Happy Birthday, Maestro Goldsmith

Composer Jerry Goldsmith, who along with John Williams is one of the living titans of film music, is 75 today. He's best known, probably, for his work on the Star Trek films, of which his score to Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a true classic. (The others are all superb, with the exceptions of Insurrection, which is merely good, and Nemesis, which is downright bad.)

He's written a lot of other wonderful scores, but Goldsmith's name tends to be in the shadow of John Williams because, well, Goldsmith writes scores for really crappy movies that nobody ever goes to see. His score to the third Omen movie, The Final Conflict, is magnificent -- but who on earth has seen that movie? Who on Earth has seen The Thirteenth Warrior (an appallingly bad swords-and-brawn epic)?

Of all the films Goldsmith has scored -- and there are many -- the only "classics" are probably Patton and Alien (and I wouldn't even include the latter). Since I suspect that, for the general public, film music is viewed only in the context of the film (a wrongheaded view, but prevalent), I expect that Jerry Goldsmith won't ever have the same cultural visibility of a John Williams or a John Barry (at the height of his career, which was quite some time ago).

Anyway, happy birthday, Maestro Goldsmith.