Intrada Soundtrack Forum

November 02, 1999

A Best List
- For All Time -
Part One

While working with Bruce Broughton recently on a research project for a paper he was doing I thought about great film scores. Really great.

Lists like this are meaningless mostly. Nothing matters. Just opinions. But they're fun to do sometimes. Here's one to peruse.

It's an "all time" list. My criteria was sorta broad. Probably great music, yes. But an emphasis on originality. Contributions that furthered the craft. Music that lasted. Sometimes over people's heads. Sometimes just popular stuff, easy to swallow. But music that worked. Where the movie and the particular music are inseparable - even after decades have passed.

And, mostly, just scores that I find amazing no matter what angle you approach. Whether your hearing a spectacular new rendition or wincing at ancient elements buried under dialog and effects. I'm listing no particular number per decade. Just randomly thinking of ones I like.

I'm starting with the thirties since it's where my interest starts. Where movies have sound, and original scores are up and running. I'm also pretty much going with American scores. I know I'm neglecting the importance of British, French, Russian music back then. Alwyn, Addinsell, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev, Auric, Honegger. I'm darting past Eisenstein, Fellini, the Ealing, Rank, Hammer scores. All of that stuff. But that's for another time. I still have too much to learn about it.


1930-1939

King Kong (1933 - Max Steiner)
Kinda predictable. Makes a great starting point though. The amount of music written was significant. Original music under the picture, from start to finish. Pulsating rhythms. Edgy chases and monster fight music. And a motif for the big ape. His own "theme". It's a landmark.

Bride Of Frankenstein (1935 - Franz Waxman)
Like Kong it furthered original music in movies. Maybe not as much original music as Kong had, but something pretty impressive. It pushed dissonance. Pretty aggressive for movies at the time. Even the primary motifs stressed some harmonic clashing. It's impossible to imagine the creation scene with any other music.

Adventures of Robin Hood (1938 - Erich Korngold)
Rousing, colorful. Not particularly challenging to the ear, though certainly challenging to play. Really exciting, with fanfares, fights, spectacle. Sweeping love themes, swashbuckling action music. It's wall-to-wall scoring, keeping everything moving right along. But it makes a great movie come alive. An example of a lengthy score that sounds fresh from start to finish.

Of Mice And Men (1939 - Aaron Copland)
What an opening cue. It was pretty new to have a pre-credit sequence in a movie. And Copland introduced the idea with one of his richest, most powerful melodic ideas. He also knew how to stay out of the way. This one's never overscored. Copland used music to score atmosphere without commenting heavily on the drama at all. And his music for the final chase is particularly effective.

Wuthering Heights (1939 - Alfred Newman)
Maybe the strongest thing I think this one did was showcase a romantic string theme. A truly memorable, really soaring theme. The Newman "string sound" had arrived. And "Cathy's Theme" made it clear that a rich and soaring movie melody (without words) could penetrate the ears and linger.

1940-1949

Citizen Kane (1941 - Bernard Herrmann)
Pretty hard to pass this one by. Something really neat was happening. Not just dramatic underscoring. But rags. Dances. Opera. And music timed for amazing effects. Sometimes simply a few bars. It wasn't just a background score. It was sound design - right in there with effects - dialog. With instrumental timbres unlike anything that had come before it. Just like the movie.

How Green Was My Valley (1941 - Alfred Newman)
Music that actually captured both place and mood. It's a movie with a lot of atmosphere. Despair, troubles in the coal mining industry. A family torn apart. Also a lot of love. Rich emotions. A boy growing up. All these elements were captured with sensitive music, flavored by the Welsh setting, always part of the drama. The music surrounding the strike scenes is especially powerful. And those Newman strings.

