John Williams will be the first composer to receive the AFI Life Achievement Award

Since they added sound to movies in the ‘20s, very few people have made that change as worthwhile as John Williams has. The scores he composed for movies like Star Wars and Jaws were some of the most influential things that anyone had heard in a movie for decades—at least until 2010 when Hans Zimmer introduced that terrible Inception noise that we can’t get away from. Now, according to Deadline, the American Film Institute has decided to honor Williams with the AFI Life Achievement Award next summer.

“John Williams has written the soundtrack to our lives,” says AFI Board Of Trustees Chair Howard Stringer, most likely referring to those of us who are moisture farmers on a faraway desert planet, kids at a school for wizards, or overwhelmed police chiefs in shark-ravaged resort towns. This will be the 44th time the AFI Life Achievement Award has been given out, with Williams being the very first composer to receive the honor (take that, Zimmer). As Deadline notes, Steven Spielberg’s upcoming Bridge Of Spies will be his first film in 41 years without a score by Williams (he had to back out due to “a minor health issue”), though the two will be back together for Spielberg’s adaptation of The BFG.