Trekking Through the Franchise: The Music of Picard's Final Season
Composers Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann spoke with CineConcerts about the score for the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard!
Composers Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann
CCineConcerts (CC): What was your first experience with not just Star Trek, but specifically the music of Star Trek? What was that first theme that caught your attention and your imagination for this giant, wonderful franchise?
Stephen Barton (SB): For me, the Next Generation theme. I was about five when Next Gen premiered so I always thought of that as “the Next Generation theme.” And then a few years later we're finally watching The Motion Picture, and I was like, “It's the Next Generation theme!” and then going, hang on a minute. No, it's not, this is where it came from originally. But everything about that track and particularly about the recording of it, it's a very bright sound. The brass is very bright. It's very in-your-face and it's got a real punchiness to it. So, I just remember being struck by that, really. That was my first.
Frederik Wiedmann (FW): I grew up in Germany in the 80’s and 90’s, way before the digital age. So, to get your hands on the soundtracks was a very difficult thing to do. So, I, like Stephen, grew up watching Next Generation as a kid because it was on TV all the time, just like Bonanza and the Flintstones.
SB: Was it dubbed?
FW: Oh yeah, everything's dubbed. It's terrible, especially in hindsight. Now when I'm watching it in English, it's great. And then I watch the German one and I find it very strange.
There was a drugstore that was close by our house. They had a little CD section and a small row of soundtracks. They kept changing them every month or so, there would always be some new ones. And it was completely random. It wasn't the current stuff or new movies. All sorts of stuff would pop up there. And I found this CD, this 30th anniversary special, Star Trek CD. It’s got many of the themes and some underscore cues, featuring Jerry Goldsmith, I think McCarthy, Horner, Alexander Courage and more.
I bought it because they didn't have anything else and then I was like, “Oh, I like the music of this. I'm going to buy this.” And it was just an amazing selection of Star Trek history to that point in time. And I think that's when I really got to know Jerry Goldsmith as a composer, as a name. I was maybe 12 or 13. Then that transitioned into “I need to get more Jerry Goldsmith scores.” So, I found a bunch of other random things in that same store, like that unicorn movie with Tom Cruise, Legend.
It's fantastic score. I mean, the movie is so unbelievably cheesy, but again, Jerry doesn't care if the movie's cheesy or not. He's just scoring.
SB: He did do a lot of cheesy movies, but made them a lot better than they were meant to be. I mean, The Mummy is only really good, like a really good fun ride, because of his score. That would not be a good movie with the wrong score.
CC: The score can really do a lot to elevate the quality of the film in the end.
SB: Years ago on a Ridley Scott project, there was a cue I was orchestrating on for Harry Gregson-Williams for Kingdom of Heaven where it was temped with a Jerry Goldsmith cue, and it was maybe not the on-screen actor’s finest hour - and for some reason, it didn't quite work until you put the Jerry Goldsmith music in. I think Harry must have written that cue like 14 times, and it was brilliant music each time, each cue very different from the last. And I think Ridley, true to form, because he does this a lot - I think in the theatrical version he just kept the temp. I think he just licensed the Jerry Goldsmith because it made everything work for him, and it made a slightly weak performance into a strong one and nothing else could ever do that for him. Jerry’s music is always good for that.
FW: There’s that famous clip on YouTube where somebody extracted the soundtrack from Empire Strikes Back, the ending when they're getting their honors. It's so awkward, the coughing and the footsteps and the mumbling. That's an excellent example of why you need that score.
SB: Set is so quiet as well. That's the thing, going to set for this, what really struck me is that you're on the bridge of these starships, and you expect the thrum of the engines. You expect certain sounds that aren't there, even down to the sound effects of the doors, and nothing is there - and people are tapping on the LCARS screens, and they don’t make a sound! It’s all added afterwards. I mean, the screens are all very practical now, you can press things, and they are touch screens and they work, but it doesn't make a noise.
So yeah, it's interesting - the difference between what you expect, and then watching the footage and seeing how much the sound department adds, you know, especially with the ships really being characters as well.
Film Still from Picard Season 3
CC: How did you guys get started on Picard the season three? There's a shift, not just musically in terms of who is composing the score, but in the tone and of the story and writing of the show from the previous two seasons.
SB: I'd done the last two seasons of 12 Monkeys with Terry Matalas and we I think we just clicked and he's a very, very musical director. I mean like in the truest sense of the word. He likes sitting at the back of the room whilst you're writing. It's one of his favorite things in the world, but to many composers it sounds like the worst idea in the world. And I'v said that to other composers and they look at me with a look of complete horror.
