(Welcome to our Emmys FYC miniseries for “Notes on a Score,” GVN’s interview series highlighting the composers and musicians behind some of the year’s most acclaimed films and television series.)
Much has been lauded about the role of the composer, to the point that some have become industry icons: Williams, Zimmer, Elfman. But behind every great composer is a great music department: orchestrators, musicians, engineers, even the occasionally music-saavy director or showrunner. Sometimes, it’s behind every two great composers.
Such is the case for the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard, which saw the initially bumpy spinoff for fan-favorite captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) sail off on a high note. For composers Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann, it was a number of incredible collaborations that set them up for success, including with each other. As Barton frankly describes it, composing for film and television is “a team sport.”
Originally, only Barton was signed on to score all ten episodes of the series, a remarkably difficult task for even the most experienced composer. However, after burning out at Episode 6, Wiedmann was called in when the team noticed they had used his Operation: Rainfall score as temp music. Thankfully, Wiedmann was enthusiastic to join the project and hone his skills in blending into another composer’s established sound.
“It’s not an easy skill to quickly adjust to somebody else’s sensibilities,” expressed Wiedmann, “style, orchestration technique, all that stuff. I think it’s a good skill for a composer to have, to figure out a way to jump in and be the chameleon, so to speak … from my perspective, I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job making it feel cohesive and seamless.”
Another key collaborator was Phil McGowan, the season’s score mixer. An often undersung role, the score mixer is responsible for taking any and all score recordings and balancing the sound so that it is given greater definition. Because this project was recorded locally in Los Angeles, McGowan was also given the rare opportunity to handle microphone placement and initial sound balance at the season’s recording sessions.
“It’s a great opportunity because the mix is far, far easier if things are done right at the session,” explains McGowan, “which relies on me getting a proper recording, but also Stephen getting the balance of the orchestra in the room the way he wants it first. I’m just trying to capture that performance and enhance it in the mixing phase.”
Barton was eager to discuss his collaboration with McGowan, as he sees the score mixer as an essential piece of the composing process. “As a composer, you can never objectively listen to a mix,” Barton insists. “We’re so obsessed about the harmonic details, the timbre, the melody, the orchestration, things like that, to the point where we won’t really listen to the simple thing of balance.
“You’re handing over this final part to someone that’s a different set of ears and it becomes a process of really, really working with someone who understands what you’re going after, but then makes it better … At the end of the day, we just deliver a thing to the dub [stage, when dialogue, sound effects, and music are all mixed together] and the dub is the be all end all of everything to do with film and television.”
McGowan, who posts in-depth breakdowns of his mixes on YouTube – including one of Picard’s most resonant cues, entitled “The Missing Part of Me” – was excited to lend his abilities to recapturing Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner’s iconic orchestral sound. “I grew up in the ‘90s listening to film and TV shows that had big orchestral scores like this. It’s really exciting to be a part of this franchise in this way where we’re really honoring the themes from pretty much every version of the franchise.”
It is this heavy level of tribute that has made Picard’s third season one of such note to the Trek fandom. As the season was being released week-to-week, fans were eager to pick up on all of the show’s musical references, big or small. “[The fans] picked up on such small details that I would think only the greatest film music nerd would recognize,” said Wiedmann. “I was just like, ‘Wow, you guys really know this stuff so immensely well and have obviously such a great appreciation for it too.’ It was incredible to see.”
In this in-depth roundtable discussion with Geek Vibes Nation, the music team dives deep into the many collaborations that made Picard Season 3 such a resounding success: working with each other, showrunner Terry Matalas, and even session musicians who had been a part of Trek history from the very beginning. Here is that discussion, edited for length and clarity.
Season 3 of Picard has seen such a universally positive response from the Trek community, more so than the first two seasons. Fans have been especially responding to how you approached repurposing the franchise’s many themes from over the years. How wonderful has it been to see the fans’ positive response to the music of Season 3?
Stephen Barton: It’s incredible, really. Whenever you’re working on anything, you get a prevailing sense of whether it’s good or not. I’ve worked on a few things where everyone was like, “Okay, let’s just get this finished.” But [for Picard], there were two barometers for me. The first was that I’d been on the Enterprise-D set and it never leaked. I was like, “How is this?” There’s 150 people on the set, all of whom have cell phones, and it only takes one person sending something to a friend saying, “Look at how cool this is!” You know everyone loves it when things stay that under wraps. The second was the recording sessions, particularly the final session. I think we could all feel it. The musicians had all come from doing an Indiana Jones 5 session that morning and John Williams is a hard act to follow, but we literally had the A-list of the A-list of the A-list talent in town and they all said yes. I think that was the point at which I was like, “This is going to be good.”