Best Years Of Our Lives (1946 - Hugo Friedhofer)
My favorite work of the thirties and forties. A candidate for best of all time. This one brought the Americana idiom to the fore. No score before it so richly captured a distinctive American musical sound. Coplandesque. Powerful. Subtle. Every cue linked to the Homer/Wilma storyline stood out. Just perfect, sensitive, sad writing. When Homer goes upstairs and shows Wilma his bedtime routine, without hands, Friedhofer simply defined sensitive writing. No other sequence in film up to then had more skillful music.

Double Indemnity (1944 - Miklos Rozsa)
This one was hard-edged. Dramatic. Nothing tender. Rozsa wrote an abrasive score, difficult music for an audience certainly, and made the picture to me. The unrelenting tone matched Billy Wilder's storytelling. As the insurance guy is sucked deeper and deeper into trouble, with no hope of survival, Rozsa draws his angular theme tighter and tighter. Right up until the very last scene. An amazingly powerful final cue.

Spellbound & The Lost Weekend (1945 - Miklos Rozsa)
These two brought Rozsa further up front. The theremin was a haunting sound, unforgettable in both pictures. Whether matching the unrelenting despair of Ray Milland's alcoholism, or coloring Gregory Peck's mental problems, the sounds were unique and - well, spellbinding.

The Heiress (1949 - Aaron Copland)
A landmark composer doing another amazing, powerful - and carefully spotted score. Again, never overscored. When Copland provided music it was noticed, felt, but seemed so right. Surely an example where a music Oscar seems proper.

November 09, 1999

A Best List
- For All Time -
Part Two

Continuing this look at film scores leaving an imprint I slide into the1950-1959 period with:

1950-1959

Broken Arrow (1950 - Hugo Friedhofer)
Not your usual western score. This one captured a Native American feel. A lot of woodwind solo colors. It wasn't the authenticity (or lack of) that stood out, but the feel. And a sense of nobility. One of the more powerful main titles up to that time. Strong, angled, heavy on intervals, a lot of brass. The music when James Stewart works his way deep into the Apache stronghold remains one of the most powerful cues in film. A great example of a composer not only highlighting specific drama in a movie but capturing an entire feel.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951 - Alex North)
Yes, it gets mentioned a lot. But North did more than use jazz in a film score the likes of which had not been noticed before. He integrated it into the fabric of a full orchestral work. Sometimes the jazzy sounds (bluesy trumpet, piano riffs) emerged from the larger orchestra in a seamless blend. The locale was certainly captured, but so was the powerful drama taking place. A pretty amazing thing to be able to do well.

High Noon (1952 - Dimitri Tiomkin)
An easy target because the song kinda made history. But what it did was amazing. It helped tell the story. And there's more. Tiomkin actually followed the stark black and white images (and for a western at that time these were pretty stark!) with restrained music. He focused not on the western landscape, or even feel, but the underlying tension in the story being told. And he paid attention to the editing. Western scores up until then rarely attempted this. Tiomkin did. His scoring of that late sequence, with Gary Cooper preparing for the showdown, the clocks ticking, the empty chair. It's just a superb cue.

On The Waterfront (1954 - Leonard Bernstein)
Another major American musical figure doing a film score. This one had one of the most innovative - and powerful musical openings of any picture to date. A solo French horn. That was it! A long, lean melody, almost arpeggio-like, climbing, then returning. Then muted trombone. As brass enter, the idea thickens. But never gets loud. Bernstein made a powerhouse musical statement. Then his score gets going. Later there's percussion. Aggressive orchestral outbursts. When Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando begin to relate, there's a love theme that remains one of my favorite melodies of all. And when Bernstein re-introduces that powerful solo French horn for a key scene late in the film - you know a masterpiece of composition has been worked out. No other film that I can think of has such a well-developed musical crescendo as this one does for the ending. Yes, it's a great scene, of course. But try to imagine Brando walking up that pier without Bernstein's unrelenting crescendo. I can't.

