Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Rosenman)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) is not a soundtrack that jumps out as an obvious classic, but has many one-of-a-kind qualities, on perfect display in Intrada’s remastered reissue from 2012.
When the album was released on vinyl, shortly after the movie in 1986, I immediately bought it – because it was Star Trek, and because one must obviously have these items. At the time, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. My first reaction was that it was strange to renew the composer yet again after James Horner’s two successful scores (even though I had also thought it strange to change to an unknown Horner for the second film). We film music enthusiasts are a fickle bunch, right? But Horner had already won his accolades and created something memorable, so it was probably time for him to move on. The score didn’t seem to have the same grandeur as Horner’s work. It felt like a cheaper option, the work of a fish out of water. Leonard Rosenman (1924-2008) was an unknown quantity for me, but the film’s humorous escapades were sufficiently distracting that I didn’t notice much of the music in the film itself.
So, as a soundtrack, it languished in my collection for some time. That’s not to say that I hadn’t noticed anything at all about the music. It had a certain mystery about it. One moment, in particular, that did stand out for me was when the Klingon bird of prey decloaks over the villainous whaling vessel, and stops a harpoon from hitting the fleeing humpback, much to the consternation of the modern slavic Ahabs. That musical cue stood out to me as both powerful and unique. But then again, at the other end of the spectrum, I was taken aback by the 1980s jazz-fusion music that was scored for the Market Street sequence. That was definitely not Star Trek, in my mind, and I can still only just tolerate it. It reeks of the 1980s, like a Mezzoforte cast off – but I suppose, that’s fair. It was the 80s after all.
Some years later, after replacing vinyl with a CD, hoping for better sound, I still wasn’t at all convinced. The sound quality (both on vinyl and on the CD) was rotten: both compressed and badly distorted. I thought it was almost unlistenable. Indeed, it was years before I pulled the CD out again to give it another chance. That was just after the Planet of the Apes movie soundtracks were released as a set. Rosenman wrote two of the later soundtracks, after Jerry Goldsmith (Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes). There was clearly something about Rosenman that was interesting. He was quite different from the other film composers I’d heard up to that point. But how to listen to the music when the record producers let us down so badly?
Struggling through the poor sound, I was nevertheless struck by the brilliantly composed chords that Rosenman assembled for his Star Trek score. His signature move was apparently to build chords by adding one note at a time, from a multitude of voices, in a rising chorus to form a mysterious crescendo. Walking through harmonic sequences, like stepping stones. It was very Bach Toccata, or Richard Strauss in Also Sprach Zarathustra, without being either of them. The tonal qualities of the chords were also unique, dominated by a mild dissonance and with percussive wind instruments, and a splash of 1970s stringiness at the top. As a composer myself, I wanted to study it more deeply and fully understand its uniqueness. It was very 1970s, but at the same time, timeless.
For years, then, I had been crossing my fingers for a remaster of this music to see if it could actually shine. So when Intrada gave the score their unique treatment in 2012, and added the usual additional material, remastering everything to modern standards, I was already looking forward to it. Ignoring the fact that it takes forever and a treasure chest to order CDs from the US these days, I bit the bullet and waited a full six weeks for it to arrive. One wrongly delivered package and redelivery later, I was ripping the tracks and playing back on my Linn Akurate, and within seconds it was already clear that this was now a totally different sonic experience. All the distortion and EQ imbalances were fixed and the beauty of the orchestra could flood out, like flavour from a Tetley’s tea bag!
So what of Rosenman? As a composer, he didn’t obviously have many different ideas. There is an unmistakable style to his works, repeated you could say, but the ones he had were surely original. As a student, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg at Berkeley University (the California one, not Boston). Schoenberg was famous for the twelve tone philosophy that came to dominate much of European and American music in the early 20th century, as well as his very public contempt for late romantic inspired composers like Sibelius and Bax. Rosenman no doubt soaked up this philosophy, as did many in the 50s and 60s–but even more so, drilled into him by his tutor. It was a time when you couldn’t not write to this 12-tone principle and be considered a serious composer. Thankfully, not everyone fell for it, but American film and television was certainly influenced by this movement led by people like André Previn, who later went on to conduct the classics, handing over to Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams, whom he considered to be better composers.
