Billy Goldenberg, an Emmy-winning composer who worked with Barbra Streisand and Elvis Presley, scored Steven Spielberg’s early work and wrote the theme music for more than a dozen television series, has died at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.
Gary Gerani, a friend who is making a documentary about Mr. Goldenberg, said the cause was most likely heart failure. He said fire department personnel found Mr. Goldenberg’s body on the morning of Aug. 4 after he had failed to answer his door for a delivery. He had died overnight.
Mr. Goldenberg’s TV career was blossoming in the late 1960s when he met Mr. Spielberg at Universal Studios and began composing the music for a number of the young director’s television efforts, including the horror anthology series “Night Gallery,” the whodunit drama “Columbo” and the 1971 TV movie “Duel,” in which a motorist is terrorized by the driver of a big rig.
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Mr. Spielberg then gave him the script for “The Sugarland Express,” the director’s first feature film.
“I didn’t even look at the script because I was busy writing television,” Mr. Goldenberg said in the trailer to “Romantic Mysticism: The Music of Billy Goldenberg,” Mr. Gerani’s documentary. He added, “How stupid can a person get?”
John Williams ended up writing the score for “Sugarland” (and many other Spielberg films).
Mr. Goldenberg may have lost an opportunity, but he was on his way to becoming one of the busiest composers in Hollywood, writing theme music for popular series like “Rhoda,” the Valerie Harper spinoff of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and the detective drama “Kojak,” with Telly Savalas.
In 1972, he wrote the scores for Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam” and “Up the Sandbox,” starring Ms. Streisand as a bored housewife with bizarre fantasies.
Howard Thompson of The New York Times praised Mr. Goldenberg’s “striking, luscious score” for “Sandbox” and called it “the real pulse of the movie.”
Mr. Goldenberg said Ms. Streisand had called him often after filming to “hum me the music for tomorrow,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1976. She once asked him if he could turn a sequence from the score into a song she could record.
Working through the night, he wrote the music for “If I Close My Eyes.” Ms. Streisand then asked the Oscar-winning songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman to write the lyrics, as they had for her big hit “The Way We Were.”
“Billy was a wonderful composer who didn’t get the recognition he deserved,” Mr. Bergman said in a phone interview, adding: “He was a composer who knew dramatics, which is very rare. He knew how to build characters with music.”
Source: Billy Goldenberg, TV, Movie and Stage Composer, Dies at 84
