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Posted: |
Apr 5, 2020 - 10:01 PM
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By: |
Zoragoth
(Member)
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TWOK is definitely one of Horner's best scores with some great moments - particularly all the climactic music. But IMHO it's not a patch on Goldsmith's mind-boggling achievement with the first score. Horner's 'mad Khan' music is gratuitously unimaginative, as is his Aliens (excuse me, *Klingon*) theme. A Goldsmith treatment would have helped TWOK belie its lower budget, set bound atmosphere (Goldsmith's scores always sound like a million dollars). And Horner's Main Title, while appropriately nautical, has always sounded a bit wan and limp to me, though admittedly he does subject it to interesting treatments during the course of both scores.
Goldsmith's omission from TWOK (and ALIENS) will always constitute monumental what-ifs for me, on an order of Timothy Dalton not getting a 3rd, 4th, and 5th crack at James Bond.
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Even though TWOK's music is what got me into Film Scores, a Jerry score would have been fine.
The bigger what if is a Horner score for IV.
2, 3 and 4 are a trilogy and the change in composers has bugged for 34 years.
Imagine if Rosenman had scored TSFS like Nimoy originally wanted!
Never heard that.
I'd always heard they couldn't get James for IV because he cost too much by 1986.
I think it's in the liner notes on ST3 and 4.
I can't imagine Goldsmith on either 2 or 3. I can barely imagine him on 5!
I mean, he was amazing, and yes, he did NIMH the same summer (and Poltergeist!). But Horner was in such a groove that I can't imagine JG getting anywhere close to.
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Posted: |
Apr 5, 2020 - 10:38 PM
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By: |
Ray Worley
(Member)
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I've given some more thought since my earlier post about BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS. I'm not a Horner hater. BATTLE has a really fine original Main Theme that owes nothing to Goldsmith, but some cues are definite lifts of ST:TMP's "Klingon Battle".
I will admit I lost patience with Horner's incessant un-credited "lifts", especially of Prokofiev, in many of his later scores. But when Horner was "on", he was really, really on and wrote some excellent scores. I am very fond of the score for the WRATH OF KHAN, and its hard to imagine it without that score. BUT, I think Goldsmith would have really nailed it.
And let's face it, everything Horner would have written, would have ended up in another movie.
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I never, really never understood the problem some people have with the electronic sound in some of Goldsmith's scores. I mean, it is just an instrument, like a flute or a violin? Why should a flute be ok, but a Moog synthesizer not?
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Saying that an eventual score by Jerry Goldsmith would be awful is unfair.Jerry demonstrated us to be a first class master of music and scores.Sure he had some minor flaw in his career,but left us with perhaps the most important legacy in fil music history.Horner did a lot of synth farts in his days and the ever recurring four note motif,didn't claim for a superior inventiveness.He was a good scorer at some point,but he never succeded to be in the class of Goldsmith.The unability of Goldsmith to deserve the rigt score for The Wrath of Khan has tio be demonstrated,but in his life he demonstrated he can approach any kind of film,without failing.
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When I listen to Goldsmith's initial take on Star Trek, the couple of cues he recorded but was asked to change, what strikes me about it is that the original theme sounds much more like an old fashioned nautical adventure. He was making a musical connection between the idea of old naval sailing ships and the imagery of space ships. That parallels his Klingon music, which similarly sounds like vikings. When he redid the theme to make it more catchy, it lost a lot of that flavor, becoming more of a "happy military' theme.
Nicholas Myer said that his take on Star Trek was that he saw it as "Captain Horatio Hornblower in space", that it was basically an old naval adventure set in the future. Which I think is precisely what Goldsmith had been going for. So I think they would have clicked just fine. He probably would have composed something like the initial theme, creating a more historical sound. Not likely very synth heavy.
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I actually wish that Horner had got to score the comedic/light hearted ST4 Voyage Home, instead of Leonard Rosenman (even though I do really enjoy LR's effort).
It would have been interesting to hear how Horner would have scored it in a lighter vein.
I like to think Cocoon is probably pretty close to what we could have gotten. Light, airy, whistful and with some nice action licks (and the wholesale reuse of his Trek 2 work would have been approriate this time).