Freddie Wiedmann: When you’re in post-production as a composer, you’re in this weird bubble. The schedule is crazy. I wasn’t really even thinking about how a fan was gonna react to this. You’re just focused on the work, getting it done, it’s out there, and then all of a sudden I see this immense love blow up on Twitter. I have never had a single project with this much of a response. It was really, truly amazing. [The fans] picked up on such small details that I would think only the greatest film music nerd would recognize. Steven’s pieces embodied so many different themes strung together and woven into each other. They were all like, “Oh, here’s that theme from that composer and that composer and that composer.” I was just like, “Wow, you guys really know this stuff so immensely well and have obviously such a great appreciation for it too.” It was incredible to see.
Phil McGowan: This is probably the current crowning achievement of my whole career. I remember when Steven first talked about it, before we started doing any recording sessions, he was like, “Yeah, we’re doing the next season of Picard and they want to go back to James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, big orchestras,” and I was like, “Hell yeah, I’m totally in.” That’s the kind of music that I grew up with. I’m slightly younger than Steven and Freddie, but I grew up in the ‘90s listening to film and TV shows that had big orchestral scores like this. Even though I didn’t know a ton about Star Trek, I had watched Next Generation on TV as a kid here and there. It’s really exciting to be a part of this franchise in this way where we’re really honoring the themes from pretty much every version of the franchise.
The brilliant @ComposerBarton & @freddiewiedmann brought the house down at @DEADLINE’s concert tonight of television masters! #StarTrekPicard #FYC pic.twitter.com/p5x6cLx0Na
— Terry Matalas (@TerryMatalas) May 10, 2023
Let’s talk about the “Sound & Screen” event you guys did with Deadline. That is such a rare kind of event because the music gets to be performed in front of an audience. Stephen, I saw you were conducting. What did it feel like to perform this music?
Barton: Absolutely incredible, but also mildly terrifying. As composers, we live in the studio really, which is great. If we screw something up, we can just hit stop and start again. But, you know, it’s nice to reconnect with playing live. It forces you to think about the practicality of some things, like page turns. We don’t really care about them in the studio, but [when they’re playing] live, they have to be able to actually turn the page and see the music. You get the ability to ask, “How do we rethink this for the stage and go through all the details of how it functions as a piece of music?” We had one minor snafu where we were slightly off the click [track], but it’s all good for adrenaline. [laughs] It’s something I hope we do more of. It’s just nice to be able to present this music because I think it means so much to people.
Freddie and Phil, how did it feel to hear it in that setting?
McGowan: It’s nice for other people to hear that the music really does stand on its own. A lot of scores are produced in ways that aren’t intended to be performed live; we record the orchestra in different sections and balance them, sometimes in musical but unnatural ways. Since [Picard] goes back to this sort older, fully orchestral scoring style, it translated phenomenally to a live orchestra on stage. The audience reaction felt great. There was a pretty thunderous applause at the end. That was a really fun moment.
Wiedmann: I was just extremely happy that I didn’t need to conduct this. [laughs] The first half had some very interesting meters and tempo changes. I am not the greatest conductor in the world, but doing it in front of people? I was like, “Thank god, Stephen is here to take that on.”
McGowan: Yeah, those are hard cues. I remember even at the recording session we had to do a couple of takes of the sequence where they leave the space dock, and that was with some of the world’s best musicians and best sight-readers. We had to finesse that live. It was tough for them to do, but they nailed it.
Wiedmann: I just enjoyed it from backstage and thought it was amazing. It felt amazing to hear people respond to it. It was just beautiful.
Barton: I used to conduct a lot more. The hardest part is the fact you have your back to everyone. It’s a very strange strange sensation having 1,800 people look at the back of you.
Wiedmann: Yeah, you’re performing and you’re not seeing anything. It’s weird.
Barton: That was the main thing going through my mind for the first minute, other than trying to get around the first tempo change.
Wiedmann: I hope my butt looks good.
I want to break down a little bit more about your collaborative processes. Freddie, you came in later on in the process, around the time Stephen was scoring Episode 6. What does it entail for another composer to come in when you have only four episodes left? Do you go do your thing, or do you work even more closely?
