Monday, April 20, 2015

Movie Music Musings – Mining for Goldsmith Part 1

So back in January in my Looking at 2014 post, I mentioned that I had not written nearly enough posts about film composer Jerry Goldsmith on my blog, and that I needed to rectify that. So I figured now would be a good time to post some short blogs about my favorite film composer.

I’ve already posted a pretty extensive list of Goldsmith’s greatest scores, or at least my favorites. But I figured it would be good to dive into some of his less known stuff. Goldsmith was incredibly versatile, and had the good fortune of being selected to score all kinds of films. He did feel a bit typecast in the late 80s and early 90s as an action film composer, thanks to his wonderful work on scores like Rambo and Total Recall. But the man was so good at scoring action I can’t blame directors for wanting his skills to help their films.

Goldsmith got his start in scoring for television. He scored for some classic television series like The Twilight Zone, Thriller and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But the 1970’s gave rise to the television event miniseries. Goldsmith found himself scoring several miniseries and some of his best work can be found on these large canvas opportunities.

Three of my favorites are:

The Red Pony from 1973

QB VII from 1974

This is sample of the wonderful rerecording of QB VII done in 2012 for Prometheus records. They do some amazing rerecordings of lost, forgotten and classic scores. 


Masada from 1981

5 comments:

  1. Was QB VII really over 40 years ago? I'm losing my sense of chronology for many things. It reminds me of the Steven Wright bit that doesn't seem 30 years old: "About 4 Years Ago . . . No, It Was Yesterday." https://youtu.be/vroWEVKnsWE

    Goldsmith certainly enhanced the productions whether the flicks were generally meritable or not.

    Good to see you back at Blogger, btw. I hope all the real world distractions are resolving satisfactorily.

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    1. Yeah it's pretty crazy how fast the years go by, especially my thirties. Damn they flew!

      Thanks for the kind words. Things have eased up a little bit, and I had some time to write up these short Goldsmith explorations. Hopefully I'll be able to work in a review or two as well. :)

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    2. Oh that Steven Wright clip was great. I forgot how funny he was. :D

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  2. The Twilight Zone, Thriller, and Man from UNCLE were a part of my childhood growing up, but never considered who wrote those classic themes. It makes me wonder who wrote some of the other television theme music to some of the other shows I grew up with.

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    1. Yeah I don't think most of us really ponder who wrote those themes. But it is funny to think how those shows would have less of an identify without that theme music. These days we are lucky if we get opening credit themes or even end credits for shows. It is kind of a dying art.

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