Russo: Creating Star Trek Music
2 min read
Star Trek: Discovery fans will have noticed the influence of Alexander Courage when they listen to the theme song for the new series.
Jeff Russo had a reason for wanting to include Courage’s music in the new show. “To me the original series music was really about Alexander Courage,” he said. “Now, Courage didn’t write all the original scores. He wrote the theme. But, there were so many composers in the original series. But where I did give the biggest nod, was in our theme, where I nod very apparently to Alexander Courage’s fanfare is at the end. His was at the beginning, I put ours at the end. But we all thought that was really important. We wanted to acknowledge where we come from. We’d be nothing without that. But, then, the question was, how to jump off from that point.”
“It’s so funny,” Russo told TrekCore. “We have a joke when we’re recording the scores for Discovery. I sometimes will record the strings and the woodwinds together, and then in a separate session record the brass. And I always sort of joke around that it doesn’t really become a Star Trek score until after the brass session — because once you add that brass to some of these big queues, all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Yeah, there it is; there’s the Trek sound.”
What can fans expect in season two from Russo? “In Chapter 2, there’s a lot of new thematic material, which you won’t have heard yet, as the storyline progresses into a new part of the story,” he said. “They [the writers] were very methodical in how they wanted to split this season up into these two chapters. And, I would say you’ll hear a lot of new material for new characters, and new storylines. Lots of stuff that you haven’t heard before. And, of course, that doesn’t appear on the soundtrack yet, because I didn’t want to give anything away.”
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