jerry goldsmith star trek

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Jerry Goldsmith

• View history
• 1 Biography
• 2 Notable works, awards, and honors
• 3.1 Star Trek credits
• 3.2 See also
• 3.3 External links

Biography [ ]

Jerry Goldsmith began studying piano at the age of six, and was studying composition at age fourteen. He became acquainted with the legendary composer Miklós Rózsa , and attended his classes in film composition at the University of Southern California.

Goldsmith originally intended to become a concert hall composer, but soon realized that the infrequency of concert hall commissions would never satisfy his hunger to write music (much less pay the bills).

In 1950, he was employed as a clerk typist in the music department at CBS . It was there that he was given his first assignments as a composer for radio shows, such as Romance and CBS Radio Workshop . He would stay with CBS until 1960, having already scored some episodes of The Twilight Zone . He was hired by Revue Studios to score their Thriller series, which lead to further television commissions. He composed his first film score for the 1957 western Black Patch , which featured Star Trek: The Original Series guest actors Stanley Adams and Peter Brocco .

In 1962, Goldsmith was awarded his first Oscar nomination for his acclaimed score to the poorly-received John Huston picture Freud . At the same time, he became acquainted with influential film composer Alfred Newman, who, recognizing Goldsmith's talents, influenced Universal into hiring him to score the film Lonely Are The Brave in 1963. From then on, Goldsmith established himself as a leading name in American film music.

Jerry Goldsmith died of cancer in Beverly Hills, California. He was 75 years old.

Notable works, awards, and honors [ ]

Goldsmith won his only Academy Award for scoring the 1976 horror movie The Omen , which featured David Warner . He was also nominated for writing a song from that film called "Ave Satani". He had previously been nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work in the acclaimed films A Patch of Blue (1965), The Sand Pebbles (1966, directed by Robert Wise and featuring Jon Lormer and Gil Perkins ), Planet of the Apes (1968, with James Daly , Lou Wagner , Paul Lambert , Billy Curtis , Jane Ross , Felix Silla , and designs by Wah Chang ), Patton (1970, with Carey Loftin and Lawrence Dobkin ), Papillon (1973, with Anthony Zerbe , Bill Mumy , William Smithers , Victor Tayback , Ron Soble , and Peter Brocco ), Chinatown (1974, with Perry Lopez , Roy Jenson , Noble Willingham , cinematography by John A. Alonzo , and stunts by Hal Needham ), and The Wind and the Lion (1975, with Brian Keith and Roy Jenson). He went on to earn nominations for scoring the films The Boys from Brazil (1978, with Walter Gotell , David Hurst , and Michael Gough ), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Poltergeist (1982, photographed by Matthew F. Leonetti ), Under Fire (1983, with Joanna Cassidy and Hamilton Camp ), Hoosiers (1986), Basic Instinct (1992), and L.A. Confidential (1997, with James Cromwell , Matt McCoy , and Steve Rankin ). His last nomination came for his work in the animated Disney film Mulan (1998, featuring the voices of Miguel Ferrer and George Takei ).

Goldsmith was additionally nominated for four Emmy Awards, winning all of them. Aside from the theme to Star Trek: Voyager (see below), he also won Emmys for scoring QB VIII (1974, with Michael Gough, Mark Lenard , and produced by Douglas S. Cramer ), the 1975 TV movie Babe , and Masada (1981). His other television scoring credits include episodes of Gunsmoke , Wagon Train , and Perry Mason , multiple episodes of The Twilight Zone and Thriller , and the opening themes for Dr. Kildare , The Man from U.N.C.L.E. , The Waltons , and Barnaby Jones (starring Lee Meriwether ).

Action epics such as Alien (1979) (for which he received a Golden Globe nomination), the Rambo films (1982, 1985, 1988, with Bruce Greenwood , Charles Napier , Steven Berkoff , Kurtwood Smith , and the first film photographed by Andrew Laszlo ), Total Recall (1990, with Ronny Cox , Marc Alaimo , Robert Picardo , Mel Johnson, Jr. , Roy Brocksmith , Lycia Naff , Robert Costanzo , Frank Kopyc , and Michael Champion ), Air Force One (1997, with Dean Stockwell and Robert Duncan McNeill ), and The Mummy (1999, with Erick Avari ) were scored by Goldsmith.

Other films he scored include Seven Days in May (1964, with Whit Bissell and Leonard Nimoy ) (for which he was also nominated for a Golden Globe), The Blue Max (1966, with Jeremy Kemp ), Our Man Flint (1966, with Peter Brocco, Chuck Hicks , and Roy Jenson), In Like Flint (1967, with Steve Ihnat , Yvonne Craig , Dick Dial , and James B. Sikking ), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970, with Keith Andes and Ken Lynch ) Logan's Run (1976, with stunts by Bill Couch, Sr. , based on the novel by George Clayton Johnson ), The Secret of NIMH (1981, with Wil Wheaton ), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983, with John Larroquette , Bill Quinn , Peter Brocco, William Schallert , Dick Miller , and Bill Mumy), The Russia House (1990), Six Degrees of Separation (1993, with J.J. Abrams ), Congo (1995, with Carolyn Seymour ), Hollow Man (2000), and The Sum of All Fears (2002, with James Cromwell and Bruce McGill ).

Goldsmith composed the soundtrack of numerous films for director Joe Dante : Gremlins (1984, with Zach Galligan , Keye Luke , Frank Welker , William Schallert, Kenneth Tobey , and Goldsmith himself having a cameo) (for which he won a Saturn Award from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films), Explorers (1985, with James Cromwell and Brooke Bundy ), Innerspace (1987, with William Schallert, Kenneth Tobey, Andrea Martin , and photographed by Andrew Laszlo), The 'Burbs (1989), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990, with Zach Galligan, John Glover , Keye Luke, Kenneth Tobey, and again Goldsmith's cameo), Matinee (1993, with William Schallert), Small Soldiers (1998, with Kirsten Dunst , Frank Langella , Michael McKean , and Gregory Itzin ), and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003, with Marc Lawrence , George Murdock , Ron Perlman , and Frank Welker). Also, with the exception of the first Gremlins , all of these films featured Star Trek: Voyager star Robert Picardo , and all of them featured two-time Trek guest actor Dick Miller in the cast.

In addition to his Oscar and Emmy achievements, Goldsmith received nine Golden Globe nominations, seven Grammy Award nominations, four nominations from the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Awards, and seventeen Saturn Award nominations (winning one). In 1999, he received a Hollywood Film Award in Outstanding Achievement in Music in Film from the Hollywood Film Festival. He also won an Annie Award for his work on Mulan , received a Golden Palm nomination from the Cannes Film Festival (for Basic Instinct ), received a Golden Satellite Award nomination (for L.A. Confidential ), and won fourteen BMI Film Music Awards, among several other honors.

In June 2016 , it was announced that Goldsmith would be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame . [1] The star – the 2611th – was dedicated on 9 May 2017 . [2]

Association with Star Trek [ ]

Goldsmith was Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry 's original choice to compose the music for " The Cage ", which would have included the show's theme music . Goldsmith had to decline, however, as he was committed to other projects and he recommended that Alexander Courage (who was mostly an arranger, and often worked with Goldsmith in that capacity) write the score instead. ( Star Trek: The Motion Picture (The Director's Edition) audio commentary)

In 1979, Roddenberry offered Goldsmith Star Trek: The Motion Picture and the composer leaped at the opportunity. Here, Goldsmith was tasked with re-inventing a franchise and creating a brand new theme. Goldsmith himself remarked it was the toughest he ever wrote, and it remains a remarkable achievement. The Motion Picture also marked the second time Goldsmith worked with director Robert Wise ; Goldsmith previously scored The Sand Pebbles for Wise in 1966.

Beyond creating a new theme, Goldsmith also created new kinds of soundscapes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture , through the inventive use of unusual instruments, such as the "Blaster Beam". At the behest of Roddenberry, it was later adapted to become the signature theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation .

Goldsmith's other famous tune from the film, the "Klingon Battle Theme" was also reused in later Star Trek productions, most notably in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: First Contact by Goldsmith himself, and in TNG : " Heart of Glory ", " The Bonding ", and (via stock footage) TNG : " Shades of Gray ".

Some initial music Goldsmith composed for The Motion Picture differed from the final product, particularly the fanfare written for the scene in which the refit USS Enterprise is revealed. The original score did not meet with Robert Wise's satisfaction and Goldsmith was asked to do the score over again. According to Goldsmith, Wise was displeased with the score because "there's no [ Star Trek ] theme." Although Goldsmith was "crushed", he came up with a revised score which did meet with Wise's approval that same night. ( Star Trek: The Motion Picture (The Director's Edition) special features – "A Bold New Enterprise")

Goldsmith's score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture earned him the eleventh of his eighteen Oscar nominations in the category of Best Music, Original Score. The score also earned him nominations from the Golden Globes and the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films.

During the 1980s and '90s, Goldsmith's orchestra often included tuba player Tommy Johnson , best known for the ominous theme music from Jaws . Goldsmith and Johnson collaborated on all of Goldsmith's Trek productions, with the exception of Nemesis , as well as such films as Executive Decision , Air Force One , and Mulan .

In 1989 , Goldsmith scored Star Trek V: The Final Frontier .

In 1992 , Goldsmith was approached by Paramount Pictures to write the main title theme for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . Goldsmith commented " Yes, I was supposed to do that and I had a conflict and I couldn't ". ( The Music of Star Trek , p97)

In 1994 , he wrote the main title theme for Star Trek: Voyager , for which he won an Emmy Award ( Listen  file info ). He later composed the scores for Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Insurrection .

By the early 2000s, Goldsmith's health prevented him from working as much as he once did. He did, however, finish his work on the franchise with Star Trek Nemesis . This film also marked his third collaboration with British director Stuart Baird after Executive Decision (1996, with Andreas Katsulas ) and U.S. Marshals (1998). Nemesis marked their fifth collaboration in general, as Goldsmith composed two previous films on which Baird served as editor: 1976's The Omen and 1981's Outland (with James B. Sikking and Steven Berkoff).

After his death, a tribute was made to him on the special collector's edition DVD of Star Trek: First Contact .

Star Trek credits [ ]

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (main title theme, all episodes)
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
• Star Trek: Voyager (main title theme, all episodes)
• Star Trek: First Contact
• Star Trek: Insurrection
• Star Trek Nemesis
• " Remembrance " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture )
• " Maps and Legends " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture )
• " Absolute Candor " (theme from Star Trek: Voyager )
• " Stardust City Rag " (theme from Star Trek: Voyager )
• " Nepenthe " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture )
• " Broken Pieces " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture )
• " Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2 " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture )
• " The Star Gazer " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture )
• " Fly Me to the Moon " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture )
• " Farewell " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact )
• " The Next Generation " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact )
• " Disengage " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact ; Klingon theme)
• " Seventeen Seconds " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact )
• " No Win Scenario " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact )
• " Imposters " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact ; Klingon theme)
• " The Bounty " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact ; theme from Star Trek: Voyager ; Klingon theme)
• " Dominion " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact ; theme from Star Trek: Voyager )
• " Surrender " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact ; Klingon theme)
• " Võx " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact )
• " The Last Generation " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture ; theme from Star Trek: First Contact )
• " Temporal Edict " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture )
• " No Small Parts " (theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture )
• " We'll Always Have Tom Paris " (theme from Star Trek: Voyager )
• " Grounded " (theme from Star Trek: First Contact )
• " Twovix " (theme from Star Trek: Voyager )
• " Crossroads " (theme from Star Trek: Voyager )
• " Mindwalk " (theme from Star Trek: Voyager )

See also [ ]

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture (soundtrack)
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (soundtrack)
• Star Trek: First Contact (soundtrack)
• Star Trek: Insurrection (soundtrack)
• Star Trek Nemesis (soundtrack)

External links [ ]

• Jerry Goldsmith at Wikipedia
• Jerry Goldsmith at the Internet Movie Database
• Interview at EmmyTVLegends.org
• 1 Abdullah bin al-Hussein

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Published Dec 7, 2023

Looking Back at the Music of 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture'

How Jerry Goldsmith tackled the majestic score for the Enterprise's first big screen adventure, in theaters 44 years ago today.

StarTrek.com / Charlotte Tegen

"I was miserable," admitted Jerry Goldsmith.

Four months from the December 7, 1979 release date of Star Trek: The Motion Picture , the composer only had a limited amount of footage and had to begin recording in a month. It was hardly an ideal situation, and it would get worse before it got better, but Goldsmith's score would go on to become an iconic part of Gene Roddenberry's creation.

StarTrek.com

The issues during The Motion Picture ’s production were far larger than the music. Paramount had given the film a budget of $46M and locked in the release date while there were still story problems, not to mention visual effects difficulties. Subsequently, the post-production process was manic, and Goldsmith was writing music as fast as he could with what little he had. But when he put his music in front of the orchestra to record, director Robert Wise was less than thrilled.