Them! (1954 - Bronislau Kaper)
Perhaps not the most frequently discussed score of the day. But to me it did something really amazing. Here was a real monster movie, all those giant ants, and a score that went for dark, dramatic shades instead. Restrained music. Few shrieks and screams. No stingers. The movie had a grim and dramatic story to tell, unfolded like a mystery. Monsters came later. Kaper chose to focus on the grim atmosphere from the very start. Rarely telegraphing any scares, he instead made them real. You took it all seriously.

East Of Eden (1955 - Leonard Rosenman)
An incredible landmark. Music of beauty - one of the most memorable melodies of the fifties. But there's more. Atonality. Serial writing. Stuff you heard in the concert hall. Compositional technique up the wazoo. Here was a thoroughly trained musician writing profoundly complex music in a medium for the masses. And how Rosenman slid from the warm and accessible to the layered and complex in a single bar. Unprecedented in movie music. Watch the opening. The warm main theme under the credits. Then complicated brass and woodwind figures as the movie starts.

A sidebar. Note the secondary theme, first heard as James Dean arrives home in the Salinas valley, and associated mostly with his father. It's developed in the final sequence in depth unlike few scores before or since. And it remains one of my own favorite melodic lines of all time. This score is literally a masterpiece.

The Man With The Golden Arm (1956 - Elmer Bernstein)
Another important score using elements of jazz. Often mentioned. But something else. Elmer Bernstein's dramatic sense. Here the music mirrored those frantic drug-induced traumas of Frank Sinatra, and captured his ambitions to become a drummer - at the same time. For just about every dramatic scene, dialog or otherwise, Bernstein heightened it. Kept it tense. A neat idea: having the solo trumpet line (identified with the streets) heard early as a jazzy figure, then brought back in the finish as a symphonic line for full orchestra.

The Brave One (1956 - Victor Young)
Okay, this one's a shot fired from a loose cannon. But it's one of my real favorites. No other film score captured the locale (a humble ranch in Mexico) so well as this one. The music was a leading character in the story. The emotional voice of the bull, the boy who loved him, Victor Young was there with heartfelt - and richly Spanish music. A neat sidebar: The original trailer for the movie (available on the DVD) actually climaxes with a huge (and I mean huge) credit for the music by Victor Young, recorded with a hundred piece orchestra!! When else did a trailer actually draw attention to the music in such fashion? RKO Pictures knew they had something special here.

Black Patch (1957 - Jerry Goldsmith)
Okay, this one has just one claim to fame. It introduced to the movies a composer without peer. The movie's forgotten. But look where the composer went. Listen and you'll notice already Goldsmith's incredible understanding of the orchestra, the sounds he wanted. A full orchestra - but without any trumpets! The results were somewhat dark, subdued. Virtually no western music cliches.

The Big Country (1958 - Jerome Moross)
Virtually the opposite of Black Patch. This one defined an American (Copland) musical landscape now applied to a western. Huge themes, evocative and expansive. But there is something else. It's vital and energetic unlike any western score before it. Everything had rhythm, the main themes, the secondary themes. There are times when the orchestra became simply one huge rhythmic machine. Perhaps the highlight: a long musical treatment of Charles Bickford's theme (amazingly omitted from the original United Artists soundtrack album!!!) as the final canyon showdown approaches.

The Old Man And The Sea (1958 - Dimitri Tiomkin)
Hemingway's always tough to do on screen. Once this picture got going most of it was out at sea. Just Tracy and the boat. Tiomkin had a lot to do. He wisely avoided an expansive or soaring "seagoing" kind of thing. The music was often subtle. Intricate things going on in the orchestra. Tiomkin catches the bird flying above, the marine life darting about, the terrifying shark. And always the lonely fisherman.

