[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Nic(k), that is quite an achievement indeed. I expect that my following point has been covered (I’m here so infrequently), but… how do I word this… what percentage of those Goldsmiths do you not really like? Isn’t it inevitable that if you have ALL of a composer’s scores, you’re going to dislike at least some of them?

Well, considering that you basically asked the same question at the FSM Forum, I give you basically the same answer here, with some slight adjustments to fit the way you asked the question here. 🙂

I should start with pointing out that way back I never set out to have a “complete” Goldsmith collection. When I started, many years ago, with my POLTERGEIST LP — my 8th LP, my 4th “Original Motion Picture Soundtrack,” and the first Jerry Goldsmith score in my collection — the very idea of owning any composer “complete” was entirely out of reach. I was a 14-year-old kid with limited means and practically no information about such things.

Years and decades passed, and I accumulated a lot of Jerry Goldsmith along the way. I should note, though, that a “complete” collection was still never my intent. I didn’t adopt a “completionist” mindset, didn’t maintain a checklist, didn’t hunt down the missing links (no, LINK I already had).

However… not too long ago, partly prompted by the upcoming English translation of the French Jerry Goldsmith book, I happened to go through his filmography and noticed there were fewer than a handful of scores I didn’t own. At that point I decided to get them… what the heck, I’d come this far, might as well. I was just a few albums away from closing the gap, and thought: “might as well.”

I mean, I had all of Jerry Goldsmith’s feature film score except for three or four scores, and all but one of them were easy and cheap to get, so I thought “what the heck, might as well finish it”. It was just “completing” something that was already 98% complete anyway.

But back on track: there’s a few things to take apart here, and one of them is “liking”… You asked “what percentage of those Goldsmiths do you not really like?” I mean, what does that mean, to “like” something. For me, “liking” is more than just saying “it’s pleasant to listen to”. I do not think at all that it is a given that ALL composers wrote “good” and “bad” things. That’s just not so. There are no “bad” compositions by composers I really enjoy, there are no “bad” compositions by Beethoven or Mozart or Mahler for example. Not one. Sure, there are some I enjoy more than others, but none of them fall below a certain standard. But to answer your question in more detail: So far, I like all of Jerry Goldsmith’s scores… except for one, ANGIE… I’m afraid I haven’t managed to like that one yet. 🙂

But back to “liking”. What is “liking” music even. I’m not even sure. Which is why sometimes these forum questions are quite interesting, because they lead you to think about things that are seemingly “obvious” (we’ve all said we “like this or that piece of music), but that are not “obvious” at all once you try to articulate what they actually mean. So I’ll give it a shot.

I’m composer oriented, or perhaps artist oriented. So if I really like a substantial amount of work by someone I consider a genuine artist, I tend to be interested in what else they have done, and it’s usually a worthwhile undertaking. So once I “like a lot”, I tend to “like all”, because I find something worthwhile, revealing, and interesting in their works. It moves from “ah that’s great to listen to” to “what was Goldsmith up to here?”.

Because here’s the thing: genuine artists have almost always something genuine to say. Not occasionally, not in their “good periods”… consistently, across the span of a career. Sure, some may write throwaway compositions that are not of wider importance or interest, but once you are interested in an artist, you find even those failures interesting, sometimes very much so. The artistic intelligence that produces a masterpiece doesn’t simply switch off when the film is drivel or smaller or the inspiration less glorious.

Which brings me to something else that deeply interests me, and that isn’t really about individual albums at all. I like to “hear” the big picture. I want to hear where a composer came from and where they went. The arc. The whole trajectory. So I’m not just looking for “ah, this score is rather nice and that one isn’t quite as strong.” That kind of cherry-picking tells you almost nothing about the artist, and quite a lot about your own mood on the afternoon you pressed play. Mind you, I find a “cherry-picking” approach perfectly ok if that’s what you want. It is just not my own personal approach to art.

The most obvious composer illustration of this, certainly one of the most extreme, is Gustav Mahler, who happens to be one of my favorite composers. You can, of course, take each symphony on its own terms. Many people do, perfectly happily. But once you have encountered the COMPLETE output, the individual works transform into something else entirely. They become chapters in a single, extraordinarily long argument. The song cycles and symphonies totally interconnect, and earlier compositions contain the seeds for what is explored later. The Ninth echoes things planted as far back as the Wunderhorn songs. The Sixth seems almost to be in dialogue with the Fifth. Long-range structural thinking, across not just movements but DECADES. These arcs are simply invisible if you are only sampling. And I find these arcs in many composers, especially when I have more than casually focused on their work.

