From 1965 through 1980, scoring music for television was an especially brutal gig. Composer Quincy Jones writes in his autobiography Q: "Television scoring can be one of the most stressful and demanding jobs in the musical profession...we all busted our asses keeping up." Keep in mind that this was a time when scoring 30 to 40 minutes of new music once a week for as much as a 40 piece orchestra was considered the norm. The workload was grueling. Oliver Nelson who succeeded Jones as the composer for the TV show Ironside famously and tragically died from a heart attack after a scoring session. Perhaps because of the pressure, the television music that came out of this time period was usually quite good, if not iconic. Jones and company may have been practitioners of what is now a lost art form. Today's television scores pale in comparison.
With this in mind, and with no commercial interruption, we bring you five examples of great television scoring going back to the late '60s and winding up in the '80s.
Ironside (1967-1975) Original opening theme and series music composed by Quincy Jones
Those two screaming synthesizer notes. The military pattern on the snare drums. The telegraph-like clanging that sounds like a marimba and piano doubled in their highest registers. Weird woodwind chords, brass in pocket, then POW! The gunshot! And then the theme starts. With a Quincy Jones television score, you always got your money's worth and then some. In fact, another more experienced TV composer warned Jones early on: "Don't try to write Stravinsky's Firebird Suite for every episode, or you'll never live through the year."
Below is Ironside's opening theme as described. And yes, Quentin Tarantino appropriated the theme for Uma Thurman's flashbacks in his ultraviolent revenge flick Kill Bill.
Star Trek (1966-1970) Original opening theme composed by Alexander Courage. Series music composed by too many other people to name here.
The two scenes in the first video below include just about every musical motif you will hear over the course of every single season of the original Star Trek. Check out the deep electric bass and muted trumpet that follows Dr. McCoy's somber diagnosis. Or the brass chords punctuating some blue Andorian ass-kicking by James T. Kirk. Nobody composes musical cues for television like this anymore. But unlike Ironside, Star Trek's music was reused over and over again, its various themes accompanying sometimes wildly divergent scenes and scripts. It's a technique similarly used by composers of classic opera, although the show's notoriously small budget probably had everything to do with this creative recycling.
Brand new music was composed for some episodes by a variety of composers. One example is Mr. Spock's rocking duet with one of the sexier members of the children of Eden ashram who crashed for a few days on the Enterprise.