알렉산더 커리지

Alexander Mair Courage Jr. (December 10, 1919 – May 15, 2008) familiarly known as "Sandy" Courage, was an American orchestrator, arranger, and composer of music, primarily for television and film. He is best known as the composer of the theme music for the original Star Trek series.

The son of a Scottish father and a French-American mother, Alexander "Sandy" Mair Courage was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father Alexander Sr. immigrated to the United States in 1913 and obtained work in a munitions factory supplying France during World War I, where he met his future wife. They married in 1917.

While Sandy was still a young child, his father joined the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as a salesman and moved the family to New Jersey. The family relocated regularly as his father earned promotions, requiring Sandy to switch schools.

His gift for music was noticed and encouraged at an early age. Courage’s father arranged for young Sandy to learn the bugle as his own father had been in a band and he himself was an enthusiastic parlor singer. When Courage wanted to learn the cornet, his father got him one.

Courage developed an uncanny ear for accompaniment. His tendency to play by ear what he wanted rather than play the music as written was a source of frustration, as he recalled, for his piano instructors: “I wanted to play Sousa marches and things like that. My uncle had a boys’ camp [in] Pennsylvania… When I was twelve, a new camper came in named Bobby Brecker. He had been to New York with his parents and seen a show there called The Band Wagon with Fred Astaire and his sister Adele, and he knew all the songs... I learned how to pick out the tunes with one finger and play what then used to be called a graveyard bass, which had no chords, just a sort of “thump” with the fist in rhythm with whatever the tune was [in] your right hand... That’s really where I got my start as a show pianist and little did I know that I would one day be writing arrangements for Fred Astaire in a movie called The Band Wagon. It’s really, really, really spooky in my life, how things like that have happened.”

Courage later learned to play the trumpet and the French horn, as these instruments were available to him in school. In high school, Courage auditioned for and was chosen as the first solo player of the New Jersey All State High School Orchestra. Also in the orchestra was a violist for whom Courage was inspired to write a symphony, leading him to pursue music as a career.

Taking some preparatory theory lessons, Courage was admitted to the Eastman School of Music in 1937. He intended to study composition. Having never attempted it in a formal way before, Courage found the study challenging and failed his introductory composition course twice before passing the course in his senior year. While at Eastman, he switched majors multiple times and found the academic coursework ill-suited to his improvisational nature. At Eastman, he studied conducting under the composer Paul White (1895–1973).

In early 1940, Serge Koussevitzky auditioned Eastman students to join the Tanglewood Music Festival that summer. Courage succeeded in earning a spot at Tanglewood, where he met Richard Bales, Lenny Bernstein, and Thor Johnson.

In 1941, Courage graduated from Eastman with a degree in piano performance.

Upon graduation, Courage moved to California to join a close friend Doris Atkinson who had graduated from Eastman a year earlier. He served in the United States Army Air Forces at March Field as a horn player, composer, arranger, and band leader. There, Courage launched and led a monthly radio program featuring band arrangements he wrote.

Once out of the army, Courage lived with his parents while looking for work. Through the wife of an army buddy, Courage met Bill Hatch, who hired Courage to work for CBS Radio. Around the same time, Atkinson introduced Courage to Herb Spencer, who introduced him to Ed Powell, who was looking for an orchestrator to recommend to Adolph Deutsch. Through these connections, Courage wrote and arranged music for several radio shows before following Deutsch to MGM.