The Frontiers of Reader Response

Compiled by Jeff Bond

Jason Comerford is an ace guy. After my somewhat heated second-guessing of his Frontiers review, he would have been perfectly within his rights to nail my overbearing keister for undermining his well-reasoned opinions in print. Instead, he sent me a nice e-mail expressing curiosity about the Goldsmith scores I disagreed with him on, wanting to know if he should check them out in the films themselves or in other forums if that would help him to appreciate them better. A man who doesn't have a hair-trigger temper AND wishes to expand his knowledge? That's my kind of human. The Frontiers debate produced a number of responses like the ones below:

Ed Kattak <ekattak@poloralphlauren.com> wrote:

I second Jeff Bond's comments on the Frontiers CD. I think to be fair to Mr. Comerford, I believe he was reacting to the CD from a "Goldsmith Fan" perspective, which may tend to get reactionary and make comparisons to the original works. Thus, expectations may not be that great. I, on the other hand, had no expectations at the onset. After playing the disc once through, I enjoyed it greatly, putting the comparisons to the original out of my mind.

But what amazes me is how many people out there in the general world are still Soundtrack illiterate. We still have people who listen to a piece from Executive Decision or Robocop and say, "Gee, that was great Star Wars music." So, with CD's like Frontiers, it gives an opportunity to present a cross-section of scores by a composer and hopefully expose the general populous to the many talents/styles of that composer. Hopefully, by doing that, a person may be inclined to sample some other composers and discover something new and interesting.

However, one might argue that this album was aimed at the soundtrack community - specifically Goldsmith fans. That may be the case. But, I brought the CD into the office the other day to take a break from the enormously redundant Christmas music extravaganza. It was interesting how some people reacted. All identified the Star Trek music immediately. But many became curious about some of the other music. The Capricorn One theme drew some interest, because of the complexity and business of the theme. (BTW, everyone in the room only remembered the film because O.J. was in it.) Many were impressed to find out that the same composer wrote all of these movies. I was asked where this CD could be purchased and we had a mini lunch trip to the Virgin Megastore on 45th and Broadway.

I guess that's how it starts.

Goldsmith recently came out on top in our FSM survey as fan's favorite film composer of all time. Yet it's interesting what a low profile he has with the general public except for a dim, phonetic acquaintance with his name. That may be because there's really no consensus about what a "Jerry Goldsmith score" is; Goldsmith's approaches have been so Protean that people can't define his sound the way they often can with Williams, Barry, Zimmer, Horner and others.

"R. Nelson" <rnelson@kikuobata.com> writes:

...I hate compilations. Well, most of them anyway.

They always tend to play out like a greatest hits of this genre or that genre. Theme after theme after theme, building to the obligatory crescendo finish. It always seems that familiarity is the top priority that guides the selection of the material on these things. The overall listening experience is usually fatiguing.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra comes across as pristine and cohesive except for one segment during the glorious cue "The Enterprise". Unfortunate, since this is one of the great set pieces for the entire album. And there is another bugaboo. The rest of the selections, aside from the mournfully beautiful end title to Alien, seem wrong for this album.

Total Recall, never one of Goldsmith's strongest main titles, really suffers in the powerful company of the previous material. Recall would have been much better represented in a suite that blended "The Mutant" with any one of the other ferocious action cues from that score. The Voyager theme, while beautiful in its own right, is too brief and self-contained for this program ... it somehow halts the flow in what is, for the most part, a very organic sequencing. Jerry Goldsmith has written so much fantastic material for science fiction that it's a shame that the last third of this disk doesn't measure up.

Even with these flaws, "Frontiers" is superior to nearly any other compilation I can think of. This due to the sheer brilliance of Goldsmith's writing, a sparkling performance by the Royal Scottish Nation Orchestra, and an impeccable sequencing for the first 2 thirds. Having this CD could help ease the disappointment of the composer's departure from Lost in Space. If we can't get what likely would have been a great new sci-fi score by JG then at least we can revel in the old ones.

