Track Listing

1. Opening
2. Let There Be Light
3. Navy Planes
4. Lost Squadron
5. Roy's First Encounter
6. Encounter At Crescendo Summit
7. Chasing UFO's
8. False Alarm
9. Barry's Kidnapping
10. Cover Up
11. Stars And Trucks
12. Forming The Mountain
13. TV Reveals
14. Roy And Gillian On The Road
15. Mountain
16. Who Are The People
17. Escape
18. Trucking
19. Climbing The Mountain
20. Outstretch Hands
21. Lightshow
22. Barnstorming
23. Mothership
24. Returnees
25. Visitors/Bye/End Titles

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59520 in Music
• Released on: 1999-10-01
• Number of discs: 1
• Original language: English, French, Hindi, Spanish
• Running time: 77 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
With its vast, star-filled skies and pervading sense of imminence, Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) still ranks as one of the director's finest achievements. Longtime Spielberg advocates will remember this enchanting story about a series of UFO appearances that climaxes with a confrontation between man and an alien species. John Williams's music score, in tandem with his work on George Lucas's Star Wars, singlehandedly revived popular interest in symphonic film music in the 1970s. Released concurrently with Spielberg's 1998 "Collector's Edition" edit, this expanded, 77-minute release (from a brand new 20-bit digital master) offers 35 minutes of previously unreleased material, including cues not used in the film. In Close Encounters, Williams discarded the leitmotif approach of Star Wars in favour of a developmental score progressing from pure atonality to a breathtakingly romantic conclusion. In between, the composer offers a myriad of textures, motifs and themes that illuminate Spielberg's visionary magic and childlike spirit. Whether it be several moments of orchestral turbulence, a sprightly eight-note "travel" motif, or the haunting secondary themes, Williams's tone poem is both mysterious and inspiring. When the aliens and mankind finally converge, the composer allows the disparate cultures to communicate through the universal language of music, resulting in one of the most famous instances of "overlapping dialogue" in film history. Spielberg structured the final act of the film to fit the composer's score, a rare case where the editing was dictated by the music. Williams's dramatic submersion is so complete that the finished score stands on its own as a substantial, self-contained symphonic work, one of the finest written in the 1970s. --Kevin Mulhall

Customer Reviews

A very good overall package that some will find too long.
This re-release of Williams' memorable score to Close Encounters has finally been given the expansion a score of this scale deserves. Here you will find every note composed for the film in chronological order. The only setback is that compared to the first release where we were presented suites and themes, here we are given the real "avant-garde" experience which some listeners may find hard to get through.

John Williams stole the theme
Not a bar in John Williams's oevre was written by himself. He stole it all. For this one, have a listen to Sibelius, Symphony number 7 in C (opus 105). A great Sibelius collection is available at Amazon.

A Absolute Classic
Sorry, but I'm not sure what on earth the previous reviewer is talking about - or indeed what they was expecting from this album. Not the Synth album?? This is the film's original soundtrack as the music appears in the film, albeit in extended form from versions previously released - and it's an absolute classic of film scoring by John Williams, one of the greatest film composers in the history of film. There is little else I can say really, other than sheer brilliance.