Recalling his thoughts on the 2001 DVD release of the Director’s Edition of the film, Wise said, "It's not working. I listened to the first couple of pieces and it didn't seem quite right to me. I got visions of sailing ships somehow.."

In the same behind-the-scenes interview, Goldsmith admitted, "I was crushed." Wise went onto explain his problem with the music — there was no theme. Specifically, there was no Star Trek theme.

The composer struggled on, but 10 days later, he played his new creation for the director.  Upon hearing the next version, Wise approved and asked, "Why didn't you come up with that in the first place?" With the themes written, Goldsmith revised the cues he had previously recorded, and the score was on its way.

Goldsmith recruited original Star Trek composer Fred Steiner to write several cues based on the material, and November of 1979 saw the belated arrival of some of the film's effects sequences. The score was finally completed on December 2, and five days later, The Motion Picture left drydock.

While reviews were mixed across the board, Goldsmith's score stood out as a towering achievement, one that not only gained him his 12th Oscar nomination (he had previously won for 1976's The Omen ), but also one that would be an integral part of Star Trek' s future legacy.

One of the challenges Goldsmith faced was to compose a symphonic score that was different from John Williams' Star Wars compositions, which hit two years prior. Instead of the leitmotif device Williams utilized, Goldsmith employed his main theme as a backbone, using it to encapsulate an approach that combined the romance and mystery of space exploration. This was a new direction for Goldsmith, venturing into a more romantic idiom of scoring.

"He was definitely a modernist," said composer David Newman in the liner notes for La-La Land’s definitive release of the soundtrack. Newman, who played the violin on The Motion Picture , added, "I think Star Trek was a turning point for him. I think he realized he couldn't be a Planet of the Apes modernist and compose [for] films."

But The Motion Picture is still very much a Jerry Goldsmith score, especially in the way it adds esoteric instruments and electronic augmentation to the traditional orchestra, harking back to previous scores such as Planet of the Apes (1968) and Alien (1979). One of the signature sounds of the film is the blaster beam, the instrument which emits the harsh electronic tones for V'Ger . This was built and performed by Craig Huxley, using "a long piece of aluminum with metal strings strung the whole way over it and amplifiers under each string," as Goldsmith described it.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Goldsmith introduces his main theme in a thundering fashion, setting out his intent in the opening credits, which, in the La-La Land liner notes, film score expert Jeff Bond calls "a musical distillation of Roddenberry's utopian vision." In the same notes, Goldsmith himself echoed Roddenberry's original concept of Star Trek as a western, saying that it was no different than "the stirring music you'd play in a western as they're going across the plains... The only difference is you're going across the universe."

Goldsmith's theme conjures up a bold feeling of exploration, cutting a path through the stars with the Enterprise in its wake, while its B-theme suggests not only adventure but the connection between Admiral Kirk and the starship herself. Goldsmith expanded on this in "The Enterprise ," the show-stopping cue that scores the moment when Kirk and the audience first glimpse the brand-new refitted starship.

Almost as a contrast to the Federation's benign mission, the opening sequence introduced Goldsmith's theme for the legendary warrior race of Klingons. Setting a trend for other composers to follow, Goldsmith used the theme to summarize their barbaric and aggressive tendencies, with the Indonesian angklung and plucked strings leading the sharp and angled main melody. Interestingly, Goldsmith would return to this material for his score to Star Trek: First Contact , where it was turned on its head to become a heroic motif for the character of Worf.

Goldsmith's music for V'Ger explores the dynamics between the idea of a living machine — a contradiction in terms — and its quest to meet its creator, with a long-lined undulating melody conveying a mechanical feel but also suggesting that something else lies under the surface. The score also features a haunting ostinato for the Enterprise 's journey through V'Ger , and surprisingly, another motive, which is a minor-mode version of Ilia's theme, foreshadowing the union at the climax of the film.

Ilia's theme, which also appears as the overture —one of the last for a theatrical film for several decades — is the main love theme of the film, a gorgeous but delicate melody representing the Deltan's previous relationship with Commander Decker. Also in tune with V'Ger is the composer's fascinating theme for Spock, a truly alien melody that captures the character's unemotional state as he unsuccessfully attempts to purge his human emotions in the Kolinahr ritual, which Goldsmith juxtaposes with the V'Ger material to indicate their destinies may be intertwined.

An interesting anomaly is the lack of music referring to The Original Series . While Star Trek as a franchise is still musically defined by Alexander Courage's famous opening fanfare, Goldsmith requested to not use any of Courage's music. Although, he later relented and allowed Courage to write an arrangement of his main theme to score two sequences where Kirk narrates the Captain's Log. The result is a pair of brief cues that present the theme in a very subdued manner, a far cry from its use in the original series but appropriate for the seriousness of the Enterprise 's mission.

Getty Images

Jerry Goldsmith returned to the franchise in 1987 when The Next Generation debuted, with the opening credits of the show successfully combining the Courage fanfare and the Goldsmith theme (something the composer would later do himself in 1989 for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier ). He composed music for three additional movies, as well as wrote the main title theme for Star Trek: Voyager . Whether it was for film or television, where Star Trek was concerned, Goldsmith was omnipresent.

Sadly, Jerry Goldsmith passed in 2004. However, his music for Star Trek and particularly The Motion Picture continues to live on, through the wonderful La-La Land soundtrack release, as a concert staple, and in the hearts of Star Trek fans across the universe. For them, there is no comparison.

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This article was originally published on September 18, 2019.

Charlie Brigden (he/him) is a writer specialising in film music and is based in Wales in the U.K. He has a rather large tattoo of the TOS Enterprise and can be found on Twitter @moviedrone.

• Behind The Scenes

Jerry Goldsmith (1929-2004)

• Music Department

Additional Crew

IMDbPro Starmeter See rank

• 43 wins & 97 nominations total

• Music Department (uncredited)

• In Production
• theme music composer

• additional themes
• 'star trek first contact end title'
• 'star trek first contact main title i locutus' ...
• 11 episodes

• Original Star Trek Themes by

• composer: "Universal Theme" Universal Animation Studios logo (uncredited)

• music by: "Ambassador" and "Trial Run" from "The Final Conflict" Original Soundtrack

• composer: additional music

• music composer

• composer: themes from "Explorers", "Innerspace" and "Gladiator - Unused Score"

• composer: original themes

• composer: "Universal Theme" (uncredited)

• Composer (music by)

• in remembrance of

• additional interviewee

• scoring tasks (uncredited)

Personal details

• Jerrald K. Goldsmith
• February 10 , 1929
• Los Angeles, California, USA
• July 21 , 2004
• Beverly Hills, California, USA (lung cancer)
• Spouses Carol Heather Goldsmith July 23, 1972 - July 21, 2004 (his death, 1 child)
• Joel Goldsmith
• Other works The song "No One Like You" on the Sarah Brightman CD "Timeless" (Track 1) is a vocal version of the "Theme from Powder" (1995) with lyrics by David Zippel .
• 1 Biographical Movie
• 1 Portrayal
• 1 Interview
• 16 Articles

Did you know

• Trivia He considered Star Trek: First Contact (1996) the best Star Trek film he ever scored.
• Quotes If our music survives, which I have no doubt it will, then it will be because it is good.
• Trademarks Best known for composing the music for the Star Trek franchise
• The Omen ( 1976 ) $25,000
• When did Jerry Goldsmith die?
• How did Jerry Goldsmith die?
• How old was Jerry Goldsmith when he died?

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Interview: ‘Picard’ Season 3 Composers On How They Are Reviving Classic Star Trek Music

| March 29, 2023 | By: Jeff Bond 50 comments so far

Paramount+’s recent Star Trek series Discovery and Picard have employed composer Jeff Russo to bring a modern edge to the shows while occasionally tipping a hat toward the thematic material of earlier Trek composers. But for Picard’s third season, showrunner Terry Matalas recruited British composer Stephen Barton, who worked with Matalas on SyFy’s 12 Monkeys , and Frederik Wiedmann (who’s scored everything from numerous DC animated movies to children’s TV shows and video games). The pair were given a specific mission: resurrect the bold, in-your-face orchestral style of the classic Star Trek movies, with major callouts to themes by Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Cliff Eidelmann, and even Leonard Rosenman. The result is some of the most exciting Star Trek scoring in years, music that has fans fired up for the imminent soundtrack release. TrekMovie sat down with the composers for an extensive discussion to talk about this classic musical approach and how they tackled it.

Who do you guys answer to on Picard in terms of scoring? And what was the brief, just in general, when you started?

Stephen Barton: Terry Matalas and I had talked about Trek for a long time, actually, particularly when 12 Monkeys was going on. He’s a veteran of Star Trek —he was a PA on Voyager  and then worked as a writer on Enterprise . So he’s kind of come up through the ranks on the Star Trek side. And when I first started working with him, five, six years ago, it was something we chatted about quite early on. I think even when I first met him for lunch on the Paramount lot it was one of the things we chatted about. And add the fact we had a shared past in that sense, in terms of what Trek we had grown up with, which was for both of us a case of parents having seen the original series, but the first time we got a series of our own was really Next Generation and watching it as kids. He’s a little bit older, but I was watching it when I was like five or six. I think for both of us it was very much a defining point in our relationship with television and with media in general. Akiva Goldsman was still very much running Picard season two and Terry was very much involved at the beginning of the season as a writer but about three or four episodes in he split off to really look after season three, which was always going to be his baby.

Terry very much pitched it to us as this idea of, let’s look back to the whole of the franchise and let’s look back, really in-depth at the Horner and the Goldsmith scores. Let’s look back at Dennis McCarthy’s work. Let’s look back at Ron Jones’ work, Cliff Eidelman, and Leonard Rosenman, looking back at all of it, let’s take a step back and look at what it means. And because the other thing was, obviously with Trek there’s been so many iterations and things used from one version into another, sometimes without a sense necessarily of what specifically something means. Even the Alexander Courage theme, this is a general Trek theme now and even was, I think, by the third movie, with the idea that this isn’t a specific thing; this is a wider theme. So, I think that was always what we were talking about.

And then as we got through the season, we were about six episodes in and one of the things we set out to do at the very outset was score it all. We weren’t going to do the typical TV thing of tracking, but the problem is, the shortest episode is 50-something minutes. So it’s 500 and something minutes of television. To most TV shows it would just be, we’re going to track half of this, or track a third of this or have three episodes in the middle which are just edited with some interstitials and things like that. And he was like, “No, no, I want to treat every scene of this like one of the scenes in the feature films.” And so, there are two ways to do that. Either you write a ton of music or… well, that’s basically the only way of doing it, really. So that was kind of the genesis of it. And we got about episode six, and I think I’d been on it for three months, I’d written about five hours of music, and was just dead, and we got to this point where we’re like, do we sacrifice the vision? Do we sacrifice that? Or do we get some help? And mercifully, episode seven to nine had a ton of Freddie’s music in the temp track. Because I think that’s one of the things that Drew Nichols, our editor, tried to do-he tried to temp with not Star Trek music, just to be able to get a lens on it, that was different to just putting Trek music wall to wall, which is obviously incredibly easy to do, because there’s so much of it. So Freddie came in and saved the day and took two episodes over and knocked them out of the park, and actually really allowed me to do what I want to do, which is to land the last 30 minutes of the final episode.

Frederik Wiedmann: I was just looking at the minutes for the final episode and I’m counting 55 minutes of music. In one episode of TV.

Frederik Wiedmann, Drew Nichols, Terry Matalas, and Stephen Barton (center four L-R) during Picard scoring session at WB Eastwood scoring stage

Since you mentioned Ron Jones, did you discuss the whole Rick Berman aesthetic versus what Matalas wanted? Because even though the scoring is different for the first two seasons of Picard , there’s a lot of active music, but this in particular, it’s very upfront in the mix and hits things. It is more of a movie aesthetic or a Ron Jones Next Generation aesthetic, as opposed to what the TNG music turned into by season four or five.

Barton: Yes, we discussed this at length. It wasn’t necessarily always even with the Ron Jones stuff what the music was doing in terms of harmonically or thematically, it was just in the way it’s paced and the way it’s scored. And I went back and watched what for me is the pinnacle of season three of Next Generation —at the end of “Best of Both Worlds, Part One,” the end of season three, which for me was ingrained in my mind in the summer of 1990. You have music that’s very overtly scored, it goes right for the jugular, it’s not holding back at all, but it works and it’s not full of music that you separate from the picture, it just is part of it. And so, scoring like that, that it’s okay to be big and it’s okay to go off to moments. And funny enough, I think in episode three, we had a big homage—there’s a big sequence with the first time Vatic fires the weapon, that’s very much an homage to Ron Jones throughout that whole sequence. It just goes there and it says, let’s turn the burner up to 10 and go maximum in terms of the way it’s scored. It’s okay to be big and it’s okay to make bold statements and okay to play melody. And I think that was very much the focus, because that’s what we loved from the Trek both Terry and I remember; that’s kind of a hallmark of it. And Freddy has a number of massive moments in episode seven that are very, very similar, that were just moments where you play it.

