As anyone knows Star Trek had some of the most iconic music in all of television ever. Does the UCLA archives have the original manuscripts from all the composers? And if not, Why not? It should be available to the general public to transcribe or whatever as it is a remarkable testament to Trek's true genius and should be studied by future Trek composers.
Star Trek music
- Thread starter Valenti
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Fred Steiner’s papers are at Brigham Young; Sol Kaplan’s are at the University of Wyoming.
The vast majority of the Star Trek collections at UCLA were donated by Gene Roddenberry and Bob Justman - the music sketches are not part of those collections because those two men didn't have them in their personal papers.
In 1980 when I was a music composition undergrad, I wrote a fan letter to George Duning, and he replied saying all his Star Trek materials were at the USC library. When I next visited LA in July 1985, I spent a day there studying the collection and taking notes. It's been a while, but I assume these materials (cue sheets, script development memos, etc.) are still at USC.
I think Star Trek had a lot of memorable music but these same composers wrote for a lot of other shows and didn't phone it in there. The Trek music is iconic because Trek is iconic, not necessarily because it's greater than its contemporaries. I mean, John Williams' stuff for Irwin Allen is pretty great.
Well, it's true that Williams' LIS music is timeless and masterful. But he was scoring some of the first and best episodes of the series. Compare Gerald Fried's music for LIS versus ST: there's no comparison. Same for Alexander Courage and Fred Steiner. Their ST music was magnificent, and their music for those later, crummy LIS stories was nondescript at best.
The music for TOS was intrinsically great, and that happened because the composers wanted to serve the series as best they possibly could.
Williams' Lost In Space was but one example. And, honestly, Gerald Fried already did his signature thing for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode "The My Friend, the Gorilla Affair", which aired a full nine months before "Amok Time" and which features some verrrrry familiar Amok-Timey music.
That's a new one.
Thanks to The Music of Star Trek by Jeff Bond, the La La Land box set liner notes, and some interviews in Starlog, we know the composers largely felt the same way. Gerald Fried and I think Fred Steiner said as much. Fried said that Star Trek was taken a lot more seriously by all the artists working on it, and they had long philosophical discussions and so forth.
The third season music for LIS was great along with the new credits! LOTG also had a great second season theme and credits compared to the first!
JB
JB
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