Jerry Goldsmith
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Amazingly, there was no Jerry Goldsmith thread here yet. I’m approaching him soon, in my collection walkthrough. He used to hold a solid position in my top 10, now he’s just outside, in Waiting Room No. 1. Maybe because his music is so busy, there are few lyrical or downkey scores to get lost in, which is what I gravitate towards these days. And so he’s fallen a little bit. But still damn high.
My physical collection is so tiny, it’s embarassing to even tell you. I count about 20 CDs and 1 LP. It used to be much, much bigger, but I’ve traded off a lot of stuff over the years. Fortunately, I have many in digital file format, so a combined collection of some 70 titles, which I have now, is pretty good.
What’s my favourite? Traditionally, it used to be THE MUMMY, but it might be slightly too bombastic for me these days. I think it’s a tossup between UNDER FIRE and MEDICINE MAN. If someone put a gun to my head, maybe UNDER FIRE.
What are yours?
Long time my favourite Goldsmith score was LEGEND. Then it was STUDS LONIGAN. Meanwhile it might be HOUR OF THE GUN. Or all these three together as some kind of triptichon or trilogy.
But in general I rather gravitate towards early Goldsmith than later Goldsmith.
My favourite late Goldsmith score is definitely L.A. CONFIDENTIAL.
I quite like stuff like POLTERGEIST 1 and 2, RUSSIA HOUSE, BASIC INSTINCT and POWDER.
And his HOLLOW MAN sounds somewhat like Jan Hammer’s Last Flight!
But in general I rather gravitate towards early Goldsmith than later Goldsmith.
Yes, I primarily like end of the 60s till end of the 80s mosts with 70s to early 80s as the peak. The last really great IMHO was TOTAL RECALL.
I cannot really pick a favorite as I like so many scores by him since he is one of my favorite composers. All already named scores are great. But PLANET OF THE APES is one of my all time favorite scores in general.
My favourite late Goldsmith score is definitely L.A. CONFIDENTIAL.
I like that as well, I always see this and CITY HALL as related. MUMMY is good too.
And his HOLLOW MAN sounds somewhat like Jan Hammer’s Last Flight!
This figure going up right at the beginning of LAST FLIGHT you mean? Probably they just used the same scale. Similar I heard in different places and even Goldsmiths before (I thinkt it might be in POLTERGEIST Or INNERSPACE as well).
This figure going up right at the beginning of LAST FLIGHT you mean?
I just remember thinking it used some oF the same notes as Last Flight when I saw HOLLOW MAN. But of course, every composer must somehow use the scale.
Not too long ago, I noticed that I have every single feature film score Jerry Goldsmith ever composed in my collection in some form (sometimes in multiple forms).
Jerry Goldsmith is definitely one of the composers responsible for why I am here today, why I listen to film music, why I have a film music collection. I have always enjoyed film music and found it interesting, but it’s because of Jerry Goldsmith that I actually started to seek out album after album of film music — not because of the films (I often didn’t even know the films… what did I know what A PATCH OF BLUE — another all time favorite — was about when I found the album in a record store?), but because of the composer.
The initiating scores were STAR TREK – THE MOTION PICTURE, FIRST BLOOD, and POLTERGEIST. These three — still favorites to this day — were just music unlike any I had heard. It was music that was both instantly accessible and dramatically clear, yet totally different from any other music I was familiar with. So Goldsmith struck a nerve with me, and I’m very faithful, so he has been and will be always one of my favorite composers.
As far as favorites… I generally like all of Jerry Goldsmith’s scores, but there are clearly some I like a lot more than others. (I have often noted that I can do without ANGIE).
