Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home remains one of the most popular Star Trek films, and is often considered the biggest hit of the original crew’s cinematic run. The movie is certainly the oddest of the bunch and adding to the goofier tone of the film is Leonard Rosenman’s score.
The score is usually sited as one of the weaker elements of the film, but that is an opinion born mostly from one or two very unfortunate cues that made it into the movie. The score as a whole is very good and the movie features one of the best main theme’s written for any of the films.
The wonderful folks at Intrada thankfully see it that way too because they have just announced the release of the complete score for Star Trek IV.
“Intrada ends 2011 with one last major release – the complete Leonard Rosenman score to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The second film in the series under the helm of director Leonard Nimoy, Nimoy choose a lighter approach to this outing and injected liberal amounts of well-placed humor. For this fourth entry, Nimoy introduced another element he had wanted to bring on board earlier in the series: the music of Leonard Rosenman. Rosenman’s Star Trek IV music bears the hallmarks of the composer’s distinctive style: vaulting brass figures, complex textural passages, thumping suspense motives. The main theme—and also Kirk’s theme—is upbeat, heraldic and heroic, its optimistic flavor cutting a different path than the other scores in the series.”
The most exciting aspect of this new release is the inclusion of alternate takes and cues. For film music fans it is always fun to hear what might have been, especially for music as polarizing as this.
“For this release, Intrada worked from the original session masters housed at Paramount, reassembling the complete score in film order. This presentation also includes numerous bonus tracks, including alternates and the song “I Hate You.” A stand-out is an alternate version of the “Main Title.” Rosenman created this stately arrangement of Alexander Courage’s classic Star Trek theme to accompany the first part of the opening credits, which appear against a background of deep space.”