Ben-Hur (1959 - Miklos Rozsa)
A lot of important stuff here but one thing towers. The sheer amount of music written. Hours of it. Numerous major themes. Incredibly long sequences of score. And always cohesive throughout. One of the best examples of using individual motifs for major characters and events. There's the proud one for Ben-Hur, a nasty one for Messala, a rich one for the love story, a reverent one with chorus for Christ, one for the Jews. There's music for spectacle, for battles. Roman fanfares. Everything you'd want in an epic historical movie. And the showstopper: here's a movie with an enormous, lengthy overture, then an opening sequence of background story completely scored, then a dramatization of the entire birth of Christ, all set to music, a fanfare, then finally a segue into the main title. By the time the words Ben-Hur spread across the screen you've listened to a symphony!!

November 16, 1999

A Best List
- For All Time -
Part Three

The sixties are my beginnings. Armed with my first record player a monster was created. Expect me to favor scores from this period to the present.

When I conclude this whole thing with the nineties I’ll spotlight the best one from each decade. I’ll even try to come up with one greatest for all-time. Whoopee!

A parenthesis. Something interesting was going on early in this decade. A number of aging pioneers were in closing phases of their careers yet were turning out some of their most inspired work. While not groundbreaking, these scores represent in a single brief, highly concentrated period, some of the most moving and powerful of all-time. Proof, you ask? Between 1960 and 1965 we find: The Alamo (Tiomkin), King Of Kings (Rozsa), One Eyed Jacks (Friedhofer), Mutiny On The Bounty (Kaper), Taras Bulba (Waxman), How The West Was Won (Newman), Fall Of The Roman Empire (Tiomkin) and Lord Jim (Kaper). Surely this is proof positive not all composers are burned out near the end.

1960-1969

Spartacus (1960 - Alex North)
My own personal favorite score. Along with The Best Years Of Our Lives and a couple of others this is an honest candidate for the single greatest score ever written. Never was a main title so musically perfect. Lots of highlights in this one. Listen to what North does in the scene where two gladiators fight to the death, with another reluctant pair (Spartacus and Draba) waiting in the wings for their turn. North doesn’t catch any clashing action in the arena, rather he ponders the silence in the dugout. A great example of music adding profound layers to the onscreen drama.

Exodus(1960 - Ernest Gold)
Easily one of the richest melodies to come from the movies. Easily one of the finest examples of a composer fashioning a single theme to perfectly capture, underline, summarize an entire picture. A worthy candidate for the most haunting movie melody of all time.

The Magnificent Seven(1960 - Elmer Bernstein)
An important western score. Incredibly energetic, even when the picture wasn’t. An example of a theme being so popular it was recorded commercially a number of times that year by numerous artists - except the composer!!! (For a real version the public had to wait several years for a sequel, prompting the score’s first release). The fact that this theme became a signature tune for the Marlboro cigarette folks makes it all the more legendary.

El Cid (1961 - Miklos Rozsa)
Perhaps not groundbreaking, but lengthy, incredibly rich in detail. Few film scores have matched the passion, epic scope, massive battles, and truly moving romantic storyline as this one does. A true "widescreen" score.

Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961 - Henry Mancini)
Tender and touching film music reaching the public interest like never before. With a tune like "Moon River" and an ending aimed at your heartstrings it was destined for success. Listen to Mancini’s opening. Contrary to popular belief the tune does not first emerge as a vocal, but as a solo line for accordion.

To Kill A Mockingbird (1962 - Elmer Bernstein)
Probably an easy target because it’s talked about still. But Bernstein did more than capture the flavor of the period and the kids point of view. He defined sensitive scoring. Gone was the huge orchestra. Rarely lifting above chamber forces Bernstein simply used just what he felt necessary. A line for piano - left hand only. A solo flute. Exposed passages for solitary clarinet, wisps of accordion. Still a model for understatement in film music.

Goldfinger (1964 - John Barry)
An exception to my focus on American work. But the impact in Hollywood was there. Just like the film something new was here. Brash, brassy. Trumpets way above the staff. Trombones way below it. More than the preceding From Russia With Love this score took off like a rocket - as did the movie. Spies were here to stay. Spy music was too.

