Intrada Soundtrack Forum

This isn't what you think!
I was wondering today how you fine folks would respond to the following.....
Which Star Trek scores are MORE MEMORABLE... the TV SCORES, or the FILM SCORES.... and please explain your reasons/theories!

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I-love-Goldsmith, yes-I-do...
I-love-Ber-nard-Herr-mann-too! EVERYBODY SING!!!

For me - film scores. Bigger and more epic, larger orchestras.

Just my thoughts.

Matt

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http://www.mjefilms.com

Alexander Courage's original theme is now the most memorable because it embodies the Star Trek saga and has been reprised so much. But the film scores were the best Star Trek could offer to us, because it was right after Star Wars, in that great 80's golden age of film music, with the birth of a new genre and a new area in 1977.

I think Jerry Goldsmith has outdone himself in 1979 when he composed Star Trek the Motion Picture. It was certainly at the time the best score he had ever composed, and it was for a legendary Hollywood director (Robert Wise). Of course, John Williams (with Star Wars and Superman) had widely opened the gates of big epic science fiction/fantasy music. He even created the genre. But Jerry Goldsmith quickly proved that he could enter this new area in his own fantastic way.

James Horner was certainly the next great one to prove that he could follow the leader as well, except that he was a beginner in the film music world and started to compose big Star Wars like symphonies right from the beginning of his career (Battle Beyond the Stars and then Star Trek II, Krull,...). With Star Trek II he's accomplished something even more impressive than Goldsmith, simply because he was so young and unexperienced. And his Star Trek II & III were hugely epic, and certainly set the tone for many 80's SF/fantasy scores to come...

When Leonard Rosenman entered the franchise, he couldn't match his two giant predecessors, in my opinion. So we had to get back to Jerry Goldsmith for most of the future episodes of the saga and he managed to compose wonderful new themes and yet remain faithful to his first effort for the saga, but without ever being able to surpass it.

Cliff Eidelman, Dennis McCarthy and Michael Giacchino have created wonderful scores in my opinion, inferior to the original musical trilogy, but really impressive for such young composers. I think Star Trek has been a really inspiring universe for composers, but the SF/fantasy music was a fresh new genre in the late 70's/early 80's and now it's become something quite conventional...

Hmmm, this question is quite hard in some respects.

I would go, ultimately, with the film scores. But then after giving it some thought, scores for episodes like "The Doomsday Machine" are right up their with the score for "Wrath Of Khan". Both stories deal with personal human vendetta, and the music respectively captures that in both stories.

The music in the TV show had the luxury of personal growth in the individual characters, while the films generally dealt with sprawling epic adventure concepts like survival of man as a species.

But, if we are going to talk memorable only, than most of the themes in "The Motion Picture" are without doubt some of the most infectious of the group. The "Klingon Theme" alone became part of Star Trek lore forever in this film. Not to mention the main title theme to the film which became the voice of Star Trek for a whole new generation.

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http://www.ccci.org/wij/index.html

The music from Star Trek is interesting because the franchise has been so long-lived that it reflects several eras and encompasses many diverse scoring styles.

The original series had big melodramatic music as was the order of the day in the late 60s. While Sandy Courage started the series off with his eerie scores for the earlier episodes, Fred Steiner was responsible for what became the overall sound of the series. The composers were subsequently told that that the producers didn't want weird science-fiction music, they wanted Captain Blood. And, of course, the original series had access to such musical luminaries as Gerald Fried, George Duning and Jerry Fielding. For my money, however, the best of the original series scores was Sol Kaplan's "The Doomsday Machine," which is everything you could ask for in a space opera score about ten years before John Williams made that sound de riguer for the subgenre.

I think that there was a lot of music from the original series that became etched in the minds of viewers because of the repetition that came about from the retracking that was standard practice in television scoring of the day. Certainly several of Steiner's themes and the aforementioned "Amok Time" material stay in the mind for a very long time after the fact. And there were several episodes ("The Conscience of the King," "The Paradise Syndrome") the scores for which were just gorgeous.

While one could certainly say that the Star Trek film series came about because of the success of Star Wars, I find it interesting that Jerry Goldsmith's score bears more marks of the science-fiction genre than the adventure scores that were to follow subsequently. While I would tend to list both Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as my favorite of the film scores, they really are of two different genres with the latter being much more an adventure score than science-fiction. Goldsmith's later scores would also be in the adventure vein.

I never warmed up to Leonard Rosenman, although I do like his theme, the chase music and the way that he incorporated Sandy Courage's music. Cliff Eidelman's score was an interesting change of pace that never really reached the heights of the other films.

There have been a few exceptional scores in the spin-off series ("Tin Man," "The Inner Light," "Bride of Chaotica," "Canamar" etc.) but for the most part the approach taken for those series was ambient rather than thematic, which led to more nondescript scores (of which I would count Dennis McCarthy's Generations, despite a few rather nice moments).[/i]

Latter-TNG and post-TNG series scores (at least until the final season of Enterprise) tended to be more atmospheric and unobtrusive, reportedly due to producer Rick Berman's preference for that sound. This means that the majority of scores, while supportive and competently executed, didn't really function dramatically the way I (and most score geeks, it seems) tend to prefer.

That said, there are a handful of scores I really enjoy from those later series. Dennis McCarthy's scores for the DS9 episodes "In the Hands of the Prophets" and "Image in the Sand" had some very nice moments, as did his score for the series finale "What You Leave Behind". I saw the VGR two-part episode "Scorpion" once, many years ago, but Jay Chattaway's main motif still pops into my head today. David Bell truly distinguished himself with the DS9 episode "Second Skin", and Mark McKenzie (who orchestrated on several of the films) did a wonderful job on the ENT episode "Horizon". But my favorite unsung Trek composer has to be Paul Baillargeon. In addition to excellent scores like "Waltz", he is responsible for probably the single greatest Trek episode score post-Ron Jones (who did great, expressive work during TNG's early years; check out his website) ... "The Siege of AR-559". It showcases a strong, powerfully emotional, in-your-face main theme that gets developed throughout the episode. I'm kind of shocked it made it past Berman, actually. Perhaps he felt it was OK on account of the episode being an unconventional "trench warfare" sort of story. Whatever the circumstances, it's a diamond in the rough, and I'd pay dearly to enjoy it on CD someday!

By the way, I always wondered, who wrote this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6tJQ05YJ58

Was it Alexander Courage (since he scored the episode)?

According to Jeff Bond's book The Music of Star Trek: Profiles In Style, the "Bitter Dregs" song was written by Leonard Nimoy.