Intradiegetic music.

Music also plays a role in narrative television by furnishing background, or “underscore,” music for narrative programs, similar to the role of music in narrative films. Like film music, intradiegetic television music often uses themes as leitmotifs to signify characters and settings in a TV narrative. Music also creates moods in the story, recalls past events or predicts future events, builds action or suspense, reveals the inner thoughts of characters, and transitions from scene to scene. In the early years dramatic music on TV functioned much like its counterpart in film, often anchoring the audience to the image and sounds of a program and adding another dimension of sound and meaning to the show.

During the radiophonic era dramatic genres such as anthology dramas and soap operas were acted live on stage, and live music accompanied the action. In these programs a pianist, organist, or small orchestra would play as live action took place in an adjacent studio, with the conductor or solo performer watching a monitor. Because such production practice was expensive, many producers soon opted to use recorded music, where a music editor would “needle drop” musical cues from a vinyl LP record. This practice led to the AFM banning recorded music from its members until a deal for a system for paying royalties was negotiated in 1950 (even though no such system existed for the film industry).

As TV emerged in the late 1940s, film studios regarded it as a rival medium and either ignored it or sought to limit its influence. At the same time small, independent film companies sprang up to make films for television. Frederick Ziv, who developed a radio–television syndicate, became one of the most famous of these independent producers and began his career with the daytime children’s Western series The Cisco Kid, with music by Albert Glasser. Glasser set the trend in early TV scoring by recording a set of cues in France to circumvent the expense of hiring union musicians and to avoid the AFM ban. These cues were recycled in the show and even sold to other shows, creating a library like those used in B movies.

Glasser’s work compiling his small library of cues for specific TV series led to imitators. The MUTEL (“Music for Television”) Music Service was created by David Chudnow, a former music editor for Republic and Monogram film studios, in 1951. Many of the cues in MUTEL probably originated in stock tracking libraries that Chudnow had assembled for B movies in film studios where he was a music supervisor. Chudnow created MUTEL in part because of the AFM’s ban on recording cues for TV tracking and partly as a way to market his pre-existing stock cue library. The MUTEL scoring service provided both custom themes for such early TV series as “The Adventures of Superman” and a library of cues for tracking episodes of many shows. Among the other TV series that made much use of MUTEL were Racket Squad, Captain Midnight,Broken Arrow, Annie Oakley, Sky King, and Ramar of the Jungle. Other TV music packaging services followed, including Omar Music, Gordon Music, Guild Production Aids, Structural Music, and the Capitol “Q”-Series Library (see Production music).

The major film studios ended the boycott of network television in 1955, when Warner Bros. produced three programs, Cheyenne, Kings Row, and Casablanca, based on their earlier studio films. Of the three, only “Cheyenne,” a Western starring Clint Walker, was successful. Music for the series was scored by the B-movie composers William Lava and Leith Stevens; the other two programs contained music by David Buttolph. As other film studios followed, many film music composers tried their hand at composing for the new medium. Bernard Herrmann, who had scoredCitizen Kane and many of the Alfred Hitchcock films of the 1950s, composed the original theme music for The Twilight Zone and Have Gun—Will Travel and provided music for several episodes of these programs as well as cues for Gunsmoke and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Leonard Rosenman, who composed scores for such films as The Cobweb and East of Eden, scored several episodes of Combat!, Marcus Welby, M.D., and The Virginian, among other TV shows. Hershel Burke Gilbert, who composed several Academy Award–caliber film scores (The Moon is Blue, Carmen Jones), composed music for such TV Westerns as The Rifleman and Gunsmokeand for popular shows like Perry Mason and Burke’s Law. As television gained viewership, a symbiotic relationship between film and TV scoring became apparent, with many film composers working in television, but also newly minted television composers moving to film. Jerry Goldsmith worked primarily in television in the 1950s, scoring programs like Climax!, Dr. Kildare, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., before breaking into film in the 1960s with scores forLonely are the Brave,Seven Days in May, and Von Ryan’s Express. John Williams, who began his career as a TV music copyist, scored programs like Kraft Suspense Theater and Irwin Allen’s sci-fi series The Time Tunnel and Lost in Space, before composing for blockbuster movies including the Star Wars andIndiana Jones films.