Wiedmann: It’s funny, when I watch old movies, including all Star Trek , I’m always baffled by how little music there is actually, in an episode or a movie, how much space there was back then, that was okay. Even when you watch a James Bond movie from the Sean Connery-era Bond, there is so little score in the entire movie. And when it comes, it’s big. It’s bold, and it has a very distinct purpose. I think the aesthetics have changed a lot over the past 20 years in terms of scoring movies, especially in the sci-fi genre, where there’s a lot more music now, and a lot more subtle stuff in between. What used to be just empty space and ambiance now has something like a little pulse or something going on to keep the tension going, that we just didn’t do back then. And I think one of the big challenges in this particular Trek was how do we make it feel like the old ideas, and the old sonic templates for Star Trek while taking it into this current time of scoring? And I think that the response so far has been fans have absolutely noticed how much we go back to the roots of Star Trek sounds while also kind of giving it this modern edge I think it needed.

You have, I think, at least five or six themes that are preexisting, very specific melodies. And then you provide one major new one, I know that there are other pieces of new material, too, that you guys develop, but you have a theme for the Titan that is in the end title. So first, tell me a little bit about developing that. I was talking to someone who’d seen the early episodes before I had and he said, “They’re playing James Horner music.” And when I heard this theme, I realized the theme is not James Horner’s, but the setting it’s in is very evocative of Horner.

Barton: Yeah, that was 1,000% the goal with that. I think the thing that Horner brought to Trek , which I think some people would say is not in the Goldsmith scores—but I think it is, it’s just a lot more buried—is that kind of nautical thing, the militaristic feeling, but it is a very specific, militaristic thing of very much feeling that these ships are just boats in space. Everything from the very classical horn kind of harmonic series, like we’ve got two horns in pairs going up and down the harmonic series, those sorts of motifs, they have a very English feel, and that was something that Horner was very interested in. He was obviously an anglophile and I had the pleasure of meeting him once, actually, only at Abbey Road one time, but I think that that part of Trek was something we felt had been put aside a little bit. It wasn’t that we wanted to necessarily turn it back to being Wrath of Khan but it’s just acknowledging the fact that whilst this is a ship of exploration, it’s still a military command structure, there’s still danger, and I think that the Horner scores for me (danger being one of his motifs, literally , but we then do use his danger motif), it was one where we talked at length about it as, “This is the strongest of spices,” in terms of its musical presence, and I think that’s why James Horner liked it. It’s just such a bold statement, that to not use it to us was almost disrespectful. We’re not going to plaster it everywhere, but I think when we’re in the nebula, there is obviously a bit of a callback to the Mutara Nebula cues.

And so the Titan theme, I think I looked back through a lot of the orchestration, and had access to a fair number of the written scores and I was really looking about how it was constructed. And what was really interesting about Horner’s scores is how he works with limited resources. You get a sense of a very full sound playing, but it isn’t tutti, it’s not wall-to-wall, whereas the Goldsmith scores tend to be very dense, there tends to be a lot going on. And virtually everybody is doing something—during the main title, I don’t think anyone has any bars’ rest in the whole piece, they’re all doing something, whereas the Horner scores are often quite stripped back, very pointillistic, and very focused in their orchestration. There might be quite complicated things, so you have these violin arpeggio figures and I was having to sort of consult on whether they were even playable, because some of them were trying to do some augmented chord stuff that was a little tricky under the fingers. So I think that was the overriding thing with the Titan theme; it was very much an homage to James Horner versus the rest of Trek stuff, the Jerry Goldsmith stuff.

Here is the brilliant ⁦ @ComposerBarton ⁩ conducting his Titan theme with all those wonderful nods to Horner in his arrangement. String section only. It’s been stuck in my head for over a year. #StarTrekPicard pic.twitter.com/f5YCKXI6MS — Terry Matalas (@TerryMatalas) March 4, 2023

So did you sit down and discuss or map how you were going to employ all these themes? Because you’ve got Goldsmith’s March theme, which became the Next Generation theme; you have his First Contact theme, and you have that motif that’s actually from Star Trek V [the “Busy Man” motif from the cue of the same name], and the Klingon theme—and it’s obvious how you’re going to use the Klingon theme, but the other themes, you’re using them but not necessarily the way they were used by Goldsmith. So how did you decide where you were going to apply these themes?

Wiedmann: For my episodes, in particular, it was really all Terry’s roadmap. He’s got an incredible knowledge of Star Trek music, going back to the beginning of it, more than anybody I’ve ever met. And Terry gave us this specific and detailed kind of map, with, “This theme here, I want this thing here.” And he and the editor Drew, they kind of created this roadmap for us where things needed to be dealt with, small adjustments based on our creative ideas that the music had to adjust to, as we were writing. But in general, I would give Terry all the credit for placing the moments and the thematic ideas from the old Trek into the right pivotal places.

Barton: The “Busy Man” motif [from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier ] came to represent a lot of the stuff to do with both Commander Data and then also it’s almost like a nostalgia theme. It’s used in a few places where it’s not specific to that, but it’s used in a couple of places where it’s used to introduce the First Contact theme. And that’s been something where, lots of people say, “Oh, it’s the First Contact theme, it represents first contact. And to me, actually, when you look at the way Goldsmith uses it, the most poignant usage of it for me is in the scene where [Lily, the Alfre Woodard character], is seeing Earth from space for the first time. When she points a phaser at Picard and he gets her to put it down, and he says, “Okay, you’re really on a spaceship.” So for me, that theme always represented the love of spaceflight, and for me what I think Goldsmith was so good at doing was finding themes that can play from different perspectives. So, in those sequences, it’s playing both from the perspective of the audience looking through the crew’s eyes, like you’re going back to this great historical event, but also then you’re looking at the perspective of Zefram Cochrane and you’re looking at all these people with the goal of spaceflight ahead of them.

So, for me, that was always the “nostalgia for spaceflight itself” theme. And so that’s a lot of why we use that in the end credits. And also partly because it was one of those ones where we just felt that theme deserves to be heard more. We put it on the end credits because we felt that it just said something in a really nice way; that it said a lot more about what we were trying to say about the season to the audience. Then the Titan theme, I think very much was looking towards the same thing, where the original Jerry Goldsmith march became very much the Enterprise theme and very much represented the ship and its crew, and we knew we needed a theme for the Titan to do the same thing. This is the Titan and its crew, and obviously, there are places we then take that we haven’t shown yet, so very much that has a purpose and that is going somewhere.

Frederik Weidmann during a Picard scoring session

I think there’s some variation, at least one variation early on of the First Contact theme, something where it’s presented in a way that hasn’t been done before. So obviously, you’ve got access to the written scores for all this material, but have you internalized any of it enough so that you can just go ahead and write that? Or do you always need to refer to the written scores?

Barton: Really good question. Some I have internalized, because some of the genesis of that music and some of the influences on that music, I would certainly count as influences my own, particularly in some of the lesser-known influences, some of the English composers particularly. Growing up with a lot of English choral music and things like the Walton Henry V score, that’s not a million miles away at times from some of the stuff Horner was doing in terms of some of the ways it’s built, and particularly the horn writing. I think that’s one of the hallmarks, but it draws from other influences, too. But there’s a very Waltonian thing in there. And it’s funny with the Shakespeare reference, which plays a lot into certain parts of Trek , and I don’t think that’s an accident in the sense of how it’s scored. So I think that stuff comes a lot more naturally. I find the Goldsmith stuff harder to work with in terms of how it’s built, largely because it’s so heavyweight. He built the big sound before anyone else does. When we sometimes think of combos in the ‘90s and 2000s, of doing the big wall of noise and synths and stuff like that, he was doing it well before then. It’s very much that use of the whole spectrum, and the difficult part of that is time. Building those really dense scores takes a while. I can’t really rush it. And we just didn’t have very much time.

Wiedmann: I can tell you that there’s a short synth-only theme from Goldsmith that we’re using in the later episode for a very particular character. And it took me ages to make that sound out of my synthesizer. There’s probably just a patch Jerry had on some old keyboard, but I had to create it to make it feel just like that, and it took me way longer than dissecting an actual orchestral score. It’s a theme played with a very specific synth sound that fans will be able to tell exactly who I’m talking about when they hear it, so I really can’t talk about it because that hasn’t aired yet.

There’s a specific sound in movies you hear a lot for the past decade. Supposedly, Hans Zimmer invented it, but I’m not necessarily sure that he did. It’s this thing we just call the “ Braaam .” It’s this big bass noise that’s in Inception . But I was thinking actually, that this almost goes back to the blaster beam Goldsmith used for V’ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture . That was actually the first time that kind of approach was used, and so it’s unique and specific to that. And I was thinking, “Oh, this is almost like blaster beam sound,” in some of the Shrike scenes.

Barton: Yes. Very much. I think we had exactly that conversation in February. It’s interesting where things like that become ubiquitous, and particularly in trailers. You could look at it two ways: on one side you could say, “Well, it’s a lazy trope of action writing.” But then you could also look at it as at its core it’s fundamental—you can go back to Carl Orff, Carmina Burana , if you play the orchestral version, not necessarily the two-piano version, it basically starts with that figure, and it’s one of those strong spices. I think the problem is that sometimes the tendency is to just chuck it in like a handful of chili peppers that blows your head off in two seconds. Fabulous, but then 10 minutes later, you’re like, it’s not a particularly good experience, and you’re regretting it. Gordie Howe and I talked about this a great deal on Star Wars as well, on the stuff we’ve been doing together, because if you just plaster the “Force Theme” everywhere, it loses any impact it will ever have. And it’s one of the most precious gems you can be entrusted with. So, I think even when Freddy and I were working out where we have these themes, literally sitting down and asking yourself, how should this be harmonized? Or how should this be accompanied and what’s the arrangement and making it not just a, “press button, Trek theme here,” but actually something that weaves in and out and feels cohesive with the narrative. We did a wonderful session with Craig Huxley, who plays the blaster beam, and we brought him in on the first episode to do some of the sound design around the Shrike.

Blaster Beam on the mixing board from Picard scoring session

Tell me about some of the other new material that you guys produced. And in terms of what you can talk about, there’s a number of dialogue scenes between people where you guys come in very quietly, and I was feeling like I was starting to hear melody, maybe for Roe and Picard. There’s something that plays I think when they’re having their final goodbye. And then you also hear it when Riker and Picard are looking at her Bajoran earpiece, her spycraft. And there’s a big birthing scene in the nebula that has this specific music for it. So how much specific character-centered material did you come up with?

Barton: That’s the family theme, which is what we eventually christened it. We went through many names, it didn’t really quite have a name at first. It’s something that is in the nebula birth sequence, but is hinted at throughout episodes earlier; you kind of hear hints at it. There’s a very, very oblique reference to it the very first time Beverly and Picard catch eye, that very slow string arrangement, but it’s very buried in there. And gradually we unfurled it, and it’s actually very much based off the Star Trek V “Busy Man” motif, but it’s upside down. So the flow takes the first three notes of that and then expands out and that was very much deliberate, and there are reasons for that, actually, that we can’t talk about yet. But there’s a very good reason for that. So the family theme, I think, was the big one, that we unfurl and kind of show for the first time in its full bent. And the other thing that Terry was very adamant about was that he wanted a theme that had a beginning and middle and an end that you play the whole way through. And then, funnily enough, we played it again in Episode Six, pretty much end to end as well.

Did you rerecord the end title, the arrangement of the First Contact theme and the march?

Barton: Those two aren’t rerecordings, those two are actually the original recordings. We went back and found the original—I forget what the mixes of them were off the top of my head, whether they were just LCRs or whether they were 5.1, I think I think First Contact was 5.1. And so they’re cleaned up to a degree so it is a bit of almost a remaster, but those two pieces, we didn’t rerecord. But that was largely because of time, because the other thing we inherited was very much a schedule from two seasons of previous TV, and to a degree of budgets as well. So we had one session in LA where we recorded, I think, 41 minutes in three hours—the musicians were just amazing; we could not have done this anywhere else. The L.A. musicians just killed it, but so many of them have played on so many of the scores. I think when [music contractor] Peter Rotter put the call out, we very much said what it is and we went out after people who had played on [the previous Trek movie scores] and said, “This is what we’re trying to do. We’d love you to come play.” So we had some players who I hadn’t seen in a number of years at the session, and we were actually very honored to have Steve Erdody, who’s playing cello. It was I think his last session pretty much not If not his last batch of sessions, but maybe his penultimate; I think Indy V might have been his last.

There are some pretty deep cuts and other things you referenced. For Daystrom Station you are referencing the orbital office complex music from Star Trek – The Motion Picture . And then there’s the whole museum scene where you even referenced Leonard Rosenman’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home theme, which I was really impressed by.

