Fandom’s new frontier: Star Trek in the concert hall

Star Trek’s fan group stands out as one of the oldest and most prominent within ‘nerd culture’, in both popular media and fan studies scholarship. The franchise has a long history of fan participation via fanzines, fan fiction, cosplay and conventions. Fan participation and consumption of Trek-related music has an equally extensive history. This article examines new ways in which music and Star Trek fandom intersect by focusing on the concert movies Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage and Star Trek Movie Live. In these events, live musicians, typically an orchestra, performed a score in synchronization with projected visuals from a pre-existing movie or television show. The comparison of the events’ different approaches to format and marketing inform different means of fan musical engagement with Star Trek. Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage attracted older ‘hard core’ fans by harnessing nostalgia in service of the production. Alternatively, Star Trek Movie Live opened up the doors of fandom to include not only Trekkers, but also other fandom subcultures and the general public. Ultimately, both events represent opportunities for the expansion of the classical music repertoire and the broadening of audiences.