There are currently 285 albums in my collection related to “Jerry Goldsmith” (which includes compilations such as Intrada’s AMAZING STORIES, Volume 2, or his recordings of Alex North scores). So that’s quite a bit.Hard to name favorites… but I want to give at least an idea… among my absolute hard-core favorite scores (apart from the ones I already mentioned up there)
ALIEN
That’s just one of the most interesting film scores I know… I was very happy when Intrada released the expanded edition for much better flow and more of the avant-garde writing Goldsmith employed in that score.PLANET OF THE APES
Just one of the greatest film scores ever written. It’s one of the most accessible and fun 12-tone serial compositions I know, it’s amazing how Goldsmith manages to take an abstract avant-garde concept and write a dramatically coherent film score in that idiom.CHINATOWN
This is probably my “most often played” Goldsmith score… but it’s short, so it’s easy to make room for it. It certainly helps that I love the movie, I’d say it’s the best movie Goldsmith ever scored. This is one of the few Goldsmith cases where, while I have both the expanded film score and the original soundtrack album, I tend to gravitate more towards the soundtrack edit of the music for listening purposes.PAPILLON
Just one of Goldsmith’s most emotional scores. Again, terrific movie.OUTLAND
That’s just one great score… and very dark, brooding… and some of the most aggressive action cues in film history… that music makes even Stravinsky’s Le Sacre sound mellow. I had always enjoyed the album edit, which was well done, except for the missing “Main Title”… which may be the most devastating, empty lonely-space cue Goldsmith ever composed. So I always add that even if I listen to the soundtrack album edit.HOLLOW MAN
A totally underrated Goldsmith score, that rarely appears on the “all time best lists”. But musically, it definitely belongs there. I wanted to pick a “late Goldsmith” score before I stop, so here it is. It may have been Goldsmith’s last great “science fiction concept” score, with the swirling, punctuating electronic sounds whirling around symbolizing the molecular disintegration of Kevin Bacon’s character, who is not just losing his visibility, but his humanity. It is a brilliant fusion of orchestral muscle and cold, clinical synthesizer sonics, excellently recorded and superbly engineered and balanced by Bruce Botnick, no doubt one of the best sounding film score recordings of its kind. I had HOLLOW MAN music with me when I did test listening for new speakers some years ago. It’s a portrait of terror built from texture, momentum, and that unmistakable Goldsmith sense of danger. If the movie were anywhere near as good as this music (which it isn’t) it would be a classic.I could name some more favorites, and even my list of “absolute” favorites is not finished… but this will do for now. 🙂
This is the first thread devoted the giant, Jerry Goldsmith? Oh my! 🙂
Well, I can expound for weeks and months on how much I love this man’s music, he became my favorite film composer during the 90’s, when I finally started discovering more of great scores from past decades alongside kick ass 90’s action scores like TOTAL RECALL, AIR FORCE ONE and THE MUMMY. In contrast to Thor (sorry, Thor!), I’m still much more of a fan of film music that is bombastic, busy, pulse-pounding, etc, and less inclined to go for the lyrical (which is why I listen to so little Horner in the last 5-6 years!). Thus, so much of Goldsmith’s catalogue is still on heavy rotation for me, whether it’s his 80’s and 90’s action scores, his sci-fi masterpieces, the electronic heavy scores (I love RUNAWAY), his gritty, dissonant 70’s scores (CONTRACT ON CHERRY STREET, CASSANDRA CROSSING) or the big epics like BLUE MAX and SAND PEBBLES. Funny enough, my least listened to Goldsmith scores are ones that I often see topping other fan’s lists – RUDY, THE RUSSIA HOUSE, POWDER and MEDICINE MAN – probably because they don’t have enough kinetic energy, strange sounds, grittiness or darkness.
I can just sign off Nicolai’s list, too! I really have to re-listen to HOLLOW MAN it seems which never made mch of impression to me. For some reason I have a boot of it only…
According to iTunes, there are currently 285 albums in my collection related to “Jerry Goldsmith”
Wow, I have 188 listed but my CDs are missing here and I have no number for them. Not sure if I would top that.
Well, I can expound for weeks and months on how much I love this man’s music,
Well, feel free, Tom 😉
I just remember thinking it used some oF the same notes as Last Flight when I saw HOLLOW MAN. But of course, every composer must somehow use the scale.
Yeah, sometimes a matter of what you heard first or what you just heard. I often have that “I know that from somewhere” as well but I cannot always tell from where. Happens even on actual themes/melodies I do know. Curse of knowing so (too) much music I guess.
One thing worth highlighting regarding Goldsmith is, that he was great with sequel scores. Like John Williams. That was in my view for example a weakness of James Horner. When he created a sequel score to one of his own works the score was mostly more of the same. Only exception that I know of might be CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. But Jerry Goldsmith usually managed to really create something new with each iteration. See THE OMEN, FIRST BLOOD, POLTERGEIST.
One thing worth highlighting regarding Goldsmith is, that he was great with sequel scores. Like John Williams. That was in my view for example a weakness of James Horner. When he created a sequel score to one of his own works the score was mostly more of the same. Only exception that I know of might be CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. But Jerry Goldsmith usually managed to really create something new with each iteration. See THE OMEN, FIRST BLOOD, POLTERGEIST.