He's just very good at asking the right questions when you're trying to write a bit of music. And he wouldn't say, “It doesn't feel like it reaches enough,” or “it doesn't feel like it does this enough.” He rarely says it doesn't or it does. He asks, “Does it?” or “Could it?”
That’s one of the best things from anyone who's directing a composer. It's actually much better to ask questions, actually, than say like, what are you trying to do here? Does that feel like I've come across as well as you want it to? He often talks about committing, he’s like “you should commit to playing a piece of music.” If you're going to play a piece of music, start with confidence. Don't just creep in, unless that's what it needs.
That's basically his ethos, and we just really hit it off and we were talking about Trek as a possibility. So, season 3 came around and he got the got the keys to the car, basically to do whatever he wanted and said, “Here's what I'd like to do.”
For so much TV you write an hour or two of music and it just gets cut and chopped up, and episodes five or six might not even have any new fresh cues. It might just be edits of the previous music. But that doesn't work here. He's like, “I don't want to sacrifice anything here.”
And that's where Freddy comes in, because we realized, I mean, the shortest episode in the season is like 50 minutes. I’m in the middle of episode six and have written about five hours of music already, and I'm just dead, I mean working 17-hour days, seven days a week, three months solid, and it was insane.
And there was a ton of Freddie's music in the temp for episode seven and Drew Nichols, the editor, and Terry and I sort of all came to the same conclusion at the same time. We need help if we’re not going to sacrifice that original vision. And we need help specifically from this guy.
FW: It’s funny, I always find myself easy to find because I'm all-over social media. IMDB has my agent's contact info, but Terry started emailing me through my website, and the emails I get from my website are usually random spam that I do not need. So, I barely read it because it's almost never anything useful. And my agent called me and said, “Hey, we got this call from Terry for Star Trek and you’d start immediately.” And of course, I said, “Yes!” And a day later I go into my email for my website and I saw I received an email from Terry six days ago. I was shocked, how did I miss something this important?
So that's basically how I got involved. They used a lot of my music in the temp in Season 3 of Picard, which proved to them that I’m the one that can do that type of music. TV music is one thing, but Star Trek in particular, it's hugely complex orchestral music, which you don't really have a lot in TV anymore. So, it's not just about writing five-minute-long electronica tension beds (which I also love writing), which generally you can write much quicker than an intricate Goldsmith-esque action piece with all the orchestral instruments. Let alone having to prepare all that for the orchestrator and get it orchestrated, get the music prepped and then have it on the stands on time. I mean, it's a massive undertaking and it’s definitely easier with two people than just one, it’s insanely ambitious.
SB: Freddie's got a seven-minute-long cue in one episode. I've got tons of big four or five-minute ones, and we'd finish the first take with the orchestra and my favorite joke would be to remind the orchestra “by the way, this is a TV show.” They just laughed about it because, I mean, almost nobody does this for TV on this scale.
FW: I mean, honestly, it felt like ten movies that we were doing, just shorter films really. Because it’s so big in scale.
SB: That’s what we wanted musically. The biggest reference I think we had for the idea and the ethos of how we would score it, was First Contact, which arguably is the probably the strongest of the Next Generation movies; particularly in terms of having an overarching theme, a new tune, which for this would be our Titan theme. And it was also a reference just for the way it’s scored, the way the music works with picture; it very heavily draws from First Contact, not specifically harmonically or thematically, musically, but just from the idea of how it's done. So, you know, we didn't really want to make it feel like TV, we wanted to make it feel like a movie.
CC: What was it like composing for such an iconic franchise? It's got so much history and so much content and it's so beloved. That's got to be pretty intimidating coming in and working on something like this.
FW: I mean, Stephen probably has a different story because he had a lot more lead up time where he could have had anxiety attacks. Ha! For me, it was more like, “Hey, are you ready to do this right now? Drop everything. Here's the episode. Go.”
So, while I was hugely intimidated and the pressure was immensely high, they already had scored six episodes. So, this was all set up. And I had to sort of find a way to blend into what Stephen’s been doing. Beyond that, this is one of the biggest franchises that I think a composer dreams of working on. But I really didn't have much time to agonize over it. It was more like, let's just do this and start writing. And then there was one piece in episode nine that I really physically sweated over because I felt immense pressure with everything that I was asked to incorporate into it. You will see it when we get there. But other than that, I kind of just went into this hole and just got it all done. And then by the time we were finished, I was looking back at it thinking, wow, that was intense. I'm kind of glad I didn't have weeks and weeks of agony leading up to this because I would have probably driven myself crazy, so I didn't have the time to really panic over anything because I just had to go.
SB: Well, kind of similar and different. The hardest part was the themes, particularly the Titan theme; the first sequence Terry showed me was Leaving Space Dock. And you're just like, okay, this mirrors probably the greatest scene ever in the Star Trek movies, certainly the most iconic visually at the time.
