Alexander Courage; wrote 'Star Trek' theme
LOS ANGELES - Alexander "Sandy" Courage, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated arranger, orchestrator, and composer who created the otherworldly theme for the "Star Trek" TV show, has died. He was 88.
Mr. Courage died May 15 at the Sunrise assisted-living facility in Pacific Palisades, his stepdaughter Renata Pompelli of Los Angeles, said yesterday. He had been in poor health for three years.
Mr. Courage collaborated on dozens of movies and orchestrated some of the greatest musicals of the 1950s and 1960s, including "My Fair Lady," "Hello, Dolly!" "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," "Gigi," "Porgy and Bess," and "Fiddler on the Roof."
But his most famous work is undoubtedly the "Star Trek" theme, which he composed, arranged, and conducted in a week in 1965.
"I have to confess to the world that I am not a science fiction fan," Mr. Courage said in an interview for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation's Archive of American Television in 2000.
"Never have been. I think it's just marvelous malarkey," he added. "So you write some, you hope, marvelous malarkey music that goes with it."
Mr. Courage said the tune, with its ringing fanfare, eerie soprano part, and swooping orchestration, was inspired by an arrangement of the song "Beyond the Blue Horizon," which he heard as a boy.
"Little did I know when I wrote that first A-flat for the flute that it was going to go down in history, somehow," Courage said. "It's a very strange feeling."
Mr. Courage said he also mouthed the "whooshing" sound heard as the starship Enterprise zooms through the opening credits of the TV show.
Among the many other projects Mr. Courage worked on was the 1987 TV special "Julie Andrews: The Sound of Christmas," for which he won an Emmy for musical direction.
He and Lionel Newman shared Academy Award nominations for their adapted scores for 1964's "The Pleasure Seekers" and 1967's "Doctor Dolittle."
A friend and colleague of movie composers John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, he also provided the orchestration for such movies as "The Poseidon Adventure," "Jurassic Park," "Basic Instinct," and "The Mummy" and supplied arrangements for the Boston Pops while Williams was conductor.
"He was known to most musicians in the community as having been one of the architects of what we used to refer to as the MGM sound, which meant that most of the musical films from MGM had a particular style of orchestration, which was an extension and development of what was done in the theater in the 1920s," Williams told the Los Angeles Times yesterday. "They actually took that to a very high art form."
A native of Philadelphia, he served in the Army Air Corps during World War II before becoming a composer for CBS radio shows and then became an orchestrator and arranger at MGM.
He also was an accomplished photographer whose images appeared in Life magazine. 