In Memoriam Jerry Goldsmith

I can't believe I missed it. Jerry Goldsmith died a year ago yesterday. He was one of the greatest and most diverse composers to ever write for the silver screen with a particular knack for little character films and science fiction (although I wouldn't slight most of his vast action output, either). He was nominated for the highest achievement one can receive in film 17 times and won once for 1976's The Omen. He enjoyed long collaborations with the likes of Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Hollow Man), Franklin J. Schaffner (Planet of the Apes, Patton, The Boys From Brazil), Joe Dante (Gremlins, Innerspace, Small Soldiers) and Michael Crichton (Coma, The Great Train Robbery, The Thirteenth Warrior).

He began his career not as a composer but as a clerk/typist at CBS in the 1950s after taking classes in film scoring as USC with Miklos Rozsa. Soon he was scoring live radio programs and episodic television. He soon worked his way into regular episodic television scoring lots of now-forgotten CBS shows and several episodes of The Twilight Zone (the original is still the best). By the early '60s he was scoring between 4 and 9 (!) films a year creating works for such critical fare as A Patch of Blue, Planet of the Apes, and The Sand Pebbles. The '70s brought such films as Chinatown, Logan's Run, and the Oscar winning score for The Omen. The '80s brought more work and, in a post-Star Wars Hollywood, a huge sylistic shift that brought with it films like Ridley Scott's Legend (well, the European print of the film has Jerry's score. It was dumped once the film came stateside 2 years after is was made and replaced with a - gulp! - Tangerine Dream score. Ugh. Thank you, Sid Sheinberg) Poltergeist and Total Recall (yes, it was released in 1990, but it was made the year before! Incidentally one of Goldsmiths' personal favorite scores). The '90s brought such fare as Basic Instinct, Rudy, L.A. Confidential, The Edge, Air Force One, Mulan, The Mummy (which Goldsmith hated), and The Thirteenth Warrior. The twilight of his career brought scoring assignments that seemed more like favors for friends than anything. Hollow Man, Looney Tunes: Back In Action, The Sum of All Fears, Timeline (which was withdrawn because the film was a mess and heavily reedited. By this point Jerry was battling cancer and Brian Tyler stepped in to write a serviceable, though ultimately forgettable, score) and the underrated Star Trek: Nemesis. I would also be remiss not to mention that his theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture graced the beginning of every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation winning an Emmy for best theme and would go on to write the noble theme (and win another Emmy) for Star Trek: Voyager.

A friend of mine who played for Goldsmith a couple times once told me that Jerry had figured that he had written so much music for television and film that every minute of every day, somewhere in the world something with his music attached was being shown. That's impressive.

Despite his vast film and television output, he wrote only a handful of concert works. His "classical" works include the cantata Christus Apollo for orchestra, chorus and mezzo-soprano soloist based on a text by Ray Bradbury (with whom Goldsmith had been friends since his days at CBS), Music for Orchestra, commissioned by Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony in the early 1970s, and Fireworks, an abashedly neo-romantic work which Goldsmith wrote as a celebration of his hometown for his first concert series with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999.

I still remember when my friend Mike called me to tell me that he had read that Jerry had died. It was like a very close friend had died. I was in a funk for a little while and knowing that I would never hear a new Jerry Goldsmith score again was a difficult pill to swallow. Even though I never met the man (regrettably) I always felt like I had known him a little bit through his music. One of those few composers in Hollywood that had his own sound (there are now even fewer) and, if you listened closely enough, you could in many cases hear his personality come through his music. You could always tell when he loved his subject and you could always tell when he was kind of poking fun at it (a la The Mummy).

For all those that derided film music as nothing more than a red-headed stepchild to "classical" music he said, "If our music survives, which I have no doubt it will, then it will be because it is good." I think this goes for any kind of music.

Jerry, for those of us that never met you but grew up on, learned from and knew you through your music, we still miss you.