Terry very early on said “I want a new tune.” The Titan theme was one where Terry and I kind of wrote most of it in an afternoon together; I had the basis of the idea, but it needed fleshing out. You know, a Star Trek theme, to really be successful as a Star Trek theme, must have a beginning, a middle and an end that makes sense. And it has to feel like it absolutely flows one from the next to the end. Trek themes traditionally are very much the embodiment of good melodic writing.
So that's the benchmark you have to reach. And so, I was listening a lot to the First Contact theme and just the way it was structured and the architecture of it and then looking back through a couple of the others. But I had mercifully I got an idea quite quickly. That was the very beginning of it. And what Terry helped me do was figure out how to make the arc and make the middle and the end because I had a solid beginning but hadn’t figured out to get around the contours of the end of the tune, and basically [he] sat in the back of the room and…well, this is how patient he is. I probably sat there going round and round and round it for over a couple of hours, every possible ending I could think up, and he’d leap up every time he heard something that felt right. And by the end of that evening, we had something. He went home and I worked late doing a mockup of it, and emailed it to him. By the following morning he’d emailed me back saying, “Great, awesome, now you've got it. Now you have to now figure out how to use it.”
FW: So, you didn't write a theme, show it to him and he said no. And then you wrote another one?
SB: No, I had the genesis of it.
FW: You pre-wrote that before Terry came in?
SB: Yeah, I liked the shape of that first phrase, I like the fact that it doesn't start by going straight up at the outset. I always liked the Voyager theme tune, for example. It was my other favorite tune because I think it plays against type; Deep Space Nine a little bit to a degree as well is similar, they are slightly more of that sort of expansive, slow melody versus a march.
Terry was always using this word, he’s like the ship is elegant and it's not just a spaceship, it's a boat. It's a boat sailing out on water. And that's why we looked at a lot of the Horner nautical orchestration and stuff like that and saying like, “How can we bring that into it?” Terry was very keen on the idea of the melody being a cello thing the first time you hear it properly, it has this rich weight to it. So, I sort of had the basis, but then it was just finding the way to make it pay off.
Film Still from Picard Season 3
CC: There is a video that Terry posted online of a portion of the Titan Theme, I believe when you were recording, and the thing that really struck me is that even though the Next Gen films are mostly composed by Goldsmith, there is very much a Horner vibe for this specific theme. What was the inspiration for going back to the style of a composer for some of the Original Series films?
SB: It was something that Terry talked about early on. I think the biggest aspect of it was that Horner brought this nautical thing to Trek, where it's really focused on the idea that this is still a military operation. It's still a ship, and there is a command structure here; and although we have these big space exploration themes, and the lofty and honorable ideals about the human condition, and references to Shakespeare and, you know…big, weighty things. There is still this overriding thing beyond that, that the Titan is a ship, a ship with a captain and a crew underneath him and a very definitive command structure. So much about what happens this season asks questions about that juxtaposition, the military crew, versus the idea of family. And it just seemed like a natural thing to do, going for that slightly more serious nautical tone.
Next Gen has times where it plays with that balance a bit, because you have things like Captain Picard Day, and the Enterprise-D had kids on it. But then they're on the bridge sometimes setting the auto destruct to blow the ship up, or in a standoff where they might be destroyed. Like, well…hang on a minute, that's got some implications!
CC: “Separate the saucer section!”
SB: Exactly! There really is that play between those two ideas, family and crew and how those ideals conflict. I think that was something that Terry felt was worthy of bringing back and having as a core to the season. Also, the idea of looking back and saying “This is not just a landing of Next Gen but also aspects of Voyager and DS9.” It really was a moment of taking a step back from the whole thing and looking at the whole picture and saying, “How has this all led to here?”
So, to not include the Horner side of it would have been wrong. And then also, Wrath of Khan was obviously a very, very big influence in terms of the stuff from the Mutara Nebula, where we wanted to play with similar ideas of cat and mouse and Vadic is a very much a villain in the vein of Khan.
So yeah, that was all those things coalesced together. And so, this idea that we should probably play with some of the James Horner-isms and enjoy them and make sure that that is as much a part of the picture as anything else.
FW: What I love about the theme Stephen wrote is that, like you said, it feels more like an emotional Horner thing rather than a fanfare type, Jerry Goldsmith thing. But you’r using some of the chords in the B section that instantly remind you that you’re still in a Sci-Fi environment. When you go from that F major to B major, those tritone relations, that instantly tells you, okay we're still in space. This is still science fiction. This is Star Trek. To me, those small moments within it, they define where we are and what we're doing, while overall the piece is a lot more on the emotional side. So yeah, quite brilliant.
