Jerry Goldsmith

Jerrald King Goldsmith (Pasadena, California, February 10, 1929-Beverly Hills, California, July 21, 2004), better known as Jerry Goldsmith, was one of the most important and recognized composers of cinematography. He is known for being the composer of the Universal Pictures tune that has been used since 1997.

Biography

Of Jewish origin, Goldsmith learned to play the piano at the age of six. At fourteen, he studied composition, theory, and counterpoint with teachers Jakob Gimpel and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, both members of the European Jewish musical tradition. Goldsmith entered the University of Southern California, under teacher Miklós Rózsa, who wrote the score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 film Spellbound. Goldsmith became interested in writing film music as he was inspired by the music composed by Rózsa himself.

His music was not stuck in any style, but adapted to the demands of the film, ranging from jazz to great symphonic works, through folk music, ethnic music and even synthesizer. Even so, his music could be defined as energetic, since he is especially brilliant in terms of rhythm, without disdaining melody. He was a defender of using music only when strictly necessary, for which reason he accused recent cinema of having too much music on numerous occasions. He gave as an example his own score for Patton , in which there is only half an hour of music, despite being a tape that exceeds two hours of footage.

He touched all genres throughout his career, although it is in fantasy cinema where he achieved his most popular successes: Planet of the Apes, the The Omens trilogy i>, Logan's Run, Zero Atmosphere, Alien, the Eighth Passenger, Total Recall or the two Gremlins movies, to name a few titles. Because of his rhythmic quality, he also stood out in the action thriller genre. However, he always stated that he preferred small and character films, which is why for a long time he mentioned that Goodbye Island was his favorite work.

Its beginnings were television series such as The Fourth Dimension, The Waltons, Perry Mason, El agente de CIPOL i> and Lost in Space, which made him known. Later, despite becoming a musician in great demand by Hollywood, he continued to maintain contacts with the small screen through miniseries such as QB VII and, above all, Masada, the which became one of his best-known scores. One of his last works for the small screen was the theme song for the series Star Trek: Voyager .

He only got one Oscar, for The Prophecy (1976), out of the 17 nominations he got. Despite this, he was during the 1980s and 1990s one of the musicians with the largest number of followers, perhaps only surpassed by John Williams.

During the last years of his life, he combined composition with teaching, teaching film composition courses to young musicians at the University of Southern California (USC). Among his disciples was Marco Beltrami, a composer who began to make a name for himself on the Hollywood scene from the 1990s.

Outside the world of cinema, he composed works such as Music for orchestra, characterized by its atonal style; the oratorio Christus Apollo, with a text by the writer Ray Bradbury, the ballet A patch of blue, based on his own score for the film of the same name (A patch of blue ) from 1965, and Fireworks, commissioned by the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra in 2002 to celebrate its anniversary and accompany a fireworks display.

He was married twice and had four children, one of whom, Joel Goldsmith, also took up film composition.

He passed away on July 21, 2004 in Los Angeles, California at the age of 75 from colon cancer.

Filmography

Awards and nominations

Oscar Awards