Barton: Leonard Rosenman and sneakily, there is the Horner Klingon theme on the top! That cue, I literally kind of sat down and said, “How many references can we get in?” Some of them are all completely obvious. But even there, we looked at how the harmony, for example, of the Voyager theme—because I find that to be one of the most restrained Goldsmith things where, so often where he pulls back, and really, you’re just dealing with two lines—there’s the melody line, and just a counter line, there’s no real harmony and everything’s implied, and I’m saying, “Okay, how can we even reference that and say we want to call back to that and the way it weaves through?” And so even when Jack gets his idea at the end, there’s a callback to the [ Voyager ] synth theme. I think it gave the studio a bit of a nightmare on the cue sheet because it’s like nine segments. And I think on the soundtrack that’s actually just gonna be listed as like eight Star Trek themes in the space of 90 seconds. And it was a challenge to make it make sense as well and not just feel like, “press button, press button…” I think if anyone’s going to criticize us, I think there’s just the thing of something Terry and I chatted a lot about, which is what would Jerry Goldsmith have done on the sequence? He has these great themes, and I think he probably would have gone to the approach of doing a million other things, and they would have pushed him back and said, “Well, we just want to hear the Voyager theme when you see it with Seven, so, please give us that.” But then he would have done it with consummate class. And that’s obviously the highest bar you can get, and I think in 25 years’ time, someone will say whether we reached that or not, but we certainly are not the ones to be the judge of that. So we’re just trying to do as well as we can.

The Fleet Museum brought back a lot of themes

I was getting choked up during the museum sequence. It is very literally fan service but it’s done very well and tastefully, and especially after everything else that has been built up it works beautifully. When I first started watching this I was initially kind of groaning because it seemed like it was diving so deep into, “we’re gonna do the lost son from Wrath of Khan .” And by the time I got to episode three or four, it all just was working so well, that I really felt like, “Okay, now they’ve earned all this.” And it stops becoming just, we’re gonna throw references to the fans, and it becomes much more like affection, and kind of earning all that and using it and in a really moving way. And the scores are a big, huge part of this. And it’s not just all the references, it’s the approach, the dynamic approach of having real action music and having big commercial playouts and all those things we associate with the older movies and shows.

Barton: Freddie has, without spoiling anything, a cue in episode seven that I think is eight minutes long or something, and it’s one idea. We were into the last three, four weeks, and we still have this pile of music to write, but it was one of those ones where you look at the sequence, and there’s no tracking, there’s no editing that can get you through this sequence. And that’s true of all of the back four episodes, seven through 10. I think that was the other thing we were very much thinking about when we were doing a lot of the action music. And Freddy and I chatted for quite a bit about this: the pacing, particularly when he gets to the final episode is like, how would you get bigger? How do you find places to pay this off? Funnily enough, a lot of where we found the answers to that was in the Goldsmith stuff. Because I think one of the Goldsmith hallmarks is his ability to use silence and his ability to write something big and massive. He’s a master of huge textures, but also a master of when to shut up and let something play. And so in all four of the final episodes, I think there are times we both realized you just pull back and you just let a moment be a moment, and you just be confident that we have the performances and we’re not trying to apologize for anything in terms of the production. The other thing we have is the visual effects are so much better now. We’re never trying to tell you something looks awesome because it probably does. And I think that a lot of the reason for modern film scoring and action scoring being the way it is, is because you see something so amazing on the screen. It’s almost like people are like, “Yeah, you don’t really need to add to it.” Whereas what you can do is realize that that’s not the total idea. The idea is, it’s okay to paint big themes around there, provided you do it in the right way and from the right perspective.

Wiedmann: I think this goes back to another question you had earlier, about new themes that I can’t talk about much. But there is a Jack Crusher idea, a musical idea that comes in the later episodes as his relationship with his father becomes more and more distinct. And his performance was so on the spot every single time that it just felt like you don’t want to do anything. So the theme for him in those particular ones is extremely subtle because he just does it all. So it’s really just very subtly supporting what’s going on, but the performance is so strong that you really don’t want to overstep that. There are so many instances of that throughout the whole season. I think that we’re almost like, “Let’s not break it.” Because it’s so good to begin with.

Frederik Wiedmann at a Picard scoring session

Yeah, that’s something I think people who didn’t grow up on it don’t understand about the older movies and television is that the music was the special effects and it was the sound design on a lot of these things. Before you came up with all these layers of Dolby sound and super sophisticated visual effects, the music had to sell all that stuff. And so it wound up doing so much more dramatically than you necessarily have to now. So what can you tell me about the soundtrack?

Barton: I think it’s about two and a half hours. That was a pretty heavy cull down from five hours. But I think we very much also wanted it to stand up as a listening experience in its own right. Gordy and I have Star Wars , we have a three-and-a-half-hour soundtrack. And at that point with these things, I’d be honored if anyone ever listens to it from start to finish. That’s the nicest compliment I think anyone could pay. But I think what we tried to do is to make it make sense. The funniest thing about the soundtrack is we didn’t cut it. And that sounds terrible. Terry cut it. We presented him a draft and we were chatting about it. And then the following morning, he’s like, “Yeah, I stayed up all night and cut this together,” and gave us a spreadsheet. Not only is he incredibly musical, he actually loves sitting at the back of the room while I write. He just loves it and will actually weigh in with suggestions. And most composers, I tell them that and they go white, and they’re like, “Are you kidding? The director’s in the back of the room while you’re writing, are you insane?” But he’s got such a good sensibility for it. And he’s not someone who says, “Yeah, go up, now go down,” or something like that, but he’s like a rather good composition teacher in a way without knowing it. Without having a background in music, he asks questions and says, “Well, is that theme, does that feel satisfying?” One of the things he often talks about is he wants his music to commit. And I think that’s what sets him apart from a lot of filmmakers in terms of how they handle music. He likes the music to go there. He’s like, “Commit to what you’re doing. Commit to shutting up, if you’re shutting up—get out, don’t leave some little pad.” He’s like, “Just shut up. Don’t be afraid to make the bold choices.” So that’s very much his directorial style. So he cut the soundtrack together, literally put it together and we listened through but I think we changed one track.

I’ve been into this music since I was a kid and it’s very much waxed and waned in terms of how much fun it is. This is very fun. And it definitely feels like something I want to listen to outside of the show and it helps drive the show and make it exciting. So, all props to Terry for being someone who wants that. Because it seems like filmmakers over the past few decades have been very conflicted about whether they actually want music as a real contributor, as a character, as opposed to just filling in the silence.

Barton: I think there was a process that filmmaking went through in the 2000s, and particularly with the boom of digital cameras, digital cinema, and the speed at which the process and the difference between the editorial versus where it’s gone to the Avid, and now we have the online and the offline and there’s the whole process of filmmaking. I think people thought we were going through a growing-up period where less music is more, and undoubtedly films were “less music is more,” and undoubtedly films did take the approach that the filmmaker wants that. That’s their prerogative. Now we’re passing through that and we’re getting to a place where it’s okay to be musical again. And I listen to a lot more scores now and hear a lot more scores where I actually like the music. And I think where it goes in the next 10 years will be very interesting. I think we’re starting to come to a place now where all of those languages are okay, provided you know what you’re doing with them. And so people are coming back to it and saying it’s okay to be melodic, it’s okay to have tunes, it’s okay to develop them. It’s okay to have a theme and call it something and have a leitmotif. That’s okay, again.

Wiedmann: One thing this whole experience working on this show taught me is there’s a lot of film music from 25 plus years ago, when you listen to it today, and you go, “This is not really what we’re doing anymore. This doesn’t really go with today’s aesthetic of moviegoers.” But anything that Goldsmith did, however old it may be, I think it holds up like nothing else to today’s standards. There’s nothing old or old-fashioned or cheesy sounding about it. It’s just like, “Holy crap, this is so fucking great.”

Barton: It’s taken 25 years to realize that.

Soundtrack announced

Lakeshore Records has announced they will be releasing the soundtrack for season 3 of Star Trek: Picard , containing 45 tracks . The digital release will arrive on April 20, the day of the season finale in April. You can pre-order the soundtrack on Vinyl for $35.98 , coming on May 12.

Jeff Bond is the author of The Music of Star Trek . He co-produced the 2012 15-disc box set of all the music from the original 196 6 Star Trek series and has written liner notes for releases of all the original Star Trek theatrical films from Star Trek: The Motion Picture to Star Trek: Nemesis .

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I would prefer more originality across the board myself

Agreed. It’s one thing to celebrate the franchises music, but this is a patch-work quilt of music written for entirely different scenes, characters, what-have-you. Can come over as leaning too much on prior musical greatness rather than doing something original that stands on its own two legs. It’s great to see the love and reverence for the scores however, and it’s incredibly well done. But it just seems an odd season/show to suddenly decide to celebrate Trek’s filmic music in particular, rather than it being a special Trek Anniversary or something. Too much reliance and memberberries!

Ditto. I don’t know why, but it really bums me out that they’re using the First Contact theme as the end theme — and I *love* that theme. But it just feels out of place and, well, borrowed/recycled here. I’d almost prefer the previous Picard theme (which wasn’t perfect). Or a new theme using some of the FC cues.

It’s kind of like how I felt the TMP theme for TNG. It’s one of my favourite movie themes, yet it never felt like it fit the show to me.

I thought combining the TOS theme and TMP theme to create the TNG theme was inspired. It easily became my favorite Star Trek theme. The classical opening narration continued Space The Final Frontier, and the music swells up. Just brilliant.

with all of these former “12 Monkeys” alum showing up on Picard, the one I would most like to see is Emily Hampshire ($chitt$ Creek)

She would be a wonderful addition. Shaw’s ex-wife, another captain, the event planner for Frontier Day, anything.

That would be awesome. But she’s a regular on” The Rig”, filmed about the same time as Picard. So it’s a slim chance at best.

It would be fantastic her and/or any number of 12 Monkeys alumni in addition to those who’ve already appeared. I just finished that show this week. One of the all time great series finales.

I was very much hoping Matalas would bring Hampshire into Trek as well.

Hopefully, he’ll have the opportunity to create as rich and wonderful character for her in a future show, limited series or movie as he did for Stashwick.

And yes, putting Stashwick and Hampshire back together in a scene would be the chef’s kiss.

Another captain would be nice. I want Shaw to be LGBTQ+.

Yep, also agree. I think she was the first person a lot of people thought of who would be involved in this season, even if it was for an episode.

I’d like to see Amanda Schull!

The score is wonderful. Plenty of legacy and plenty new that fits. I just love it all.

Same here. It’s magnificent.

Completely agree. It’s a fantastic score and I love it.

This was a very interesting read but I have to admit, I read the part where Barton was talking about composing for Star Wars and got very confused because when the interview said “Gordie Howe” my brain went “like the NHL player?”

Ha, you HAVE to be Canadian to know that name!

That’s what leapt to my mind also . ;)

No, American, but one of my headmates is Canadian and passed on his love of hockey to me. So I learned a lot about it, including about former players of some kind of note.

Picard season 3 has a great score so far. Job well done on that part . Just thinking about it even the weaker Trek movies are worth watching just for the score alone sometimes. I can just close my eyes , when one of the bad or boring bits crop up ,and just get enveloped by the music.

Absolutely!

Good point. I find this true as well. Generations and Insurrection , specifically.

My unpopular opinion is that I think that Star Trek III is the most under-rated Star Trek movie. It’s far from the best, but far from the worst. I love the music in that movie.

BTW: I noticed the TVH score played a bit when they showed the Bounty BOP in the previous episode.

To be honest, it’s probably the best “odd” Star Trek movie.

Found Matalas’ burner account!

Kidding aside, while this is an unpopular opinion, it shouldn’t be.

I absolutely love ST III, and have since seeing it in theaters. Sometimes I watch it even without watching WOK first. (But usually watch the two as one long movie).

Horner’s score for Star Trek III is my favorite of all the Trek movies new or old. Don’t get me wrong, Goldsmith’s score for The Motion Picture’s is amazing as is Horner’s work on Wrath of Khan. But, Search for Spock just rises that much more above in my book.

Your post just described my total viewing of TMP lol.

Star Trek 5 has awesome music despite the flaws of the film itself.

Awesome score so far on this show, definitely the best we’ve had in all of New Trek including the alternate timeline movies. I especially like what he’s saying about the Voyager theme in regard to Goldsmith’s restraint, and that it basically just has two lines and little harmony… but what they did with the theme *harmonically* for the museum scene was fan-tas-tic: it was just a few small harmonic tweaks (with a modified repetition of the three-note Voyager motif at the end), but it didn’t just make it weave through the scene, it really opened up the theme itself, made it deeper & more nuanced, and underscored Seven’s emotional state very well in that moment. That scene, in a masterful way, went far beyond fan service, and the composition was a big part of that success. Some absolutely brilliant composing for this season, for sure.

Just a quick word to praise this wonderful interview. It had great questions that elicited substantive and fascinating replies. Thank you!

Seconded. Great questions that really let these artists let loose.

Yes, thirded. Substantive discussion, no softballs.

For some reason, every time I hear a musical reference to the TOS movies, it takes me right out of the show. It’s like the auditory equivalent of seeing half the Titan’s crew wearing Monster Maroons instead of current uniforms. For whatever reason, I don’t think of it as “Star Trek” music, but as a historical signifier. I suppose it’s nothing more than a “me” problem in the end.

I feel the same.

