As we enter the new year, Neumation Music is hard at work shipping the last editions from 2025–The Mummy and a reprint of Beetlejuice. Demand for both of these titles has been astounding! We are pleased that fellow film music lovers around the world will have these scores on their shelves for study and enjoyment. Everyone who ordered these scores will receive them ASAP.
We have a lot of exciting projects in the works that we think you’ll love, including: an anthology of 35 episode scores from CBS’s The Twilight Zone; Jerome Moross’s The Big Country; and Fumio Hayazaka’s Seven Samurai. Additional planned releases include: one more title acquired during our Brooksfilms archive exploration (Young Frankenstein and The Elephant Man now available); Steve Bramson’s charming and offbeat Scooby Doo on Zombie Island; and the long awaited Spider-Man 2 by Danny Elfman.
We are also deep into the editorial process for our revised edition of Krull (still one of our favorite scores here at Neumation HQ). It’s our intention to sell this at a substantial discount to anyone who purchased the first edition to ensure that everyone has a definitive edition of James Horner’s masterpiece. You won’t need to pay full price to know what was changed. We’ll have more info available later in the year.
As time allows, we’re also hoping to begin releasing a series of semi-regular articles and videos, with the goal of providing more insight into how we work and what we love about this unique and wonderful art form.
Along the lines of trying to add some insight into our process, we thought we’d take a moment here to talk a little about our source material and editorial process for The Mummy.
The Neumation Music team is always grateful to be granted direct access to studio vaults and composer archives. The Music Business and Legal Affairs department at NBC Universal kindly granted Neumation Music access to scoring assets held in their archive, including recording session audio and high resolution scans of the complete scores, sketches, and duplicate booth scores. Two cues were pulled from the original archive boxes in 1999 and used for concert performance. These were supplied by Jo Ann Kane Music Services. Both pencil scores and booth scores contain annotations and changes. Numerous edits heard in the film and on the soundtrack CD were made editorially after the sessions.
It may come as a surprise (or not) that Jerry Goldsmith’s use of synthesizers and music technology included extensive use of MIDI sequencing dating back to the early days of MIDI’s introduction. MIDI floppy disks were created and played back in the booth during the orchestral recording sessions. A keyboard player was often not playing these parts live. To add further confusion, Alexander Courage occasionally wrote out synth parts in the score for reference despite them not being performed live on the scoring stage.
After reviewing all the assets provided, we found, much to our surprise, not present in any of the materials are notated parts for an oud. There is no formal record of a live oud player being present at the recording sessions. The orchestra contractor did not hire one and the musicians in London did not perform alongside one. There is evidence via an engineer and synthesizer programmer that a sampling session for the Kurzweil K2500 took place at Sony and that MIDI sequences were pre-recorded prior to the London sessions. We can speculate all we want about how these particular sounds wound up in the score, but the answer is: they were not notated and we simply don’t know their origin.
Neumation Music strives to prepare our editions based on what the composer wrote. Whenever possible, we like to view the score as the primary, authoritative document (this, of course, opens up a discussion on what “authoritative” means in film music, but that’s a topic for another time). In the case of The Mummy, Goldsmith simply didn’t include the electronic elements in his sketches. Additionally, we discovered, with the aid of Goldsmith’s programmer, that the MIDI files have unfortunately been lost to time. As part of our process, we generally do not feel it is necessary to transcribe MIDI sequences and sampled parts that were not notated and performed by live musicians.
Uncovering the past requires research and access to authoritative historical records. At Neumation Music, we seek out answers from people who worked on the film as often as possible. We have to trust and respect the information coming from experienced professionals who were in the room when the music was being made. This is what we mean by “music archaeology.” We’re archivists, librarians, performers, composers, musicologists, and, of course, fans. We want to bring you more insight into our world and how we approach this thing we love so much. We look forward to sharing more great music with everyone in 2026 and beyond!