Film music / New Hollywood · 1968
Planet of the Apes
Jerry Goldsmith
Planet of the Apes · 제리 골드스미스
Why listen
A score that makes the orchestra feel unfamiliar through sharp attacks, unstable spacing and competing motion.
Listen and read
Tracks · previews
English editorial edition
Album story
A useful way into this music is to stop waiting for a tune to carry you safely across it. Choose a small sound instead: a low impact, a clipped figure, an unexpectedly long resonance. Keep track of its return. Goldsmith makes the listener’s effort to locate the next event part of the drama, and that remains compelling without a screen.
The music belongs to Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 film. Our reference is the expanded Varèse edition carrying a 1997 phonographic date, not the original LP programme. Its eighteen tracks have clear boundaries: Alfred Newman’s studio fanfare opens the collection, and a suite from Escape from the Planet of the Apes closes it. Tracks two through seventeen contain the score discussed here. The added suite is a different work, not this film’s extended ending.
Find a foothold in the texture
A brief repeating shape can provide orientation even when the surrounding sounds refuse an easy sense of home. Follow one gesture through a change of instrumental colour. Does recognition make the passage more secure, or does the unfamiliar setting make it stranger? There is no need to identify every instrument. Attacks, lengths and distances between sounds offer a vocabulary that the ear can use before technical terminology becomes helpful.
More than a fast chase
The Hunt accompanies pursuit, but speed alone does not explain its pressure. Pearson’s score guide describes recurring figures and overlapping rhythmic activity. Try maintaining one layer in your attention while another enters. A sustained sound can press against a rapid pattern, and increasing density can make the music feel more urgent even before a large rise in volume. Separate those two experiences: more simultaneous events and louder sound are related, but not identical.
Give the work its own ending
The expanded sequence alternates brief cues with more sustained spans. Listen for the way a sparse passage keeps you alert rather than simply offering relief. After track seventeen, pause if you want the first film’s musical world to retain its own outline. The concluding suite can then be heard as a deliberate move into a sequel. This approach preserves the surprise of the story while revealing how orchestral spacing and colour can reorganise the listener’s sense of familiar territory.
The album through its tracks
Keep one short repeating figure in mind while the sounds around it change.
Main Title
Begin after the studio fanfare: this is track two and the entrance to Goldsmith’s score itself. Listen to the space between events before trying to memorise their pitches. A sound that dies quickly and one that leaves a long trace create different expectations of what can follow. On another pass, alternate your attention between the low and high material. Can you hear something return even if you cannot yet sing it? That small recognition provides a foothold without removing the strangeness. The exercise also keeps the familiar ceremonial opening of the album separate from the film’s own musical language. Treat the gaps as active parts of the phrase, not empty time.
Reference · Apple Music: Planet of the Apes, Varèse 1997 editionThe Hunt
Follow a recurring figure while allowing the surrounding activity to remain slightly out of focus. Pearson’s guide identifies the relationship between a piano pattern, sustained sounds and shorter fragments; hearing their different jobs is more useful initially than counting every beat. The selected album track is number seven, about five minutes ten seconds long, so it should not be equated with the duration of a concert excerpt. When the texture grows busier, ask whether your chosen figure still supplies a foothold. Then notice what remains when a layer drops away. The cue’s force comes into sharper focus when you distinguish rhythmic crowding from sheer loudness, without needing to reconstruct the pursuit shot by shot.
Reference · Pearson: Goldsmith The Hunt score guide
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Written for English readers. Album facts are referenced below; listening suggestions are editorial interpretations. AI-assisted editorial review; not independently human-reviewed.