Planet of the Apes Score Outland

Jerry Goldsmith's score for Planet of the Apes (1968) abandoned conventional melody and tonal harmony in favor of twelve-tone writing and an enlarged percussion section built around non-orchestral objects. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score (Not a Musical) at the 41st Academy Awards and lost to John Barry's The Lion in Winter. Film-music critics routinely describe it as one of the most consequential Hollywood scores of the 1960s — though "consequential" here means a particular thing: it brought concert-hall modernist techniques into mainstream studio filmmaking, rather than inventing them from scratch. (wikipedia, wikipedia)

Goldsmith built the score on twelve-tone writing instead of melody

Where most science-fiction pictures of the era still leaned on lush orchestral themes, Goldsmith wrote Planet of the Apes around serial techniques inherited from the Second Viennese School. The Wikipedia summary of the film's music points specifically at a twelve-tone violin line — using all twelve chromatic notes — as the harmonic engine of the score, chosen to match the astronauts' disorientation on an unfamiliar planet. (wikipedia)

"Goldsmith took a relatively experimental approach that relied heavily on avant-garde, tribal-sounding percussion and ethereal strings." — Garrett Tiedemann, Music of the Apes (2014)

"It's a startling score that is terrifying in its sparseness: there's tremendous space provided for silence within the music." — Garrett Tiedemann, Music of the Apes (2014)

The percussion section was built around kitchen hardware and inverted horns

Goldsmith's orchestra was conventional on paper but used in unconventional ways: French horn players reversed their mouthpieces and blew through them, woodwind players fingered keys without air, and the percussion section was stocked with stainless-steel mixing bowls, a cuíca, a ram's horn, a vibra-slap, and a bass slide whistle. The drums were routed through an echoplex, which is the only piece of electronic processing on the recording. (movie music uk)

"Goldsmith filled his percussion section up with everything — almost the kitchen sink — there are pots and pans, mixing bowls, no doubt other unspecified kitchen items." — James Southall, Movie Wave (2014)

"The opening title piece sets the scene perfectly: an array of percussion (some of it filtered through an echoplex), a jabbing little piano phrase, stabs of brass." — James Southall, Movie Wave (2014)

Critics have treated the score as a fusion point rather than a one-off novelty

The score's reputation has held up in part because reviewers keep returning to it as a reference for what "modernist Hollywood scoring" sounds like. The specific claim is usually not that Goldsmith invented atonal film music — composers like Leonard Rosenman (The Cobweb, 1955) got there first — but that Planet of the Apes made the approach commercially legible inside a wide-release studio picture.

"It was immediately acclaimed as being one of the most daring fusions of movie and music and is still regarded as such today." — James Southall, Movie Wave (2014)

"It's not traditionally melodic in any way, indeed it's an extremely challenging listen in so many ways, but such a rewarding one. A Goldsmith masterpiece." — James Southall, Movie Wave (2014)

The 1968 Best Original Score Oscar went to John Barry

At the 41st Academy Awards, the Best Original Score (Not a Musical) category went to John Barry for The Lion in Winter, beating Goldsmith (Planet of the Apes), Lalo Schifrin (The Fox), Alex North (The Shoes of the Fisherman), and Michel Legrand (The Thomas Crown Affair). It was Goldsmith's fourth Academy Award nomination; he would accumulate eighteen over his career and win once, for The Omen (1976). See Jerry Goldsmith Awards for the full record. (wikipedia)