Alexander Courage, whose theme for the original Star Trek, became a legendary part of TV history, died this week at age 88. Courage once said of the theme, “What I based the whole thing on in a way, was an old Hebredean tune
from the outer islands of Scotland.Because I wanted something that had a long, long feel to
it, and I wanted to put it over a fast-moving accompaniment to get the
adventure and the speed and so forth, so there was an old song called
‘Beyond the Blue Horizon,’ and when I was a kid I would hear it on the
radio and they used to play a double time accompaniment to it, while
this thing was singing over the top, so that’s what I really wanted to
do, I wanted to make all of the scales go way out, and I wanted the
intervals to be long, and I wanted to have a kind of exotic feel to it.â€
Courage also worked on other TV series such as Judd for the Defense, Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. For more click here