Goldsmith, Jerry

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JERRY GOLDSMITH

Born: Los Angeles, California, 10 February 1929

Genre: Soundtrack

Jerry Goldsmith is one of the few remaining exemplars of the old school of movie music composition. He studied piano, composition, theory, and counterpoint seriously as an early adolescent and attended film composition classes held by Miklos Rozsa at the University of Southern California. He began his professional life as a clerk typist in the music department at CBS in 1950, writing one score each week for live performance and immediate transmission on radio shows, including Romance and CBS Radio Workshop.

Goldsmith switched to television and composed the unforgettable theme of Rod Serling's innovative series The Twilight Zone and for Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, and Have Gun Will Travel. Goldsmith left CBS in 1960 to work at a smaller studio and drew the attention of the famed film composer Alfred Newman, who hired him to score Lonely Are the Brave (1963). This was not Goldsmith's first major studio film—that distinction belongs to The Black Patch (1957)—but along with the score for John Huston's Freud (1962), his work on Lonely Are the Brave was his career breakthrough.

Since then Goldsmith has been a first-call composer for producers and directors interested in professionalism and innovation. He pioneered unconventional treatments of conventional instruments, such as horns blown without mouthpieces or fingered without being blown. He was also an early adopter of electronic sound sources, using them extensively on The Omen (1976), his one Academy Award–winning soundtrack. Goldsmith's subsequent scores, including his Academy Award–nominated works for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Under Fire, Hoosiers, and Poltergeist, have made extensive use of synthesizers as a sound source.

Goldsmith's first Academy Award nomination was for his score to The Sand Pebbles (1965), a military epic set in China, and his name is associated with an impressive number of films that feature military action and/or travel in outer space, including A Gathering of Eagles (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), Von Ryan's Express (1965), In Harm's Way (1965), Morituri (1965), The Blue Max (1966), Planet of the Apes (1968), Tora, Tora, Tora (1970), Patton (1970), The Wind and the Lion (1975), Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), MacArthur (1977), Damnation Alley (1977), Capricorn One (1978), The Final Conflict (1981), Super-girl (1984), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Lionheart (1987), Extreme Prejudice (1987), Rambo III (1988), Total Recall (1990), Executive Decision (1996), Air Force One (1997), the animated Mulan (1998; for which he was again nominated for an Oscar), The Last Castle (2001), and five Star Trek films (he also wrote themes for three series of the television franchise). Goldsmith is known for his bold dramatic strokes—his bold brass fanfares and electronic episodes, his broad, thick harmonies, and his use of seam-lessly shifting and building motifs. He is sometimes credited with developing the movie-music genre Militaria, which evokes aspirations to glory several steps beyond martial marches.

Goldsmith has also been commissioned to write for many science fiction, horror, and fantasy films such as Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), The Mummy (1999), and The Haunting (1999). He also writes against type, as he did for the police drama L.A. Confidential (1997), the shaggy dog spy story The Russia House (1990), the slapstick Dennis the Menace (1993), the sophisticated treatment of John Guare's stage play Six Degrees of Separation (1993), and the literate Steve Martin comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile (2003). Goldsmith has an active English fan club with its own website. His most avid fans claim that his sensitivity to details of human interactions has allowed him to elevate laughable situations and bad writing in wretchedly realized films to watchable—or at least listenable—levels. (The Swarm [1974] may qualify as one such example.)

Nearly all of Jerry Goldsmith's film scores have been released as commercial recordings, and his work has frequently been re-recorded in expanded editions, but not all of his music remains in print. One compilation of his work—produced in an edition of 500 by the Society for the Preservation of Film Music as a party favor for its annual dinner in 1993—is said to have become "one of the most collectable soundtrack-related CDs of all time," fetching bids of more than $500 on the open market.

When he is not composing film soundtracks, Goldsmith tours with a concert ensemble that performs excerpts from his oeuvre. He also teaches a graduate course in music composition at the University of Southern California School of Music.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

The Russia House Soundtrack (MCA, 1990); Sleeping with the Enemy (Columbia, 1990); Total Recall (Varese Sarabande, 1990); Basic Instinct (Varese Sarabande, 1992); Dennis the Menace Soundtrack (Big Screen, 1993); Goldsmith Society for the Preservation of Film Music Tribute (1993); Six Degrees of Separation (Nonesuch, 1994); First Knight (Epic Soundtrax, 1995); L.A. Confidential (Restless, 1997); Star Trek VIII: First Contact (GNP Crescendo, 1996); Frontiers (Varese Sarabande, 1997); The Omen: The Essential Jerry Goldsmith Collection (Silva, 1998); Mulan (Disney, 1998); The Mummy (Decca, 1999); The Last Castle (Decca, 2001); The Film Music of Jerry Goldsmith (Telarc, 2001); Star Trek X: Nemesis (Varese Sarabande, 2002).