Welcome back to Scoring for Films by Vito Lo Re and Fabrizio Campanelli. Today we’re going to talk about a truly monumental score: Star Trek, the score from the movie, not the series... Even though they’re connected because the composer who wrote the music for the series served as orchestrator for the film: Alexander Courage. So, it’s truly an epic film that received a lot of recognition, especially for its soundtrack. I watched it again the other day and some effects, after 45 years... Today we see them on LED screens, or OLEDs, but if you were to watch them again on film or on a cathode-ray TV, where there was blurring between individual dots, you wouldn’t notice the sharpness of the edges that today allows you to see every contour.

Damn high definition! So, it’s 1979; Goldsmith scored two science fiction films that year: Star Trek and Alien. Two sci-fi scores, but so different from each other! Alien is all based on introspection, on the psychological aspect,on the horror element too. Star Trek, on the other hand, is based on adventure. So much so that there are even echoes...

of Star Wars. Star Wars created a new form of expression tied to science fiction, it set a new world. Goldsmith, in this field, arrived a little late, but still, he hit the mark! The reference for this score is Omni Music Publishing. It’s a huge soundtrack not just for the 500+ pages of the score. Even the percussion list...

is an endless instrumentation, but there’s a reason for that. Let’s revisit the old theme, there was the intention of exploring open spaces, the sense was more centered on the interaction between the characters. It was more focused on the crew discovering new worlds. Here, Goldsmith takes us into boundless spaces, he takes us to a dimension that he renders with an equally boundless symphonic orchestra. And keep in mind that there’s music on 75% of the filmand the full soundtrack is almost two hours long. So, in about four months, Goldsmith composed nearly two hours of music.

And not bad, right?... Not just good, but also with a prominence that today would be unthinkable. There are many sequences of just images and music. The music says a lot. There are entire sequences told solely through images and orchestra. But not just orchestra, also synthesizers.

Including the famous CS80 from ARP 2006. We are in 1979, and there is already a union between symphonic sound and synthetic sounds,which are an expression of a futuristic language. It has an endless list of percussions, it has synthesizers, and yet, in many instances where synths could be used, percussion is used instead, especially unconventional ones. There is also remarkable work on timbre, although you never know how much credit goes to the orchestrator, but still... As usual, let's bring out our psychiatrist's couch and lay upon it the hypertrophic ego of Goldsmith and the entire Enterprise crew, but also the hypertrophic ego of Kirk... And this is the introduction that launches the famous theme.

There are already some interesting things that—distracted by the overwhelming beauty of the theme— when I saw the film as a child, truly left me with so much strength, so much epicness, enthusiasm, the idea of progress, the idea of moving forward—pure exaltation... Let's see what musical means Goldsmith used to achieve this exaltation. First of all, the entire soundtrack is truly a triumph of the Mixolydian mode, okay? This Mixolydian mode starts from a major scale and lowers the seventh degree: B-flat in C major. It is perfect for sci-fi. Later on, the blues was also used, but with a different function.

In blues, it is used mostly as scales, whereas here it is harmonized. Why is it perfect for this type of music? Because when you want to create music that jumps between very distant keys, not necessarily to modulate, but simply with the goal of touching keys far apart from each other, the lowered seventh degree is perfect because it does two things: First, it instinctively gives you a dominant seventh that regularly does not resolve as it should, but it also removes the leading note, which is precisely the note that most pulls you toward the tonic, so it’s perfect for wandering and touching all the keys you want. This shift allowed by the Mixolydian scale, from the triad built on the tonic to the one built on the minor seventh, allows us to shift this center of gravity toward a new, very strong point. This passage, for example, from B-flat to the triad built on the minor seventh (A-flat major), is a pattern often used in cinema to achieve a smooth transition between two very strong chords, creating a cohesive movement. From the very first measure, and then we go really far...

you can also tell by the number of accidents we find, but always with a sense of incredible uniformity, meaning you don’t feel we’re moving to distant tonalities, it always feels very organic and cohesive. Because in the construction of the theme’s character— a very strong, very glorious, very epic character— to express the strength of this character, you must always move through a path that touches strong elements, like tonic/dominant, tonic/triad built on the minor seventh; elements that lead our brains to assimilate an idea of control, dominance, even assertion, so in this case, it’s helpful to use those strong triads that communicate stability and possibility: Kirk can do it, he’s a resolute man who gets his missions done, and the theme tells us through this alternating succession touching the most attractive points of the scale, that the goals are being achieved. And another way of reaching these goals is the Lydian mode we find at this point, with the augmented fourth, which is another typical feature of adventurous, heroic music. The Lydian mode also carries a sense of dream, because it can lend itself to very ethereal, dreamy succession of chords; at the same time, it has that delicacy and otherness that takes us into a dimension of fantasy and dreaming. The harmony underneath the theme is a harmony often found in this kind of science fiction film. You can see the tonic - in this case we’re in B-flat - and then this A-flat sixth with the tonic in the bass; this is used a lot, meaning instead of doing tonic-dominant-tonic, this progression is used because in the Mixolydian mode we try to avoid, as much as possible, the dominant, unless we want an explosion.