I don’t know if he was better or worse at sequels than other composers. But yeah, he often did well. I far prefer GREMLINS 2 to the first one, for example. And THE FINAL CONFLICT speaks for itself.
I far prefer GREMLINS 2 to the first one, for example. And THE FINAL CONFLICT speaks for itself.
Both are great but I think both examples are more “traditional” than the first/previous ones. Especially OMEN 3 is rather “calm” compared with the previous ones.
I wouldn’t call THE FINAL CONFLICT calm, but it has a little bit less of the doom and gloom horror of the first, that’s true. And GREMLINS 2 is just through-composed better, more lush and funky at the same time. As if there’s more budget somehow. Same as PREDATOR 2 is vastly superior to PREDATOR, IMO.
The topic of best composer of sequel scores to their own original work is a worthy topic, but I do think that Williams and Goldsmith are tied for first in that category, considering how much new material they provide to every sequel score they composed.
Side note – I would love to quote a comment in my reply, but I can’t see where that button is?
Goldsmith has been in my top 3 since I started listening to and buying film scores in the late 70s.
For a long time he was always number 2 behind John Williams.
But over the past years, he’s probably slipped to 3 (and sometimes further) as I dropped off with a lot of his work in the 90s and beyond.
James Horner has supplanted him in my top 3 as the years have passed.
And I don’t think a lot of his scores have stood the test of time so well, as I return to them from time to time.
I think one of the reasons his music hasn’t reached beyond the niche score fan in general is down to some of his artistic choices (silly sounding synths) and terrible selection of the films he worked on.
Having said that, many of his scores rank amongst the greatest I have ever heard. Certainly his 60s 70s and 80s output is fantastic (often the only good thing about the whole sorry affair in many cases).
Like my other favourite composers, he’s the only thing who can scratch a certain mood itch, when the need arises.I genuinely feel that James Newton Howard was writing better Goldsmith styled action/dramatic suspense music during the 90s and 00s than JG himself.
Yes, both JNH and Chris Young channeled JG well in that decade. But I’ll shamelessly admit that the 90s is my favourite Goldsmith decade, and it ain’t even close. It contains most of the soundtracks I like to listen to. More streamlined? Perhaps. But all the more entertaining. Of course, I can well see the greater artistic value in some of his 60s and 70s efforts, especially in context of their films, but they don’t have the same stand-alone listening value to me.
But I’ll shamelessly admit that the 90s is my favourite Goldsmith decade, and it ain’t even close. It contains most of the soundtracks I like to listen to.
I find it really interesting that in John Williams’ work the 60s and early 70s are your favourite era but for Goldsmith the 90s. Any music related reasons? Or is this more related to the time experiencing the music?
No, no, the 90s is also my favourite decade for John Williams, easily. It’s just that I like to explore his early days in the 50s and 60s so much, as a “researcher” and completist. I’ve never really had this need for Goldsmith.
Goldsmith! I think I have more CDs of his than by any other composer. THE OMEN was one of the first LPs I ever bought, and therafter it was incredibly exciting to come across copies (in brick and mortar stores) of PAPILLON, THE WIND AND THE LION etc etc. These were years when I just absorbed the music without trying to intellectualise it, or worse, go in warily beforehand due to cynicism. They were incredibly exciting times, and a lot of it was to do with my age.
But now, “dulled and prosaic with the poison of life” (H.P. Lovecraft must have been an absolute blast at parties), I see that my interest in his scores waned steadily after the early ’80s. That was a long time ago. I loved all the note-crunching he did from the late ’50s through to around 1982, but I found his music “decreasingly interesting”. That’s the thing I loved about those long, early decades – his music was often startling, and genuinely thrilling to listen to. And although I love POLTERGEIST, the three RAMBO scores and THE RUSSIA HOUSE, I found that his music was both too sentimental and simple. One review of the WARLOCK soundtrack has stuck with me. I can’t remember who wrote this, but it went along the lines of, “I think I put more effort into listening to this than Goldsmith did in writing it”.
But he’ll always (I think) be in my top 3 just for all those amazing scores he did from… let’s narrow it down… around 1963 to 1979. Sixteen years with a 90% hit rate from me. That’s quite incredible.