Rosenman, for his part, was certainly a talented composer, who also wrote for the concert hall. He was brought into film in the 1950s, more by chance than as a career choice – just at the moment when America was flirting with avant garde styles. Leonard Nimoy, who directed The Voyage Home, had apparently liked the East of Eden soundtrack and found Rosenman to be an intellectually stimulating colleague, with interesting concert pieces as well as a broad and varied intellect (like Nimoy himself). East of Eden, for me, was perhaps sweetly romantic but otherwise unexceptional. It was already impregnated with Rosenman’s unique style. His work on Fantastic Voyage and Planet of the Apes was much more avant garde – the latter perhaps following Jerry Goldsmith’s initial stylistic choice, in the footsteps of Varèse and Messiaen. One immediately hears Rosenman’s technique at work. As I’ve grown to understand it better, the one score that does stand out for me is indeed The Voyage Home. Even with a relatively small amount of music, Rosenman pulls off some brilliant scoring.
As far as James Horner is concerned, it is now revealed that Leonard Nimoy had already tried to replace him as composer for the previous movie The Search for Spock, but the studio had protested. As a young man, Horner was cheap and a safe pair of hands – which was also good for the continuity of those two story parts. In retrospect, this is not a big surprise. Leonard Nimoy and Leonard Rosenman were friends going way back. And in the end, it turned out to be an inspired choice – a fitting challenge approaching the end of his career.
This challenge for Rosenman was something out of the ordinary, however. Something about the scope of the film, and the way it flips between action and contemplation stretches Rosenman to overcome his tendency to fall back on style. He had to write several styles to fit the film, which forced him to study new music – taking him out of his trained comfort zone. The result is an interesting melange of tracks, all quite short. Even with the extra alternate tracks on the Intrada CD, there is relatively little music for a film of its length, yet each piece is memorable. Apparently, Nimoy had asked for there to be no music where there was dialogue – which turns out to give the music a character role of its own in the film.
Much of Rosenman’s own music is built around long chords, followed by repeated rhythmical stabs. The chords are assembled note by note from different instruments that are introduced, with a percussive, “avant gardey”, atonal quality. These generate the rising suspense around the imagery of the film. Yet despite this signature move, the score also has a multitude of strongly melodic themes that suddenly burst out, as if in celebration, or in comic slapstick. In places, it’s almost reminiscent of Debussy’s Images pour Orchestre: there is a romance in this score that is absent from his other works. As if the prison of atonal cynicism was broken apart by a fine French wine. This is very different territory than James Horner’s work, and yet it all fits nicely with the change of universe.
Another noteworthy deviation from the norm was that the original opening sequence was originally envisaged as an embedded Alexander Courage themeplay, but it was ultimately replaced (at Nimoy’s request) by the final more celebratory, even heraldic rendering of the film’s main whale theme, thus breaking the ties to the past and shifting the focus. The result for the rerelease is that now the album tells a story. Perhaps you wouldn’t guess the movie from the music, but the music has its own story to tell and there is just enough of it to stimulate the imagination (now also without hurting the ears).
As far as I can tell, there has never been anything quite like Rosenman’s score for The Voyage Home, either before or since. The uniqueness of his style and the uniqueness of the movie conspired to polish a small but not insignificant gem. The music was Oscar-nominated for best original score in 1986.
Rosenman never made a huge amount of music during his career. He was already 60 by the time of The Voyage Home, but the little he made was noteworthy. The Voyage Home is probably a one-off, now rescued from the archives. However you choose to view it, love it or loathe it, now we can enjoy it as it was intended. I recommend giving it a try.
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The remastered release from 2012 is currently not available for streaming, but the CD can be purchased at Intrada’s store.
