by jon » Sun Jan 12, 2014 6:49 pm
I'd really have to do some serious looking through a lot of TV shows to answer this one, but Firedog got me thinking about what great combo composer/conductors have applied their skills to theme music for TV (and, of course, movies) over the years. Henry Mancini and Nelson Riddle come immediately to mind, but there were many others. At CHQM, when I had access to all the new releases, it was amazing to see how many TV themes by Mancini showed up as 45 rpm singles. And they were all great, even when the TV show bombed. There were actually more themes than you might think, as a single time spot on network TV might be rotating weekly through several different series, typically in the 90-120 minute TV movie format. It is easy to forget, for example, that Columbo was never on every week, to the best of my knowledge, and there were probably three other series that occupied the same time slot.
I'm currently watching Gunsmoke from 1961 at the moment, and there is my all-time favourite composer of movie music, Bernard Herrmann, in the credits for all the Music in the last three episodes I've been watching. This is the guy who did the amazing music for Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Vertigo and Psycho, being hired to compose the music specifically for only three episodes of a TV show that lasted 20 years. If you look him up on imdb.com and add up all his credits under Music Department, Composer and Sound Track, you'll find hundreds of TV episodes where he was involved in the Music.