Goldsmith operated along similar lines. His career was long, his range considerable, and his thematic and harmonic preoccupations surface and resurface across scores that, at first glance, might seem entirely unrelated. An original idea of orchestration that appears in one context quietly reframes something you heard ten films earlier. An orchestral texture he experimented with, perhaps just tentatively in a lesser-known score becomes, two years later, the foundation of something genuinely extraordinary. You only perceive this if you have the full picture. I know not everyone listens to film scores like that, that’s ok.

There is also the question of what the “lesser” works actually reveal. Not every composition by Jerry Goldsmith is a masterpiece, certainly not, that’s accepted, but the works that fall flat on their nose are still frequently where the most interesting creative risk-taking is legible. A composer who is technically and aesthetically ambitious will sometimes fail in ways that are far more instructive than a safer composer’s successes. You see, or perhaps better “hear”, the attempt. You see what they were REACHING for. Strip those works out of the picture and you lose precisely that dimension of the artist’s mind. So I want them to be included in the big picture.

The major works of any great artist, of any great composer, meanwhile, gain considerably in depth when placed against what surrounds them. A masterpiece understood in isolation is like a mountain viewed from the base: impressive, certainly, but you have no real sense of the terrain. Everyone knows Beethoven’s 9th, sure, but it’s his far lesser known “Choral Fantasy” that was part of the way to get there.

In my view, there is of course often a “canonical “greatest hits” version of any composer, and that is always to some degree a distortion. The pieces that became famous became famous, sometimes rightly so, because everything comes together, for example Beethoven’s 5th or 9th, Goldsmith’s STAR TREK – THE MOTION PICTURE and CHINATOWN, Morricone’s THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, these are the “hits” where everything’s “perfection”, but they just tell part of the artistic journey. Serious engagement, or perhaps at least the way I engage with artists and composers, means bypassing that distortion and encountering the actual body of work on its own terms. Which frequently turns up surprises. Strengths in unexpected genres. A chamber piece that outshines the celebrated orchestral work. I love FIERCE CREATURES, for example. On its own terms, it’s a lovely, charming piece of chamber music. Much better than the film it was written for (thought I think it has some very funny moments).

So no, I don’t approach a complete Goldsmith collection, or a complete any other composer collection, thinking “I wonder which of these I like and which I won’t like.” I’m not much for cherry-picking, my approach is more like: let me see the full picture.

How often do you listen to those titles, or are they just like “books read once”, which sit on the bookshelves for the rest of our lives?

As noted on FSM, which is why I’ll just do a more or less copy-and-paste job here, that’s actually an interesting question, and when I think about it, it implies that a music collector cares to have only the music in his collection that he then repeatedly listens to. I’m not sure that is a sound premise. In fact, I am sure that is not a sound premise by now. For many reasons. I mean why have a music collection at all? You can listen to most of it in the highest quality without having any personal “collection”.

I’m with Umberto Eco, who once famously said (about books, but it’s also true for music): “It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.” That’s how I see this. (I have THE NAME ON THE ROSE in my bookshelf… and have read it twice. Will I read it a third time? Maybe, it’s a great book.)

My music collection is a curated garden full of possibilities. There are the cornerstones, the albums that I’ve heard countless times and which made me fall in love with music, the very familiar parts of my center trees, where I know every branch and every root and the way it smells in the spring, and from these trees, the collection grew to contain many compositions, many composers, there are plenty of albums in my collection I have not (yet) listened to at all, there is unfamiliar and undiscovered country in my collection. So it’s a great wonderfully curated garden with the cozy and familar places rooted in the center, and brooks and bushes and woodland going in all kinds of directions from there, until I am even within my own curated garden in undiscovered country, with new plants and bushes that have come there in time.

By now, I would find a music collection were I already know and have actually repeatedly listened to everything in it pitifully insufficient. For me, a music collection is now about options, about possibility, not about familiarity. But will I listen to MR. BASEBALL again at one time in my life? For sure.

And as I said… theoretically: why buy music at all anymore? Most of it is available at the highest quality on streaming services like Qobuz. So why bother? We do it nevertheless.

Goldsmith might be my favourite film composer, but I have very little interest in his scores after around 1990, and thus haven’t bothered buying them.

And there may be others who are saying the 90s is their favorite phase by Jerry Goldsmith. Personally, I think he wrote masterpieces during his entire career. I think a score like HOLLOW MAN (not a very good film, I’m afraid) for example is as good as any Goldsmith has ever written.

Many people seem to dismiss, for example, ALONG CAME A SPIDER, as a by-the-numbers score, so much so that I actually I didn’t bother with it until a few years ago, when I got a copy, and I found it surprisingly original and inventive, it had one of the most startling openings of any Goldsmith score… very spooky, avoiding melody, instead sneaking synthesizers that lured in the dark, ready to attack. Great stuff.