Boy, it's going to take more than that to ease the disappointment of Goldsmith leaving Lost in Space. Total Recall is a score that has really been undermined by the somewhat "stealth" quality of its title music, which most people remember only as a variant on Basil Poledouris's Conan the Barbarian theme. Yet the totality of the score adds up to one of the most rollicking, heavily symbolic and technically brilliant scores Goldsmith has ever written, a prime candidate for an expanded album.

wjfinn@reliable-net.net (Bill Finn) writes:

I have just a couple of comments on the Varese Frontiers and your reviews of it. To begin with, I was more in tune with Jeff's comments than with Jason's. Goldsmith's 60's and 70's work is still very much the part of his music that I love most (or at least for the longest).

That remark out of the way, I did enjoy the album and my only complaint about it is what was not included on it. At only around 40 minutes, there should have been room for Explorers (one of Goldsmith's most lyrical and joyous themes). Some music from The Other to correspond with the Varese/Fox release would have also been interesting. I do agree with Jason certainly that Outland would have been a nice addition. And finally, why were there no cues from Goldsmith's greatest sci/fi score Planet of the Apes? Strange!

Still, it was a great compilation for a composer whose music has warranted several over the years but never given the opportunity. Now of only Varese would see clear to do a collection of Goldsmiths Western scores!

Mmmm...Jerry Goldsmith Western Compilation... it's actually good to know that there are possibilities for a Frontiers 2, because if the first album is a success we might just see one. There are great unreleased cues from Explorers, Total Recall and others that would fill out a second volume nicely. I'd love to see Goldsmith re-record his first stabs at the "Vulcan Shuttle," "Leaving Drydock" and "Enterprise" cues from ST-TMP, which are wonderful concert-style pieces.

"Liverance, Howard M" <HLIVERANCE@tpa.HealthPlan.com> writes:

Personally, the Ilia theme from ST: Motion Picture deserves honorable mention alongside the Enterprise theme. Goldsmith's best work can be found in his original T-Zone TV scores (esp. "Nervous Man in a $4 Room", "The Invaders", "Back There") and Poltergeist.

Question: Ever notice the similarity between Goldsmith's "Kick The Can" main melody (from T-Zone Movie) and Menken's Beauty and the Beast theme?

Good Lord! Actually, I hadn't, but there is a similarity.

"Bill Harnsberger" <bharns@cybertours.com> writes:

I thought Frontiers was a decent effort with solid choices. Goldsmith definitely needs to do a second CD to "finish the job."

My only quibble is the theme from Capricorn One, which has always been one of my favorites. On the original soundtrack, after the first few bars, Goldsmith employed a snare drum that added to the urgency of the piece. On the Frontiers CD, for whatever reason, he dropped the snare drum, and the theme lost a lot of its punch. Wonder why he did that. I know...picky, picky.

Actually, the original Capricorn One album is quite different in sound and orchestration to the music contained in the film soundtrack, and the main title is far more spare and tough-sounding, with more percussion effects than were used in the rerecorded Warner Bros. album.

"Kyle Beatty" <saracen_cabana@email.msn.com> writes:

...Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. You've emerged from whatever dank crypt you keep yourself in long enough to lash out at the harmless soprano in Illustrated Man and say nothing about the frenetic tempos of Twilight Zone: the Movie. You can do Jason a favor and get him a recording of the LP so he can hear for himself what he has been missing. (The lack of a CD of this score is a sore misery.)

Jason, you're onto something with your cant against the Star Trek march. I've been completely inoculated by Star Trek the Next Generation to ever actually hear this music as music again. That doesn't keep me from loving the Voyager theme a lot. There is more going on in that one composition than in the entire series to date. You don't watch the show, so that doesn't concern you, but this music completely envelops and makes sense of the opening sequence.

