Duning's work is stupendous--he probably wrote the most gorgeous "Enterprise flyby" music of everyone and he scored the quintessential Kirk speech ("Risk is our business...") in Return to Tomorrow. As for Kaplan, the amount of detail and material in his two scores is truly remarkable for a television score--I love it when the landing party beams aboard the Constellation and we get not only the pulsing, weakened heartbeat of the ship in Kaplan's music but that brilliant burst of piccolos and vibes for the sparking panel Scotty checks out. I know the climactic music SEEMS over the top but what you have to remember here, and with a LOT of pre-Star Wars music, is how much composers had to sell these scenes with their music. This was before Dolby sound and both sound and visual effects were very minimal and simplistic, so the music carried an ENORMOUS amount of the final effect, almost as if the composers were providing the special effects and sound effects themselves. That's one big reason why scores no longer have quite the impact that they used to; they just don't have the vast canvas to fill out any more.
I personally feel that the Doomsday Machine was in many ways superior to Williams's later Jaws. I can't believe Kaplan achieved such a masterpiece with such a tiny orchestra.
And some of it sounds like it influenced Goldsmith's "Logan's Run".
Agreed Jeff, Kaplan's climactic blaring is only really over the top on CD. Good comments about how the music in those days had to bolster the special effects etc.
Great book, by the way (The Music Of Star Trek). I trust that everyone who has posted on this thread has it.
Agreed Jeff, Kaplan's climactic blaring is only really over the top on CD. Good comments about how the music in those days had to bolster the special effects etc.
Great book, by the way (The Music Of Star Trek). I trust that everyone who has posted on this thread has it.
Speaking of "Star Trek" music, I watched an episode of "Mission: Impossible" titled "The Visitors" (airdate: 11/27/1971), scored by George Romanis which contain ST's sound effects because it deals with outer space passengers and their technology hence the use of sounds. For the anecdote, one MISSION season 1 integrates a recycled set from the Enterprise and the collaboration of Mr. Sulu aka George Takei in "The Carriers".
All of the composers mentioned are interchangeable for me in terms of the overall quality of the series as it relates to picking a best. It would be much easier to think of m'most memorable cues and match them to the composer. And there are a ton of cues, even simple ones. Think of the simple but highly effective 2-note 'sighs' in Return of the Archons, for example; these are the type of things that makes one salivate at the thought of Goldsmithian involvement, for he excelled at such things in Twilight Zone, as did Fred Steiner. I have pretty much viewed the latter series as the gold standard for episodic television, and ST pretty much ranks alongside it. As well it should. Now if only Elmer B. had done a TZ...ah
Damn you guys make me feel like an Iotian the way I had to put on my Doomsday Machine CD like the rest of ya. But it is amazing how you can practically "see" the entire episode just from listening to the soundtrack. And there is no question that in another life I am going to sit down in a hermetically sealed vault and not come out until I've compared and correlated TZ & ST cues/instrumentation so as to finally shut the mind's ear up. I mean hearing the vibrating 'Coke bottle effect' in Mr. Kaplan's Light Beams/Tractor Beam instantly brought to mind Franz Waxman's earlier use of same in his 16-Millimeter Shrine. And Mr. Fried's bass guitar for Spock demands a comparison to Mr. Steiner's sinister employment in the latter's A Hundred Yards...Rim. And this is for starters.
Something else: the power of the Doomsday film/music marriage stands as a microcosm for the power within the overall series arc. To illustrate, recall the intriguing ST: DS9 ep wherein the crew became part of The Trouble With Tribbles. Was not it jolting to watch the barroom brawl without the score? to see the tribbles without hearing the whiny instrumental??
Forgive me for hogging the floor but man, short cues are just so freaking indelible. Like the one underscoring the moment Bones rips Kirk's sleeve and hypos him in the aforementioned Naked Time; the little blips after Percy Rodriguez intones "Finney" in Court Martial; and perhaps another transporter moment--the ascending/descending harp scale when Mudd's Women first come aboard.
