Star Trek Movie 1-6 Music

I put on some of my old Star Trek 1-6 movie soundtracks,(some for the first time in years) today, which I'm delighted to say have aged very well.Here's my brief verdict on them:

The Motion Picture: is a masterclass in movie scoring (that theme)
The Wrath of Khan: great naval themes, terrific swashbuckler music( battle in the Mutara Nebula)
The Search for Spock: more subtle, which fits the tone of the movie, some great set pieces (stealing the Enterprise)
The Voyage Home: Completely different to what went before, but has some nice pieces, as well as a memorable theme
The Final Frontier: return to the Motion Picture themes, with some nice additions (the mountain)
The Undiscovered Country: Much darker than previous scores, well suited to the movies conspiracy storyline.

 

They really have aged well

Star Trek: The Motion Picture -- A world-class score. This is a score that really creates a whole musical universe for the film to reside in. Unfortunately, because I was into The Next Generation before I saw any of the movies, I'd heard the TNG-cheap version of this theme a bazillion times before hearing it properly played here, so it's kind of ruined for me. Also unfortunately, this score is just too majestic sometimes: my ears get tired after about a half-hour, most of the time. So it's an odd situation: I score that I admire immensely, and that I absolutely love large chunks of, but which I rarely listen to all the way through.

Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan -- Unlike Goldsmith's grand, remote musical backdrop to the first movie, Horner's score is married perfectly to the story and visuals in this film. An entirely different beast, and yet no less perfect. I will say that while the complete release from last year was more than welcome for its remastering over the original releases subpar sound, most of the additional tracks don't help the listening experience. While they're fine within the film, the original album had the majority of the really wonderful listenable stuff in a superb arrangement.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock -- Possibly my least listened to of the scores, it's largely less of the same. It has its moments, like the Prokofiev at the beginning of the Stealing the Enterprise, and it's generally acceptable, but overall it doesn't have a whole lot to say that Khan hadn't already said.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home -- I'm not a big fan of Rosenman's music, and the mickey-mousey comedy moments here don't help the overall listenability, but even so this one does have wonderful title music and a nifty fugue.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier -- Takes Goldsmith's themes from the first one and incorporates them into a more down-to-earth adventure score. Overall a very fine album that, even if it doesn't reach the heights of the first two scores in the series, still is an exciting score in its own right and definitely deserves an expanded release!

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country -- A welcome new direction for Trek music. Great themes, some great set pieces, and "Battle for Peace" falls just a hair shy of being a sci-fi action classic. And the end of "Escape from Rura Penthe" -- great! Probably my most listened-to of these scores, even if it does sag a little in the middle.

Definitely a great set of scores. Equally impressive is that even with four different contributing composers doing different things musically with minimal reprise of each others' themes, these scores manage to hang together in a (mostly) coherent musical tapestry of Star Trek.

 

These are indeed a nice set of scores.

The Motion Picture is one of my favourite film scores of all time. What I think makes it particularly appealing to me is the fact that it's sort of right at transition between Goldsmith's earlier, more avant-garde style and his later, more romantic one; the result is a wonderful mixture of strange, savage music (e.g. "Klingon Battle"), mysterious atmosphere (many of the later V'Ger scenes), and straightforward grandeur and majesty (Ilia's theme, the Enterprise march).

The Wrath of Khan is also among my favourite scores of all time. More "mainstream", I suppose, than TMP, and probably the most Star Wars-esque of the Star Trek scores.

The Search for Spock is, as often observed, mostly just a rehash of TWoK. However, two tracks do stand out - "Klingons" and "Stealing the Enterprise" (the latter of which also happens to be the best sequence in the film, in my opinion). If only the rest of the score were up to their standard, it would be as good as its predecessor.

The Voyage Home has some great stuff and some non-great stuff. I love the whale fugue and I'm actually rather fond of the pseudo-Russian piece for Chekov's chase scene. And the main theme is nice, even if it is almost exactly the same as that from Rosenman's The Lord of the Rings score (now that is a great Rosenman score).

The Final Frontier is probably my least favourite of Goldsmith's five Star Trek scores, though this may have more to do with the fairly abysmal OST release than with Goldsmith's work itself. "The Mountain" is quite nice.

The Undiscovered Country takes, of course, a different and much darker approach than the previous scores, which was a risky thing to do but which turned out great. "The Battle for Peace" is almost up there with "Surprise Attack" from TWoK or "Klingon Battle" from TMP. And Eidelman's Enterprise theme manages to be both heroic and somewhat bitter-sweet, appropriately for the last of the original cast's films.

But let's not forget the scores for VI-X, which are undoubtedly worthy successors to the original six. Generations is perhaps a little week, though it does have a certain amiable, Copland-esque charm. But First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis are all first-rate Goldsmith scores.