Remembering Jerry Goldsmith

By Peter J Corrigan

Jerrald King ‘Jerry’ Goldsmith was born on February 10, 1929 in Pasadena, California. Goldsmith studied piano with Jakob Gimpel and composition, theory, and counterpoint with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He also attended classes in film composition given by Miklós Rózsa at the Univeristy of Southern California. In 1950, he was employed as a clerk typist in the music department at CBS. There, he was given his first embryonic assignments as a composer for radio shows such as ‘Romance’ and ‘CBS Radio Workshop’. He wrote one score a week for these shows, which were performed live on transmission. He stayed with CBS until 1960, having already scored ‘Twilight Zone’ (1959). He was hired by Revue Studios to score their series ‘Thriller’ (1960). It was here that he met the influential film composer Alfred Newman who hired Goldsmith to score the film “Lonely Are the Brave” (1962), his first major feature film score. An experimentalist, Goldsmith constantly pushed forward the bounds of film music: “Planet of the Apes” (1968) included horns blown without mouthpieces and a bass clarinetist fingering the notes but not blowing. He was unafraid to use the wide variety of electronic sounds and instruments which had become available, although he did not use them for their own sake.
 
He rose rapidly to the top of his profession in the early to mid-1960s, with scores such as “Freud” (1962), “A Patch of Blue” (1965) and “The Sand Pebbles” (1966). In fact, he received Oscar nominations for all three and another in the 1960s for “Planet of the Apes” (1968). From then onwards, his career and reputation was secure and he scored an astonishing variety of films during the next 30 years or so, from “Patton” (1970) to “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979) and from “Chinatown” (1974) to “The Boys from Brazil” (1978). He received 17 Oscar nominations but won only once, for “The Omen” (1976) in 1977. He enjoyed giving concerts of his music and performed all over the world, notably in London, where he built up a strong relationship with London Symphony Orchestra.
 
Goldsmith scored two Euro-westerns: “100 Rifles” (1969) and “Take a Hard Ride” (1975). Jerry came closest to the sound and feel of the European composers in the western field.
 
Jerry died of cancer on July 21, 2004 in Beverly Hills, California.
 
Today we remember one of the great American composers, Jerry Goldsmith on what would have been his 90^th birthday.