{"id":5634,"date":"2017-08-25T17:01:13","date_gmt":"2017-08-26T00:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=5634"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:45:30","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:45:30","slug":"notes-on-trek-music-season-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2017\/08\/25\/notes-on-trek-music-season-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on Trek music, Season One"},"content":{"rendered":"

The essence of Star Trek\u2019s music was that it was composed of many themes that recurred across many episodes throughout the series, sometimes in variation, sometimes not, in ways that made the series\u2019 music a sort of extended symphony-cycle of recurring leitmotifs, rather than a set of themes tied to particular episodes, the way film scores are. The themes ranged from grandiose action-adventure music, to questing nautically-flavored tunes, to eerie and colorful music suited for the adventures of the Enterprise on strange planets and meeting new civilizations.<\/p>\n

Ironically, this effect of a broad set of themes that unified two and half dozen episodes \u2013 considering in this post only Trek TOS\u2019s first season \u2013 was created not by some grand master plan to unify the show in this way, but inadvertently as a consequence of musician union rules at the time. Those rules required a TV series like Trek to spend a certain number of hours in a studio recording music for each season\u2019s shows, but otherwise allowed the show\u2019s producers to reuse that music as often as they liked, at least within the same season.<\/p>\n

Thus, original music was written only for a minority of episodes, generally episodes produced early in the season. Later episodes reused or \u2018tracked\u2019 the earlier music as appropriate, no matter which composer had originally written each track, or for which episode. It was up to the show\u2019s music editor to compile a \u2018library\u2019 of tracks from the original scores, and then to select from this library appropriate music for later episodes, scene by scene. Individual tracks in this library were often quite short, some only a few seconds long; dozens of such tracks would be strung together to fill out the score for a \u2018tracked\u2019 episode.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There have been selected releases of Trek scores for decades, beginning in the late 1980s, when Varese Sarabande released, initially on LP, two discs of newly recorded<\/em> music from a total of eight episodes. You can tell that the music is from the original scores — rather than arranged suites, say — and the music was performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Fred Steiner, one of Trek\u2019s key composers, the single most prolific composer by episode count, in fact. The first album (https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Star-Trek-Recorded-Paramount-Corbomite\/dp\/B00000153T\/<\/a>) included Steiner\u2019s own music for \u201cCharlie X,\u201d \u201cThe Corbomite Maneuver,\u201d and \u201cMudd\u2019s Women,\u201d plus Sol Kaplan\u2019s music for \u201cThe Doomsday Machine\u201d; the second, Steiner\u2019s music for \u201cBy Any Other Name\u201d and \u201cMirror, Mirror,\u201d Jerry Fielding\u2019s for \u201cThe Trouble with Tribbles,\u201d and George Duning\u2019s for \u201cThe Empath.\u201d Steiner, in these re-recordings, takes his time with music originally written to fit carefully edited and timed scenes; e.g. in \u201cThe Corbomite Maneuver,\u201d the \u201cBaby Balok\u201d theme is noticeably slower than in the original soundtrack, as is the big statement of the main \u201cFesarius\u201d theme. In these recordings Steiner lingers over themes in ways that are often effective, but sometimes distracting considering what we remember and have listened to over and over again for decades.<\/p>\n

Then in the early \u201890s Crescendo released three albums of remastered original soundtrack<\/em> music. Each album contained scores from two episodes: the two pilots on the first, \u201cThe Doomsday Machine\u201d (the full score, not the under 6-minute selections on the Fred Steiner album) and Gerald Fried\u2019s \u201cAmok Time\u201d on the second; Fried\u2019s \u201cShore Leave\u201d and Alexander Courage\u2019s \u201cThe Naked Time\u201d on the third.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>With my recent ambition to rewatch the series, I recalled the ambitious soundtrack set of Trek music issued of La-La Land Records a year or so ago– http:\/\/www.lalaland<\/a>records.com\/Site\/STTOS.html<\/a>. This is the ultimate soundtrack collection, a gathering of every track recorded for the show, even some that weren\u2019t used, with annotations that include the exact dates upon which each set of tracks was recorded. It\u2019s a boxed set of three fold-open plastic cases holding a total of 15 CDs. It\u2019s not cheap — $225 \u2013 but I sprung for it, and it\u2019s finally enabled me to appreciate not only which music was written originally for which episodes, but how that music developed and built on earlier scores by the entire set of Trek composers. And so for this consideration of Trek’s music, I’m focusing on this primary set of original recordings, not on the later re-recordings by Fred Steiner, or the earlier Crescendo soundtrack releases.<\/p>\n

The liner notes for the La-La Lands CD set are by Jeff Bond, who published a book back in 1999, The Music of Star Trek<\/strong> (https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Music-Star-Trek-Jeff-Bond\/dp<\/a>\/1580650120\/<\/a>), that covered TOS (The Original Series), several of the movies, and three of the later series to a lesser extent. So I tracked down that book also and bought a copy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To go into further detail, as explained in Bond\u2019s book: the reason producers could get away with generating only a certain amount of music, and then reusing that music in later episodes, is because that was allowed by musician\u2019s union rules at the time. Bond gives some detail via an article by Fred Steiner (pp34-35 in his book). Rules at the time required a one-hour dramatic show of, say, 26 episodes over a year, to spend at least 39 hours in the studio recording music. Further, a typical episode score might run anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, but a single scoring session could record only some 4 or 5 minutes of music per hour in the studio. Arithmetic leads to the conclusion that such a series would need to fully score only eight episodes. Trek\u2019s first season had 29 episodes, and scored 13 of them, though several only with shorter \u201cpartial\u201d scores.<\/p>\n

