‘Star Trek’ Franchise Gets Its First Female Composer as Nami Melumad Visits ‘Strange New Worlds’
variety.comJon Burlingame editor“Star Trek” has always been known for its progressive casting on screen. But over seven live-action series and 13 movies dating back more than half a century, the science-fiction franchise has never had a woman composer – until now.Nami Melumad, who has been scoring the animated “Star Trek: Prodigy,” has stepped up a notch and is scoring weekly episodes of “Strange New Worlds,” the new Paramount Plus series that chronicles the voyages of the pre-Captain Kirk Enterprise.“It’s been a very busy few months,” says the Israeli-born composer, who has been writing an average of 45 minutes of music per episode of “Strange New Worlds” and is now on her 14th episode of “Prodigy” for Nickelodeon.
Melumad’s “Star Trek” adventures actually began on “Short Treks,” the 10-part series of shorts exploring various aspects of the “Trek” universe.
She scored “Q&A,” the 2019 episode that featured Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One and Ethan Peck as Spock, who now head the cast of “Strange New Worlds.”That was on the recommendation of composer Michael Giacchino, who scored the three films in the big-screen “Star Trek” reboot and has also written the theme for “Prodigy.” Giacchino and Melumad had collaborated on the 2018 feature “American Pickle” and she considers the Oscar-winning composer a mentor.“When I heard the first pass of Nami’s score for a ‘Short Trek’ we did, It was clear even in the rawness of the material that she was an extraordinary talent,” says executive producer Alex Kurtzman. “She had the ‘remember what it was like when you were a kid’ musical joy of Michael Giacchino and John Williams, while composing something wholly original that was unique to her own, nimble.
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