CC: This season you went with an ending theme rather than an opening theme and using the music from First Contact and that main TNG theme. From what I understand, you guys didn't rerecord that, those are those are the original recordings?
SB: It is. We remastered it a little bit sonically, just partly because the original is in LCR and then I think First Contact is 5.1. But definitely those two things had a different sound. So, there is a bit of post-processing to meld them together a little better and then mold them a little better to go with stuff recorded 30 years later. But the reasoning behind it, very much with the First Contact theme particularly, was we always thought of the First Contact theme as the love of spaceflight theme. Because if you look at First Contact, when people think of that theme, they usually think of the end of that movie and Cochrane and the warp flight and the Vulcans arriving. But actually, if you really look at the way it's used in the score for the rest of the film, it's generally used in places where there's this feeling of the nostalgia for spaceflight and the love of the engineering and of the marvel of it.
There's a really nice thing in episode six where Geordi comes aboard and basically Shaw, who has just been this complete jerk the entire time (but in the best possible way)…it turns out he's just fanboying over the fact that Geordi is on the ship. He's just like, it's the coolest thing, he couldn't care less about any of the others, but Geordi La Forge is the greatest thing. And so, I think it's a little bit of that. It's speaking to that in all of us. We all wanted to play with the LCARS system.
CC: The first time I watched season three and that played at the end, I just thought it was very interesting. First Contact and season three of Picard have something in common, this nostalgia for the past. So, in First Contact, it's literally time travel to see the first warp drive. In season three of Picard, it's the good old days on the Enterprise-D. And so, pairing that First Contact theme with the main theme that they used for Next Gen just seemed so right.
SB: Totally. It was one of those ones where on the first episode, when we used it, I was like, I wonder if people are going to ask, “Why are they using this?” – because you have to see a bit more of the season to really get it. I've seen recently in the last few days, a few people saying, “Oh, I understand now.” And that’s what we were after. There’s a couple of other themes, especially one that's called the Busy Man motif, that's used a lot - and it became something that was attached to Data in both Nemesis and Insurrection, I think it was in both movies. But anyhow, the use of that is going somewhere as well – the purpose of that theme hasn't fully been revealed in terms of what we're going to do with that yet by any means.
But all of those themes have been used with a lot of thought and mostly, to be honest, that's Terry. Because Terry just comes into these things with every piece of the road map in his mind. He's not one of these people who just tries things out, he knows what he wants to do. Which makes, in a way, our job quite easy, because you can focus on how to do it and say what's the best way you can? You don't really have to worry about the “should we” because he's got the exact justification and reasoning written so often into the script. I mean it's often on that level. Quite a few of the references were in the original scripts.
FW: Quick shout out to Drew our editor too because he works closely with Terry on the temp score and I've never seen an editor temp with such scrutiny and detail than he does. It's really broadcast ready in my opinion. Truly amazing.
CC: With original Trek music or did he find random stuff to jam with?
FW: I think he used a lot of original stuff and then he eventually ended up using my score in later episodes, which is the reason why I was brought on in the end. I'd never heard the temp for episodes one through six so I'm not entirely sure what was there.
SB: Well, it was a surprising number of other scores. There was a lot of Star Trek, but Drew's the kind of editor who will chop five different pieces from five different scores together to make one new seamless piece. His timeline will be like checkerboard of like a million different things.
FW: But it feels cohesive. It's amazing!
SB: Yeah. You couldn't even spot them. I mean, he'll sometimes take the top end of one track, he'll filter out some stuff and then segue into cues where he has stems of stuff. He had some stuff from 12 Monkeys where he had the stems, he would rebuild cues from it. I would listen to it going, “this sounds familiar, but I don't know what it is.” He's like, “Yeah, it's one of your cues. I chopped it up.” It’s a big collage but it sounds seamless.
FW: Recomposed.
SB: Totally. But it’s in a way that you’re like, “Oh, that’s really, really good.” He’s unique amongst editors. I've never seen another editor do anything like that to the degree he does. Many music editors (who specifically cut temp) - they take a look at his temp and are just blown away. And he does it in the Avid, as well, and the Avid audio editing tools are the worst. That program is really designed for editing picture. It's not really a proper audio editor, and he's cutting these insanely intricate temps in that environment. He matches keys, he pitch-shifts stuff, adds really cool reverb effects, numerous other things, to a degree I’ve never seen any other picture editor do.
FW: Yeah, exactly. The keys match miraculously from one soundtrack to another because he's tuning it. It's helpful for us, because we have an extremely detailed roadmap that Terry is usually on board with, too. So, like Stephen said, he can just focus on how to make it better and unique, and how to accomplish what he wants thematically and not worry too much about the structure because it's there.