s List.) He has scored over 100 film and television projects.

Williams accepted his award from BMI president and CEO Mike O’Neill and BMI VP creative, film TV & visual media Doreen Ringer-Ross.  Visibly moved, the 86-year-old cinematic legend humbly admitted “A tribute like this is something I could never feel that I would merit.” Crediting his “good fortune” to “parents, teachers, role models and family,” he ran down a list of colleagues whose confidence in the young New Yorker’s then-nascent abilities made all the difference in launching his stellar career.

Reeling off a who’s who of legendary Hollywood composer/conductors, Williams tipped his baton to Stanley Wilson, longtime head of Universal Television’s music department; composer Alfred Newman, who had a 20-year run as head of music for Twentieth Century Fox, and his brother Lionel Newman, also a composer, who headed both film and television music for Fox; Conrad Salinger, who orchestrated more than 75 films from 1931 to 1962 and was a mentor; Bernard Herrmann, known for his many collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock; Andre Previn “all people who seemed to have a lot more faith in me that I had in myself.”

Williams, who relocated with his family from Queens, New York, to Los Angeles when he was in high school, attended UCLA and played in a jazz band before breaking into show biz. He reminisced about his professional start, when in 1960 he got work at Universal television under Wilson, who had a long hallway of small windowless offices, each of which had a piano. “In any given day, I’d be in one of those rooms, Jerry Goldsmith could be in the next room, Lalo Schifren in the next room, Quincy Jones in the next one, Morty Stevens, also Conrad Salinger — who I love; some of you remember him — and Bernard Herrmann, who made Universal his home for many years, and wrote some great music and drove everybody crazy.”

Describing it as “a situation where taught each other and learned from each other and contributed to a group effort to what each one of us was able to accomplish,” Williams also extended his gratitude to BMI, “a protector and a catalyst for music.” As to music itself, the maestro called it “a gift to us,” admitting “it’s idealistic to think that what we do is not about our careers, it’s about our service to music and its tremendous literature for which a lifetime isn’t long enough to study and read.”

Although Williams has scored some art films (Seven Years in Tibet, ) and many A-list blockbusters  (Jurrasic Park, Indiana Jones, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Saving Private Ryan), like so many others coming of age in Hollywood in the late ’50s, he got his start in B-movies and television. His first feature as a composer was in 1958, for AIP’s drag-racing teen crime drama Daddy-O. In 1964 and ’65, respectively, he wrote the theme songs to Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space, scoring many seasons of both shows. 

Throughout the evening, BMI honored notable composers for music featured in the past year’s top-grossing films, top-rated primetime network television series and highest-ranking cable and streamed media programs. Among them, Christopher Lennertz, who though he was being recognized for the feature films Pitch Perfect 3, A Bad Moms Christmas and Baywatch, has also been scoring Netflix’s reboot of Lost in Space. Lennertz admits he had his own ideas for how to update the music, but said Williams original theme “was definitely something I wanted to honor. I’m a huge fan, so I wanted to do right by John Williams and bring some of that love back in. He’s my hero,” Lennertz told MaxTheTrax on his way into the event. “We got to go to Abby Road and record in London, and it was really special.” (See for complete list of winners.)

Earlier in the evening, award-winning composers Laura Karpman, Miriam Cutler and Lolita Ritmanis received the BMI Champion Award for their commitment to supporting fellow women media composers through The Alliance of Women Film Composers, which they founded in 2014. Composer Rick Baitz was also presented with BMI’s Classic Contribution Award in appreciation for creating and leading BMI’s successful “Composing for the Screen” workshop for the past ten years.

Williams was previously honored with The Kirk Award in 1999, which later became the BMI Icon Award. Since then, the award-winning composer has created an equally impressive catalog of scores for acclaimed films such as the first three Harry Potter films, Memoirs of a Geisha and Lincoln, among others, while continuing to score the Star Wars series, including the forthcoming Star Wars Episode 9. In his unparalleled and illustrious career that spans more than six decades, John Williams has in addition to his Oscar honors received 5 Emmy Awards, 4 Golden Globe Awards, 24 GRAMMYs, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 2016. Other notable honors include the National Medal of Arts (2009), Kennedy Center Honor (December 2004) and Olympic Order (2003).

Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) was founded in 1939 to provide music rights management to songwriters, composers, music publishers and businesses. The non-profit represents the public performance rights for nearly 13 million musical works created and owned by more than 800,000 songwriters, composers, and music publishers. The Company negotiates music license agreements and distributes the fees it generates as royalties to its affiliated writers and publishers when their songs are performed in public.

In 1939, BMI created a groundbreaking open-door policy becoming the only performing rights organization to welcome and represent the creators of blues, jazz, country, and American roots music. Today, the musical compositions in BMI’s repertoire, from chart toppers to perennial favorites, span all genres of music and are consistently among the most-performed hits of the year.