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Happy heavenly birthday, Jerry Goldsmith (1929-2004)
Jerrald King Goldsmith (February 10, 1929 – July 21, 2004) was an American composer, conductor and orchestrator with a career in film and television scoring that spanned nearly 50 years and over 200 productions, between 1954 and 2003. He was considered one of film music’s most innovative and influential composers.
Jerry Goldsmith was nominated for eighteen Academy Awards (winning in 1977 for The Omen), six Grammy Awards, five Primetime Emmy Awards, nine Golden Globe Awards, and four British Academy Film Awards.
He composed scores for five films in the Star Trek franchise and three in the Rambo franchise, as well as for films including Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Patton, Papillon, Chinatown, The Omen, Alien, Poltergeist, The Secret of NIMH, Medicine Man, Gremlins, Hoosiers, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Air Force One, L.A. Confidential, Mulan, and The Mummy. He also composed the current fanfare for the Universal Pictures logo, which debuted in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
He frequently collaborated with directors including Paul Verhoeven, Franklin J. Schaffner, Richard Fleischer, Fred Schepisi, Michael Crichton, Jack Smight, Gordon Douglas, J. Lee Thompson, Paul Wendkos, John Frankenheimer, and Joe Dante.
Jerry Goldsmith was greatly influenced by movements of early 20th-century classical music, notably modernism, Americana, impressionism, dodecaphonism, and early film scores. He has cited Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Miklós Rózsa, Bernard Herrmann, Béla Bartók, and Alban Berg, among others, as some of the main influences to his style of composition.
His style has been noted for its unique instrumentation, utilizing a vast array of ethnic instruments, recorded sounds, synthetic textures, and the traditional orchestra, often concurrently. When asked about his inclination for embracing new techniques and constantly shifting his musical palette throughout his career, Goldsmith said, “It seems like it’s me, and that’s that! Certain composers are doing the same thing over and over again, which I feel is sort of uninteresting. I don’t find that you grow very much in that way. I like to keep changing, trying to do new things. Basically, I’m saying the same thing with a little different twist on it. Once you get caught up in the creative process, something inside takes over, and your subconscious just does it for you.”
One reason for the consistency of Goldsmith’s aural resonance and signature sound is his long time professional association with orchestrator Arthur Morton. Their first collaboration was on the film, Take Her, She’s Mine (1963). Goldsmith was commissioned to score the features, Von Ryan’s Express and Morituri (both 1965).
He recruited Morton to serve as his orchestrator. Their bond for a unique and expressive sound was born, and their friendship flourished. Goldsmith went on to compose the scores for Our Man Flint, The Trouble with Angels (with Frank De Vol), The Blue Max, The Sand Pebbles, and Stagecoach (all 1966). Morton was there providing his orchestration services, assisting Goldsmith in attaining his visionary sounds.
Their partnership endured for over 30 years and included the notable scores for Planet of the Apes (1968), Patton (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Papillon (1973), Chinatown (1974), The Omen (1976), MacArthur (1977), Capricorn One (1978), Alien (1979), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Poltergeist (1982), First Blood (1982), Under Fire (1983), The Russia House (1990). The final score that Arthur Morton orchestrated for Goldsmith was L.A. Confidential (1997).
Jerry Goldsmith – Alien (piano solo arr.) sheet music, Noten, partitura, spartiti, partition, 楽譜
Jerry Goldsmith has been considered one of film music history’s most innovative and influential composers. While presenting Goldsmith with a Career Achievement Award from the Society for the Preservation of Film Music in 1993, fellow composer Henry Mancini said of Goldsmith, “he has instilled two things in his colleagues in this town. One thing he does, he keeps us honest. And the second one is he scares the hell out of us.”
In his review of the 1999 re-issue of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture soundtrack, Bruce Eder highly praised Goldsmith’s ability, stating, “one of the new tracks, ‘Spock’s Arrival’, may be the closest that Goldsmith has ever come to writing serious music in a pure Romantic idiom; this could have been the work of Rimsky-Korsakov or Stravinsky — it’s that good.”
In a 2001 interview, film composer Marco Beltrami (3:10 to Yuma, The Hurt Locker) stated, “Without Jerry, film music would probably be in a different place than it is now. I think he more than any other composer bridged the gap between the old Hollywood scoring style and the modern film composer.”
In 2006, upon composing The Omen (a remake of the Goldsmith-scored 1976 film), Marco Beltrami dedicated his score to Goldsmith, which also included an updated arrangement of “Ave Satani” titled “Omen 76/06”. Likewise, when composer Brian Tyler was commissioned in 2012 to update the Universal Studios logo for the Universal centennial, he retained the melody originally composed by Goldsmith in 1997, opting to “bring it into the 21st century.”
Jerry Goldsmith’s score to ‘Alien’
List of movies and series
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