Wiedmann: For anything we do, we never follow our ego. We serve the picture, we serve the director’s vision. This was really no different, except that another composer had already set all the groundwork for the spirit of the score. My job was fairly simple in the sense that I had to blend into that. Obviously, I put my own two cents into it because it’s me, it’s an individual person composing. You get my personality embedded in there without me even trying. But overall, from my perspective, I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job making it feel cohesive and seamless. It’s not an easy skill to quickly adjust to somebody else’s sensibilities, style, orchestration technique, all that stuff. I think it’s a good skill for a composer to have, to figure out a way to jump in and be the chameleon, so to speak.
Phil, you’re the first score mixer we’re featuring on this series, so thank you for being here. For those who aren’t familiar, what is the role of a score mixer and what is your collaboration like with Stephen and Freddie?
McGowan: I’m basically the head of the sonic quality of [the score] from when we record it all the way to when we deliver stems to the dub stage, which is when they blend the music with the sound effects and dialogue. My work doesn’t really start until they start recording. I come in and decide which mics to use and where to place them and how many to use. A lot of projects are recorded overseas in Eastern Europe and nobody gets to go, or sometimes there’s only enough in the budget for the composer to go. When things record in town, like [Picard] in LA, that’s a fun opportunity for me to be the recording engineer. I get to follow along with the score and help Stephen produce sessions. It’s a great opportunity because the mix is far, far easier if things are done right at the session, which relies on me getting a proper recording, but also Stephen getting the balance of the orchestra in the room the way he wants it first. I’m just trying to capture that performance and enhance it in the mixing phase.
I listened to all the old movies, I listened to whatever Next Generation soundtracks were on Spotify just to get the vibe. The main thing that even Terry was mentioning was that they wanted it wet, meaning they wanted a lot of reverb. If you listen to especially the Jerry Goldsmith scores that Bruce Botnick recorded and mixed, who is one of my favorite engineers, those are quite wet, and I love that sound. We grew up on that in the ‘80s and ‘90s. All the action films that Jerry Goldsmith did generally have a fair amount of reverb on orchestra compared to a lot of modern scores today. It’s fun for us to dump the reverb on it and just have that big, epic, old school cinematic sound.
Barton: Phil’s incredible. Essentially, you’re handing over this final part of [the process] to someone that’s a different set of ears and it becomes a process of really, really working with someone who understands what you’re going after, but then makes it better. As a composer, you can never objectively listen to a mix. You can try to, but we just hear it differently. We’re so obsessed about the harmonic details, the timbre, the melody, the orchestration, things like that, to the point where we won’t really listen to the simple thing of balance.
Wiedmann: A good mixer has good intuition. We, as composers, need to understand the sensibilities of a director or a showrunner and serve that. The mixer has to get what we’re after with the music. Phil is really intuitive about these things. For all of my cues, when there was a swell that I didn’t quite land as big as I wanted to because there was no time and I had to move on to the next cue, Phil got that. He understands the dramatic intent behind the music and he understands our sonic sensibilities. It’s very specific and very delicate, but there were very few notes back and forth. Phil was really a pleasure to work with.
McGowan: Creatively, a lot of tonal decisions are made by the composer in the writing phase and I need to honor that. That’s what was approved. That’s where Terry said, “This is done. Let’s record that and ship it off.” So, I don’t want to stray too far from the sound of that. I’m hoping it’s just bigger, wider, deeper, a much more hi-fi sounding version of what was approved already. I can’t go too far with making things really crazy, but at the same time, I’m using all my tricks to get things sounding as best as they can.
Barton: Also, you need a monitoring environment you trust. For most of Picard, I was set up where they were shooting in Santa Clarita. I literally had the office next door to Terry. It’s not really a studio. You have to have a mixer who’s able to listen to it and know how it’s gonna translate both to the dub stage and then, finally, to TV speakers or even laptop speakers, which is what most people will consume it on. They need to give you a mix that is gonna sound good and give your intentions in a true way. At the end of the day, we just deliver a thing to the dub and the dub is the be all end all of everything to do with film and television. It’s gotta work there, and you’ve gotta give them the tools to make a good sounding mix. It’s a team sport.
Wiedmann: I’ve seen the same episode in IMAX and on my iPhone. It couldn’t be more different, but both sounded great. He’s done a good job [capturing the] full spectrum, whatever the format is, You can hear every note even on the little iPhone speakers. It’s amazing.
Phil, what goes into accounting for that spectrum?
