MOVIE MUSIC: OUT OF THIS WORLD

JERRY GOLDSMITH (1929- 2004)

Main Theme from Star Trek (1966)

ALEXANDER COURAGE (1919-2008)

Suite from Things to Come (1936)

ARTHUR BLISS (1891-1975)

Music from Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)

MICHAEL GIACCHINO (B. 1967)

The music for Star Trek: First Contact (1996) is by Jerry Goldsmith, an Oscar winner and the composer of scores and themes for nearly 300 films and TV shows.

The original theme for the TV series (1966) was written by Hollywood composer, arranger and conductor Alexander Courage.

Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Golden Globe winner Michael Giacchino (pronounced “juh-KEEN-oh”) has written for video games, television, Disney theme park attractions and more than forty high-profile feature films, including Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013).

British composer and conductor Arthur Bliss studied at Cambridge University and London’s Royal College of Music. He gained a reputation as an advanced, cosmopolitan composer in the 1920s, but became more conventional in style by the time he wrote the music for a number of films in the 1930s, including the path-breaking Things to Come. The film, based on H.G. Wells’ 1933 short story The Shape of Things to Come, was meant to envision the “social and political forces and possibilities” of future history from 1940 to 2054. Unusually, Bliss composed much of the music even before production began so that scenes could be fitted to it.

Music from Star Wars

JOHN WILLIAMS (BORN IN 1932)

Darth Vader is the focus of the evil forces in much of the Star Wars series, and composer John Williams (who was nominated in 2018 for his 51st Academy Award for the score for the recent The Last Jedi) embodied him musically in the Darth Vader March.

Though the Jedi seek to purge themselves of emotion, the teenage Anakin finds love in Episode II: Attack of the Clones when he meets Padmé Amidala, queen of Naboo and senator to the Republic. Williams expressed their love in the theme Across the Stars.

Episode IV: A New Hope (the original Star Wars) closes with the music accompanying Luke, Han, Ben and the victorious rebels being received by the Princess in Throne Room and End Title.

Fanfare from Also sprach Zarathustra (“Thus spake Zarathustra”), Op. 30 (1896)

RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949)

Excerpt from On the Beautiful Blue Danube, Op. 314 (1867)

JOHANN STRAUSS, JR. (1825-1899)

Also Sprach Zarathustra and The Blue Danube Waltz are both woven inextricably into 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick’s visionary meditation on man’s place in the universe, though that was not the director’s original intention. Kubrick had commissioned a conventional score from the noted Hollywood composer Alex North (Cleopatra, Spartacus, The Rainmaker, The Agony and the Ecstasy), and he used some classical pieces as a temporary soundtrack to begin editing the film while he waited for North to finish his work. Kubrick decided that the concert music fit his ideas and images perfectly, however, so he created the entire soundtrack from compositions by the two Strausses, Ligeti and Khachaturian.

Excerpts from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

JOHN WILLIAMS

Williams provided one of Hollywood’s most musically sophisticated scores for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), director Steven Spielberg’s visionary account of the arrival of aliens on earth. In the film, Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) has strange visions and keeps hearing five musical notes in his mind after being inexplicably bathed in light on a lonely road at night. He is drawn to a remote site where scientists secretly await the landing of the aliens, who prove to be gentle, childlike beings of beneficent intent. In addition to weaving Neary’s five-note motive throughout his score, Williams used serialism and other modernistic techniques for the early, tense scenes of the film, and lyrical, inspirational, expansive music to accompany the story’s optimistic resolution (as well as an ingenious quotation from the Oscar-winning song When You Wish Upon a Star from Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio). The score received an Oscar nomination, but lost out that year to Williams’ music for Star Wars. Excerpt from “Mars, The Bringer of War” from The Planets, Op. 32 (1914-1917)

GUSTAV HOLST (1874-1934)

Holst wrote of The Planets, “These pieces were suggested by the astrological significance of the planets. There is no program music in them, neither have they any connection with the deities of classical mythology bearing the same names. If any guide to the music is required, the subtitle to each piece will be found sufficient, especially if it is used in a broad sense.” Mars, the Bringer of War is one of the most graphic depictions of its subject in the orchestral literature. Main Title from Alien (1979)

JERRY GOLDSMITH

Jerry Goldsmith wrote the score for the harrowing Alien (1979), which won that year’s Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, was ranked by the American Film Institute as the seventh-best science fiction movie of all time, and included on the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2002. Excerpts from E.T.: Adventures on Earth (1982)

JOHN WILLIAMS

Director Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: Adventures on Earth (1982) is the enchanting story of a ten-year-old who befriends a gentle, lovable alien stranded on earth when his space ship hurriedly leaves without him. E.T. was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and John Williams’ memorable score won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award.