Music plays a powerful role in film and television. It thrills us and chills us, makes us laugh and makes us cry, and is embraced by audiences beyond the screen and throughout global culture. Authors of books about some of the most beloved score composers—John Williams, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, and more—will discuss their lives, careers, craft, and legacy.

• Jon Burlingame has been writing and broadcasting on the subject of music for films and television for the past 40 years. He is the author of seven books, including Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring, The Music of James Bond, and Dreamsville: Henry Mancini, “Peter Gunn” and Music for TV Noir. He is a regular contributor to Variety, hosts podcasts with composers for Dolby, and teaches film music history in the post-graduate scoring program at USC. He is also the recipient of three ASCAP Deems Taylor awards for excellence in music journalism.

• Tim Greiving is the author of John Williams: A Composer’s Life (Oxford University Press, 2025). He is an arts journalist and historian in Los Angeles who specializes in film music, and he has contributed to NPR, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He has written program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Royal Albert Hall, and liner notes for more than 100 soundtrack albums. He teaches film music history and the music of John Williams at USC.

• Steven C. Smith is the author of award-winning biographies of composers Bernard Herrmann and Max Steiner. Both received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award; the Steiner book was named one of 2020’s best by Variety and BBC Music Magazine. This October, Oxford University Press will publish his third book: Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema. A four-time Emmy nominee, Smith has produced over 200 network television documentaries about the arts. His collaborators include Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Stephen Sondheim, Julie Andrews, John Williams, and Sidney Poitier.
• Jeanine Cowen (moderator) is chair of the Screen Scoring program at the USC Thornton School of Music and is an active media composer and educator. She trained at Northwestern University as a classical percussionist, graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in both film scoring and music production and engineering, and holds a Master of Arts in Creative Business Leadership from Savannah College of Art and Design. As a highly experienced technologist with extensive musical training in classical, jazz, and contemporary genres, she excels in creative, collaborative productions with credits spanning the film, television, game, and music industries.