Jerry Goldsmith

Goldsmith grew up in Los Angeles and studied piano and composition privately with a film composer he'd sought out after seeing a screening as a teenager, later taking courses at USC while working odd jobs around the studios to get his foot in the door. He got his start scoring live CBS radio dramas in the early 1950s, an unforgiving format that demanded he compose and often conduct under real broadcast time pressure.

The composer's composer, Goldsmith could do romantic, atonal, electronic and orchestral — often in the same cue — and scored more essential science fiction than anyone of his generation. He moved from radio into television and then film, eventually amassing eighteen Academy Award nominations across a genre-spanning career that took in horror, war films, thrillers and adventure alongside his science fiction work.

His scores for Planet of the Apes, Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture alone would make him one of the genre's most important musical voices, and his structural, dissonant approach to Planet of the Apes in particular — built from unconventional percussion and extended orchestral techniques rather than a hummable melody — is now considered one of the most groundbreaking film scores ever written.