American composer who scored The Motion Picture and four later films and whose main theme became the title music of The Next Generation.
Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004) was an American composer and conductor whose career spanned nearly fifty years and more than two hundred productions. He was among the most respected film composers of his era, with scores for Planet of the Apes, Chinatown, Alien and The Omen, which won him an Academy Award.
Goldsmith scored Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), earning an Academy Award nomination. Its soaring main march was later adapted as the main title theme of Star Trek: The Next Generation and is closely associated with the franchise as a whole, while his Klingon motif from the same film recurred in later scores.
He returned for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) and scored the three later Next Generation films, Star Trek: First Contact (1996, with his son Joel Goldsmith contributing), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). He also composed the main title theme of Star Trek: Voyager, which won an Emmy Award. He died in 2004, two years after his final Star Trek score.