MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Jerry Goldsmith died on July 21, 2004 at his home in Beverly Hills, California, after a battle with cancer. He was 75.

One of the most prolific, versatile and influential film composers of the twentieth century, Goldsmith wrote music for more than 200 film and television productions during a career spanning half a century. He received 18 Academy Award nominations, winning for The Omen, and created landmark scores including Planet of the Apes, Patton, Chinatown, Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Poltergeist, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and L.A. Confidential.

Jerrald King Goldsmith was born in Los Angeles on February 10, 1929. He began playing piano as a child, later studying with pianist Jakob Gimpel and composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. At the University of Southern California he attended classes taught by Miklós Rózsa, whose score for Spellbound had helped inspire Goldsmith’s ambition to write for films. He later studied at Los Angeles City College before joining CBS as a clerk-typist in its music department.

At CBS, Goldsmith progressed from selecting library music to composing for radio and live television. His early credits included Climax!, Playhouse 90, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and The Twilight Zone, an extraordinarily demanding training ground in which music often had to be written and recorded at great speed. His first credited feature score was the western Black Patch in 1957, although television remained an important part of his career throughout the following decade.

Goldsmith’s breakthrough in cinema came during the early 1960s. Lonely Are the Brave (1962) displayed his gift for western Americana, while John Huston’s Freud (1962) brought his first Academy Award nomination with a dark, psychologically unsettling score. He followed with The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), A Patch of Blue (1965), In Harm’s Way (1965), The Blue Max (1966) and The Sand Pebbles (1966), rapidly establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most inventive dramatic composers.

One of Goldsmith’s most important collaborations was with director Franklin J. Schaffner. Their work together included Planet of the Apes (1968), Patton (1970), Papillon (1973), Islands in the Stream (1977), The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Lionheart (1987). Planet of the Apes remains one of Goldsmith’s most radical scores, using unusual percussion, extended instrumental techniques and fiercely modernist orchestral writing to create a primitive and alien soundscape. For Patton, he famously combined military writing with electronically delayed trumpet calls, suggesting the general’s belief in reincarnation while also producing one of the most recognizable motifs of his career.

The 1970s were arguably Goldsmith’s greatest decade. Papillon (1973) produced one of his most beautiful and melancholy themes, while Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) blended lonely trumpet, strings and unusual percussion into an extraordinarily atmospheric portrait of 1930s Los Angeles. John Milius’s The Wind and the Lion (1975) allowed him to write magnificent large-scale adventure music, combining powerful action writing with North African colors. All three scores received Academy Award nominations.

His only Oscar victory came for Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976). Goldsmith’s decision to use a choir chanting sinister Latin texts, most memorably in “Ave Satani,” created a new musical language for supernatural horror and resulted in nominations for both score and song; he won Best Original Score at the 1977 Academy Awards. In the same period he experimented extensively with electronics in Logan’s Run and wrote the chillingly elegant The Boys from Brazil.

Science fiction brought two further masterpieces in 1979. Ridley Scott’s Alien inspired an eerie mixture of orchestral modernism, strange instrumental colors and haunting romanticism, while Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture produced one of Goldsmith’s grandest symphonic scores. Its majestic main theme subsequently became the title music for Star Trek: The Next Generation, while Goldsmith himself returned to the franchise for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis.

Goldsmith remained extraordinarily productive during the 1980s. His scores included Poltergeist (1982), The Secret of NIMH (1982), First Blood (1982), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Under Fire (1983), Gremlins (1984), Legend (1985), Hoosiers (1986) and Rambo III (1988). His lengthy partnership with director Joe Dante, which began with Twilight Zone: The Movie, revealed a particularly playful side of his personality, with Gremlins combining mischievous electronics, eccentric instrumental colors and broad orchestral action.

The 1990s brought another extraordinary run of scores. Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) combined pounding rhythmic complexity with enormous orchestral power, while their second collaboration, Basic Instinct (1992), offered one of Goldsmith’s most seductive and intricately constructed thriller scores. Other major works included Medicine Man (1992), Rudy (1993), The Shadow (1994), First Knight (1995), Air Force One (1997), L.A. Confidential (1997), Mulan (1998) and The Mummy (1999). Hoosiers, Basic Instinct, L.A. Confidential and Mulan were among the scores that brought him further Oscar nominations.

Television remained an important part of Goldsmith’s legacy. In addition to his early dramatic work, he composed themes for series including Dr. Kildare, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Room 222, The Waltons and Star Trek: Voyager, and won five Emmy Awards during his career. His final years remained active despite worsening health, with late scores including The Sum of All Fears (2002), Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003).

Away from film and television, Goldsmith wrote concert works including Christus Apollo, Music for Orchestra and Fireworks, and frequently conducted concerts of his own music, developing an especially close relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra. He also composed studio logo music for Universal Pictures and music for Disney’s Soarin’ Over California attraction.

Goldsmith is survived by his wife Carol and five children, including composer Joel Goldsmith. His extraordinary versatility makes his career difficult to summarize through a handful of scores: the brutal modernism of Planet of the Apes, the military mysticism of Patton, the melancholy of Papillon, the horror of The Omen, the grandeur of Star Trek, the tenderness of Poltergeist and Rudy, and the ferocious energy of Total Recall could almost have been written by different composers. That ability to reinvent himself repeatedly, while retaining an unmistakable dramatic intelligence and command of the orchestra, made Goldsmith one of the defining voices of modern film music.