R.I.P. Gerald Fried, Emmy-successful composer of Star Trek’s famed “fight music”

Gerald Fried
Photo: Albert L. Ortega (Getty Photographs)

Gerald Fried has died. A veteran musician and prolonged-time Hollywood composer, Fried contributed do the job to dozens of films, as perfectly as some of the defining Television set exhibits of the 1960s and ’70s and beyond, which includes scores for Roots, Star Trek, and Gilligan’s Island. Though his operate was occasionally overshadowed by the frequently flashier topic tunes for the tasks he worked on, many of his music would inevitably reach famous status—most notably his horn-weighty, trilling rating from the Star Trek episode “Amok Time,” in essence the iconic concept new music for a great aged-fashioned sci-fi battle scene. Per Selection, Fried died this week of pneumonia. He was 93.

The Ritual / Historical Battle / 2nd Kroykah

Born in New York in the 1920s, Fried graduated from Julliard in the 1950s and swiftly fell in with Stanley Kubrick, serving as the composer on numerous of the director’s early movies (which include their remaining collaboration, Kubrick’s 1957 military services drama Paths Of Glory). Performing often in style movie and Tv, Fried contributed scores to Westerns, crime thrillers, horror flicks, and much more above the up coming many decades, while also building considerable (and, ultimately, noticeably beneficial) inroads into the world of Television set.

Primary Title – Paths of Glory Soundtrack

Fried’s Television profession began, all over again, in Westerns—including the inevitable detour through Gunsmoke that pops up on the resumé of effectively each one human being functioning in Hollywood in the 1960s—before landing meatier gigs with exhibits like The Gentleman From U.N.C.L.E. and Gilligan’s Island. (Fried composed new music for 51 episodes of the endlessly syndicated series he afterwards pointed out, that, many thanks to royalties, the series was the most profitable detail he at any time did.) His audio appeared in 5 episodes of Star Trek: “Shore Go away,” “Amok Time,” “Catspaw,” “Friday’s Kid,” and “The Paradise Syndrome.”

Fried attained his most prestigious Television credit score in 1977, when the producers of Roots—apparently fearful that initial pick Quincy Jones was missing deadlines—brought him on to generate a significant part of the audio for the later on episodes of groundbreaking miniseries Roots. Jones and Fried would share the Emmy win for the series’ rating, and Fried would return to the franchise for abide by-ups The Next Generations and The Present.

Fried extra-or-less retired from composing in the late ’80s, not very long following the dying of his 5-12 months-old son Zachary, who contracted AIDS right after obtaining a blood transfusion. Fried devoted time and energy in afterwards a long time to boosting money for The Pediatric AIDS Foundation he inevitably returned to composing for a brief stint a lot of years later on, contributing music—including to a Star Trek lover series—in the early 2010s.