ost SF fans would readily agree that Rod Serling's The Twilight
Zone is an honest-to-goodness television classic. Yet the contribution of the series' music is rarely acknowledged. Fortunately, a new four-CD set should remedy that oversight, providing listeners with a rare opportunity to hear dozens of memorable orchestral melodies and even a few tracks that were recorded but never used in the show.
The first disc on Twilight Zone - The 40th Anniversary Collection
is devoted solely to the contributions of Bernard Herrmann (Psycho,
The Day the Earth Stood Still) and features selections from such
episodes as "Where is Everybody?," "Walking Distance" and "The Hitchhiker."
The platter also includes a sequence of 11 short works, collectively titled
"The Outer Space Suite," that were used as library music during the show's
five-year run. There are also three different versions of the composer's cues for the first-season opening and closing credits.
The second CD features Jerry Goldsmith, with most of the
melodies coming from well-known stories like "Back There," "The Invaders" and "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room." This disc also introduces Marius
Constant's unforgettable "Main Title: Second Season" and "End Title: Second
Season" compositions. These themes, which replaced Herrmann's tunes,
ultimately became the series' trademark musical motifs.
Disc three focuses primarily on the work of Nathan Van Cleave, who
provided scores for "Elegy," "I Sing the Body Electric" and "A World of
Difference," among others. Nathan Scott's "A Stop at Willoughby" is also
showcased here, along with a brief library cut from Rene Garriguenc. The
final volume presents numbers from Fred Steiner ("100 Yards Over the Rim,"
"The Passerby"), Leonard Rosenman ("And When the Sky Was Opened"), Jeff
Alexander ("The Trouble with Templeton") and Franz Waxman ("The
Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine"), plus alternate renditions of Constant's familiar themes.
A diverse dimension of sound
While The Twilight Zone unquestionably furnished viewers
with myriad intelligent and insightful speculative stories, it also subtly
exposed the audience to some absolutely phenomenal music. Twilight Zone - The 40th Anniversary Collection displays these
diverse melodies marvelously, allowing listeners to aurally journey into, as Serling himself
might have said, "a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination."
Given his impressive credentials, it's not surprising that Herrmann's
contributions are consistently outstanding. Soft brass
intertwined with a resonant vibraphone and tender harp ingeniously suggest
extreme isolation on "The Lonely," just as tracks like the spirited "Signals"
and the forlorn "Starlight"--both part of "The Outer Space Suite"--readily
reveal the composer's knack for generating simultaneously pleasing and
profound tunes.
The other artists offer equally engaging cues. Goldsmith's versatile style
is superbly displayed on "Back There," a passionate piece which, according to
the liner notes, was later recycled for the episodes "To Serve Man" and
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Van Cleave's eerie "Perchance to Dream"
spotlights the otherworldly sounds of primitive electronic instruments such
as the novachord and theremin, while melancholy horns and piercing strings
accentuate the haunting hallucinations suffered by the lone survivor of a
World War II plane wreck in Steiner's "King Nine Will Not Return."
The varied interpretations of the opening and closing themes are also
worthwhile, providing modern-day listeners with an opportunity to appreciate
the efforts that went into creating an appropriately mysterious motif for
this classic program. Twilight Zone - The 40th Anniversary Collection
is, quite simply, an amazingly comprehensive and compelling package that
should be an essential part of any SF music library.
