Music Book Review: Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring by Jon Burlingame

Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring
by Jon Burlingame (Music 781.546 Bur)

 

Author and journalist Jon Burlingame, whose books often focus on music for film and television, wrote TV’s Biggest Hits back in 1996, one of the first books to take a serious look at television music. Now he has just published Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring,” tremendously expanding on his previous book on the subject, and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.

 

One of the first big takeaways from this book for most readers will probably be about the early origins of television music. While most educated guessers would probably postulate that the methods for adding music to movies would be the primary influence, the reality is that a lot of early television shows started out life as what we now call “old time radio.” From roughly the 1920s to the 50s, radio was the dominant medium inside American homes, and serialized dramas in various formats were programmed on the radio. Obviously there was no picture, but between the dialogue, sound effects, and music, listeners could put the pictures together in their own heads that would accompany these stories. Although the television was invented in 1927, it wasn’t until 1947 that the modern era of commercial television broadcasting began, and most households started to pick up televisions in the late 40s. By the mid-50s, half of the homes in America had a television set. This means that the music in the early days of commercial broadcasting was conceptualized much more like it had been on the radio, and that meant the use of “canned” music, or pre-existing musical selections brought on at appropriate moments. This music was mostly stored by means of pressing it to 33 1/3 RPM “transcription records,” and could be used over and over. For programming that would happen on a weekly basis, adding up to dozens of hours of programming over time, this was a far more cost-effective way to work, compared to music for film, which would only need to be used for one production of an hour or two in length.

 

To some extent, television music over the decades has retained a bit of this practice, using canned music that’s more often known now as “library music,” as the companies producing it would create entire libraries of prerecorded selections to serve a variety of generic moods and transitions for television and film productions. David Chudnow founded the first of these music library companies, the Mutel Library, in the late 1940s, asked composers to write music for various moods, had their music recorded by overseas orchestras to avoid paying US musicians union fees, and made the music available to production companies on records that they could buy for relatively large sums, which in turn gave them the right to use the contents in their TV and film productions. But a few composers started to write original music for television shows, too. Despite catalogs of library music being available, there are inevitably going to be moments in a production where you just can’t quite find the right thing for a particular scene, and composers like Alexander Laszlo and Albert Glasser would write a custom cue to fit such scenes. Glasser started to take on some work like the series “Big Town” that was conceived in a manner similar to film as well, working from the scripts to come up with appropriate thematic and underscoring material.

 

A lot of early television music was classical in style, whether originally composed or from music libraries. The first major figure to change that was Henry Mancini, who brought jazz to the forefront in his work for the “Peter Gunn” series. The music became wildly popular on its own, and Alan Livingston, who was the VP of television of NBC, and had formerly been VP of the A&R department at Capitol records, saw the potential to release the music on an LP. Indeed, “The Music from Peter Gunn” hit #1 on the Billboard charts in 1959 and stayed there for 10 weeks, and also earned Mancini the Album of the Year Grammy. Around the same time, composer Benny Carter also created weekly jazz-inflected scores for the show “M Squad,” which also was released as an LP and garnered two Grammy nominations (and Carter also became the first black composer to get screen credits for writing an original prime-time score). Television music was on its way to becoming a respected art form all its own.

 

After some general history of the early days of music in television, most of Burlingame’s book is divided up by various television genres, rather than featuring an across-the-board chronological history. You’ll learn about the work of Mancini and Carter in the “Cop and Detective Shows” chapter, for example, and you’re likely to find a chapter dedicated to whatever your favorite kind of TV programming might be: westerns, sci-fi, dramas, comedies, action/adventure, documentaries and news, prime-time cartoons, and made for TV movies and miniseries all have their own sections covering their own full histories. Of course, every kind of show can require a range of moods, but considering that we think of television largely through the lens of these broad genres, the music within each category often settled into unique traditions and styles. It’s worth noting, though, that although this book is very thorough, it’s not an exhaustive look at every genre of television—as the title says, the focus is on “prime time,” or evening TV. That means that you’ll only find references to the music for game shows and soap operas, to name a couple of examples, mentioned in terms of various composers’ careers, many of whom wrote music for a wide variety of shows. And some of the more curious corners of the television world like infomercials aren’t on the bill.

 

As mentioned earlier, this book is essentially an overhaul and update to Burlingame’s previous book “TV’s Biggest Hits” from 1996. You’ll find updates in each section addressing television shows well into the Oughts and 2010s that keep the material fresh. Everything that’s here is very well-written and fun to follow. However, my biggest complaint about this book is that there isn’t much space devoted to the extreme changes that have taken place in the television industry since around 2000. Toward the end of the book, Chapter 12 is devoted to the music for programs on premium cable and streaming services, but it’s a short chapter that reads like an afterthought. For an era of programming that has often been referred to as “Television’s Second Golden Age,” full of popular programs with incredible music, I think that a book like this could easily contain as much information about the last 20 years of music for TV as it does for the first “Golden Age,” particularly considering that most of the new cable and original streaming shows are intended as prime time-style entertainment. The changes that technology has brought to the way audiences consume these programs, such as binge-watching instead of having to wait for weekly installments, also tend to make the details about musical themes and musical development within the shows more apparent to the average viewer, too.

 

I would definitely recommend this book for TV buffs, 20th C. history buffs, and those looking for some good old TV nostalgia. It will be a useful book for those aspiring to write music for TV as well, but it would be exponentially stronger in that arena with a dramatically expanded section on post-2000 television. Since that time, there have been drastic changes in the ways that composers produce finished music for TV and film that are nearly as paradigm-shifting as the transition between using library music cues and composers, and the whole subject is simply lacking here. Perhaps there will be a 2nd volume someday dedicated to these most recent decades and their rich music traditions, but until then, Music for Prime Time is a good start.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try TV a-go-go by Jake Austen or Hollywood Rhapsody: Movie Music and its Makers 1900-1975 by Gary Marmorstein.)

 

( official Jon Burlingame web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

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