McGowan: I’m always really careful to make sure the mid-range frequencies are really balanced. That’s really what gets clarity. You don’t want to take out too many because then you have all this super sub bass and high hissy stuff. I do a final process at the end, taking all the stems from all the cues and doing a fresh mix down to stereo for the soundtrack, and that’s where I’m [listening] on headphones or on [ear]buds or things like that, just to make sure. Dave Donnelly did a great mastering on the soundtrack where it really translates well. I just recently got AirPod Max’s which have a ton of low end and my mixes were a little heavy there, but the mastering came back and Dave evened that out. Still sounded like my mixes, but it just translated better to consumer devices.
Stephen and Freddie, in past interviews you’ve noted that some of the session musicians you worked with on Picard had played on previous Trek shows and films. These are people who know the original themes inside and out. What insight did they provide when recording?
Barton: The biggest one, I think, was when we got to do the Main Titles at the very end. We re-recorded Goldsmith’s theme and I reproduced his score faithfully – it literally is that Goldsmith score for a minute or two [in the cue]. Later, I was listening to the recording and then looking at the score and I realized that the musicians had changed a bunch during the session but I didn’t make any changes to what I was hearing. They were playing what’s not on the page. That’s a degree of knowledge that comes from cumulative experience. We’ve got players who’ve played on the scores, or they’ve played it in the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra or LA Philharmonic [Star Trek] concerts. They’ve played the music a million times. You learn that you don’t have to give them every little marking, “little crescendo here, little diminuendo here, little phrasing here.” You can call on that experience without even asking.
For these sessions in particular, we needed to get through a lot of music, and they obviously came in and sat down and were like, “Wow, that’s a huge pile of music.” But because of what the season represented to so many of them, musicians who have played with Jerry and James, they saw that it was very much an homage to that world and were like, “Okay, let’s do it.” The first take, second take would be borderline perfect. In one of our sessions, we recorded 42 minutes of music in a three hour session, which is … if you ever said to a session contractor that you were planning to do that, they’d be like, “No, you’re absolutely not. That’s impossible.” It was an honor that they, collectively, came along for the ride. I just sort of sat there enjoying it, at the end of the day.
Wiedmann: That’s a small realization I had. If your orchestration is rock solid, if your prep is impeccable and down to the clicks, down to the meter mapping protocols, you can get a lot done in three hours regardless of how immensely complex the music. You can come in and just tear apart an insane amount of minutes per hour, which I don’t think we should talk about too loudly because we shouldn’t set that precedent. [laughs] Those poor players are gonna hate us. But they knocked it out of the park.
In other interviews, you all have noted that showrunner Terry Matalas was heavily involved in the nitty gritty of the scoring process, which is rare in this industry. What is the value of working with a showrunner who speaks your language like Terry does?
Wiedmann: I work a lot in TV. It is so incredibly refreshing to have a person, one singular person, in charge and that’s it. When that person on top has such a clear and distinct vision of what they want, it makes the whole process so creatively fulfilling. TV can often become very patchy when you have a showrunner, a studio, producers, and then maybe a network all breathing down your neck, giving notes. It’s often very contradictory and nobody really talks to each other, they all just email each other pages and pages. As a composer, you often end up trying four versions of a cue and then it becomes this incohesive piece trying to please everybody. It’s often not very satisfying in the end for us, creatively. Terry is somebody who understands this stuff. You can trust his instincts 100% and then you can just focus on making that the best version of what he wants from the get go.
Barton: I’ve worked with James Cameron, I’ve worked with Ridley Scott, I’ve worked with a bunch of people. He is easily the best director of composers I’ve ever seen. It’s not even close. The best way someone can direct a composer is knowing what questions to ask. It’s about asking, “What do you think about this? Is that working as well as it could?” Terry’s favorite one is, “Does the music commit to what it’s doing? If you’re doing it, do it. Don’t half-do it.” There’s a big part of music direction that has nothing to do with music at all but about how you communicate, and he’s easily the best. Directors frequently don’t know how to direct post[-production]. They’re fantastic with actors, they’re great with an editor, but when it comes to, say, sitting on a sound mix, a lot of directors walk into the dub stage and just go “Oh, it sounds amazing,” and that’s no help at all to anybody. Terry is a force of nature, but also incredibly knowledgeable and humble and very musical. His sensibility is amazing and he downplays it. I often tell people, “Don’t let him.”
