It was relatively late that I got to know the film music of Jerry Goldsmith. At first I found it too traditionally 'Hollywood', until I got into his more experimental work and then understood what he was up to under the surface of all his scores.

Clever for me in Goldsmith's work are the way he relies on irregular metric treatment, the way he develops motifs and his handling of 12-note harmony. I've been influenced predominantly by his scores for Freud (1962), Planet of the Apes (1968), The Illustrated Man (1969), The Mephisto Waltz (1971), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), The Omen (1976), Logan's Run (1976), Coma (1978) (Coma is a fantastic score), Runaway (1984) and Total Recall (1990). I heard somewhere that he scored a TV episode of The Twilight Zone with just one clarinet and a set of timpani! If anyone can tell me which episode this was, I'd be keen to know!