The music is great

I’m am glad we are bringing back some awesome themes vs. the wallpaper music of TNG/VOY. Even the TNG theme was a watered down version of the TMP theme. Apart from the Borg music in TBOB I feel for the musicians as hard to utilize such forgettable music, glad to see they’ve decided to embrace the memorable TOS movie cues.

I love direction they’ve taken with the music this season. It’s fittingly more cinematic than the past few seasons and the rest of NuTrek. Great job!

Fantastic interview by Jeff Bond! I couldn’t have asked for better, just MORE!

Like so much of this season, the music harkens back to such a different and more nostalgic time and I love it! It’s a combination of nearly all the greatest Trek hits rolled into one.

I remember when the first teaser showed up on First Contact day announcing all the TNG actors were coming back and they played a piece of James Horner music in it. Many thought it was odd to include when in reality it was just giving us a taste of what was to come!

What I’ve enjoyed most is not the specific legacy cues, but how new music evokes the tone of certain older elements. It’s clear they wanted a James Horner “style” and they’ve captured it well.

Now we just need Strange New Worlds Season 1 Soundtrack!!

I preordered both the digital and the LP set (I wish there were a CD..) but I noticed the LP doesnt seem to have the 45 tracks as compared to the digital. Maybe I’m wrong.

Every time I talk to my brother about Picard, he says ‘it’s great… But how can they get away with using all that classic music and not even credit those guys?’

How could Horner rip off the same classical piece (sans credit) over and over again in his ‘work’? The opening of ALIENS and a sequence in PATRIOT GAMES are just two instances where he totally riffs on the ‘jog in a circle’ cue from 2001, which uses the Gayne Ballet Suite. And by riff, I don’t mean a bar or two, I mean MINUTES of score.

I am loving all the music in the sh0w, including the nods back to previous soundtracks. Star Wars has a very consistent feel to its music, since it all came from the same guy. I always thought that Star Trek had great themes, they just weren’t emphasized as well as they could be. This season is definitely flipping that around. Great article too. Thanks!

I think that musically they could have evoked trek simply by going deep into melody and percussion with new cues. There’s a bit of what Meyer called ‘getting kissed over the phone’ when music from another project gets tracked in, but it didn’t bother me on TOS, because the music was such a vital component, especially Kaplan’s DOOMSDAY MACHINE stuff as reused in IMMUNITY SYNDROME and OBSESSION.

Barton name-checked an absolute legend who deserves attention- Steve Erdody is one of the most prolific cellists in film music, and in classical circles as well. I love that this interview went to that depth on the creators and talent involved. If anyone is interested in hearing an interview with Steve, and to learn more about his work, check out this page: https://thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com/2021/07/26/stephen-erdody-podcast/

This was just such a great interview from you guys. Well done! Greetings from Germany!

I am a long-time fan of film scores, particularly Star Trek scores. These two composers knocked it out of the park. My ears and heart could not be more pleased.

Star Trek: First Contact (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

22 November 1996 11 Songs, 44 minutes ℗ 1996 GNP Crescendo Records

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Jerry Goldsmith’s 10 Most Indelible Scores

By Jon Burlingame

Jon Burlingame

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In honor of Jerry Goldsmith ‘s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Jon Burlingame offers ten scores that best capture the late composer’s genius.

1. A Patch of Blue (1965) For the tender relationship between a blind white girl (Elizabeth Hartman) and the kindly black man (Sidney Poitier) she befriends, Goldsmith wrote a haunting, delicate score featuring piano and harmonica.

2. The Sand Pebbles (1966) Goldsmith’s first epic score, for director Robert Wise’s film about a U.S. gunboat in Chinese waters in the 1920s starring Steve McQueen. He evoked an Asian atmosphere with exotic instruments, and his love theme (“And We Were Lovers”) was recorded by artists from Andy Williams to Shirley Bassey.

3. Planet of the Apes (1968) A landmark in film-music history, this unearthly, Bartok- and Stravinsky-influenced soundscape strongly implied that Charlton Heston and his fellow astronauts were marooned on a far-off planet… when, in fact, they were on Earth all along.

4. Patton (1970) Goldsmith’s music illuminated the character of the World War II general (famously portrayed by George C. Scott), cleverly employing echoing trumpets to suggest his conviction that he had been present at every great battle in the history of warfare.

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5. Papillon (1973) A virtual tone poem, this alternately gorgeous and harrowing score is a forgotten masterpiece of ’70s cinema music: beginning with a charming French waltz, ending with a crashing man-against-the-sea coda. Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman played inmates in the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony.

6. Chinatown (1974) Producer Robert Evans often said that Goldsmith “saved” Roman Polanski’s noirish drama set in 1930s L.A. Goldsmith wrote and recorded it in 10 days after an earlier score was discarded; his modernist ensemble included four pianos and four harps, and that sexy solo-trumpet theme is indelible.

7. The Omen (1976) Goldsmith’s sole Oscar winner was a choral-and-orchestral score for a summer popcorn movie about the Antichrist as a child, complete with Latin lyrics praising Satan. The composer’s music for Gregory Peck being attacked by dogs in a darkened cemetery is among the scariest of the decade.

8. Star Trek : The Motion Picture (1979) Perhaps the most familiar of all Goldsmith themes (used in many of the Enterprise crew’s subsequent film and TV appearances), this score established the heroic, symphonic sound of Kirk, Spock and company still in use today.

9. Poltergeist (1982) This Steven Spielberg-produced haunted-house movie about a little girl abducted into another dimension contains one of Goldsmith’s most brilliant musical ideas: a lullaby as its main theme, designed to remind listeners that a frightened child was at the story’s heart.

10. Basic Instinct (1992) Goldsmith’s most provocative and sensual score, for Paul Verhoeven’s infamous erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone, uses both orchestra and electronics to create moods of intense passion and edge-of-seat suspense.

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The 30 greatest film scores of Jerry Goldsmith

From The Mummy and Gremlins to Star Trek and Total Recall, we salute the work of the late, great Jerry Goldsmith...

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Upon presenting a lifetime achievement award to famed composer Jerry Goldsmith, his equally esteemed contemporary Henry Mancini addressed the assorted Hollywood crowd, claiming “he keeps everyone honest… and frankly he scares the hell out of us.” It was a humorous observation but one laced with truth, for few film composers were as mercurial, dynamic or thrilling as Goldsmith.

Responsible for innumerable classic works, from Chinatown to Total Recall , and a pioneer in the integration of ethnic sounds and electronic samples with a full symphony orchestra, Goldsmith stakes a strong claim to being the greatest film composer who ever lived. Although he sadly passed away in 2004 his formidable legacy lives on, so here are his 30 greatest works that continue to inspire the soul and get the blood pumping.

30.  The Mummy (1999)

Composed towards the very end of Goldsmith’s career, this richly engrossing adventure score proved the master of such things still had the magic touch, although Goldsmith himself reportedly hated working on the film. No matter: the intoxicating blend of typically thunderous action music, Egyptian instrumentation, creepy horror material and heartwarming romance made for one of Goldsmith’s late-career masterpieces, one that not only threw back to his earlier classics like The Wind And The Lion but a lost, lamented golden age of film scoring in general.

29. The ‘Burbs (1989)

Every so often, a usually serious film composer is obliged to let their hair down. Goldsmith’s partnership with mischievous director Joe Dante was one of the most unexpectedly fruitful of his career, the two men bouncing riotously silly and inventive musical ideas off one another that helped emphasise the satire of the movies in question; yet they didn’t come sillier than the score for The ‘Burbs . Here, Goldsmith throws out every trick in the book from sly spoofing of his own celebrated Patton score to blaring organ horror and utterly ridiculous electronic effects including breaking glass and wailing cats. It’s unashamedly daft but works brilliantly for the movie, heightening its sense of satirical fun no end.

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28. The Boys From Brazil (1978)

Another of Goldsmith’s great abilities was his ability to contort and manipulate pre-existing musical forms, thereby coming up with something truly twisted and unsettling. Franklin J Schaffner’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel, detailing the notorious Josef Mengele’s attempts to rekindle the Third Reich, sees Goldsmith brilliantly weaving Wagnerian and Straussian waltz movements around one another, a grandiose, decadent distillation of the Nazi regime’s lust for power that is at once both alluring and terrifying. However, much of the score is occupied by Goldsmith’s signature rumbling suspense material, off-kilter piano and terse strings reinforcing the dire threat of Mengele’s plan; truly one of the composer’s most innovative works.

27. The Edge (1997)

Goldsmith’s second animal attack movie in as many years, this gripping story of a millionaire and a fashion photographer stalked through the Alaskan wilderness by a monstrous bear is visceral entertainment. Complimenting the strong performances of Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin, not to mention the sharp script by David Mamet, is Goldsmith’s full-blooded music that, like the earlier The Ghost And The Darkness , both celebrates the beauty of the wild and also chills the blood with its depiction of animal savagery, the gloriously inspiring main theme giving host to memorably creepy textures for the aforementioned bear. Unusually devoid of any electronic sampling, it’s pure orchestral Goldsmith – and all the better for it.

26. The Shadow (1994)

Goldsmith only ever made two forays into the superhero genre, once with Supergirl and the other with this utterly rip-roaring slice of pulp action. The great success of Goldsmith’s score for The Shadow is its self-awareness: taking a cue from Danny Elfman’s trendsetting Batman (whose influence is immediately apparent), the composer wastes no time in establishing a soundscape that is both broodingly atmospheric yet irreverently tongue-in-cheek, a score that’s robustly dramatic yet never pompous enough to take itself too seriously. That was one of Goldsmith’s many gifts: the ability to look at a movie and extract its soul, giving the picture exactly what it needed yet also elevating it beyond its flaws. Few of his nineties works were as straightforwardly entertaining as The Shadow .

25. Explorers (1985)

One of Goldsmith’s most jubilant and joyous works, this charming score for director Joe Dante’s adventure distils childhood innocence to a truly wondrous degree. It’s the story of three pre-teen boys (one played by a very young Ethan Hawke) who build a spaceship out of a tilt-a-whirl, and like the characters themselves, Goldsmith revels in a wide-eyed sense of adventure, his triumphant central Construction theme one of his most infectiously upbeat creations. Augmented as ever by a host of swirling electronic effects, the Explorers score finds Goldsmith in a particularly giving mood, a nostalgic celebration of what it’s like to be young and free.

24. The Russia House (1990)

One of the side-effects of Goldsmith’s wide-ranging career is that many smaller scores risk getting lost in the shuffle. One of his most affecting was this stylish jazzy offering for the John Le Carre drama starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer. Composed for an achingly cool jazz trio of Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Michael Lang on piano and John Patitucci on double bass, backed the requisite string/electronic mixture capturing the story’s espionage elements, it’s an exquisite musical depiction of love in a cold climate, a sense of human warmth piercing through the wall of Cold War paranoia. It’s one of Goldsmith’s most underrated scores, and almost certainly one of his best.

23. First Knight (1995)

Undeniably scuppered by the peculiar casting of Richard Gere as the Yankee in King Arthur’s court, First Knight really isn’t as bad as its reputation suggests; at the very least it looks grand, and sounds it too courtesy of Goldsmith’s rollicking score, reportedly his favourite project to have worked on during the twilight years of his career. The gallantry of Arthurian knights has always been a godsend for film composers but in the hands of Goldsmith it’s especially dynamic, a feast of brass fanfares, tender love themes and explosive choral moments that further cements the composer as the greatest adventure scorer who ever lived. Noble and majestic, it’s yet another Goldsmith work that rises high above the quality of the film in question.

22. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

Goldsmith was the champion at scoring craptacular movies; far too many shoddy offerings were blessed with his talent (which, in Goldsmith’s own words, owed itself to a sense of restlessness, and a desire to continually push himself experimentally no matter the quality of the film itself). There’s no denying that the cartoonish Rambo sequel, no matter how enjoyable, was a considerable step down from the gritty, intelligent original, but it did allow Goldsmith to let rip. Whereas the First Blood score juxtaposed Rambo’s melancholy central theme with a host of dark and toiling textures, Part II is unashamedly heroic and exciting, a beefy blend of full-on fanfare material with the composer’s customary electronics. It almost veers into self-parody at times but Goldsmith’s musical integrity saves the day.

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21. Islands In The Stream (1977)

Goldsmith loved nothing more than to score intimate, human drama but he found frustratingly few opportunities to do so, especially towards the end of his career. It’s therefore little surprise that this lovely and tender little gem was regarded by the composer himself as his personal favourite, absent of orchestral histrionics but with a devastating emotional impact. The movie itself, adapted by Goldsmith regular Franklin J Schaffner from Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the same name, has slipped into obscurity; Goldsmith’s score however remains one of his most beautiful and deserves to be remembered as such, a profoundly human symphony proving there was more to him than bombastic action.