Wiedmann: While being so specific and knowledgeable about everything, at the same time, I always felt like I had plenty of creative freedom to do it the way I thought was best. You didn’t feel like you had to match note-for-note exactly what he was saying. Being in that comfort zone creatively brings out the best in you as a composer, I think. Terry created that kind of environment where you could do that, which I think was fantastic.
McGowan: I heard rumors that Terry put even more reverb on certain cues at the dub, cause he just loved it. I was telling him at the session, “this lexicon reverb here, that’s probably the same one they used on some of the scores in the ‘90s.” He’s like, “Oh yeah, I know what that is.” That just goes to show Terry really is a music lover and knows the Star Trek musical legacy better than any of us. He was calling out certain themes, “I want this old theme quoted there or bring back the Titan theme there.” It’s unusual, in a good way, that the showrunner really understood music so well. Sometimes you get directors who aren’t helpful at the session because they’re changing things too much. They don’t understand that we have a limited amount of time with the orchestra to get things done. At the sessions, Terry had very reasonable notes. He was great to work with.
At the end of every episode, I like to ask composers about what other scores they’ve heard recently that have stuck out to them or have been inspiring them. Anything you all would like to share?
Barton: Yeah, a couple. I think the Succession score is fantastic. The one nice thing about science fiction is that we have this very easy place to go to which is, generally speaking, the jugular. You’re going big. Whenever you have a show that’s just a lot of people talking in a room, very dialogue heavy scripts, that’s the hardest thing to score. So, I thought that was fabulous. Also, it’s not a TV thing, but I’ve been connecting back with game scores. I’ve recently played the latest Legend of Zelda [Tears of the Kingdom]. I enjoy hearing something where I would never have thought to score it or approach it like [how it sounds].
Wiedmann: Two recent scores that blew my mind are, one, this score from these two random guys for Star Wars: Jedi Survivor [cheekily laughs // Editor’s Note: Stephen Barton is the co-composer of Jedi Survivor]. It’s amazing. When it came out, I was texting Stephen like, “Holy crap, man. You guys are insane.” It sounds like John Williams, but better. I don’t even know how that’s possible, but they did it. Don’t get me wrong, Williams is by far the greatest composer alive. I’m not arguing that at all, but Steven and Gordy [Haab, co-composer] have the production mindset on top of the skills. The second score is The Flash by Benjamin Wallfisch, which I thought was crazy cool. I don’t even know how it’s possible. He must have sped [the music] up because I can’t imagine anybody playing it.
Barton: If I’m right, they did it by [recording] lots of elements and piecing it together. It was a really interesting approach. A lot of classical scoring didn’t have the tools that we have available to us, like being able to splice edits on the fly and record it piecemeal and put things together. Sometimes those are decried as not being good things, and there’s definitely times where you can produce something to the nines and it ends up not sounding good anymore, but there are also times where you can use those tools to do something incredible. You can go for hyper-reality. I think that’s partly what we tried to do [with Picard]. I said to Phil, “What would Jerry Goldsmith do if he were working right now.” Jerry Goldsmith was always an incredible innovator. The first sound in the Next Generation theme is a synth that had come out three weeks before. Part of honoring that was to say, “How can you do the same thing?” That’s what I love about that Flash score. It isn’t just about perfectly polished production, maybe we can speed stuff up or create some kind of heightened thing. It’s very clever.
McGowan: I’ve actually been going back a lot. I’m a big nerd for Intrada Records and La-La Land Records. They release a lot of older soundtracks. They released the Matrix scores, which sound just phenomenal. Armin Steiner, who’s a legendary engineer, did all the orchestra mixing, and then a friend of mine, Larry Mah, did all the orchestra and synth-blend mixing at the end. I just got Sabrina, which is an old John Williams score that sounds really fun. It’s just a big orchestra in a room; from a production standpoint, it’s not complicated, but just getting that really high-fi recording of an orchestra is really fun. Sean Murphy, his engineer, always does a phenomenal job getting the orchestra sounding as best as possible in the room.
All episodes of Star Trek: Picard are now streaming on Paramount+. The film’s soundtrack is available to purchase physically or stream wherever you get your music, courtesy of Lakeshore Records.
Larry Fried is a filmmaker, writer, and podcaster based in New Jersey. He is the host and creator of the podcast “My Favorite Movie is…,” a podcast dedicated to helping filmmakers make somebody’s next favorite movie. He is also the Visual Content Manager for Special Olympics New Jersey, an organization dedicated to competition and training opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities across the Garden State.