Much music in this cinematic period of TV was composed in the post-Romantic symphonic style of much Hollywood film music, but other musical styles began to creep into television music. Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn score and other programs of the late 1950s and early 1960s used jazz. The police drama M Squad featured a theme composed by Count Basie and a score by Shorty Rogers. Other shows that followed Basie’s and Mancini’s lead were 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye, with words and music by Mack David and Jerry Livingston, respectively. Bluegrass and country music were included in pastoral programs like The Beverly Hillbillies and, later, The Dukes of Hazard, the latter featuring music performed by Waylon Jennings.

Rock and pop music slowly made its way into intradiegetic television music, just as it had with diegetic television music. The first show to treat rock music intradiegetically was The Monkees in 1966. Taking advantage of the popularity of the Beatles’ films A Hard Day’s Night andHelp!, the producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson sought to create a made-for-TV group based on the Beatles that could be exploited for record sales. The program featured four charismatic actor-musicians shown performing songs composed by the Hollywood insiders Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart in an unconventional weekly situation comedy format. Songs performed during the show blended diegetic and intradiegetic music that accompanied rapidly paced visual montages of the actors on screen. The commercial success of The Monkees led to at least one imitator, The Partridge Family (1970–74, with the teen-idol singer David Cassidy). The show also set a precedent for featuring pop music within a story line and was followed by programs like Fame(1982–7), a television adaptation of the film musical, and Cop Rock (1990), a bizarre and unsuccessful hybridization of police drama and film musical.

Other TV shows in the 1960s featured music that pointed to an increased influence of rock. Hawaii Five-O, a police drama that debuted in 1968, featured a theme song composed by the CBS music director Morton Stevens with a big band sound and a rock beat played by Polynesian-sounding drums. Ironside (music by Quincy Jones) and The Mod Squad (music by Earle Hagen) also featured rock-influenced theme music as did Mike Post’s scoring for The Rockford Files.

Although these composers paved the way for greater musical stylistic diversity on television, authentic rock music truly came to narrative television with the program Miami Vice. By 1984 music videos had become influential as purveyors of popular music in the United States, and the editing techniques of quick cuts and montage, and surrealistic images of music video became compelling for television as well. The NBC president Brandon Tartikoff appointed Michael Mann to produce an “MTV cops” concept show, and Mann chose the Czech keyboard player Jan Hammer, who had played with the jazz-fusion group the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the 1970s, to compose music for the series. Hammer’s theme suggests truly progressive rock of the 1980s, utilizing synthesizer, distorted guitar, and Latin-style percussion.

Hammer’s music to Miami Vice marked the beginning of a postmodern “televideo” era for TV music in which the use of music on TV expanded, as did the multiplicity of musical styles on TV. Programs like Northern Exposure featured a wide array of intradiegetic music ranging from opera to blues, rock, and pop. The soundtrack of the show is permeated with music, and the distinction between diegetic and intradiegetic music is blurred. Post continued his work with scores that could be called easy listening or smooth jazz in Hill Street Blues, and rock and world music in NYPD Blue. Also, the proclivity demonstrated in Miami Vice to feature pop tunes in its narrative was copied by shows like Beverly Hills, 90210, The O.C., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, and Grey’s Anatomy. In turn, from the 1980s music exhibited postmodern traits of self-reflexive parody and pastiche in programs like Chicago Hope, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and The Simpsons. Rap music, or at least a version of it, appeared with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Despite the plethora of music styles featured in TV programs of the 1980s and 90s, the overall trend in narrative shows was to include less music. Shows like Frasier and Seinfeld had attenuated theme music at the beginning in order to get viewers into the show more quickly and to provide more time for advertising.

With the advent of cable television in the 1980s, and its specialty channels such as Home Box Office (HBO) and MTV, a strategy of narrowcasting was developed which involved programs being marketed to specific demographic audiences. Programs would also feature popular music that was often compiled on CD or MP3 downloads, and websites would be developed based on the show. Popular music that would appeal to this demographic was featured in episodes of the show, and music from these episodes in turn would be marketed through the sale of CDs and MP3 downloads and broadcast from Internet websites generated by the production studio and from fans. The result of such intertextual and intermedia proliferation of music has demonstrated the importance of multiple modes of presentation and highlighted the dominance of large corporate conglomerates that own both TV network and recording companies. Programs in the 1990s and 2000s like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, Beverly Hills, 90210, and The X Filesgenerated many websites and music CD sales, all of which generated more interest in the TV show.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1412