Doctor Zhivago (1965 - Maurice Jarre)
Another tune really popular with the public. But give Jarre real credit here. He scored the inner love story, not the spectacle or massive backdrop in the story. More than in his previous Lawrence Of Arabia (a terrific one too) Jarre used a single melody to dig and haunt at the audience. It worked. While some composers would have been drawn to those big revolution scenes Jarre was restrained. Another composer from outside the U.S. had arrived. Hollywood was indeed changing.

A Patch Of Blue (1965 - Jerry Goldsmith)
Chamber-like scoring, plus economical placing of music. Only where it might enhance. This one really established Goldsmith’s incredible (and possibly unrivaled) dramatic sense. No score used harmonica like this one (except perhaps his own Lilies Of The Field). It was to be a sound Goldsmith would return to again for years.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966 or so - Ennio Morricone)
Another glance outside of Hollywood. But not really. This is the one that changed film scoring here more than any other. It took a couple of years to reach these shores but when it did movie scores were flipped upside down. Gone were the expansive themes. The energetic rhythms. The Coplandesque Americana. Morricone used sounds unlike any composer before him. Whips. Whistles. Humming. Slaps. Grunts. Whatever - it was all fair game. Cues could be lengthy. They could be less than five seconds. The Morricone sound became the one to parody. Cover versions galore. Marching bands at half-time. (Morricone did earlier movies in this Dollars trilogy but it was this final chapter that really caught the attention of the public.)

The Graduate (1967 - Simon & Garfunkel/Dave Grusin)
Sure, songs had become a part of movies now. Presley. Musicals. Bond titles. But here was a series of vocals that became part of the picture. The mood. The story line. Though Grusin contributed a few pieces the songs were the thing. Great songs too. One only has to see the titles with Hoffman on the escalator to feel the impact.

Planet Of The Apes (1968 - Jerry Goldsmith)
A textbook example of taking a tiny motif and creating an entire score around it. And the use of music - almost like sound design. Unusual music. Chilling, certainly other-worldly. And all produced by players in the standard orchestra. The mixing bowls. Brass players blowing air through instruments without mouthpieces. And that ram’s horn when Heston first sights the apes on horseback. If you ever need to realize the power music can have with visuals look no further.

Midnight Cowboy (1969 - John Barry)
Barry, now part of the Hollywood mainstream. And a score full of songs. Unlike The Graduate this movie used both songs and score to tell the story. Barry managed to fashion an instrumental theme that held its own against a very popular Nilsson song. That both were so perfectly suited to the picture was amazing. That both were hits was inevitable.

Next up - the seventies. An interesting twist. As the sixties closed the impact on composers from overseas was tremendous. Delerue. Rota. Many others. All styles of music too. Rock, any manner of popular songs. Whatever advanced (or sometimes had nothing to do with) the plot. Hollywood movies were no longer a platform for the huge symphonic score.
To bring things full circle one composer in the seventies (almost) exclusively turned back the clock. To do so he digressed some forty years. The seventies were about to take a giant leap backwards.

November 23, 1999

A Best List
- For All Time -
Part Four

The seventies. Music scores came in all shapes and sizes. Serious composers could turn in funny music (Jerry Goldsmith doing S*P*Y*S) and popular composers could do something serious (Henry Mancini on The White Dawn) and sometimes the whole thing just became a bunch of songs (American Graffiti). Sometimes both were combined (Elmer Bernstein and crew with Animal House). Huge epic films could get offbeat electronic scores (Carmine Coppola scoring Apocalypse Now) and horror movies could get complex classical sounds (The Exorcist). Important symphonic composers could find themselves simply adapting someone else’s music (Leonard Rosenman penning Barry Lyndon). And Jack Nitzsche gave the saw a home with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

All of the above worked in their own special ways.

Important scores did happen. And somewhere in the later part of the decade one composer brought traditional orchestral scores back with a vengeance.

