Posted in: Paramount+, Star Trek, streaming, TV | Tagged: Frederik Wiedmann, paramount, star trek, Star Trek Picard, Stephen Barton

Star Trek Picard Composers Wiedmann & Barton on Scoring Final Season

Composers Frederik Wiedmann and Stephen Barton on how they got involved with the final season of Star Trek: Picard and legacy-building.

Composers Frederik Wiedmann and Stephen Barton have accomplished so much in their combined 40 years of experience across film, television, and video games. Their latest project tackled the Star Trek franchise in the Paramount+ series Picard, which builds off the legacy of those like Jerry Goldsmith, who composed the original theme of 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was repurposed to the theme of The Original Series spinoff The Next Generation. Wiedmann and Barton are signed with BMI, which did a profile on the two on their work on Picard's third and final season.

Star Trek: How Frederik Wiedmann & Stephen Barton Got Involved

"My involvement started towards the later episodes of Season 3," Wiedmann said. "The finale of this adventure had taken on such a massive scale, and the amount of music required for the last four episodes, as well as its complexity, required more hands on deck. Since the editor on the show, Drew Nichols, had used one of my previously composed sci-fi scores quite heavily in the temp track (Occupation: Rainfall), which Terry [Matalas], our showrunner, loved, they decided to bring me on. From the moment I got the phone call from Terry to my writing my first note for the show took only a couple of days. Things moved very fast."

Barton's history goes back to working with the showrunner on a SYFY series. "Terry Matalas reached out to me whilst he was making the third season of 12 Monkeys, and that launched easily the most rewarding collaboration of my career," he said. "We started talking about Star Trek sometime during the fourth season of 12 Monkeys, and once he was given the keys to the franchise to really make Season 3 of Picard his own, we started talking about the Star Trek legacy and the music which we have a shared love for, and how we might be able to weave all those elements together into what is probably the send-off for many of these characters."

Wiedman was a fan of the Trek franchise when Paramount reinvested it in syndication. "It is every aspiring composer's dream to follow the footsteps of either John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith. For a boy who's loved film music since age 11, absolutely," he said. "While I have yet to contribute music to a Star Wars story, I feel incredibly blessed and honored to have been given the chance to work on such a legendary franchise. I am the generation that grew up watching Star Trek: Next Generation on TV, so I was very familiar with it and its characters. In fact, I was a big fan back in the day. I still remember the day I bought the 30-year anniversary compilation CD of all Star Trek music back in the late 90s. As for a musical direction, the idea was to stay true to the original Star Trek: Next Generation tone and sound while keeping the score also contemporary and modern. The show offered wonderful moments to go back to all the incredible themes from previous Star Trek composers (Goldsmith, James Horner, Dennis McCarthy, Alexander Courage, etc.). I believe the audience will enjoy hearing familiar themes and motifs all across Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard."

For Barton, it goes back to the 1996 feature regarded as the best of the TNG films. "We started really by looking at First Contact, where Jerry wrote one of his finest tunes ever. The feelings that the movie evokes, and the fact that it had a 'movie theme,' a tune that represented more than just a character or a ship, was a big inspiration. I then went back through all of the Trek scores from start to finish, pretty much, and there were motifs both from The Next Generation TV series and movies, as well as the original series and movies, that we felt had wider significance to the whole story," he said. "The main theme of Next Generation is very much the 'Enterprise' theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but it means so much more than that now. So, we knew we needed to write a new tune that tied to the U.S.S. Titan (the ship much of this season takes place on) but also writes a score that called back to the James Horner, Dennis McCarthy, Leonard Rosenman, and Cliff Eidelman music, amongst others. We had free rein to use the tunes, but we wanted to use them as precious gems and not just Star Trek wallpaper. There are times where I'm staying very close to the Goldsmith orchestrations, or Horner's, in particular, but also times where I've re-imagined it."

For more, including what Wiedmann and Barton felt were the most challenging aspects, their creative process, and more, you can check out the entire interview here. Star Trek: Picard streams Thursdays on Paramount+.

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