All that changed in the early 1980s, when union rules changed to prohibit such reuse, requiring new music for every single episode. Thus Trek Next Generation has a unique score for every episode.<\/p>\n

One twist of the original 1960s-era rules was that music could not<\/em> be reused from one season to the next, unless the music was re-recorded (so musicians would be re-paid). That\u2019s why, for example, the main Trek theme over the show\u2019s opening credits sounds a little different from season to season. (I noticed this effect at the time, or at least in the \u201870s, when long-running TV shows would have essentially the same theme music from year to year, but you could tell that the themes weren\u2019t exactly the same \u2013 there were often slight changes in instrumentation, or intonation, or phrasing. I noticed that especially about Hawaii Five-O<\/em> back in the \u201870s when I watched that show regularly, and its iconic main theme was slightly different from year to year.) And Trek did that too, thus preserving some of Alexander Courage\u2019s and Fred Steiner\u2019s earliest themes all the way through the show\u2019s second and third seasons.<\/p>\n

In each of Trek\u2019s three seasons, therefore, the majority of scored episodes came at the beginning, until enough music had accumulated to constitute a library of tracks for reuse that season. There was an irony about writing music to be suitable for a particular episode, while being generic enough to be re-usable; a theme too specific to a situation might perhaps never be used again. An example might be Riley\u2019s jig in \u201cThe Naked Time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another technical bit: almost every episode has a \u201cmusic by\u201d credit in the end credits, to a single composer, often Alexander Courage, since so many of the show\u2019s earliest themes were by him. Even the episodes without original scores had \u201cmusic by\u201d credits. So what did that credit mean? It meant that, for a \u2018tracked\u2019 episode, the music editors would have compiled an elaborate tracking sheet, listing the length in seconds of each track and who composed it (Courage, Steiner, Kaplan, etc.), and then whichever composer was responsible for the majority of the music tracked when the episode was done, even if only by the slimmest margin, e.g. 51%, was awarded the \u201cmusic by\u201d credit at the end. You can understand how most of those credits were misleading, because all of the tracked episodes actually contained music by several composers.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a list of the originally-scored first season episodes, with composers, where the numbers indicate production order. Episodes not listed were \u2018tracked\u2019 from the scores for these 13. (There were also a few miscellaneous separate \u2018library music\u2019 tracks done by a couple composers, rescoring other composers\u2019 themes or scoring original mood bits for generic use, recorded as time permitted during sessions when original scores were recorded. They are included as a separate group on the La-La Land Records CD set.)<\/p>\n

#0, The Cage (Alexander Courage) [pilot #1]
\n#1, Where No Man Has Gone Before (Courage) [pilot #2]
\n#2, The Corbomite Maneuver (Fred Steiner)
\n#3, Mudd\u2019s Women (Fred Steiner)
\n#4, The Enemy Within (Sol Kaplan)
\n#5, The Man Trap (Alexander Courage)
\n#6, The Naked Time (Alexander Courage)
\n#7, Charlie X (Fred Steiner)
\n#8, Balance of Terror (Fred Steiner)
\n#9, What Are Little Girls Made Of? (Fred Steiner)
\n#12, The Conscience of the King (Joseph Mullendore)
\n#17, Shore Leave (Gerald Fried)
\n#28, The City on the Edge of Forever (Fred Steiner)<\/p>\n

Note first of all that the shows were not aired in production order; e.g. \u201cThe Man Trap,\u201d the fourth episode in regular production (after the two pilots), was the first ever Trek episode broadcast, in September 1966. To further complicate matters, however, the scores for these episodes were not composed in the order of the filmed production<\/em>. That\u2019s because the scoring was often one of the last things done during the post-production (i.e. after filming) of any episode; ideally, the composer would work from a nearly-finished show, completely edited and with special effects added in. But some episodes took much longer to get through post-production than others. \u201cThe Corbomite Maneuver,\u201d for example, had heavy FX (special effects) of the alien spaceships, and took so long to complete that it was the 10th<\/sup> episode broadcast, not the 2nd<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

The La-La Land CD set arranges the episodes more or less, but not exactly, in broadcast order \u2013 the order is altered a bit to fit on the CDs without splitting any one episode across discs.<\/p>\n

But to appreciate which music was written originally for which episode, and to see how themes were reused or redeveloped by later composers, you need to listen to the scores in order of their recording<\/em> (which even then doesn\u2019t necessarily reflect the order of composition!) of that music. Fortunately, this La-La Land CD set has extensive booklet notes, listing track names and timings, names of performers at each recording session \u2013 and the exact date of each recording session. (Notable because in one case, relatively short scores for three separate episodes were recorded on the same day!) (Cushman\u2019s books, too, as they nail down exact dates of every script draft and of filming and post-production, notes dates when original scores were recorded for episodes that got them.)<\/p>\n

My notes here list the episodes in that recording order, with those dates noted in bold. As I go through these scores, I\u2019ll give notable themes, especially those I know will recur, name tags<\/strong> for future reference, in bold. I should note that the scoring sheets and CD track listings use rather informal names or descriptions, some rather irreverent (e.g. \u201cZap Janice\u201d for when Charlie makes Janice disappear, in \u201cCharlie X\u201d). I\u2019ll try to use slightly more formal names.<\/p>\n

“The Cage”, by Alexander Courage<\/p>\n