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Home | Soundtracks | Star Trek | Symphonic Star Trek |
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LINER NOTES by Lawrence M. Krauss |
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The music of Star Trek is as familiar a part of its persona as the transporter. The haunting theme composed by Alexander Courage for the original pilot of the Star Trek series (later aired as the two-part Hugo-award-winning episode The Menagerie) will always be associated in the minds of Star Trek fans. I have written elsewhere that what I believe has contributed to the longevity of Star Trek is, as described by the omnipotent prankster "Q," a fascination with the "unknown possibilities of existence." Courage's unaccompanied horn theme reappears throughout both episodes and movies. It evokes a sense of adventure and exploration of the unknown that excited our imagination and a sense of hope for the future which Star Trek epitomizes. As Gene Roddenberry stated on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the series: "The human race is a remarkable creature, one with great potential, and I hope Star Trek has helped to show us what we can be if we believe in ourselves and our abilities." Other composers, including Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, and Leonard Rosenman have retained both the musical and philosophical themes in their Star Trek work. Courage's original phrase is reworked into music scores (the inclusion of bits and pieces of music into subsequent scores is a Star Trek tradition) which are alternately joyous, or, as in the case of the Klingon Battle theme be Goldsmith, suspenseful. Novel use is made of electronics and percussion, as well as the traditional horns throughout all the series and movies. Sound is such an integral part of the series—indeed, the sounds of the series are as recognizable as any in pop culture—from the short chirp of the communicators to the high-pitched twinkle of the transporter. It is therefore ironic that perhaps the biggest Star Trek gaff of all also involves sound. Sound is a wave. Waves are disturbances in some background medium. Without a medium to disturb, there can be no waves. To quote from my selection of ten best Star Trek bloopers: "In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream." The promo for Alien got it right, but Star Trek usually doesn't. Sound waves DO NOT travel in empty space. Yet when a space station orbiting around Tanuga IV blows up, from our vantage point aboard the Enterprise, we hear it as well as see it. What's worse, we hear it at the same time as we see it. Even if sound waves could travel in space, which they can't, the speed of a pressure wave such as sound is generally orders of magnitude smaller than the speed of light. You don't have to go further than a local football game to discover that you see things before you hear them. Be that as it may, all of this implies that whenever something blows up in space, it can provide a light show, but no sound. There is a more severe snafu in one episode in which sound waves are actually used as a weapon against an orbiting ship in space. If that weren't bad enough, during the episode apparently it was said that the sound waves had reached "18 to the 12th power decibels." What makes this particularly grate on the ear of a physicist (if you will excuse the pun) is that the decibel scale is a log scale, like the Richter scale. This means that the number of decibels already represents a power of ten, so that twenty decibels is ten times louder than ten decibels, and thirty decibels is ten times louder again. Thus, 18 to the 12th power decibels would be 1018(12), or 1 followed by 11,568,313,814,300 zeros times louder than a jet plane! Still, we must not be too hard on the Star Trek writers or composers. The sounds we hear when watching Star Trek establish the entire mood of the series. Courage's floating melody at the beginning of each episode of the original series and Goldsmith's driving score in Star Trek: The Motion Picture are fine examples. And we must remember that Star Trek, is, after all, science fiction, and everything, including the science, is merely, as Gene Roddenberry said when referring to the Enterprise, "a vehicle for storytelling." The cosmic themes touched on in the series—love, hate, passion, joy, fear—are essential to the success of the series. The series is driven by dramatic tension, and so is the music. Without the evocative music and without the striking sound effects, the original series could not have lasted even a single season. While the Enterprise is on a scientific mission, its mission is not to discover new laws of physics, but rather "to seek out new life and new civilizations." There can be little doubt that beyond all the sci-fi gimmickry and the awesome futuristic gadgets aboard the Enterprise and Voyager, a fascination with alien pyschologies is what most drives both viewers and writers of the series. Through the eyes of the crew members we can observe the human drama carried out on a vast galactic scale. From the Borg to the Klingons, Vulcans, and Romulans, we get to imagine how alien civilizations might develop to confront a variety of needs and threats both similar to and different from those which have governed our own development. If the human drama is extended beyond the human realm in Star Trek, the same kinship remains which produces such a fascination with our human ancestors, who lived in societies as different from our own as that of the Klingons. Indeed when a Klingon battle fleet encounters a mysterious force field in the opening scenes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Goldsmith's percussive score helps reinforce a sense of mystery and pathos, even when referring to the then archenemies of the Federation. When the superhuman genetically-engineered tragic villain Khan is left stranded on the planet Ceti Alpha V, or when he returns to haunt Kirk in The Wrath of Khan accompanied by the lyric score of James Horner, or when Spock gives up his life to save his friend at the end of this movie, the words "there, but for the grace of God, go I" come to mind. In the third Star Trek feature, The Search for Spock, the crew of the Enterprise