How Final Season of ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Honored Franchise With Musical Easter Eggs

variety.com:

Jon Burlingame “Star Trek” fans are still buzzing about the music of the final season of “Picard.” That’s because the lavish symphonic score by Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann references multiple themes from throughout the 57-year history of “Trek” movies and TV shows.

Barton, who scored seven of the 10 episodes and collaborated with Wiedmann on the finale, says that the idea belonged to showrunner Terry Matalas. “From the very beginning, we chatted a lot about the ‘Star Trek’ we grew up with.

This was a moment in the franchise to take a step back, look at the whole picture, and say, how can we honor this?” Matalas has “an amazing, vast knowledge” of “Trek” music, Wiedmann says. “He’s as enthusiastic about film scores as we are – which, in the end, was extremely helpful for us because Terry had such a clear idea on where to go with the music.” Jerry Goldsmith’s themes for “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (originally written for 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”) and 1996’s “Star Trek: First Contact” are omnipresent, but there are also quotations from James Horner’s music in “The Wrath of Khan” (1982), Leonard Rosenman’s from “The Voyage Home” (1986), Goldsmith’s “The Final Frontier” (1989), Cliff Eidelman’s “The Undiscovered Country” (1991), Dennis McCarthy’s “Generations” (1994), Goldsmith’s “Voyager” theme (1995) and, of course, Alexander Courage’s original “Trek” fanfare from 1966.

While these musical Easter eggs were fun for aficionados to identify, there was also a huge amount of original music to write as well.