Scoring Star Trek 14: George Duning, and the Hollywood Horns
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- Опубліковано 9 сер 2023
- A double feature! This special edition first explores some of the most important session musicians of Star Trek - the French horns! An historic look at the unique place these players held in American music production. THEN - a deep look into George Duning's partial score for TOS episode 51 "Return To Tomorrow"
Finally, I can put names and faces to the sexiest French horn line ever recorded. Thanks David!
Thank you for all your work on this series of videos. It deserves a wider audience.
Brain and Brain What is Brain is my favorite line from any and all of Star trek.
😆👍
After playing in the studios or the L.A. Phil. with a lot of these guys, listening to the stories, I think you give one of the best interpretations of what it was to be a Horn Player in Los Angeles in that era. May God Bless them, a debt of greatitude to one and all...
Ron Applegate
A singularly unique time and place in all the world for sure. Appreciate your comments. Thanks for watching, sir!
These videos are incredible! Thanks so much for all your hard work! Especially for possibly the best ever music made for tv on Star Trek!
Thanks. Appreciate the comments! And it's not hard work.. I mean, it's not easy, but it's enjoyable and challenging. Best time I've had with music in years.
All I remember was in High School band the Alto Saxes got blamed for the French Horn mistakes. Sorry David lol. John Williams is a national treasure & I enjoyed the French Horn scored in Leia's Theme. Love your channel & your work & thanks for this!
Thanks for this. Agreed on Williams, but not sure on "French horn mistakes".. 😁
Appreciate your time watching!
Love your channel. As a music and sci-fi nerd, it brings two of my loves together. I made a post on another platform about the musical themes of Star Trek and was told to check out your channel.
Wow. Nice to hear folks are referring others! Thanks for checking it out.
Thank you, Dave! I cannot find the words to convey how incredibly enjoyable and informative I found this video. Thank you also for bringing attention to the competence of the Desilu music editors, who did such excellent work in matching tracks to scenes.
Thank you for explaining
Thank you David
Thanks for watching 🖖
Fascinating as ever. I don't think I realised that there was a quick use of a cue from Metamorphosis right before the actual "Kirk's Philosophy" cue either, the one just flows so naturally into the other, plus the fact that the episode's music credit reads "Music Composed And Conducted By George Duning" - rather than "Additional Music By George Duning" as it would on an episode that relied solely on tracked music.
It's like Gerald Fried's cues "Mace Fight" (from Catspaw) and "Arrows" (from Friday's Child) - the two are so similar, so nearly identical that it's easy to forget that they were written for different episodes. But at least when they're used together it's in episodes that don't have original scores (like A Private Little War and I think The Omega Glory, although the latter does have one brief but significant cue composed by Fred Steiner, albeit without any credit in the end titles).
Conversely, I don't think I realised that Duning was adapting Steiner's theme here, I just thought it was tracked in from Mirror, Mirror!
I think I said on your Metamorphosis clip that with George Duning - in season 2 at least - his music is reused in such small quantities and often in episodes that have either whole new scores by other composers (if I recall correctly you mentioned Amok Time and I, Mudd) or no music credit at all (ditto A Piece Of The Action and The Gamesters Of Triskelion), so we're not looking out for it as such. Another example, according to Memory Alpha, there's a moment in The Doomsday Machine where one tiny little cue of Gerald Fried's from Shore Leave is recycled. I have never noticed this, and need to check it out.
And I remember you saying last time that it was your transcriptions of the music that is what takes the time - and as the software you said you use is the same that I use for transcribing my own songs, I know how time-consuming it can be. Last week I did one song, just piano & vocals, and even with it being a reworking of an old idea that I'd transcribed a few years ago enabling me to work from the original file, it still took me a couple of hours to get it all right! I'm trying not to imagine how long it takes you to transcribe parts for 10-20 instruments, and seeing those transcriptions on the screen, I can see how fiddly it can get, and not just the violins!
- Liam
Same here it blended together so well
Thanks again, Liam. Good stuff as usual. Yes, the uncredited cue from The Omegy Glory that Steiner wrote was his adaptation of the US’s national anthem “The Star Spangled Banner” when the flag bearer first appears. Love the shock and suspence he packed into that well worn melody!
Duning composed four cues using the Blackship Theme, but I thought there was at least one scene in which an actual tracked Blackship cue from Mirror, Mirror appeared - seems to me I heard woodwinds, and none were in the RTT orchestra. I may be wrong.
