Jerry Goldsmith
Jerry Goldsmith was born on February 10th, 1929 in Los Angeles. He learned to play the piano as early as at age of six and at 14 he already studied composition, counterpoint and theory with such teachers as Jacob Gimpel and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He enrolled in University of Southern California where he was taught by a veteran composer Miklos Rozsa, who inspired Goldsmith for score writing. Goldsmith started working in 1950 as a clerk in the at CBS music department and soon after began composing scores for radio and CBS television shows like ‘Twilight Zone’. He stayed at CBS for 10 years, after which he moved to Revue Studios, where he was composing music for TV shows like ‘Dr. Kildare’ and ‘The man from U.N.C.L.E’. See Jerry Goldsmith talk about his background and career in this interview from 2002. He received his first Academy Award nomination in the year 1963 for ‘Freud’, a John Huston’s movie. He soon got to know Alfred Newman, who helped that Goldsmith gets hired by 20th Century Fox, after which he continued to collaborate with famous Hollywood filmmakers throughout his whole career. He worked on ‘The Sand Pebbles’ and Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ with Robert Wise, on ‘Rio Lobo’ with Howard Hawks, on ‘In Harm’s Way’ with Otto Preminger, on ‘Chinatown’ by Roman Polanski, ‘Poltergeist’ by Spielberg and Tobe Hooper and on ‘Alien’ and ‘Legend’ with Ridley Scott. His most fertile collaboration was however that with Franklin Schaffner, for whom he scored ‘Planet of the Apes’, ‘Papillion’ and ‘Patton’. He was composing scores for various movie genres, including war movies, film noir, action movies, erotic thrillers, sports pictures, family comedies, westerns, comic books adaptations and many more. Notable titles are ‘The blue Max’, ‘Rambo: First blood’ and the first 2 sequels, ‘Basic Instinct’, ‘The trouble with Angels’, ‘Breakheart Pass’, ‘Total Recall’, ‘Alien’ and five ‘Star Trek’ movies. He received an Academy Award for his score for ‘The Omen’, and the Emmy awards for TV scores for the Holocaust drama ‘QB VII’, ‘Masada’ and the theme for ‘Star Trek: The Voyager’. Goldsmith composed concert music as well, like ‘Music for Orchestra’, which was for the first time performed in 1970 by Minnesota Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin. He loved innovations, use of unusual instruments and adaptations. His score for ‘Alien’ was a typical example, where he implemented instruments such as shofar, serpent and steel drums. Many instruments were used in atypical way so that they were unrecognizable. With the development of more sophisticated synthesizers and MIDI technology, he slowly abandoned acoustical solutions and started to rely more on digital instruments. He continued to use orchestras, researched ethnic music and often implemented Irish folk melody with African rhythm like in ‘The Ghost and the Darkness’ His ability to create and constantly implement innovations continued to impress his fans and intimidate his peers. Jerry Goldsmith died at age of 75, on July 21st, 2004.
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