‘Alien’ Tunes : John Frizzell, at home with MTV and the classics, scores the latest in sci-fi series.

In the sci-fi thriller “Alien Resurrection,” which opens Friday, Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder tackle the easy chores; they only have to tiptoe around bloodthirsty space aliens.

But the film’s composer, John Frizzell, had to counter even deadlier foes: sound effects and dialogue, which can overpower an entire symphony orchestra. In space, no one can hear you scream, but in a movie theater, one whimper can bury the strings.

That challenge didn’t seem to faze the boyish 31-year-old New York native as he dashed across an L.A. recording stage to put extra growl into a percussion part.

“I view a film as one entire creative work,” Frizzell later explained, chomping a chicken Caesar sandwich as the orchestra broke for lunch.

“If the audio feels incongruous from the picture, you’ve got a problem. So I’m always bugging the sound designers--’What are you gonna do right here? If you’re gonna put something big, I’ll stay out’--because I don’t want to battle anybody.

“I work with dialogue constantly, and I’m always dodging this, crescendoing there. My ultimate goal is that the music mixer on the dubbing stage won’t have to move the [audio] fader much at all.”

The effort has paid off. Frizzell’s 100-minute score is winning praise both for its emotional, melodic intensity and for continuing the adventurous musical tradition set in the previous “Alien” films by Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner and Elliott Goldenthal, a lineage Frizzell says “gave me a good goosing.”

“Thematically, I know I’ve gotta deliver, because of Goldsmith’s [original] score, which set a tone for the films. It made you really care about Ripley.”

James Horner’s pounding action music for “Aliens” earned an Oscar nomination; “then Elliott Goldenthal wove this brilliant choral mesh of ideas in ‘Alien3.’ So I’m tipping my hat to the first three scores but trying to take the series to a new place.”

A relative newcomer like Frizzell may seem a surprising choice for “Alien Resurrection,” given the high stakes surrounding the series after the critically drubbed “Alien3.”

But within the last year, Frizzell has earned a reputation for musical shape-shifting, writing epic suspense themes for “Dante’s Peak,” bringing spare poignancy to HBO’s period drama “Crime of the Century” and using deliberately melodramatic orchestral forces to play off the dimwitted stars of “Beavis and Butt-head Do America.”

Frizzell won that last job by mixing his demo tape with commentary from Beavis and Butt-head themselves. (He’s a longtime fan.) “On my tape, I’d play some really beautiful music . . . and then they’d say”--he slips into a dead-on chortle--” ’Heh-heh, that sucks.’ ”

For the “Beavis” score, “I played it very straight. I took my cue from Elmer Bernstein, and the way he scored ‘Airplane!’ Elmer said, ‘John, when you score a comedy like that, score it as if you’re an overzealous composer who doesn’t have particularly good taste. Treat each cue as if it’s the most important cue of your life and you must express everything you know about music in it.’

“Plus, having an orchestra with those two boneheads on the screen is funny.”

A composer who embraces rude MTV cartoons along with Bartok and Stravinsky was probably destined for Hollywood, but Frizzell says his interest in film scoring didn’t start until the relatively advanced age of 18.

By then, he’d been performing music for nearly a decade, singing as a boy soprano in the National Cathedral Choir as well as the Paris Opera Company during its visits to New York (his debut was under the baton of Sir Georg Solti).

Frizzell continued his music studies at USC and the Manhattan School of Music; one day, he noticed that the scoring of a Clint Eastwood movie contained “music more interesting and metrically complicated than what I’d been studying.”

After finishing his studies, Frizzell found the practical training he’d need for film in the studio of vibraphonist Michael Mainieri. His Centerfield Productions hired Frizzell as a synthesizer player, orchestrator and producer on projects ranging from jazz to rap to ad jingles. That experience led to the composer’s scoring debut, collaborating with Ryuichi Sakamoto on Oliver Stone’s futuristic miniseries “Wild Palms.”

Frizzell credits his varied work in pop and classical as a creative advantage. “I think if you’re not well versed in popular music, it’s a big mistake. I can’t think of a time in history when composers who were in touch with the world weren’t influenced by popular music. If you’re going to cut yourself off, you’re going to do just that.”

Last year, Frizzell’s eclecticism caught the ear of French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Delicatessen,” “The City of Lost Children”), who proclaimed Frizzell the original voice he’d been seeking for his English-language film debut, “Alien Resurrection.”

It was impossible to find something different, Jeunet recalls. “Everything was the same. I wanted to have music to support the action and at the same time I wanted music more romantique. Then I heard John’s tape and said, ‘This one is different.’ People said, ‘He’s young,’ and I said, ‘I don’t care. He’s new.’ ”

Frizzell finishes the story. “When I met Jean-Pierre, he held up my demo tape and said, ‘This is the score for my movie! How did you know the story?’ ”

Frizzell’s good luck continued. He signed on while “Alien Resurrection” was being shot in Los Angeles, giving him the rare luxury to observe the filming and study the brooding cinematography of Darius Khondji (“I’m very influenced by color,” Frizzell says).

Best of all, he could write music as each sequence was being edited, avoiding the dreaded fate of most film composers, who often view a movie with a “temp track” already assembled from other scores, which they are expected to imitate.

Recalls Frizzell: “I said to Jean-Pierre, ‘Send me whatever you’ve got put together. And just be patient. When you feel you have to start putting [temp track] music in, call me, give me a day--I can write two or three minutes of music a day.’ And they did.”

To suggest the confinement of “Alien’s” lethal spaceship, Frizzell “tried to tangle musical lines within a small space that feels harmonically confined and restricted unnecessarily, to give you a sense of claustrophobia.”

For the alien, “I tried to anthropomorphize the music. There’s a technique where you take the strings and play them with the back of the bow, tapping it, making these wonderful insect-like sounds.

“I was trying to bring all of Jean-Pierre’s visuals into three dimensions, to resonate exactly what’s on the screen, like a hologram, and make it feel like you’re in the room, musically.”

Frizzell says he’s most proud of “Alien’s” underwater chase sequence, which involved more than a month of writing and rewriting (the amount of time sometimes allotted an entire score).

“I know shooting that scene was very scary for the cast. They had to be in some situations where they couldn’t get to their air very quick, certain cast members [including Ryder] had phobias about it. . . . I just wanted them to know that I wore a snorkel and mask when I wrote the last version of this in their honor.”