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Yeah, Goldsmith in 1982 was a beast. No doubt he would have done a great job with a muscular score.
Interestingly, I was 14 the year that the film was released, and I wasn't as keen on Horner's nautical theme as much as Jerry's soaring, majestic TMP. It took me several years to get into it. Still not in my top 5 Horner however.
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...anyone who thinks he wouldn't have produced something great the year that he did Night Crossing, Poltergeist, Secret of NIMH and First Blood (which is probably the weakest of the four--and the only one with any real presence of electronics-- and it's still great) is crazy. . .
And it was just a year after The Final Conflict, Masada, Outland and Raggedy Man, and a year followed with Psycho II and Twilight Zone: The Movie. He was anything but lazy or hemmed in at that time. Plus, we have the wonderful music from the pretty rotten Star Trek V, done seven years later, to see how well he could develop a new score based on his TMP stuff to fit the film of the moment. I would absolutely have missed Horner's Wrath of Khan score, but it's doubtless to me that Goldsmith would have delivered something iconic, likely a top of the list soundtrack.
And then would have done the rest of the Trek films.
Meanwhile, the lesson of Rascals and Robbers: The Secret Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, which I love because it's Horner's Wrath of Khan Continued, is that we probably still would have gotten his Wrath of Khan music, just backing another film.
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Posted: |
Apr 6, 2020 - 11:17 PM
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By: |
Zooba
(Member)
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When I listen to Goldsmith's initial take on Star Trek, the couple of cues he recorded but was asked to change, what strikes me about it is that the original theme sounds much more like an old fashioned nautical adventure. He was making a musical connection between the idea of old naval sailing ships and the imagery of space ships. That parallels his Klingon music, which similarly sounds like vikings. When he redid the theme to make it more catchy, it lost a lot of that flavor, becoming more of a "happy military' theme.
Nicholas Myer said that his take on Star Trek was that he saw it as "Captain Horatio Hornblower in space", that it was basically an old naval adventure set in the future. Which I think is precisely what Goldsmith had been going for. So I think they would have clicked just fine. He probably would have composed something like the initial theme, creating a more historical sound. Not likely very synth heavy.
I totally agree!
It always struck me as funny and upsetting and perplexing, when in the STAR TREK TMP audio commentary with the Editor of the Film and Robert Wise talking about "Oh no, what are we going to do about the music? It sounds like Conistoga Wagons, It sounds like SAILING SHIPS!" And I always though YES, SAILING SHIPS is Good, SAILING SHIPS IN SPACE. SPACE SAILING SHIPS He NAILED IT! That editor always bugged me the way he spoke, like Goldsmith was SO FAR off! Stupid!
If Meyer had directed THE MOTION PICTURE he probably would have loved Goldsmith's Original more Nautical Take on the score, yes I agree.
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It would have been awful.
Goldsmith would have been just entering his 'synth farts' era and his best years were behind him, while up and coming buck-o James Horner was eager to please and really giving it his (and everybody else's) all.
Plus, the look and design of the film was so different to The Motion Picture, it needed that fresh new lick o' paint Horner managed to give it.
It's inconceivable that an artist with as much artistic integrity as Goldsmith possessed would ever have written a score to a sequel that was stylistically incompatible with the music he wrote for the original film.
A Goldsmith score would've been great, but wasn't Miklos Rozsa the director's first choice?
That rumor's floated around for years. Despite the fact that Nicholas Meyer and his producing partner, Steven Charles Jaffe, fought like hell to keep Warner Bros. from replacing Rozsa's score to "Time After Time," there is no documentary evidence that Meyer and producer Harve Bennett ever tried to get Rozsa for "Khan," and neither of them is on the record as ever having said otherwise.
Nicholas Myer said that his take on Star Trek was that he saw it as "Captain Horatio Hornblower in space", that it was basically an old naval adventure set in the future.
That wasn't Meyer's characterization, but Gene Roddenberry's (along with "'Wagon Train' to the stars") when he was still trying to sell the series to a network (first CBS, then NBC) in the early 1960s.
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I don't know what you're smoking but I want no part of it.