Gil Mellé’s electronic score for The Andromeda Strain

Abstract

Composer Gil Mellé boasted that his 1971 music for The Andromeda Strain was Hollywood’s first-ever all-electronic film score. This is demonstrably not the case, yet Mellé’s effort, which for the most part utilised instruments of his own making, nevertheless does count as something of a landmark in the intertwined history of cinema and electronically generated sound. By way of framing, this essay first puts into perspective Mellé’s boastful claim and then suggests that Mellé’s effort impacted little on subsequent Hollywood productions precisely because it was mandated by the film’s director to be more like sound effects than like traditional film music. But the primary content of the essay is Mellé’s Andromeda music, genuinely innovative music that is ear-worthy when heard in isolation and theatrically effective when heard in the context of the film, and at the same time music that to date has been neglected as much by scholars of electronic music as by scholars of film scoring.