Music, Race, and Gender in the Original Series of Star Trek (1966-69).

Abstract

The original television series STAR TREK (1966–69) enacted the social turmoil of the American sixties, as long-existing power structures struggled with progressive ideas, illuminating charged social and political tensions. Though this science fiction program aspired to a liberal stance, championing core tenets of the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements, it nevertheless reinforced the dominant position of the white, heterosexual male in the United States’ social hierarchy. STAR TREK was what Michel Foucault called rupture or break, simultaneously promoting social change while protecting old power structures.

This dissertation performs two tasks. First, it explores the pragmatics of soundtrack production within the series using primary source material from archives across the United States, including the collections of series’ creator Gene Roddenberry and series’ composers Alexander Courage, Fred Steiner, Gerald Fried, Jerry Fielding, Sol Kaplan, and George Duning. Through extant interviews, letters, sketch scores, cue sheets, and contracts, this dissertation reveals the roles of several key figures as well as the processes they imagined and implemented in creating STAR TREK’s soundscape and musical score. Understanding the means by which the soundtrack was integrated into the show not only provides new insight into the television production practices of the sixties and the politics of representation present in the administration of STAR TREK, but also exposes the ideological foundations of the series’ treatment of identity and difference.

The second portion of this dissertation demonstrates how STAR TREK’s conflicting social stances resonate through its soundtrack, especially regarding race and gender. Women, though given essential roles on the ENTERPRISE, were routinely reduced to mere romantic interests through coded musical cues; aliens and non-white humans, though treated with respect and given command positions, were often scored with orientalist music that marked them as “other.” Inspired by foundational scholarship in race and post-colonial theory, feminist and queer theory, screen musicology, musicological studies of difference, and musical semiotics, this dissertation interrogates the ways in which STAR TREK’s conflicting ideologies are revealed through its scoring of its multi-ethnic and multi-gendered crew, its many and (somewhat) varied aliens, and its leading men, Captain James T. Kirk and Lieutenant Commander Spock.