The Music of Star Trek

by William Ruhlmann Reynold D'Silva , head of Silva Screen Records, must have kept the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra working 24/7 during the 1990s creating a library of new recordings of old film scores, and while he may not have been paying the kind of union rates common in his native Britain, he has been cashing in on his investment by assembling an unending string of repackages of that music, sometimes adding another track or two to give things a sense of currency. A case in point is The Music of Star Trek . Silva Screen has delved into music written for the various Star Trek films and TV series before, notably on The Star Trek Album in 2003. The Music of Star Trek is a compilation that draws upon tracks from that disc and others, but is, of course, intended to tie in with the resurrection of the film franchise in 2009 via the prequel/origins reboot called simply Star Trek , an early summer blockbuster. That picture boasts a score composed by Michael Giacchino that bears little resemblance to earlier music written for Star Trek movies and TV shows; a four-minute excerpt is one of the few newly recorded tracks here (not that any information about what is old and what is new is provided anywhere in the packaging). Otherwise, the album presents, in order, segments of the scores of the first ten Star Trek films, followed by segments of the scores of the five Star Trek TV series. That means that Alexander Courage 's kitschy original theme from the 1960s series doesn't turn up, officially, anyway, until track 12, when it is performed by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra (just as it was on The Star Trek Album ). ...