Music for Prime Time

Television music, it has been said, provides “the soundtrack of our lives.” For those of us who have grown up in the TV generation and beyond, it is difficult to remember a time without it. Imagine watching a show without a soundtrack. Music can provide the perfect accompaniment to a scene – or, it can be a distraction if it’s too busy or loud.

From the earliest days of dramatic productions on stage, music has been there. When the motion picture industry came along, music was a huge part of its development. And when television joined a few years later, music became more important than ever.

In the 1950s, when television was really starting to come along and the networks were producing dozens of shows, a lot of the music came from existing libraries. For example, for a whole generation of viewers, the overture to Gioacchino Rossini’s opera William Tell is only known as the theme for “The Lone Ranger.”  Before long, television was looking for composers who could keep pace with the increasing need for new content.

TV was a backwater in the entertainment industry, with its music often dismissed as lacking the quality or impact of a feature film score. But TV music is not inferior. The real difference is the pay and the time: movies can develop across months or years, while a television series demands more music for exacting specifications such as time or financial constraints. TV composers are working with half the money and half the resources, with their output demanded twice as fast.

My friend Shay Watson is a television music composer. He was hired some years ago to write background music for the top-rated CBS soap opera “The Young and the Restless.” (He also had to sign a non-disclosure agreement so as not to share upcoming storylines and plot twists in order to work there.) Shay is given outlines from the producers that tell him what type of music they want and for how long. However, a show like “Y&R” has over fifty years of music cues at their disposal. In the 1970s and early 1980s, many of these soaps transitioned from an on-set organist to an orchestra or even smaller chamber ensembles, so a lot of those music cues are still heard. In the later 1980s and into the 1990s, thanks to budgetary concerns, the synthesizer ruled. Once the synthesizer came along, a lot of professional musicians found themselves out of work because one person could write and play the music. And soaps have to be produced more quickly than any other genre – 260 episodes per year, one for every weekday. That’s a lot of music to crank out.

Music for TV should not all be relegated to the dumpster. While there is plenty of music that is disposable, remember that even Bach and Mozart had to eat! They wrote constantly for whoever would pay them, with the results sometimes becoming pieces that would be heard for the next 300 years. They couldn’t have known that at the time.

On that note (pardon the pun), the stories behind the instrumental themes for TV shows was a huge reason I bought this book after seeing the author, Jon Burlingame, interviewed by David Pogue on CBS SUNDAY MORNING a while back. As it turns out, Burlingame had written the definitive – and exhaustive – survey of the history of TV music, and while this book is dense with information, it has been a joy to read.

Back to the themes. Everybody knows the themes to “Hawaii Five-O,” “Friends,” “I Love Lucy,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Cheers,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Dallas,” “Bonanza,” “M*A*S*H,” and more. What about the people who wrote those iconic songs?

This book is the story of a vastly underrated subgenre of American music, a place where some of the greatest musicians in history toiled in relative obscurity. Nearly all of the most successful film composers in the modern era – John Williams, Lalo Schifrin, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, Quincy Jones, Mike Post, and many more – honed their craft while working in television. John Williams is actually one of over 400 people interviewed for this book, and comes across as very forthcoming and humble about his life as a composer and performer.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the movie industry shunned the old-fashioned film score in favor of popular songs. Great composers like Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, Alexander Courage, and Earle Hagen found more success in TV, not to mention steady employment. Their work could be heard not only in themes, but the incidental music for various series across the years. This book gives an exhaustive account of the ins and outs of a lot of these composers.

Sometimes, a theme is written around the syllables of the show’s title. An example given is “Entertainment Tonight,” written by Michael Mark. Other themes are meant to invoke a certain attitude, such as the teletype sounds in themes for CBS and NBC News over the years. Going in the other direction, an urgent four-note motif by Bob Israel and Bill Conti became the calling card for ABC News, and is used to this day.  

Henry Mancini’s iconic theme for “Peter Gunn” has outlived memories of the show itself, while the immediacy of the 5/4 theme to “Mission: Impossible” by Lalo Schifrin is so dynamic, it is known by all. Mike Post made a foray into the Top 40 with his themes, most notably “The Rockford Files,” which was a hit single in the late ‘70s.

There are tons of anecdotes in this book that thrilled and fascinated me. Rex Koury was a staff composer for CBS Radio and sitting on the toilet when told he had less than an hour to come up with music for a new show called “Gunsmoke” one day in 1952. He wrote it in 15 minutes, and that theme played on every episode on both radio and television until the series ended in 1975!  A funny story comes by way of Hoyt Curtin, who wrote music for the Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the 1960s and 1970s. He overheard the trombone players on a recording session complaining about playing boring parts filled with whole notes. Curtin came back armed with technically difficult music written in horrible keys that challenged the trombones so much that, Curtin remembered, he fell down laughing in the control booth watching how determined those guys were to not make a mistake.  One of my favorite quotes came from Seth MacFarlane, creator and writer of the animated series “Family Guy” and “American Dad!” (and singer of the themes for each). He said, “so many big-budget shows on TV right now are using synths, and it’s crazy to me. You’re going to spend all this money to make a show that looks like a movie, and then you’re going to musically remind the audience that it’s still a TV show.”

Fans of TV themes lament their demise in these times of squeezed credit rolls that go by so fast, one cannot even read them. And on streaming services, the viewer has to manually opt to watch the credits or else the next episode begins. We are all trained for instant gratification, but one has to wonder why we had to lose something that made those television programs so memorable in the first place.

This book is highly recommended if only for the reader to realize how much great music has come from television, despite the limitations of the medium. It has truly impacted us all.

Michael Bird is an assistant professor of music at Faulkner University.