20.  Medicine Man (1992)

Throughout the late 1980s Goldsmith’s experimentation with electronics yielded mixed results, his all-synth efforts such as Alien Nation and Criminal Law leaving the orchestra behind and subsequently lacking the impact of his finest works. However, one score that beautifully fused the organic with the synthetic was his work on Sean Connery eco-drama Medicine Man , quite possibly the pinnacle of Goldsmith’s work in the area. With dreamy strings and woodwinds mixing effortlessly with an expansive synth backdrop, there’s no denying that Goldsmith captured the mystery and the majesty of the movie’s rainforest location in a manner that is really quite dazzling. It proves that Goldsmith’s synthetics, abrasive on their own, really do work better when they compliment his orchestral writing. Fun fact: Connery’s on-screen hair was in fact modelled on Goldsmith’s.

19.  Under Fire (1983)

Famously – and brilliantly – used by Quentin Tarantino during his blood-soaked epic Django Unchained , this thoughtful drama score marks one of the relatively few occasions in Goldsmith’s career where his talent matched the potential of the movie. A political thriller set in Nicaragua starring Gene Hackman and Nick Nolte, it offered Goldsmith a plum chance to not only launch into the location-specific textures he loved so much, but also build some of his most intelligent and stirring character themes. Working with noted guitarist Pat Metheny, Goldsmith crafts a slow-burner of a score that inexorably builds to the aforementioned Django track, Niicaragua , one of the most rousing and cathartic musical statements in the composer’s entire career.

18. Magic (1978)

Richard Attenborough’s under-appreciated psychological thriller is one of the creepiest doll movies ever made, featuring a terrific performance from a young Anthony Hopkins as the ventriloquist whose dummy may or may not be alive. It’s fertile ground for Goldsmith whose music wobbles uneasily between string-led compassion and starkly jabbing harmonica, a perfect crystallation of the turbulence occurring within Hopkins’ mind. As ever, Goldsmith’s use of particular musical signatures and textures to create an emotional link with the viewing audience is quite breathtaking; even when the dreaded dummy in question, Fats, isn’t moving, the composer’s eerie music invests him with genuinely terrifying life.

17. Gremlins (1984)

So robust are Goldsmith’s more adventurous scores that his comedy offerings can’t help but come off a bit fluffy and insubstantial as a result. One of the exceptions was this devious and hilarious score for Joe Dante’s tale of mischievous monsters running amok in suburbia, Goldsmith’s first score for the filmmaker who would become one of his longest-running collaborators. Anchored by the riotously catchy, all-electronic Gremlin Rag , this is a deliberately eclectic, intentionally silly comedy score that throws around a host of ideas and processed sound effects in a bid to match the movie’s offbeat tone, contravening the oft-held idea that comedy music needs to be played as straight as possible in order to be funny. As ever, Goldsmith was the one to prove everybody wrong.

16. Capricorn One (1977)

A score of pure brute force and relentless suspense, the chopping rhythms of Goldsmith’s Capricorn One acted as a massive influence on all of the composer’s subsequent action material. In fact, just listen to James Horner’s Futile Escape cue from Aliens to get a measure of how important the Capricorn One theme is. Director Peter Hyams’ conspiracy thriller regularly courts implausibility but the incessantly thrilling nature of Goldsmith’s score keeps us glued to our seats, the menace of the central theme intentionally matching the faceless threat posed by the villains’ black helicopters. If ever there was proof that Goldsmith was a master of musical tension, this is it.

15. The Blue Max (1966)

One of several 1960s scores that announced Goldsmith as a musical force to be reckoned with, this enormously stirring celebration of World War I heroism (from a German perspective, no less) remains one of his best. Honouring the master of such things, Ron Goodwin (who was originally asked to score the movie), Goldsmith utilises the 100-piece National Philharmonic Orchestra to construct one of the most robust and thrilling wartime scores in movie history; the use of the high strings and trilling woodwinds to convey the spirit of the airborne dog fights was to prove hugely influential on the likes of John Williams’ Star Wars and James Horner’s The Rocketeer . Yet underpinning it all is a refreshing sense of musical maturity that captures the darkness inherent in George Peppard’s central character, another sign of Goldsmith’s knack for capturing character as well as action.

14. Papillon (1973)

Given his reputation as a pioneer in the realms of action, horror and science fiction, it’s perhaps easy to forget that Goldsmith was also capable of turning out some of cinema’s most tender and beautiful melodies. Case in point: this sumptuously lovely score for the movie based on the story of Henri Charriere, a Frenchman imprisoned in French Guiana. Reuniting with regular collaborator Franklin J. Schaffner, Goldsmith extracts grace notes of compassion and warmth from Charriere’s heartrending story, gently teasing out his French nationality and brilliantly complimenting Steve McQueen’s terrific central performance. Goldsmith’s feather-light interactions of strings, accordion and woodwind are some of the most perfectly wrought in his entire career.

13. Alien (1979)

One of Goldsmith’s most chillingly effective horror scores suffered from a controversial post-production situation, as director Ridley Scott and editor Terry Rawlings saw fit to chop the composer’s music into bits, as well as replacing it with Goldsmith cues from other scores and a classical staple by Howard Hanson. However badly Goldsmith was treated, however, the score as heard in the film is brilliantly terrifying, although it took the 2007 deluxe album release to really appreciate Goldsmith’s towering achievement, his eerily lonely trumpet theme (butchered in the movie) representing the coldness of space gradually giving way to a host of slithery, spine-tingling textures for the titular xenomorph, including a 16th century instrument called the Serpent. Aside from its traumatic creation, Alien encapsulates Goldsmith’s remarkable ability to juxtapose glacial beauty with bone-chilling terror.

12. The Ghost And The Darkness (1996)

Only Goldsmith could have fused English, Irish and African sensibilities seamlessly together in one score; The Ghost And The Darkness is the glorious end result, by turns a triumphant depiction of the sweeping Tsavo landscape and a terrifying representation of the man-eating lions contained within. The composer was a keen studier of world music and ethnic textures, yet rarely did he pull it off as effectively as here. The score’s gripping movement from beauty to horror to thunderous action and back again is terrifically well wrought and unsurprisingly carries echoes of Goldsmith’s 1975 masterpiece The Wind And The Lion . The music even helps viewers overlook star Val Kilmer’s attempt at an Irish accent; it’s that good.

11. The Final Conflict (1981)

If The Omen introduced us to the antichrist and Damien: Omen Part II took us through his adolescence, then the third and final movie is where the final battle between good and evil takes place. That means only one thing: an opportunity for Goldsmith to paint musically with some of the most majestic textures of his entire career. Typically, he ignores the shoddy qualities of the film itself to conjure a musical depiction of the end of days, wider in scope than his Oscar-winning score for the original and possessed of stronger ideas than that for the sequel. It’s little wonder, given the sheer beauty and terror on offer, that many of The Final Conflict ’s tonal ideas were carried over into Poltergeist the following year.

10. The Secret Of NIMH (1982)

Goldsmith only ever made two forays into animation scoring (the other being the wonderful Mulan in 1998) but as ever, he redefined how the genre was scored. Don Bluth’s fantastical and often scary story of Mrs Brisby and the genetically engineered rats of NIMH required a much more sophisticated and robust score than this genre usually allows for, and Goldsmith duly responded. Defying the approach taken by his contemporaries, Goldsmith never mickey-mouses the action or attempts to make it overly cutesy, instead creating a gripping dramatic undercurrent that plays to the story’s themes of family, magic and betrayal. There are no songs, bar one lullaby; just some of the most soaringly dramatic material of Goldsmith’s entire career, the National Philharmonic Orchestra (plus choir) performing some of their greatest work.

9. Total Recall (1990)

Although Goldsmith was the king of the action score Total Recall remains pretty special, even by his own high standards. Working for the first time with Paul Verhoeven, who clearly deserves much credit for eliciting outstanding music from his composers (he also worked with the terrific Basil Poledouris), Goldsmith’s blisteringly complex, seamless fusion of dizzying orchestral writing with otherwordly electronics remains a high watermark in sci-fi/action scoring: intuitive, innovative and relentlessly exciting. His music zipping around as quickly as Arnie dodges on-screen bullets, Goldsmith himself marvelled at the sheer number of notes he’d composed for the project. Easily a candidate for the greatest action score of all time.

8. Patton (1970)

Another fine example of Goldsmith’s ability to get inside a movie’s emotional landscape (he once told a group of film score students that scoring a horseback chase should be about capturing the fear of the rider, not the chase itself), Patton zeroes in not on the obvious World War II trappings but the more elusive characteristics of Patton himself. Utilising trumpet triplets filtered through an echoplex to give a hauntingly spiritual sound, Goldsmith through his music reinforces Patton’s unyielding belief in reincarnation, a key theme in the movie made all the more so by Goldsmith’s incisive techniques. Patton was later brilliantly spoofed by the composer in his own scores for The ‘Burbs and Small Soldiers .

7. The Wind And The Lion (1975)

John Milius’ rousing period adventure features a Scottish-accented Raisuli played by Sean Connery and one of Goldsmith’s most thunderously adventurous accompaniments. Always a composer goosed by exotic landscapes and exciting set-pieces, Goldsmith here unleashes the full might of the brass and percussion section, sweeping audiences into the movie’s Moroccan landscapes whilst also capturing the noble gallantry of Connery’s central character. It was a score that proved enormously influential on Goldsmith’s later output, particularly the likes of The Ghost And The Darkness and The Mummy .

6. Poltergeist (1982)

Goldsmith once said that the role of a film composer was to score the emotion, not the visuals, and this Oscar-nominated horror masterwork demonstrates that philosophy perfectly. Although the ghostly Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg brings the scares, Goldsmith looked beyond to score the underlying love between the Freeling family that comes under threat from the supernatural scourge. The result is a powerful score that mixes tender lyricism in the form of Carol Anne’s Theme with some of the most brutally terrifying and compelling material of Goldsmith’s career, a score that brilliantly pinballs between shock and awe.

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Director Paul Verhoeven’s provocative and sleazy riffing on Alfred Hitchcock deserves to be remembered for more than just Sharon Stone sans grundies; in fact it demands more recognition for its sly visual style and playful storytelling, aided beautifully by Goldsmith’s supple and sultry score. The composer deemed it one of his hardest scores to compose, Verhoeven encouraging him to go the extra mile and compose a wonderfully icy score that brilliantly embodies the contradictions of Stone’s alluring character Catherine Tramell; it is at once deeply attractive yet utterly malevolent. Of course, Goldsmith being Goldsmith the contradictions seem effortless, and it single-handedly defined the rest of his thrillers throughout the rest of the nineties.

4. Planet Of The Apes (1968)

Although Goldsmith had been scoring movies since the late 1950s, it was this revolutionary, avant-garde work (bearing the influence of his great mentor, Alex North) that truly established him as a force to be reckoned with. Eschewing the more traditional theme and melody approach for an uncompromising array of instrumental experimentation, including rams horns, bowls and woodwind instruments used without mouthpieces, it sounds as fresh today as it did back then, and got the composer his fourth Oscar nomination, the perfect embodiment of the movie’s inverted primate landscape. So into the project was Goldsmith that he conducted part of it wearing an ape mask.

3. Chinatown (1974)

Amazingly, Goldsmith had only 10 days to compose his score (replacing a rejected work by Philip Lambro) for Roman Polanski’s classic neo-noir starring Jack Nicholson. Yet the impossible time constraints yielded one of his most haunting works: anchored by that haunting trumpet solo by Uan Rasey anticipating the doomed trajectory of the story’s central romance (reportedly scored to sound like “bad sex”), the majority of the score centres around Goldsmith’s avant-garde textures heard in Planet Of The Apes , designed to reflect the aridity of the movie’s water-parched Los Angeles landscape whilst bringing the noir genre into the modern age. There’s only 25 minutes worth of music in the movie, yet every single second counts.

2. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Despite the many glorious highs of the Star Trek movie franchise, its inception came with this somewhat muddled and slow-moving, though visually majestic, debut feature, one that fails to yield the warm responses afforded to later entries in the series. Nevertheless, its extraordinary effects allowed Goldsmith to paint an astonishing tapestry that defined the sound of Star Trek like no other. Utilising Alexander Courage’s series fanfare as a jumping-off point, Goldsmith’s immediately iconic brassy theme (later used for The Next Generation TV series) is complemented by a host of fascinating, ethereal textures including the unsettling noise of the blaster beam. It’s perhaps best to leave the movie entirely and just appreciate Goldsmith’s richly fascinating symphony on its own terms.

1. The Omen (1976)

The greatest horror score ever composed, bar none, this is a textbook example of what a soundtrack can do for its respective movie, elevating it from schlock into grippingly portentous Satanic art. Although Richard Donner’s story of the antichrist’s adoption by the American ambassador is a classy affair, aided no end by strong performances from Gregory Peck, Lee Remick and Billie Whitelaw, it’s Goldsmith’s cutting-edge and utterly terrifying Gregorian chants that cue us into the devilish maelstrom circling around our unsuspecting central characters. Almost certainly Goldsmith’s most dramatically effective and intuitive work, it got him his only Oscar and was to lay the groundwork for the next generation of film composers, including the likes of Hellraiser ’s Christopher Young.

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Film & Television , Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek: The Motion Picture in Full Score

Released in 1979, the film was the first of six to feature the cast of the original television series, and concerns the efforts of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and crew to understand and neutralise the threat faced by a mysterious spacecraft that has been destroying everything in its path.

