US Edition Alexander Courage, who died on May 15 aged 88, was an Emmy-winning arranger for television and films, and composed the original theme for the long-running Star Trek series.
Courage's iconic fanfare for the Starship Enterprise, written in 1965 for the first of two Star Trek pilots, was used throughout the show's three original series and again during all the spin-off feature films and several television derivatives, notably Star Trek: The Next Generation in the 1980s and 1990s.
He fell out with the Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, after Roddenberry wrote a set of lyrics to Courage's theme tune and claimed half the royalties.
Courage won a 1988 Emmy as principal arranger for a television Christmas special starring Julie Andrews, and was nominated for Oscars (both nominations shared with Lionel Newman) for his scores for The Pleasure Seekers in 1963 and Doctor Dolittle in 1967.
Alexander Courage, known as Sandy, was born in Philadelphia on December 10 1919 and grew up in New Jersey.
Graduating from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, in 1941, he moved to California, enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942 and became a bandleader at bases in California and Arizona.
After the war, he began working for CBS Radio, composing for such shows as The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.
From 1948 to 1960, he worked as an orchestrator and arranger at MGM, including work on the musicals Show Boat, The Band Wagon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Guys and Dolls, It's Always Fair Weather, Funny Face and Gigi.
Although Courage also scored a handful of films in the late 1950s, including Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun, television became his primary outlet for composition. He also contributed orchestrations to such 1960s film musicals as Hello, Dolly! and My Fair Lady.
But it was his theme to Star Trek, which launched in 1966, that became his most famous work. After his rift with Roddenberry, however, Courage composed the music for only four other episodes. He was much more prolific on The Waltons, scoring over 100 episodes in the 1970s and early 1980s.
As composing work in television dried up, Courage returned to orchestrating the work of such composers as John Williams (Fiddler on the Roof, The Poseidon Adventure and Jurassic Park) and Jerry Goldsmith (Basic Instinct, The Mummy and Air Force One). He also became an award-winning photographer whose work appeared in magazines such as Life and Colliers.
Alexander Courage's third wife predeceased him in 2005.