The B-flat keeps going, leading along a path that touches A-flat, but A-flat is also the minor third of the F chord. To express the character, the Kirk' strength and the incredible journey of the Enterprise, we have a path that leads us to touch the dominant, but with the lowered third, as given by the Mixolydian mode, and, at the right moment, it explodes into this F with a progression that I find beautiful: the contrary motion of the higher and lower parts, which lead and converge towards the dominant while always maintaining, as you pointed out, the bass in B-flat which then rises to D and then to G, thus maintaining that gravity that compacts and stretches, ready to resolve in a liberating way on F. Here you see in this chord the use of the first inversion: usually the first inversion is almost always a passing chord between two degrees. Rarely does the first inversion have a leap in the bass. It can happen, but it's quite rare. In this type of music, we will often find a first inversion with a leap, so it is used not as a connection, but instead as a leap in space.

The tonic-dominant language is moved in an elegant, refined way... These levels are always touched under an aesthetically beautiful path, formally rich, always varied. This is the strength not only of Kirk but also of the Enterprise; there is the symbol of the captain Kirk, who is intimately connected to the entire crew. The interior space of the Enterprise is projected toward outer space and so the sensitivity of the theme is a sensitivity of progress and a relationship between elements that moves forward, moves toward the future. Let me play the devil's advocate and put myself in the shoes of a young guy, maybe someone just getting into this profession, who might ask you: are you telling me that when Goldsmith composed, he thought about all of this? No, but surely he lived it internally; He experienced it instinctively.

Exactly, that's where I wanted to get. Let's take a painting by Caravaggio. Did he think about all the psychological implications of his painting? Probably not, but he had internalized them, of course. So this is the difference between a good professional and a great artist. Absolutely, we are here to analyze the implications of those choices: the construction of a theme is a succession of choices.

This is especially clear when studying scores like this from Omni Music Publishing, where there are not only musical notes, but indications about changes in framing, and never like in this case you do know that certain things are intentional, because: in the gaze, there's that transition, on that transition there is another transition... this goes onto that transition, on that gaze, on that close-up, on that cut. Ah, now I get it, it was really all intentional. These dynamics are always internal to that sensitivity that the composer allows to emerge when writing music, while watching the images. The images are vectors of sensations, of very psychological horizons, which converge into another type of expressiveness: the musical one. Goldsmith also brings us the alternation I-V relative to the dominant of the dominant, meaning we arrive to explode on F; Goldsmith takes us from F to C, meaning he doesn't stay on that chord for the whole bar, but alternates it with another C, like a sort of Chinese box, we find another dominant of our dominant.

So this alternation between these two strong degrees, continues to perpetuate itself as we descend through the levels in the harmonic construction. Here, let's consider that in many cases in this kind of music, the dominant, as we have seen earlier, is actually minor. So it's a very particular usage. In this case, it brings back the repetition of the A section of the theme. And then... This is a B, clearly.

A B that is a third above. In this case, the discourse has shifted onto another track running parallel, but it's like a quantum leap. The Enterprise has engaged the warp drive and reached a new position in the universe. And here I point out, as we have seen earlier, the G in first inversion jumping. We also see this B in the C bass following the D chord, which creates this sort of tension. It remains always centered on D because it’s still in Mixolydian, in this case, the C seventh of D, remaining integrated through the bass to D.

So the tension is about to once again flow toward something... Yes, in this passage you might hear many soundtracks from war films, from previous years, because this is exactly part of the style of Hollywood adventure films. Here we merge into E-flat, so from D we’ve now modulated to E-flat, distant keys... and yet this transition felt very smooth, thanks to what? Thanks precisely to C. Here again is the power of the Mixolydian, that is, C, a minor third from E-flat, it’s our famous lowered seventh degree of the D Mixolydian scale.

So from D, through the C of the Mixolydian, we reach E-flat. The language evolves, so the shift happens again by jumping to another track, seemingly even further: the Enterprise thus begins to travel in our minds, further and further, climbing higher and higher. Here, we return home. Why E-flat? Because it allows us to return in an extremely natural way to B-flat. So this little game that sounds so beautiful, so natural, so elegant, is our representation that we already form intimately, unconsciously; our brain constructs a story linked to all this journey, which is like a small journey of the Enterprise, a small but enormous journey.

B-flat, B major! Beautiful, really beautiful, really beautiful. And here we are now very far away, we are in the galaxies... And this is one of the most symbolically relevant moments of the narrative adventure we get get though music that is, the use of harmony to take us on a journey through distant but related degrees, that is, harmony built in such an elegant, clever way to move the discourse and move ourselves as well. And it’s as if, in the end, this harmonic bed the same Enterprise takes us inside and makes us travel with it. It’s time to...

say goodbye! Leave a comment, let us know if you’ve watched the series and/or the movie; Tell us what you think, leave a like, if you haven’t already, subscribe to the channel. Bye.