seeks, against all odds, to find their apparently dead crewmate, Spock, on the small, newly created Genesis planet. In some sense, their search mimics our own efforts to scan the heavens for signs of life. So it is particularly poetic that as we turn to the heavens and ask the age-old question, "Are we alone?" The sounds of Star Trek may play a role in helping us find the answer. It is unlikely that our first contact with any alien intelligence will come from traveling through the galaxy on a starship. Rather, it will come by carefully listening. For almost thirty years now the signals broadcasting each episode of Star Trek to our homes have been traveling at the speed of light out into the galaxy. In this time they will have passed several hundred stars, many of which may be surrounded by planetary systems. Indeed, planetary systems have apparently been discovered around two stars much like our sun: 51 Pegasi and Gliese 229, both less than fifty light years from Earth. While the inferred planets are sufficiently unlike the Earth as to make the possibility of the evolution of life there remote, it seems likely that many planets much like our own exist around some of the 400 billion or so stars in our galaxy. While the television signals of the four Star Trek series would be so weak by the time they arrive at even nearby stars that they would be unlikely to be detectable by anything but the most advanced type of civilization, it seems probable that the signals emitted by such civilizations might be orders of magnitude stronger. Already, with dedicated radio telescopes turned to the heavens, we are searching for some sign of our cosmic neighbors, if they exist. So far only silence, or rather chaotic static, is all that we have tuned in. However, it is well known that such a search is difficult, with a very slim chance of detection, even if such signals exist. Hopefully we will keep searching, perhaps one day to hear the Klingon version of the Star Trek theme! Veteran composer Leonard Rosenman composed the music for the Star Trek feature Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Here, the Enterprise [sic] travels back in time to bring two humpback whales—long extinct in the twenty-third century—back to the future to avert a disaster associated with an alien probe which has crippled Starfleet. Rosenman's Main Title for this movie is featured here, along with an Alien Probe and an eerie Humpback Whale Song. While Star Trek IV is perhaps unique among the Star Trek movies for the depths of its comedy, it nevertheless centers on a fascinating science fiction possibility which crops up in no less than twenty-two different Star Trek episodes, and in literature dating back at least to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: time travel. This fascination of the Star Trek writers is natural. Who wouldn't want to travel in time to revisit one's youth, meet one's heroes, or correct past injustices? And, as in the most recent Star Trek motion picture, Generations, who has not wished, at some time in his or her life, to escape the bonds of time itself? What is surprising is that modern physics has still not completely resolved the issue of whether time travel is possible. Many physicists, like Stephen Hawking, have been struck by the paradoxes which time travel seems to allow: What would happen if I went back in time, for example, and killed my grandmother before my mother was born? Indeed, Hawking has argued that there is an empirical argument against the possibility of time travel. If it were possible, he has claimed, we should already be inundated by tourists from the future! No, I have countered, because they clearly all went to visit the Sixties! While the issue of time travel is not yet completely resolved, though most working physicists would probably bet against it, we do know enough about our own galaxy to know that there is no Great Barrier Wall housing a single planet near the center of the galaxy, central to the fanciful plot of Star Trek V. Instead, a dense conglomeration of stars and gas surrounds the even denser galactic core, which may itself contain a black hole more massive than a million suns. In spite of the many logical flaws and the psycho babble which permeate the script, Jerry Goldsmith's music for the film holds its own. The selection provided here encompasses the sense of hope that infused each crew member caught up in the messianic vision of peace offered by the tragic villain Sybok. Perhaps the most hopeful Star Trek film of all, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, promises a future where even interstellar rivalries may one day end in peace. "The unknown possibilities of our own existence," to return to Q's memorable phrase, are what the future beckons us to discover. The Star Trek future is as enticing today as it was thirty years ago when Gene Roddenberry's "Space western" first hit the airwaves. The sounds of the series, from Courage's memorable theme, to the sounds of phasers, communicators, transporters, photon torpedoes, Tribbles, and even inaudible cosmic music of the spheres—the frequency of radiation associated with a characteristic atomic transition of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, and the frequency of radiation craved by the lonely space orphan mothered by the Enterprise in the episode "Galaxy's Child,"—all remind is that our galaxy is full of wonder and discovery, that all that can happen probably does happen, and that our future is as bright as we will allow it to be. Let us hope that as the sounds of Star Trek make their way at light-speed through the galaxy, that we on earth are still here to explore the awesome possibilities that nature holds out for us to discover. As Spock would put it: "Live Long and Prosper." Lawrence M. Krauss is Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Chairman of the Department of Physics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. (Along with The Physics of Star Trek) he is also the author of two acclaimed books, Fear of Physics: A Guide for the Perplexed and The Fifth Essence: The Search for Dark Matter in the Universe, and over 120 scientific articles. (Liner notes on sound effects omitted) |
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