Initially referring to itself as V'Ger, the vast structure turns out to be the (fictional) Voyager 6 probe, launched from Earth and having subsequently gained consciousness through contact with an alien intelligence. To represent this inscrutable antagonist, Goldsmith employed the distinctive, unearthly sound of the blaster beam, an enormous construction consisting of metal beams up to eighteen feet in length, strung with tensed wires and mounted underneath with electric guitar pickups. The strings are then struck with a variety of objects to create the unforgettable timbre that is heard so prominently throughout the film.

For the main theme, Goldsmith wrote perhaps his best-known melody: so popular was it that in 1987 it was re-used as the theme for the television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation . In addition, he provided a lush, sweeping theme for Ilia, the Starfleet officer killed and then artificially recreated by V'Ger during the events of the film, as well as a primal motif based on perfect fifths for the rallying war-cry of the Klingons.

Omni's score presents every cue written by Goldsmith, as well as a handful of short cues adapted by Fred Steiner and quoting Alexander Courage's theme from the original series. Furthermore, as an appendix this volume includes early versions of almost a dozen cues, offering a fascinating insight into Goldsmith's working methods and also into the ways in which his music evolved during the scoring process.

Jerry Goldsmith: Star Trek The Motion Picture

The complete orchestral score of Jerry Goldsmith's music for the 1979 film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture , including early versions of several cues.

Available Format: Sheet Music

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James is a conductor, répétiteur, arranger, and tuba player. His musical interests include opera, film music, late-Romantic orchestral works (especially Mahler and Richard Strauss), and twentieth-century American composers such as Copland, John Adams, and John Williams. He read Music at Christ Church, Oxford, writing his postgraduate dissertation on the music of Star Wars .

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FOND MEMORIES – EPISODE 6: 1982-1984 – JERRY GOLDSMITH AND STAR TREK

"My peers at the time, the people who were most respected at that time, and who I looked up to, were John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein. I would often be at their recording sessions listening to everything." 1

" I did go to the sessions with Jerry Goldsmith while I was working at Roger Corman . I knew Jerry and I wanted to see what big sessions were like. I was impressed with Jerry’s sound world." 2 “ I was curious what Jerry would do, and he invited me to the sessions and I hung out a lot and that was sort of a big event for me to see that being conducted and that being put together.” 3

"When I started, for sure I was influenced by Goldsmith and his large orchestral scores, but at the same time the people who employed me wanted that kind of music. I was not able to tell them, "Go to hell!" 4

“ That is often what one is up against. A producer or director has seen the move and test-tracked it with somebody else's music and has fallen in love with that score, and says: this is what we want, period." 5

" A lot of people say that they hear Jerry Goldsmith, but that's only because they know Jerry Goldsmith's music. I mean, other people think they hear Debussy's music or Mahler's music or Strauss’ music or Beethoven, it just depends on who one talks to ." 5

" Most of the films that I've been doing are, in fact, adventure, horror or whatever, and those are the kinds of films Goldsmith does, he very rarely does sensitive films. " 5

" I’d known James Horner in high school through a friend of mine he was dating…Dad loved to exaggerate my one outing with Jamie Horner into boyfriend proportions…. " 6

"He refused to come and conduct his own Fanfare for Oscar and the ceremony because he absolutely did not want to play the music of Titanic . I'm no longer the young man who was once his friend. Times changed a long time ago. I am a rival now." 4

" a much lower budget and the search for a different musical color ". 8

" They did not want the kind of score they had gotten before, they did not want a John Williams score, per se. They wanted something different, more modern. " 5

" I n terms of first "Star Trek", the studio was very disappointed with the way the movie came out commercially and they wanted something much more exciting and visceral and not so much of a thought process. I was asked to do more of an adventure score and that’s how I approached it initially. " 3

" The producers loved my work for Wolfen , and had heard my music for several other projects, and I think, so far as I've been told, they liked my versatility very much. I wanted the assignment, and I met with them, we all got along well, they were impressed with my music, and that's how it happened." 5

“ I knew nothing about Star Trek . I don’t watch TV so I knew nothing about the series. I had seen the first Star Trek and wasn’t particularly impressed, although I did love the visuals and the effects, but emotionally it didn’t do much for me.” 10

“ It was an action movie but the thrust of what I wanted to give it was the tune that goes between Kirk and Spock. I’m always looking for the core story, and that’s what I narrate. I wanted to make much more of Spock than had ever been done before. That unique undercurrent of Spock and the Captain, Jim, was a relationship that had never played in anybody’s approach. I wanted to make that bond very tight. That was really important because there was a Star Trek 3 and that bond ended up being the whole thing of Star Trek 3 . I wanted to tell the story of two men and their friendship, and that’s what I gleaned out of the series and out of the first movie. So the closer I could play that bond during the movie, the more I could make of that bond separation when Spock dies, the more I could break the audience's heart at the end of the movie. Seeds I was sowing in Star Trek 2 were now going to be able to bloom and work in Star Trek 3 , and that was very important, and that was all part of the work and how it was all going to be woven together.” 3

"The director was passionate about classical music. There was much talk of Mahler, Prokofiev, the symphonic approach, contrasts between brass and strings. It was stimulating. There were times when he could describe things in terms of symphony movement and form." 8

"He and I talked about it at great length. We spent so much time together on this project that we've become rather close friends. Nick knows what he's talking about, musically. He wanted to give the feeling of an adventure on the high seas. It's that sort of nautical, under-sail, wind-blowing spirit that I'm after, as opposed to Star Wars ' very imperial, martial kind of theme." 11

"It took me a little over four weeks. I freed myself from the musical imprint of Jerry Goldsmith, who had composed the first Star Trek, and I brought back the theme of the TV series, composed by Alexander Courage. " 8

" Star Trek had a large brass section—six French horns, otherwise it was a general, large symphonic orchestra.” 12

"There were quite a few instances where I would be called up on a sequence that we had timed out, asking to change lengths because they couldn't use the full special effects shot, or they had lengthened it or re-cut it slightly." 6

"I never wanted to use it. I begged, begged, 'Please don't make me use 'Amazing Grace. ' It was the only battle in the film I lost. They all seemed to feel that 'Amazing Grace' was the only thing to make them happy. It was 15 seconds—I just did it. It had already been shot, and I had to match it." 12

“ Star Trek had a rushed production schedule; they had to be in theaters by June 4 th , and they started dubbing April 9 th . I had to have the music available by April 15 th . They locked the picture four weeks prior to that, and they were still getting special effects shots while I was writing it. It was a very rushed schedule. Nicholas was editing while he was directing: editing nights, directing days. Hollywood doesn't usually do it that way, but the film turned out to be wonderful. Every sequence I scored was in the film. There was one bit I wanted taken out. It was after Kirk surprises the Reliant, hits it with photon torpedoes, and Scotty carries the dead guy up to the bridge. Everyone just closes their eyes on the bridge, then they cut to the Enterprise, 'blowing in the wind.' I scored a big bittersweet chord for that cut. I wanted it to play very ghostly, very, very quiet, after all that battle noise. And we finally cut the music at that point. It works terrifically. Now the Enterprise just turns in that silence. It's really kind of nice.” 12

" The villain stuff, the big effects stuff, the chases, all of that takes care of itself because it’s all visually stunning. What has to be brought to the surface more in the storytelling is the deep affection that occurs between these two characters, Spock and Kirk, and that’s really what I focused on. It ended up fortuitously working to set it up that way because it cemented something that wasn’t in the first movie, it cemented something on a big scale that wasn’t in the television series. It was always implied. I tried to nail it in the movie." 10

" I believe that you had to have 2, maybe maximum 3 themes that an audience could keep track of, and then it was important that 3 themes be your principal themes and then have maybe a motif or two that were very short but narrated other things. And themes tended to be long melodies and the motifs could be short blasts of things. " 3

"The score is designed to help create a feeling of tremendous speed and power for the Enterprise" 12

" There was a theme I composed for Kirk, (that nautical, Horatio Hornblower -sounding theme), a separate theme for the Enterprise, and the two themes are intertwined—Kirk and the Enterprise as one. There's a very strange, ethereal theme for Spock. " 12

"Nicholas Meyer wanted something very sea-faring, something that gave the feeling of space as an ocean, and I tried to achieve that without getting too literal about it."  6

“ Producer Harve Bennett would've probably been more comfortable had I reused material from the television show, but I chose not to do that and Nick (Nicholas Meyer ed.) backed me up on that decision. They didn’t want to repeat the theme of Star Trek 1 . They wanted a new theme. Nick wanted it to be seafaring, as I told you, so they didn’t want to re-use or reference anything of Star Trek 1 . That was history now. So we had to come up with a new theme and it had to be very musical and had to be memorable.” 3

"Well I was little more rebellious probably than Jerry was. I refused to use the Alexander Courage theme. Honestly it’s a period type of tune and I felt it didn’t have the emotional thing that I wanted to get out of it " 3

"I didn’t think there would be a place for it in the film. I said I would think about it." 12

"At first I was not going to do it, but then as I started writing the music I figured out a way to incorporate part of the fanfare into the music, and it works very well." 6

"I worked out a way to use the Star Trek fanfare, which I used about four or five times. I always had wanted to use that fanfare, actually. Unlike the first Star Trek film, I wanted right from the start, from where the curtain first opened, to grip the audience, to tell them that they were going to see Star Trek.” 12

"I felt it was very important to Star Trek to somehow tie in the characters and the ship that everybody knew. The audience seems to like it. When they first hear the music they start applauding!" 6

" There are only two things that can do that, either the Enterprise, or the Star Trek fanfare. The fanfare draws you in im mediately—you know you're going to get a good movie. " 12

" One of my absolute favorite sequences of Star Trek was seeing the Enterprise in Drydock. I just thought that was unbelievable. And the whole leaving Drydock for the first time. And I had to write a really long sequence to narrate that, and I had to make it perfect because I thought the sequence was perfect, visually. The music works in a very special way. I wanted it to be as ship-like and as old-fashioned as it could be, and as majestic as it could be. It's not so much the music that I’m proud of. It’s the whole sequence when you watch it. And I always believe that you shouldn’t be aware of the music. What I’m proud of is the marriage, that you're just in awe of the sequence and it's the visuals and the music working together that make that moment dramatically, that whole long 12-minute sequence of pulling out of Drydock. It's just such a terrific sequence. " 3

"There were certain ways that drama was treated musically on the TV show. In certain spots in the film I tried to play on that. In the sequence where the Ceti eels are put into the helmets, Khan says 'That's better. Now tell me about Genesis…." There, you hear a very high, weird lyre. And the strings are doubled with several percussion and electronic instruments. That's a very weird permutation of the Star Trek love theme from the TV series. It's a strange inside joke on my part. Very few people recognize it, but it's the kind of thing I smile at when I hear it. Maybe I perverted it so much that no one can recognize it now." 12

" Khan didn’t have a long theme. Khan had a high, sort of war-like thing that I did in high french horns. But it helps you know right away that that's Khan’s music, and it's very short and distinctive, and that plays against the theme of the Enterprise, which is a long melodic thing. I wanted it to be really something that was strong and war-like, and to me the high horns in terms of color did that. Not the trumpets. But in terms of sheer power…I think it was 8 french horns that did that. It was something that I could play, a short blast of power. It wasn’t really a theme, it was just a motif for Khan and then, I could do that, and then when you cut back to Kirk, you could have Kirk’s theme, very simply so that these chases could be very easily theme-driven because there was a lot of battle music…and it was incessant. And I had to find a way to musically say who was what, and what was who, and who was damaged, who was not damaged. And that helped a great deal, knowing how the battle was going and I think that that is really, really important when you are having long battle sequences. Otherwise it's just action music. " 3

"It's sort of a menacing undertone, very quiet music that underplays his insanity in a subtle way that wil have a disquieting effect on the audience. When he's involved in battles, the music is wild and pagan. A lot is going on in this movie, and by means of music you can help the story along. You can represent how characters feel about each other in an instant by using a bristling theme or a friendship theme. We do that with Khan. You know he's crazy the moment you see him, but you don't know why you feel that way." 11

" Spock's motif is a very haunting theme, very different from anything else in the film, but done with conventional instruments. It emphasizes his humanness more than his alienness. By putting a theme over Spock, it warms him and he becomes three-dimensional rather than a collection of schticks. " 11

" Spock had never had a theme before, and I wanted to give him a theme to tie the whole of 'Genesis' and 'Spock' by the end of the film, so that it would all mean something." 12

"It's not the swelling dawn-of-creation, Stravinsky-violins theme you might expect. It's kind of awe-inspiring. There are large sustained orchestral chords which change slowly and almost imperceptibly. The closest comparison I could give you would probably be certain passages in 2001 . It's got a nice texture, but we're not in it for all that long." 11

"Despite the cramped production schedule and the curse of the bagpipes, Star Trek II is the most enjoyable project I've worked on (in 1982, ed.). Everyone—Harve Bennett, Bob Sallin, the actors—were great to work with." 12

" Initially when I was doing Star Trek II there was no Star Trek III . Star Trek III got formulated somewhere along the end while we were doing it, I had to change the end of Star Trek II musically and they changed the cut so that it merged into the beginning of Star Trek III and it actually held me in very good stead. Star Trek II was really to me, an emotional story between Kirk and Spock and that really paid off in a big way obviously in the next movie and I always look for those types of things in the films I do. It's like a trademark of my writing. " 3

" I have very mixed feelings about doing epic scores. Lately I've been trying to do more and more small films, gentle films rather than this sort of epic blockbusters, because I like what I can do with a small film. I find it more interesting than what I can do, usually, in a large film. " 13

" That was 2 years ago for me. I was twenty-seven and a half when I wrote Star Trek II and now I'm thirty. So a lot of musical time has gone by for me and I just think that the score for Star Trek III is just so much vastly better than Star Trek II . It's just a much more interesting score and, for me, a much more beautiful and emotional score than Star Trek II . " 13

It's an opportunity for all those involved to breathe new life into the established themes and melodies, for Genesis and especially for Spock. A powerful tutti opens the film and the score (blaster beam and all). On the one hand, Horner pays homage to the lofty mysticism of the link between the humans and the Vulcan Spock, on the other hand he indulges in the grotesque humor represented by the Klingons. The Klingon and Enterprise elements contrast heavily in the film’s editing and allow the composer to further develop a technique he experimented with in Star Trek II for the Enterprise and Khan.