1970-1979

Patton (1970 - Jerry Goldsmith)
Goldsmith’s often-discussed score was complex, subtle, at once patriotic, then introverted, cerebral. And it lost an Oscar bid to a mono-thematic score for Love Story by Francis Lai!! This was the decade when the Academy Award for "best music" became a farce. But no matter. Goldsmith added another layer to an already complex film unlike any score that had come before. A standout feature: there was little more than a ½ hour of scoring for the three hour movie. The trumpets (recorded through an echoplex) have since become a war movie cliche.

Dirty Harry (1972 - Lalo Schifrin)
That more attention was not accorded this score back when is nonsense. Schifrin nailed the urban settings, the nervous community periled by serial killings - and the most vivid cop ever to hit the screen. Not just a jazzy score. Tight. Complex. Creepy female voices for the killer. Arpeggio-dominated electric piano for Eastwood. Everything fit like a glove.

Chinatown (1974 - Jerry Goldsmith)
Yep, here he is again already. Written in two weeks, Goldsmith dramatically focused his music somewhere between the period (1930s) setting and the complex musical possibilities of the seventies. His trumpet carried flavor, his strings added edge and complexity. In the history of movie music there are few scores as carefully placed, subtly scored - and as listenable apart from the visuals.

Jaws (1975 - John Williams)
The composer had been around for quite some time, the director less so. But Spielberg made movie history. Lines around the block. And millions of people humming a two-note half-step snippet of a melody. An Academy Award winner. A standout feature - noticing where music wasn’t! If Spielberg and Williams didn’t want you to think shark - they left those two notes in the dust. And when there was music... Rarely has a film score led audiences so easily by the nose. My favorite cue - quite simply the end credits. No cheap thrills. The shark is gone. Williams worked his secondary theme, omitted the shark material, and fashioned a rich and warm wrap-up.

The Omen (1976 - Jerry Goldsmith)
Continuing to dominate the decade, Goldsmith unleashed the choral side of his personality with cold-blooded ferocity. Cries, whispers, intense rhythmic chanting. And a powerful orchestra driving it all. Perhaps the most rhythmically alive film score up to that point. Took an Oscar. And deservedly so.

Star Wars (1977 - John Williams)
The big one. Williams, Oscar material, a movie that made history, a soundtrack success story of incredible proportions. The album actually jockeyed with a major Fleetwood Mac album in some circles for chart-topping sales! And in one single two hour stroke Williams made old-fashioned Erich Korngold swashbuckling thirties and forties music the sound to beat! But there is much more. The harmonic language moved effortlessly between that earlier style and aggressive, dissonant and propulsive sounds identified with intense concert hall works of the day. Not just two hours of background music. Theme after theme. Motifs up the wing wang. All incredibly well-constructed, woven together. Material comes and goes as fast as the space ships on screen, but always musically coherent. Never had an orchestral film score hit with the mainstream like this one did. For the moment, orchestras ruled.

Halloween (1978 - John Carpenter)
All the above said, Carpenter did a 180-degree turn and had in his own way, a similar impact. An electronic score. A low budget. But a sound. Something that just worked. This time the synthesizer seemed part of the picture, not cheap background support. Carpenter showed, in his own movie, the effectiveness of the keyboard, the noodles and tinkling of a truly minimalist score. From Williams to Carpenter. Two opposite sides of a coin. Film music was moving in all directions.

Alien (1979 - Jerry Goldsmith)
The score I consider Goldsmith’s most challenging. Most complex. I recall talking with the late Len Engel about this one, the intense composing period, the recording sessions, the album editing. There’s probably no other score using such terrifying musical devices, nor a writer with a better understanding of string instruments and how to compose for them. And there’s a serpent in the orchestra too!

This easily seemed the most varied decade. As a result, low budget knock-offs of Star Wars got huge symphonic scores (sometimes the biggest credit in the movie!) and big budget fright fests could get tiny electronic mood pieces. An interesting way to enter the nineties.