I think that we'll someday see that Jeff was right all along: Jerry Goldsmith had his mojo going in the seventies. There is a cynical, detached element to his work that says much about that era. His love themes are often as desperate as tender, action, often psychological action, was scored with a relentless, unforgiving sound that was impossible to dismiss as mere musical commentary on the visuals. Scores like those to Capricorn One, Outland, Twilight's Last Gleaming, even Damnation Alley, invest the movies with a depth they would certainly otherwise lack. They ARE these movies.

I gave Kyle Beatty his first instruction in Jerry Goldsmith. He chose to devote himself to Starfleet instead of the Vulcan Science Academy. The Twilight Zone overture is erratic, but the displaced music forced me to cut the piece more slack; since this isn't the original version, it's hard to tell exactly how the various transitions should be played. If there's a place for differing interpretations of film score music, it's in exactly this kind of presentation, but when the original version isn't available on CD it's always frustrating to get something that sounds different on a new recording. Leading us to:

"Pieter Coenen" <pieter_c@hotmail.com> writes:

What is striking for many film music collectors is that they get used to the "original soundtrack recording" and not liking any other sounding interpretation of a work.

I liked the orchestral arrangement of Total Recall a lot: Powerful brass and impressive drum rolls. Too bad for its one important flaw: those typewriting sounds. What is that? Some kind of triangle? Was there no other more suitable instrument Goldsmith could have used?

I agree with Comerford on Capricorn One: Good theme but not a score to listen to. Those seventies synthesized sounds make it sound very dated. I was charmed with the seventies pop arrangement of the Kay theme however.

Everybody probably knows this one, but the First Contact End Title is the same as the one for Star Trek V, swapping the Klingon Theme (the same Klingon theme as for the Motion Picture) for the First Contact theme. I found this First Contact End Title a very good choice for the compilation cause IMO it summarizes the musical originality of Star Trek V and First Contact in 5 minutes. :-) A variation on the well known theme and a fairly good new one. I think these are very bad unoriginal scores but then again the pictures are too. :-)

The First Contact themes echoes the Voyager theme, which was written BEFORE First Contact and is in IMO one of the best accomplishments of an aging-and-way-too- many-pictures-scoring Goldsmith in the second half of the nineties.

I'm trying to think of what 'seventies synthesized sounds' from Capricorn One Pieter is talking about. There's one electronic effect that makes a brief appearance at the beginning of "The Docking" and maybe a couple of other cues, but this is an almost completely acoustic score. I think Star Trek V is one of the most underrated scores around. It is literally almost the only thing that makes the film watchable, and there is some great unreleased music in there.

Pieter, your final description reminds me of an old Monty Python description of a vicious gangster: "He was a cruel man, but fair."

Chris Jojo <C_JOJO@exchange.creations.CO.UK> writes:

...I align myself totally with Jeff's opinion with particular emphasis on his observations regarding Goldsmith's neglected and sadly under-appreciated seventies output. I also have a fondness for the Damnation Alley score even though the film had the most dire production values and in spite of it's Twilight's Last Gleaming revisited tendencies. It has an edgy, quasi-serial feel (the 'Landmaster' action cues in particular) with some great harmonic material.

It also marks Goldsmith's earliest forays into melding Orchestral Instrumentation with Analog Synthesizers (before his ubiquitous FM synth stylings with the DX7). A technique that he has honed to perfection over the years; and is especially exemplified by his Sci-fi work (Does anyone out there have the original Judge Dredd trailer cue?) A scoring approach that now seems to be 'de rigeur' with composers such as Goldenthal, Zimmer, Serra and co.

I find it lamentable that scores such as Damnation Alley, The Other, Mephisto Waltz and Logan's Run (another gem of atonalism and synthoid futurism!) have not been championed for a release/re-release.

The Frontiers cuts were cool, but in a few cases I felt that the 'attitude' and dynamism (Capricorn One especially) of the originals was not bettered, which considering the fidelity of this new recording is a shame.

Will a day go by without another question about Goldsmith's Judge Dredd trailer music? This may go down in history as the composer's most popular composition...

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