Remembering Jerry Goldsmith

I can’t quite believe it’s been twenty years since the great Jerry Goldsmith left us. His music has been part of my life for most of my life – still today, rarely a day goes by that I don’t listen to at least some of it. We all have different reasons for liking film music – for some, it’s a musical reminder of a beloved film; for some, it’s a place where you can find great tunes, great melodies; for others, it’s (for the most obvious reason) the most viscerally visual form of music, constructed in a way that allows the listener to either recall a particular film in a particular way, or better still create their own interpretation of it; and there are many other reasons besides. Goldsmith, uniquely, did all of it – just the perfect blend of the European style of encapsulating a film or key moments of a film with an idea or a theme with the Hollywood style of creating a musical journey from one moment to another.

He rose to prominence when composers like Herrmann, Rosenman, Bernstein and North had already begun changing film music away from its seminal romantic classical form into something different, and took their ideas and launched them into the stratosphere – taking the idea that the absence of music can be as powerful as the presence of it, absorbing ideas from classical masters like Bartok and Ravel as much as his film music heroes Waxman and Rózsa (and his great friend and idol North), blending this into the most phenomenal technique.

He could do everything – I don’t think there’s ever been another Hollywood composer who could so naturally drift from serious drama to action thrills to romance or comedy. While outside of the core niche who appreciate his breadth he may be best-known for his music for science fiction or other futuristic movies – whether Planet of the Apes, Alien, the Star Trek movies, it’s not hard to know why – he himself was always most proud of his more personal music – anyone who asked him what his own favourite thing he’d written was got told it was Islands in the Stream, his exquisite and deeply personal music for Franklin Schaffner’s Hemingway adaptation – until the 1990s that is, when his answer changed to Rudy.

Jerry Goldsmith

In the ten years from 1974 to 1983, he did the most extraordinary roster of wide-ranging scores, including Chinatown (which created the “film noir sound” still in use today), The Wind and the Lion (which features perhaps the single most thrilling piece of film music ever created, “Raisuli Attacks”), The Omen (which created the choral “horror movie sound” still in use today), Capricorn One (which served as the template for most action scores for a good couple of decades), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the most dazzlingly beautiful symphonic interpretation of Roddenberry’s vision of the future), Alien (haunting, scary, beautiful), Poltergeist (the third horror movie I’ve mentioned and the scores are all exceptional and all completely and utterly different from one another), The Final Conflict (the best music ever written for a bad movie), First Blood (another action masterpiece, but it’s the way he single-handedly brought humanity to a character who would otherwise have just not worked that makes it stand out) and the utterly astonishing Under Fire (has there ever been a greater “ethnic” film score? – no, there hasn’t). And in between all these there are literally dozens of other scores which, had they been penned by anyone else, would be lauded as masterpieces.

I mentioned The Final Conflict as being the best music ever written for a bad movie – and while it’s sad in a way that he found himself having to do this so often – the way Goldsmith could elevate literally anything to a different level was something which just can’t be touched by anyone else. This is certainly a generalisation and by no means applies to everyone, but generally with even the greatest film composers you can tell when they were really inspired by a film and went to the next level. But with Goldsmith, you really couldn’t. The Final Conflict is an absolutely terrible film and yet he wrote for it one of the grandest, most epic film scores that anyone has ever done.

Later in the decade he reluctantly agreed to work with Ridley Scott for a second time, after his score for Alien had been so butchered in the picture, on Legend – and after writing one of his most ambitious scores, an extraordinary blend of new age electronics, fantasy vocals and 19th century classical romanticism, he found it dumped (for the US release anyway) in favour of simplistic electronics by Tangerine Dream. While I may be projecting, I always felt he changed a bit as a composer after that – never giving less than a film needed, but perhaps so scarred by that experience that he kept things a little more streamlined from thereon in.

Jerry Goldsmith

Change was, in fact, a constant through his career – he embraced new technology, new ways of making music, new sounds available to sit alongside (or on rare occasions even to replace) the orchestra. His music was as relevant and as vibrant in the last few years of his career as it had been in the first few. I know I’ve said it – but he really could do it all.

I met the great man once, after he did a talk at the British Film Institute in London – I got to shake his hand and say thank you before he moved on to the next eager fan – and I saw him conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in countless concerts over the years. While there were some standards that were present more often than not in the programmes, it’s astonishing just how many different scores were represented in these concerts over the years (by my reckoning, something like 75). That none of them sounded out of place in a concert hall is further testament to just how good he was, so consistently. A few times we were treated to pre-concert talks by Goldsmith – I’ll never forget one which coincided with him writing his score for a new film, The Mummy, which he probably immediately regretted saying was “a piece of shit” at the time and “I don’t know what I’m doing working on night on something like that.” Then a few weeks later we all got to hear the results of that labour – a score filled with incredible energy, action, romance, comedy – not a single shred of evidence present that he didn’t approach it with everything he had, regardless of his feelings about it.

There was only one Jerry Goldsmith. I remember the day he died so vividly – I don’t think any “celebrity” death had ever affected me so much. It was well-known that he was ailing, in very poor health for quite some time before that moment – but always, it had felt like there was something new to come. Because that’s what he did, over and over again – something new. Inevitably over the last twenty years film music in general has changed unrecognisably from what it was at the time, let alone when he was in his prime – but there’s still something so exciting about listening to his music. He could write a romantic theme as well as John Barry, he could write with as impressive orchestral technique as John Williams, he could get notes on the manuscript as creatively as Ennio Morricone – he really could do anything. I have absolutely no doubt that however long I’ve got left, a reasonable chunk of it will be spent listening to the music of Jerry Goldsmith – the standard-bearer for Hollywood film music, the best of the best.

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