Gerald Fried composed several indispensable Star Trek scores.
Not all Star Trek fans would recognize the face of Emmy-winning composer Gerald Fried, who died last week at age 95. But most, if not all, would recognize his music.
Gerald Fried’s list of credits is long. It includes about 40 films (including five early films from director Stanley Kubrick), 36 TV movies and miniseries—including the epochal Roots (1977), which made a star of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s LeVar Burton—and episodes of 40 more TV series, including Gilligan’s Island and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Fried was also the first and so far only composer to receive an Academy Award nomination for a documentary (Birds Do It, Bees Do It, 1975).
Yet his scores for Star Trek: The Original Series are what Star Trek fans will know best. Although Fried wrote original scores for only five TOS episodes, some of them are among the series’ most popular and enduring installments. And individual cues from Fried’s scores became part of the series’ music library, and can be heard multiple times throughout the series. The Memory Alpha wiki counts 25 occurrences of music by Gerald Fried in TOS, as well as one—so far—in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
To celebrate the life of Gerald Fried and his indelible contributions to the sound of Star Trek, here’s our ranking of his five TOS scores.
“Catspaw” (Season 2, Episode 7)
“Catspaw” isn’t one of Star Trek’s better hours, but the series’ “Halloween episode” does feature some quality musical moments from Gerald Fried.
He provides two snappy, snare drum-heavy settings of Alexander Courage’s fanfare, for instance. The cue “Bones, the Zombie” is a dread-filled death march for McCoy when the good doctor is under Sylvia and Korob’s influence. It got lots of mileage in TOS, often when the show needed menacing music for invaders. For example, it’s the music playing under Nomad’s trips through the Enterprise’s corridors in “The Changeling.”
But much of the “Catspaw” score is the orchestral equivalent of waving your hands around and speaking in a bad Bela Lugosi accent to try and frighten your friends. Cues like “Fog Planet,” “Thicker Fog,” and “Fog Storm” sound more silly than they do scary. And the music by which Sylvia tries to seduce Captain Kirk leans too heavily on wah-wah saxophones to be taken seriously.
Still, Fried’s theme for Sylvia and Korob appears in many inventive variations throughout the score, and his music for the moment when they are revealed in their true form is suitably alien and unsettling—almost enough to distract you from the ludicrous creatures on the screen.
“Friday’s Child” (Season 2, Episode 11)
“Friday’s Child” is another sub-par Star Trek episode, despite coming from the keyboard of D.C. Fontana. But Fried’s score makes up quite a bit for the slow action and padded plotline.
Jeff Bond, the foremost expert on the music of Star Trek, praised Fried’s score for “Friday’s Child” in a 2007 review of the remastered episode:
"The opening and closing credit cues, with a thrilling trumpet figure playing against the familiar Alexander Courage Enterprise fanfare, [are] some of the most rousing music in the series (all the Enterprise shots in the episode get thrilling, brassy music cues); the tribal, pounding march that plays over the first tracking shot of the Capellan village perfectly establishes the warlike character of these people, and I love the sheer balls of moments like the cut back to the Enterprise bridge … [where] Fried’s music [is] laying down a furiously heavy downbeat just to show Chekov’s sensors losing track of the Klingon ship."
Bond also notes that Gerald Fried gave the franchise its first uniquely “Klingon theme,” more than a decade before Jerry Goldsmith gave it one in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
“The Paradise Syndrome” (season 3, episode 3)
It sounds to my ear as though Gerald Fried borrowed freely from himself when scoring “The Paradise Syndrome.”
Like “Friday’s Child,” this episode takes place on a “primitive” planet, among “primitive” people—in this case, Native Amercians removed to a far-away world by the enigmatic Preservers. So much of Fried’s material sounds very similar to what he composed for the earlier episode. And, yes, some of it sounds like Hollywood’s idea of what Native American music should sound like.
But Fried also creates exciting new material for the sequence in which the Preserver’s obelisk zaps away Captain Kirk’s memories, turning him into the tribe’s long-expected “Kirok.” He again quotes Alexander Courage’s fanfare to fine effect in moments when Kirk is struggling to remember his former life.
Most of all, the love theme Fried wrote for Kirk and the doomed Miramanee is exquisitely beautiful. Fried takes it through several effective variations during the episode—tender, playful, even ominous. It is devastatingly gorgeous in its final appearance, as Kirk says goodbye to the dying Miramanee, and is no small part of the scene’s heartbreaking power.
“Shore Leave” (Season 1, Episode 15)
None of the scores Gerald Fried wrote for Star Trek is more varied than his score for “Shore Leave.”
Every time the “amusement planet” brings the Enterprise crew’s imagined scenarios to life, Fried is able to introduce a new style of music. And so the audience is treated to a bouncing, playful theme for Alice and her White Rabbit; a jauntily fiddled faux Irish jig as Kirk chases his Academy nemesis, Finnegan; a flourish of medieval strings as Yeoman Barrows imagines herself a fairy tale princess, which then blares on the brass when a knight attacks McCoy; and even a gong-heavy cue using the pentatonic scale when Sulu is attacked by a samurai warrior.
As in “The Paradise Syndrome,” Fried’s “ethnic” cues in “Shore Leave” may sound embarrassing to listeners today. The grinding “stripper music” that scores McCoy’s reappearance with a scantily clad dancer on each arm also has not aged well.
But, also as in “The Paradise Syndrome,” Fried delivers a beautiful love theme to secure the score’s overall greatness. It is one of the most fully developed love themes in Star Trek, consisting of not only the lilting flute sections at its beginning and end, but also an aching, yearning string section in between.
Gerald Fried gave “Shore Leave” a score every bit as imaginative and fun as the makers of the amusement planet intended their world to be.
“Amok Time” (Season 2, Episode 1)
How could Gerald Fried’s unforgettable score for Star Trek’s first trip to the planet Vulcan not top a list of his contributions to the series?
The score’s centerpiece is, naturally, the driving and pulsing “fight music” that accompanies Kirk and Spock’s duel to the (supposed) death. It quickly became the go-to fight music in TOS, but few fans can think of anything but “Amok Time” when they hear it. But Fried also gives us moody, brooding music on what sounds like the electric guitar as Spock suffers the blood fever.
Even had he scored only “Amok Time” and no other episode, Fried’s contribution to Star Trek would be immeasurably valuable. Composer Michael Giacchino briefly quoted Fried’s fight music as the Kelvin Timeline’s Spock chases down and pummels Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness. And composer Nami Melumad used the fight music in the Strange New Worlds episode “Spock Amok,” as Spock fights himself in a dream sequence.
How would you rank the five Star Trek scores Gerald Fried composed? Let us know in the comments!