November 30, 1999

The Twilight Zone
Composed by Bernard Herrmann
Conducted by Joel McNeely
Varese Sarabande 302 066 087 2
2 Discs (93 Tracks)
Total Time = 106:30

A brief respite from the "best of..." column courtesy of Varese Sarabande.

If you’re a fan of the tuba read on. You’ve got two of ‘em coming. Follow me a few paragraphs and it’ll make sense.

Music at CBS must’ve been held in pretty high regard. Shows like The Twilight Zone, Have Gun Will Travel and Gunsmoke carried music by Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Franz Waxman, others. Later episodes of Gunsmoke even had Elmer Bernstein music.

The Twilight Zone music has had considerable attention. Five volumes on LP, two on CD from Varese Sarabande, plus all five original volumes on CD from SLC in Japan (one with additional music in fact.) Recently all five volumes again appeared on CD in a newly sequenced package clustering the Herrmann and Goldsmith segments into bunches. Padded with library material (some not used in the series) and including dialog tracks by Rod Serling, the set seems bloated, not quite as enjoyable a listen as the original volumes were.

Now the music returns home on the Varese label. This time all Herrmann and nothing but Herrmann. Everything he contributed. Newly recorded in superbly played fashion (by London musicians) and conducted with incredible detail by Joel McNeely.

The two-disc set reprises episodes heard before as well as premiers four complete suites not recorded before. Each score is presented in its entirety.

Make a bee line for "Eye Of The Beholder". Anyone familiar with the show recalls the impact music had on the episode. Doctors and nurses working with a woman, face wrapped in bandages. When the bandages were finally removed, one of the most memorable moments in television happened.

Herrmann loved harps, vibraphones, usually in arpeggio fashion. It was a trademark through much of his work. This episode was a certainly a showcase. Through most of the score these two instruments provide slow arpeggio figures, lending a mostly neutral, sometimes unsettling tone for the woman pleading inside the bandages, praying her ugly features have been replaced by beauty. Finally the bandages come off.

And now we come to those two tubas.

When the strips are finally pulled loose (The Last Bandage) Herrmann introduces muted brass chords. The face is revealed to be gorgeous. But the doctors claim "no change". They turn on lights, face the camera and... Herrmann takes over. Two tubas in low fifths hammer one of the most incredible, bone-chilling motifs to come from the screen, big or small. Recorded in stunning crispness on this album it makes one fantastic moment indeed. Through the next cue (Hysteria) these tubas pound, bleat, race. There are jabs of muted brass but its those tubas that draw blood.

The set offers additional highlights (though those tubas are worth the price alone!) including suites from "Little Girl Lost", "Living Doll" and "Ninety Years Without Slumbering". Of particular note is the variety of material Herrmann manages for "Living Doll" using just four players (2 harps, celeste and bass clarinet).

I wasn’t familiar with "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" and found it to be a marvelous discovery, especially enjoying the woodwind solos (flute, oboe, clarinets, bass clarinet) over harp and vibraphone. Herrmann was nearly without peer in orchestration, in knowing the colors possible when combining one instrumental sound with another, knowing what registers those instruments spoke best in, all that stuff.

With these transparent scores designed for small groups he had many a field day.

And there are the scores familiar from previous recordings. Heard like never before. Take "Where Is Everybody?" and the small orchestra Herrmann used. Now revealed are the amazing textures he went for, from solo writing through a full ensemble sound. Portions of this score remain some of the most recognizable cues appearing throughout the series.

Probably standing apart from the others is the suite from "Walking Distance". Written for strings and harp it became one of the composers most lyrical works. Often played under dialog the music wove a haunting, wistful, sad elegy to a time gone by. Hearing the violas finally separated from the violins, for example, is a treasure unto itself. What was before a moving work available only in mono is now finally a revelation in stereo.

Next week: the "best of the eighties".

Unless producer Bob Townson pops in with more newly-recorded Twilight Zone music, like the ones by Jerry Goldsmith - hint, hint.