“Fiddly” - ha ha, good word! Working on the transcriptions is sort of a love/hate relationship. It’s like studio time - the hours whiz by, but it’s mentally taxing and after a while just have to walk away. I once read a fortune cookie - of all things! - saying “Every great accomplishment is at first impossible.” Not that I think these qualify as “great accomplishment” but it does apply to so much of life in this world.
@@davidpage9355I know what you mean. I heard a quote once, I forget who said it, an author or some other type of writer I forget, when asked if he enjoyed writing, he said "I don't enjoy writing, but I enjoy having written".
- Liam.
@@davidpage9355 I should mention that I misremembered something above. I said before that Memory Alpha states that a brief bit of Gerald Fried's "Shore Leave" is heard in "The Doomsday Machine", but I've just looked it up again and it's actually Alexander Courage's theme for Kirk that it lists on the site, which makes a lot more sense.
Come to think of it, one thing that can be confusing is when two episodes that have freshly composed music are made in one order but aired in the other, and one makes use of a cue from the other - "Mirror, Mirror" for instance, makes use of music from both "The Doomsday Machine" and "Catspaw", both of which were produced before it but aired after. Conversely, "The Corbomite Maneuver" uses the establishing cue from "The Enemy Within" which was produced after it but aired before. It can make it difficult to be sure who composed what at times!
- Liam.
@@dressinggownsessions7296 Yeah, it can be a real puzzle!
Dave, I really appreciate the work you're doing, here. I'm a 55 yr old amateur composer who never learned to read or write music, so tho I get lost on keys and such, the way you talk about the nature of Trek's *sound* in comparison to other works and composers is very enlightening. If you decide to expand your content, I hope someday you can cover Dominic Frontiere's work on the Outer Limits, or Bernard Hermann's work on the Twilight Zone, to name a few! Cheers, RW.
Hey I'm glad you found this and thanks for the comment. And appreciate the tip. Maybe once I exhaust ST music!
Thank you for this video David and all the hard work you do; another wonderful informative video. This really does deserve a wider audience.
Your bloopers are great too!
"A picture paints a thousand words, while music expresses that, for which there are no words."
Great vid. I love that you include the bloopers at the end. More UA-camrs should do that.
Believe me, there's lots of "blooper" material to pick from! Thanks.
.. and I should add - thanks for watching to the end!
This one had Shatner's infamous "Have no fear Sargon is here!" as a blooper.
Brilliant music
I've always loved the French horn, probably because of the way it is used in both Star Wars and Star Trek. I appreciate you devoting this time to it. Thanks, David!
Most kind. Thank you!
I've just discovered that the main theme from this episode's score bears a striking resemblance to one used by Franz Waxman in Alfred Hitchcock's 1941 film "Suspicion". I was watching the film earlier and it could be heard at least twice, although the feel was less romantic and more heartbroken, I think it might have been in a minor key rather than a major one, but it was very much recognisable for all that. For all that's been said about the influence of Sol Kaplan's music from "The Doomsday Machine" on "Jaws", this blows that clean out of the water.
- Liam.
As Christine Chapel said at the end of the episode, "It was beautiful."
I liked this episode, but not top-tier enough to buy it on VHS 30 years ago as I did a third of them.
I think it must be a trope that Kirk meets beautiful women in the transporter room, like Dr. Ann Mulhall.
Vince DeRosa also worked with Henry Mancini (John Williams played piano on some of those dates).
Ed Smith, my orchestration professor, said in his swaggering Tennessee twang, "Horns are like mayonnaise. They go with everything."
😄 awesome!
"Ah, John Williams!" [Luke sees him burned up (with baton in hand) along with his orchestra and his aunt and uncle.]
"Great, now we got to do the rest of this thing with Danny Elfman!"
Orchestra plays a fast march.
Luke decapitates him with lightsaber.
From Family Guy: Blue Harvest.
🤣
Did you see la la land is reissuing the original series Trek music in the 1701 collection, in 2 cd sets at a time. The discs have new liner notes
Yes I did. Actually, I had coffee with Neil Bulk when I was in LA last month and he mentioned the project! Very cool for those of us who missed out on the first big collector's set!
I'm liking the sound of that, although it seems an odd way to split it. I'd have thought that by season or by composer (in five sets, grouping Kaplan, Fielding, Mullendore and Matlovsky into one) would make more sense. Oh well, I'll be looking out for it in any case!
