‘Star Trek: Picard’ Composer Stephen Barton On Toll It Took Attempting To Create Season 3 Score From Scratch – Sound & Screen TV
deadline.comSeason 3 of Star Trek: Picard not only reunited all of the Next Generation crew, but also gave them a fitting sendoff for which fans have been waiting since the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis.
It wasn’t easy for anyone, including composer Stephen Barton. Barton admits, however, that he painted himself, or composed himself rather, into a corner. “We decided we were going to try to score all of it which meant writing seven hours of music,” Barton said during a panel for the CBS/Paramount+ series at Deadline’s Sound & Screen event. “I think about four hours in I was literally dead, absolutely.
I was doing seven days weeks, 16-hour days, I hadn’t seen my family. It was absolutely brutal.” Normally TV shows can reuse pre-existing tracks.
Barton’s goal to compose an all-new score for Season 3 wore him down. He credits showrunner Terry Malalas with suggesting they hire Frederik Wiedmann for episodes 7-10. “I almost missed that email that was supposed to reach me because it ended up in my spam folder from my website email contact form,” Wiedmann said. “It took me a week to finally see that, which was quite mortifying: Start this day, here’s episode 7 and go.” Wiedmann said scoring the moment where the Next Generation team resumes its positions on the Enterprise set came with a lot of pressure.
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