[11][12] John Williams had previously scored Steven Spielberg's debut feature, The Sugarland Express, and he would go on to collaborate with the director on almost all of his subsequent films.

[13] Spielberg had used Williams' title theme from Robert Altman's 1972 psychological horror film Images as a temp track during the editing of Jaws.

[14] Calling for rapid, percussive string playing, the score also contains echoes of Debussy's La mer, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and the opening of the 4th movement of Dvořák's New World Symphony.

[22] Grammy-award winning Theodore Keep was the sound engineer, and musicians included guitarist Tommy Tedesco, trumpet player Malcolm McNab and percussionists Shelly Manne and Emil Richards.

recording for the diegetic music played by the Amity marching band early in the film; this included tunes by Scott Joplin, Johann Strauss II and original compositions by Williams.

When audiences commended the music on comment cards at the previews of the film in Dallas, Texas and Long Beach, California (on March 26 and 28 respectively), it was decided to produce a soundtrack album.

[25] The liner notes for the Intrada release explains that Williams wanted to develop some of the cues to "make a more cohesive listening experience, so... he expanded and rearranged the highlights of the Jaws score for album presentation.

"[27] In a five-star review of the 2000 Decca Records release, Freer highlights the inclusion of previously unreleased material, the liner notes from Spielberg and Williams, commending this collector's edition as "the last word in Jaws musicology.

[31] According to Alexandre Tylski, like themes Bernard Herrmann wrote for Taxi Driver, North by Northwest, and particularly Mysterious Island, it suggests human respiration.

[30] Music scholar Emilio Audissino writes, "Williams came up with the primitive rhythmic simplicity of an ostinato... those three repeated bass notes recall the heartbeat, the primordial rhythm of life.

Audissino points out that Williams "plays fair" by only using the leitmotif when the shark is genuinely present; for instance, it is not used in the panic sequence on the beach transpires to have been caused by boys with a fake fin.

The humans, "lit by the sun", are represented by melodies with "bright tibres of violins, flutes and trumpets", whereas as the shark's music is "low pitched, mechanical, with dark timbre".

Although the bulk of the score for Jaws 2 was original, Williams retained the shark's motif , which he says is in "the great tradition" for repeating musical themes in Hollywood serials such as Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger.

[33] Although the soundtracks for the subsequent sequels were written by different composers, Alan Parker and Michael Small incorporated the main shark theme into both of their scores, with credit to Williams.

The original soundtrack for Jaws was released by MCA Records on LP in 1975, and as a CD in 1992, including roughly a half hour of music that Williams redid for the album.