JERRY GOLDSMITH, R.I.P.

While I was in England last week, I learned over breakfast that one of my favorite film composers died. Jerry Goldsmith yielded so much work in his life that I don't know which of his dozens and dozens of scores I first heard, which one seduced me first and made me a lifetime admirer. I put him in the same class as Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, and John Barry, authors of cinematic music inherited directly from early 20th C. composers like Prokofiev.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Planet of the Apes. Alien. The Omen. L.A. Confidential. Poltergeist. Chinatown. Patton. These are the titles for which he's is most widely known by younger people. But he's been composing music since the 1940s, and produced a body of TV and movie work that you could not have escaped unless you lived in a cave: Perry Mason, Twilight Zone, Thriller, Dr. Kildare, Lilies of the Field, Seven Days in May, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Man from U.N.C.L.E., Our Man Flint and In Like Flint, Seconds, The Sand Pebbles, The Flim-Flam Man, The Mephisto Waltz, The Other, Barnaby Jones, The Waltons, The Wind and the Lion, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, Logan's Run, Islands in the Stream, Coma, Capricorn One, The Swarm, The Boys from Brazil, Magic, Outland, Rambo, Gremlins, Legend, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, the list goes on.

At one point or another, I've owned pretty much all of the film scores mentioned above, mostly on LPs, though I bought what became available on CD in later years.

Goldsmith was important for me the way that John Williams is important for me. Although they were classically trained composers with ears for vivid, nuanced, and distinctive characterizations, they were often called on to apply their talents to large science-fiction and fantasy movies or TV shows. So, I grew up associating the music from my favorite shows and flicks with pretty much these two men.

Like Williams, Goldsmith understood how to make big symphonic statements that often dramatically improved the movies they supported. He differed from Williams in that he experimented more with post-modern orchestral sounds, using spare electronica the way that Bernard Herrmann used to break rules with zithers and theremins. Goldsmith was also much better at evoking the sinister than Williams, whose "dark" phrasings speak to a frightening image more than to a dreadful human condition.

If you want a taste of one of his more wonderful works, you can listen on iTunes or Napster to his 1966 score for The Blue Max, which is, as NPR writes in its post-mortem appreciation, "A traditionally orchestrated score evoking both the wonder of flight and the hard edge of combat. Goldsmith at his Richard Straussian best."

Peace, Mr. Goldsmith. And thanks for so much listening pleasure.