I love this, David. I wonder: are there other examples of Trek composers taking motifs from other Trek composers and weaving them into their scores? I guess the obvious one would be the way many of them riff on Courage’s main theme. Are there others?
There is a reference in the big LaLa Land soundtrack collection that Courage arranged and conducted a session of about 30 minutes of library cues at the beginning of season two, basically updating material from season one (as required by the musicians union contract rules) for the new season, and this included a Gerald Fried cue from S1 "Shore Leave" called 2nd Ruth re-orchestrated for a different ensemble. You can hear this in the S2 episode "The Apple" as Chekov and the pretty lady officer are alone. Other than that, I haven't found anything else, but I have a lot more to go.
Wasn't the french horn the instrument Cliff Eidelman used in the last scene of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, as the crew says goodbye and the Enterprise flys off into the sunset? Heroic and nostalgic indeed.....
David, another amazing video and SO well done and the research was wonderful. Tell me more about you and your background? Do you have a website?
Well, thank you. I'm pretty much a hobbyist now, a musician who may have missed his calling due to poor decisions decades ago as a music major who thought he knew everything. We can all look back, can't we? and wonder "if only.."
I don't have a website or anything to promote. Just love this music and the challenge of doing these videos. And appreciation for so many people who have felt the same way about Trek music. Thanks for checking it out! More to come.. one at a time!
@@davidpage9355 I’m the best music major on my team of fellow iOS software engineers for a financial tech app ;). Thus a hobbyist too. Your narration and editing are quite good. Bravo. Just appreciate similar interests and assumed you had original compositions posted somewhere.
5:43 rofl 🤣
Did one of Parisi's descendants invent the game Parisi Squares, later mentioned in TNG? It wasn't beyond the producers to honor non actors - the Jeffries Tube.
Hm.. I wasn't an avid TNG viewer, never heard of it. Probably just coincidence I'm guessing.
@@davidpage9355 I mostly found TNG sacharrine and the characters poorly written. Parisi Squares was also mentioned in DS9, I believe. I prefer DS9 to TNG personally.
I asked this question before and didn’t get an answer: what is tracking? Is a music editor reusing recorded tracks or are they re-recording written music?
Hey, apologies if I missed your question! Tracking is the first of what you said. A specific cue composed for a specific new episode, once recorded for that episode could by union rule be used again and again throughout the same production season at the discretion of the music editor. One of my earlier videos "Tracking At Desilu Studios" explains the details. This was a common practice in that era of TV production and is why so much of that music for so many shows (pre-1980) is so familiar.
A great example is the intense dramatic score for "The Doomsday Machine" by Sol Kaplan. Much of this recorded music later appears in "Journey to Babel", "The Immunity Syndrome", and "The Deadly Years" among others.
But if they wanted to use a score from one season for the next, it would have to be re-recorded for the new season so that the union players wouldn't be shorted on work, which I get (as a musician). So, they would pre-plan what they wanted to use for the new season, and include that along with scheduled sessions for new episodes - even if it took the session into overtime, it was money well spent to have that much music material available.
Hope that answers!
@@davidpage9355that's something I was curious about as well, the reuse of music in a later season. As far as I can tell, there are only a small number of cues that were reused in a later season, but what few there are were used very effectively. Alexander Courage's theme for Vina in "The Cage" springs to mind, as it was used in all three seasons, Fred Steiner's theme for Apollo in "Who Mourns For Adonais" was used more in season 3 than it had been in season 2!
For the most part, it tends to be only composers that composed music for one season got music rerecorded from a previous season (which makes a certain kind of sense to me) but there's a couple of exceptions that I can think of - Courage as stated above, and one tiny cue from Sol Kaplan's score for "The Doomsday Machine" could be heard at the climax of the final episode, "Turnabout Intruder", the only time any of Kaplan's music was heard in season 3.
I sometimes wonder if season 3's poor reception was as much down to the lack of new music by Sol Kaplan, along with the severely reduced presence of Gerald Fried's as the loss of Gene Roddenberry, Gene L. Coon and Dorothy Fontana from the writing staff (they wrote some episodes freelance but didn't edit the scripts), and regular directors like Joseph Pevney & Marc Daniels, who had helmed so many memorable episodes in the first two seasons.
- Liam.
What piano concerto is that at the beginning?
Brahms #2 💟
brane and brane! 😆
HA! Love that moment. What's funny is their last name is actually spelled "B-R-A-I-N"!