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Cliff Eidelman in the 1990's

"With Star Trek I just felt so good about doing that, and being part of such a legacy, a part of history that would live on... I would have loved to do more Star Trek movies."
-- Cliff Eidelman in 1998

Bursting into a legacy of film scoring held in high popular esteem, Cliff Eidelman was never the same after scoring the sixth installment of the Star Trek film series in 1991. For the young composer, it was about as large of a career break as any other had ever received. By both critics and fans, the dark and choral score for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is considered to be one of the finest (if not the outright best) score of the treasured franchise, elevating the upstart Cliff Eidelman to a cloud among Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner for Trek fans. Eidelman would battle through issues of his youthful age in the industry and compose a handful of powerful, epic scores in the late 1980s and early 1990s, often with romantic and melodic attributes best performed by large orchestras and choruses. Ironically, while Eidelman remains best known for these large scale triumphs, his career has been best defined by the character dramas for which he scored in the 1990s. The rich multi-instrument training of his youth, ranging in genre from classical to jazz, has offered Eidelman a vast array of musical knowledge and perspective from which to draw for his own compositions.

Beginning with Leap of Faith and Untamed Heart, Eidelman would compose a series of sentimental and minimalistic scores for heavily dramatic films in the years following Star Trek VI and Christopher Columbus. And while his scores for such heartfelt projects as Now and Then and One True Thing were praised by critics, this turn of sentimentality did not sustain the interest of the fans he had gained with his early bombast. Eidelman continued his career by writing several concert hall pieces and conducting film music performances in Seattle and the U.K. Even in these lesser known projects, Eidelman's sense of harmony and thematic sincerity continues to prosper. Without the heavy exposure he received in the early 1990s, however, Eidelman faded into obscurity later in the decade, and his career would progress a matter of a few years without a feature film project. Nevertheless, the existing body of Eidelman's work is still an impressive selection, and Eidelman's youth will allow him countless more years of composition in the future, some of which may involve more commercially available recordings of his concert works. If Star Trek VI is the only Cliff Eidelman score in your collection, then that's a good start... but there's much more to hear.