"I'm using a couple of themes and reweaving them differently." 13

The "barbarian" aspect outlined by Jerry Goldsmith in the opening scene of Star Trek: The Motion Picture , depicting the Klingons waging war under Prokofiev’s watchful eye, is back in full, with its chromatic phrases, cousins of Khan’s motifs conceived two years earlier.

"It's percussive and atonal. I don't know how one would characterize it. It's obviously very different from any of the other themes. This film deals a lot with Klingons, and there's a lot of Klingon music in it." 13

" Star Trek is what it is. It's never going to be God's gift to man, never ever. And Star Trek is also the kind of thing that the studio, for better or worse, is never going to spend 50 million dollars making, either. They have a budget and certain constraints. I think that Star Trek III is the best of all the Star Treks. It's made with the most amount of feeling, in a certain sense, of all of them. It's made by someone who knows the characters of Star Trek so much more intimately than anybody else involved, except maybe Gene Roddenberry. The fact that Leonard Nimoy directed this film gives it a whole interesting light that it would never have had with anyone else. It was fascinating to work with him. " 13

The Search for Spock marks the end of the James Horner Star Trek saga.

" What appeals to me about writing film music is that each project is completely different. I could have chosen to do another Star Trek or two or three Star Treks because I was certainly asked, but I wasn't interested after doing a couple of them. "

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2 thoughts on “fond memories – episode 6: 1982-1984 – jerry goldsmith and star trek”.

The track “klingons” rappelle bien “Wolfen”

I love learning about James and his collaboration with Nicholas Meyer and Leonard Nimoy on the Star Trek movies. I wonder how he landed the cameo role. As always amazing article well worth reading.

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'Star Trek' composer Jerry Goldsmith dead at 75

Academy Award-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith, who created the memorable music for scores of classic movies and television shows ranging from the “Star Trek” and “Planet of the Apes” series to “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Dr. Kildare,” has died. He was 75.

Goldsmith died in his sleep Wednesday night at his Beverly Hills home after a long battle with cancer, said Lois Carruth, his personal assistant.

A classically trained composer and conductor who began musical studies at age 6, Goldsmith’s award-dappled Hollywood career — he was nominated for 18 Academy Awards, won one, and also took home five Emmys — spanned nearly half a century.

He crafted an astonishing number of TV and movie scores that have become classics in their own right. From the clarions of “Patton” to the syrupy theme for TV’s “The Waltons,” Goldsmith sometimes seemed virtually synonymous with soundtracks.

He took on action hits such as “Total Recall,” which he considered one of his best scores, as well as the “Star Trek” movies and more lightweight fare, like his most recent movie theme, for last year’s “Looney Tunes: Back in Action.” His hundreds of works included scores for “The Blue Max,” “L.A. Confidential,” “Basic Instinct” and “Chinatown.”

Goldsmith’s output also spilled into television, with the themes for shows including “Dr. Kildare,” “Barnaby Jones” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” He also wrote a fanfare that is used in Academy Awards telecasts.

He won his Oscar for best original score in 1976 for “The Omen.” He also earned five Emmy Awards and was nominated for nine Golden Globe awards, though he never won one.

“He could write anything. He did Westerns, comedies,” Carruth said. “He preferred writing for more character-driven, quiet films but somehow they kept coming back to him for the action films.”

Born Feb. 10, 1929 in Los Angeles, Goldsmith studied with famed pianist Jacob Gimpel and pianist, composer and film musician Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He fell in love with movie composing when he saw the 1945 Ingrid Bergman movie “Spellbound,” Carruth said, and while attending the University of California took classes with Miklos Rozsa, who wrote the Oscar-winning score for that film.

In 1950, he got a job as a clerk typist at CBS and eventually got assignments for live radio shows, writing as much as one score a week. He later turned to television.

In the late 1950s he began composing for movies. His career took off in the 1960s with such major films as “Lonely Are the Brave” and “The Blue Max.” He earned his first Academy Award nomination for his work on 1962’s “Freud.”

Goldsmith was know for his versatility and his experimentation. He added electronics to the woodwinds and brasses of his scores. For 1968’s “Planet of the Apes,” he got a blaring effect by having his musicians blow horns without mouthpieces. With a puckish sense of humor, he reportedly wore an ape mask while conducting the score.

“He experimented a lot and that’s what made him so popular with his fans,” Carruth said. “When he wrote, he got inside of the characters and he wrote what he felt they were thinking and feeling.”

Some of his motion picture scores were adapted for ballets. Goldsmith also wrote composed orchestral pieces and taught occasional music classes at local universities.

He is survived by his wife, Carol; children Aaron, Joel, Carrie, Ellen Edson and Jennifer Grossman, six grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

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Star Trek: The Motion Picture – The Director’s Edition (Music from the Motion Picture)

Music composed and conducted by jerry goldsmith.

• Overture 2:49
• Main Title And Klingon Battle 7:02
• Total Logic 3:54
• Floating Office 1:07
• The Enterprise 6:01
• Malfunction 1:31
• The Crew Briefing 2:12
• Leaving Drydock (Film Version) 3:33
• Captain’s Log – Warp One :49
• No Goodbyes :54
• Spock’s Arrival 2:04
• Captain’s Log – Warp Seven 1:49
• Meet V’Ger 3:04
• The Cloud (Film Version) 5:05
• V’Ger Flyover 5:03
• The Force Field 5:06
• Micro Exam 1:15
• Spock Walk (Film Version) 4:22
• System Inoperative 2:03
• Hidden Information 3:58
• Inner Workings 4:04
• V’Ger Speaks 4:05
• The Meld And A Good Start 5:38
• End Credits 3:15

Total Album Time: 86:37

• Album Credits

Score and Original Soundtrack Album Produced by Jerry Goldsmith Score and Original Soundtrack Album Executive Producer Bruce Botnick

Music Composed and Conducted by Jerry Goldsmith Orchestrations: Arthur Morton Orchestra Contractor: Carl Fortina Music Performed by The Hollywood Studio Symphony Recording Engineer: John Neal Assisted by Terry Brown, Randy Saunders and Barry Walters Recorded on October 23, 25, November 1, 2, 8, 14, 15, 21, 25, 26, 27 and 29, 1979, at Twentieth Century Fox Music Scoring Stage, Century City, California Music Editor for the Film: Ken Hall

1979 Credits

Digital Editing Engineer: Bruce Botnick Sony Digital Recording System Consultants: Rick Plushner and Roger Pryor For 20th Century Fox Music Department: Lionel Newman For Paramount Pictures Music Department: Hunter Murtaugh For Columbia Records: Michael Dilbeck, Bruce Lundvall, Joe Dash and Guy Spellman

The Director’s Edition

Album Produced by Mike Matessino and Bruce Botnick Executive in Charge of Music for Paramount Pictures: Randy Spendlove Soundtrack Album Coordinator for Paramount Pictures: Michael Murphy Executive Producer for Robert Wise Productions: David C. Fein 2″ Multi-Track Hi-Resolution Transfers by Precision Audiosonics, Hollywood, CA Music Restoration, Editing and Track Assembly by Mike Matessino Music Mixed and Mastered by Bruce Botnick at Uniteye Productions, Ojai, CA

Jerry Goldsmith compositions published by Sony/ATV Melody (BMI).

Tracks 9 & 12 include: “Theme From Star Trek (TV Series)” by Alexander Courage and Gene Roddenberry, published by Bruin Music Company (BMI).

Conductor Jerry Goldsmith

Orchestra Manager Carl Fortina

Violins Paul Shure Bonnie Douglas Judith Aller-Talvi Thelma Beach Arnold Belnick Diane Brodick Norman Carr Arkady Delman Glenn Dicterow Ronald Folsom Frank Foster David Frisina Harris Goldman Joseph Goodman Debbie Sue Grossman Reginald Hill William Hybel William Hymanson Davida Lou Johnson Anatol Kaminsky Ezra Kliger Bernard Kundell Robert Lezin Kathleen Lenski Norma Leonard Marvin Limonick Mary Debra Lundquist Yoko Matsuda Irma Neumann David L. Newman Stanley Plummer Jerome Reisler Nathan Ross John Sambucco Sheldon Sanov Erica Sharp Daniel Shindaryov Arkady Shindelman Haim Shtrum Ross Shub Jennifer Small Marshall Sosson Spiro Stamos Joseph Stepansky Lya Stern Robert Sushel Vicki Sylvester Ilkka Talvi Mari Tsumura-Botnick David Turner Dorothy M. Wade Miwako Watanabe Jerome Webster Harold Wolf

Violas Pamela Goldsmith Marilyn H. Baker Meyer Bello Denyse N. Buffum James G. Dunham Allan Harshman Harry Hyams Roland Kato Louis Kievman Renita Koven Janet Lakatos Archie Levin Margot MacLaine Francie Martin Pat Mathews Carol Mukogawa Mike Novak Robert Ostrowski Sven Reher Harry Rumpler David Schwartz Leeana Sherman Ross Shub Barbara A. Simons Linn Subotnick Milton Thomas Barbara Thomason

Cellos Eleanor Slatkin Robert Adcock Barbara Badgley Ronald Cooper Douglas L. Davis Ernest Ehrhardt Christine Ermacoff Marie Fera Todd Hemmenway Paula Hochhalter Igor Horoshevsky Selene Hurford Raymond J. Kelley Mary C. Lane Carolisa Lindberg Jacqueline Lustgarten Robert L. Martin Nils Oliver Dana L. Rees Harry L. Shlutz David M. Speltz Gloria Strassner

Basses Milton Kestenbaum Arni Egilsson Jim D. Hackmann John Hornschuch Peter A. Mercurio Milton E. Nadel Meyer Rubin David Young

Flutes Louise DiTullio Lisa Edelstein Susan Fries Geraldine Rotella David Shostac Sheridon Stokes

Oboes Arnold E. Koblentz Norman Benno William Criss Gary Herbig Kathleen Robinson Robert Steen

Clarinets Dominick Fera Gary Gray James Kanter John Neufeld Hugo Raimondi

Bassoons Norman H. Herzberg Don Christlieb Fowler Friedlander Jack Marsh David W. Riddles Robert Tricarico

Saxophones Clifford E. “Bud” Shank William Perkins

French Horns Vincent N. DeRosa James Atkinson David A. Duke George W. Hyde Richard Gus Klein Arthur N. Maebe Brian D. A. O’Connor Richard Perissi George F. Price Alan Robinson Gale Robinson Henry Sigismonti James W. Thatcher

Trumpets Malcolm McNab Boyde Hood Chase Craig Jay J. Daversa Nelson E. Hatt Walter Johnson Glenn Lutz Anthony Plog Roy Poper David Searfoss Anthony Terran Allen Vizzutti Graham Young

Trombones Richard T. Nash Charles Loper William Booth Dominick Gravine Barrett O’Hara Lloyd E. Ulyate

Bass Trombones George M. Roberts Phillip A. Teele Donald G. Waldrop Vincent J. Fanuele

Tubas John T. Johnson James M. Self Stephen T. Klein Ed Welter

Piano Ralph E. Grierson Michael A. Lang Eric Lindemann Ian Fraser John Berkman

Synthesizer Craig Huxley (Hundley)

Organ Douglas Clare Fischer Ladd Thomas David Wheatley

Harp Dorothy S. Remsen Catherine Gotthoffer Lou Anne Neill

Percussion Larry Bunker Joe Porcaro Emil Radocchia Kenneth E. Watson Carl Rigoli Jerry D. Williams Al Lepac Shelly Manne Robert Zimmitti Dale Anderson

Music Consultant Arthur Morton