To me, the Ron Jones' music is one of the things that really elevates BoBW as well, and thank goodness they allowed him to do both parts of it and maintain thematic consistency throughout.
Ditto!
The story itself had a great Picard buildup, but sometimes a good score is inevitably needed. Ditto for TOS or any other show. The one thing I've wondered is if it's worse to have too little music, or too much. Am thinking it's the latter.
S3 and S4 are definitely better than S5-S7 in terms of music, but even by S3 we had started to see the edicts that prevented them from using any recurring themes or motifs.
True. While every composer has their style, recurring themes should be avoided. TOS reused music way too often, partly because it became iconic to an episode. Like "Amok Time". Individual scores for every episode costs more, but can get around that repetition easier, as well as allowing a composer to have so much more freedom to whip up and branch out styles, or to experiment...
Or how far the composers could go. "Booby Trap" was definitely too experimental, and as much as the original music was also thematic to the rest of the episode, I prefer what was cobbled up as it did have more tension. To compare:
(The intended score, so glad it exists so we can hear it! IMHO it really is too bombastic and has a style of "forget the scene, focus on THE MUSIC instead!", even when compared to the other scenes scored in this, which did work. But it does fit the style of the preceding scenes' scores in the episode. Yet it doesn't sell the suspense and tension in the way that the next clip does.)
(Which was cobbled from a couple bits of existing music, also composed by Ron Jones, with one notably from "Where Silence Has Lease", so it doesn't feel entirely out of place. But, yeah, the scene needed tension tension tension, not action action action. Could the style Ron created for this episode actually have continued the tension motif, as opposed to choosing an actiony piece that doesn't fit the scene in the same way?)
Sadly, with season 4 getting
too adventurous and too experimental with the bombast again, after "The Drumhead", the show would sharply change course and seasons 5-7 became... bland bland bland, no matter what the dialogue was trying to do. Bland, or unintentionally funny.
One story in particular is the polar opposite of "Booby Trap" regarding how music can impact a story and "Power Play"'s is just so bad that it takes me out of an otherwise story too many times to laugh with a tinge of sadness over how TNG could have continued. Then came future episodes where now they're really trying to mix action with "wallpaper" and the result is like taking a bucket of wallpaper paste and flinging it everywhere in the room. It's a bit messy...
After S1, we barely ever catch any reference to Goldsmith's TMP theme and, heck, only relatively rarely do we get even the TOS fanfare. Even beyond that, though, the composers were prevented from developing themes or even motifs that would persist beyond just an episode.
The TOS fanfares were almost as grating as seeing TOS model ship props in the ready room, briefing room, etc. There as fanwankery and "memberberries". As in 'member this, we do, don't you see it here, isn't that cute, coochiecoochiecoo?
TMP's theme is a curate's egg. It's grand, but never clicked for TOS for me - why was the TOS theme not rescored for the big screen? Not deemed iconic enough? Especially when Star Trek V rolled up. A movie later, it's proven that the TOS theme could be translated to the big screen.
In addition to Jones being fired, it was absolutely criminal the way they hamstrung Dennis McCarthy and Jay Chattaway, because they both proved that when they are allowed to stretch they can really rise to the challenge.
^^this
Seasons 1-4 are replete with scores from every composer that embrace and extend the episodes, melding with an iconic style but not
supplanting. 5-7 too often do the sheer opposite, pulling away from the potential of the episode and distracts.
McCarthy's Generations score is awesome, for example, and Chattaway's music that Picard plays in "The Inner Light" has become quite iconic. Unfortunately, those times they were allowed to do such things are few and far between.
Or "The Next Phase" which, after a dozen episodes featuring what sounds like a bog full of frogs farting, has something of substance that complements the story instead of distracting from it.
I will never understand how Berman could sit and watch Jerry Goldsmith work his magic for the movies he produced and yet think the sonic wallpaper was what the TV shows needed.
My guess, of recent, is that "24th century humans are more like proto-Vulcans and not as emotional, so why shouldn't their music be?" The music is arguably an "embrace and extend" in a completely different way - from this possible future universe of the 24th century down to us in the 20th/21st. But does it work? Often, IMHO, not often. Storytelling has always been a balance of the intellect and the visceral, though not always 50/50 and too much of one or the other can become grating. But even silent films had the background music to enhance proceedings and to maintain attention. The "wallpaper music" is another interesting experiment. The problem is, I don't recall episodes in which it worked (unless it was rarely used). Most of the time I only remember episodes rendered worse because of it.
