At 94, John Williams spent the better part of half a year assembling the music for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, recording with a 96‑player orchestra across seven sessions that began Sept. 11, 2025, and finished on Feb. 20, 2026. Sources who worked on the sessions say Williams—sometimes seated, sometimes standing—wrote through last summer and then guided the music in the studio in a process stretched out by design rather than necessity.
The scale is striking: this was Williams’ 30th score for Spielberg, and the schedule was unusually spare for a major picture. After the Sept. 11 opener at Sony in the “John Williams Music Building,” the team returned twice in October, twice in December, once in January 2026 and for a final session on Feb. 20. Spielberg had a 96‑player orchestra assembled for the dates and scheduled the sessions with a flexibility that suppliers and musicians said was deliberate, not accidental.
Credits list the score as orchestrated and conducted by Williams, William Ross and Randy Kerber. But people close to Williams say he orchestrated the entire score and conducted much of it himself, a fact that underlines how hands‑on he remained even as health issues limited other parts of his life. Williams is no longer doing press interviews, has faced unspecified health challenges over the last two years and is now only seen in public in a wheelchair, yet those who attended the sessions described him as engaged and directing the music in fine detail.
That Williams was the chosen composer for Disclosure Day matters beyond the numbers because it speaks to a working relationship that began in 1974, when the two first collaborated on The Sugarland Express. Over five decades, Williams has become the musical voice of many of Spielberg’s films; this project joins a line that includes blockbusters, intimate dramas and, most recently, The Fabelmans, which Williams hinted might have been a swansong three years ago.
The friction in this story comes from what Williams himself did before agreeing to score Disclosure Day: he suggested four other composers as possible successors. Spielberg, however, pushed to keep Williams on the project, arranging an unusually loose recording timetable and, sources say, making it plain he wanted Williams’ music. The director has already spoken to Williams about doing a 31st film together—a conversation that undercuts the idea that Disclosure Day was necessarily the capstone of their partnership.
Practically, the extended schedule changed how the music came together. Rather than a concentrated week or two of sessions—still common for big scores—engineers and players returned in pockets over six months, giving Williams room to refine arrangements and, according to collaborators, to hear workgrow between sessions. That process suited a composer who had made public notes about preferring to marshal his energies toward writing obligations rather than a full public schedule.
People present at the recordings described Williams as in high spirits and quietly authoritative, both marshaling the ensemble and delegating where he wished. The credits sharing orchestrator and conductor duties among Williams, Ross and Kerber reflect that collaborative bookkeeping, but the accounts from the sessions leave little doubt who was ultimately steering the music.
Is Disclosure Day Williams’ last score? The facts collected here do not close that chapter. Spielberg’s insistence, the flexible recording plan and his own discussions with Williams about a 31st collaboration all point the other way: rather than settling into silence, Williams’ recent work looks like a deliberately paced continuation. If this is a twilight turn, it is one chosen on Williams’ terms and with Spielberg’s full insistence—making it unlikely, on the evidence available, that Disclosure Day will be his final bow.
