Film & Television, Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek: The Motion Picture in Full Score

Omni Music Publishing was launched in 2011 by veteran of the film music recording industry, Tim Rodier, with a focus on publishing full orchestral scores of modern film music. Now available from them is the full orchestral score of Jerry Goldsmith's music for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Released in 1979, the film was the first of six to feature the cast of the original television series, and concerns the efforts of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and crew to understand and neutralise the threat faced by a mysterious spacecraft that has been destroying everything in its path.

Initially referring to itself as V'Ger, the vast structure turns out to be the (fictional) Voyager 6 probe, launched from Earth and having subsequently gained consciousness through contact with an alien intelligence. To represent this inscrutable antagonist, Goldsmith employed the distinctive, unearthly sound of the blaster beam, an enormous construction consisting of metal beams up to eighteen feet in length, strung with tensed wires and mounted underneath with electric guitar pickups. The strings are then struck with a variety of objects to create the unforgettable timbre that is heard so prominently throughout the film.

Aside from this, Goldsmith utilised a massive orchestra, most notably a colossal array of percussion including rub rods, waterphones, elephant drums, boo bams, mixing bowls, angklungs, a wind machine, slit drums, a rumble board, a devil chaser, and dozens more. Similarly, the score requires a prodigious number of keyboard instruments, from celeste, cimbalom, two pianos, clavichord, electric piano, and organ, to five different synthesisers.

For the main theme, Goldsmith wrote perhaps his best-known melody: so popular was it that in 1987 it was re-used as the theme for the television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. In addition, he provided a lush, sweeping theme for Ilia, the Starfleet officer killed and then artificially recreated by V'Ger during the events of the film, as well as a primal motif based on perfect fifths for the rallying war-cry of the Klingons.

Omni's score presents every cue written by Goldsmith, as well as a handful of short cues adapted by Fred Steiner and quoting Alexander Courage's theme from the original series. Furthermore, as an appendix this volume includes early versions of almost a dozen cues, offering a fascinating insight into Goldsmith's working methods and also into the ways in which his music evolved during the scoring process.

Other Omni Music scores currently available from Presto Music