Like many (though by no means all) composers, there is a clear development in Goldsmith’s compositions. You can see how they progress and are interconnected, and how his type of scoring goes through certain phases. Leaving the 1950s aside, as he was just starting towards the end of the decade, Goldsmith’s 60s output was both very lyrical (scores like Stagecoach, A Patch of Blue, bluesy/jazzy, and aggressive percussive (100 Rifles, Planet of the Apes), his 70s output was enormously diverse, in the mid-80s he started to heavily incorporate electronics and synthesizers (more than before), and in the 1990s he often employed great orchestras, with more subtle electronics than in the 80s.
I find great scores by Goldsmith in any decade, but if I had to pick a single decade, it would be the 1970s, which was just packed from beginning to end with one fantastic score after another. Some of my favorite Goldsmith music was written in that decade, not just STAR TREK – THE MOTION PICTURE and ALIEN, but also many other scores that are among my all time favorite film scores, like (leaving aside those I already mentioned up there):
LOGAN’S RUN
THE MEPHISTO WALTZ
WILD ROVERS
THE OTHER
COMA
CAPRICORON ONE
THE WIND AND THE LION
QB VII
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
DAMNATION ALLEY
THE SWARMand countless others. These are all “top drawer” Goldsmith for me.
Interesting that LEGEND doesn’t get more credit here. As I said, for me this was the entrygate to Goldsmith and remains a favourite and is for me still one of his richest and most glamorous scores despite all its synth textures and the massive reverb.
it would be the 1970s, which was just packed from beginning to end with one fantastic score after another.
Great decade for sure!
Interesting that LEGEND doesn’t get more credit here. As I said, for me this was the entrygate to Goldsmith and remains a favourite and is for me still one of his richest and most glamorous scores despite all its synth textures and the massive reverb.
Yes, undeserved, I didn’t name it since you did already. It’s a great score and one of best use of synths with orchestra.
I found that his music was both too sentimental and simple
Yes, I fould that with his themes at times. Williams for sure wrote the more complex (better?) themes in general. That’s why I never really liked the fan favorite RUDY or the already mentioned POWDER that much. As long as there was the constrast with his busy odd meters and dissonances this was not that much a problem.
LEGEND is great, synth farts and all. In fact, I have it twice. On LP (bought on eBay in the late 90s, believing I bought the CD), and then on proper CD, the Silva Screen version. The film is also vastly underrated. Nils wrote a fine article on it here, in 2022 — here’s a Google-translated version.
I found that his music was both too sentimental and simple
Yes, I fould that with his themes at times. Williams for sure wrote the more complex (better?) themes in general. That’s why I never really liked the fan favorite RUDY or the already mentioned POWDER that much.
I would disagree with that, and I find POWDER a more emotional but less sentimental listen than, say, E.T, but that just shows how subjective these things are.
Goldsmith was the second film composer that really caught my attention, after Williams, and those two still have the top spots among my favourite composers. Which of them has the no. 1 spot usually changes on a weekly or monthly basis.
I agree with what others here have written about what makes his music so great, so I won’t repeat that, but will just mention that for me it’s his inventiveness and versatility that stand out. And that his tonal language and the way he orchestrates obviously resonates with me.
I have around 360 Goldsmith CDs along with some 70 LPs. Obviously, Goldsmith didn’t score 360 films, so there’s a lot of doublets and triplets, a few quadruplets and even a couple of quintuplets (!). I have a hard time letting go of previous releases of a score when I get an expanded or remastered version. That’s the collector mentality, I guess. And it’s fascinating to have the “release history” of a score, so to speak.
My favorite decade will have to be the 80s (all those terrific, busy, complex orchestrations!), followed by the 70s. But he did amazing work in every decade. Favorite score? Oh, that’s a hard one… But if pressed, I’ll probably have to go with STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, followed by UNDER FIRE and LEGEND – which, as Gerate mentioned, doesn’t get enough credit. I find it an amazingly complex and accomplished work – synth farts notwithstanding (which should be clear from the review Thor linked to 🙂 ).
But those three are really only the tip of a very large iceberg of enormously enjoyable Goldsmith scores.
I have around 360 Goldsmith CDs along with some 70 LPs. Obviously, Goldsmith didn’t score 360 films, so there’s a lot of doublets and triplets, a few quadruplets and even a couple of quintuplets (!). I have a hard time letting go of previous releases of a score when I get an expanded or remastered version. That’s the collector mentality, I guess. And it’s fascinating to have the “release history” of a score, so to speak.
Yeah, wow, 360 tops even my not exactly small Goldsmith collection by far, but I did get rid of a lot of doubles and triplets at some point, but yes, action nice to have the release history, different booklets, etc.
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