Talk:Sol Kaplan

IMDB
imdb says he scored six Trek episodes and lists them


 * imdb is wrong. But it's important to remember how Star Trek scoring worked. A composer would write original music for an episode, either as a part score or as a fully scored episode; then the music coordinator for the show would re-use music in other episodes during the season.  Those other episodes are said to use "tracked" music, ie tracks originally recorded for other episodes.  Most Star Trek episodes were "tracked".  Only 13 episodes from season 1 had any original music recorded for them; another 13 episodes from season 2; and only 9 episodes from season 3.  (Most of those shows only had a bit of music written for them: few of them were full scores.)  All other episodes were tracked.  Kaplan scored precisely two episodes for Star Trek: but his music was tracked into many more episodes.  For example, recently a TV station local to me has shown a few episodes, and I've caught Miri and Devil in the Dark.  Both of them use music from Enemy Within pretty liberally thruout.  Likewise the season two episode Patterns of Force, you can hear part of the Doomsday Machine score in the background while Kirk and Spock are in the jail cell and working on their escape.

Actually you could say imdb is wrong in two directions, listing too many and too few episodes. When an episode was "tracked", it typically used music from a few different episodes, so different composers would be involved. Producers used a formula to figure out which composer did "most" of the music, and that composer would be credited in the end titles. imdb is probably listing the number of times Kaplan was credited. But Kaplan's music was used more often than he was credited; for example, Alexander Courage gets the sole music credit for Miri, and Kaplan is not mentioned at all. The source for how the Star Trek scoring was done is Jeff Bond's book The Music of Star Trek. Jim Hardy (talk) 19:38, 11 June 2009 (UTC)