Chapter 7 - Less Frequent Used Composers

Summary

While the composers of the previous chapters wrote many scores for The Twilight Zone, the composers discussed in this chapter wrote four or fewer scores for the series. While we know that some of the composers such as Laurindo Almeida and Tommy Morgan were chosen to write scores for specific episodes that featured the instrument on which they were trained, the reason that other composers were asked to score certain episodes remains unknown. This chapter looks at these scores and examines the reason for their compositional style.

Jeff Alexander

Although Jeff Alexander was best known for his film scores such as The Tender Trap (1955) and Jailhouse Rock (1957), he did write music for television shows such as My Three Sons (1961-1963), The Lieutenant (1963-1964) and, of course, The Twilight Zone, for which he composed two original scores. Alexander was trained as a pianist and got his start in show business as a vaudeville performer. His first foray into composition was writing big band music. He eventually became one of the founders of the Screen Composers of America.

In “The Trouble With Templeton,” Booth Templeton (Brian Ahern) not only longs for his deceased wife Laura (Pippa Scott) when things go sour with his current wife, but also for his youth when he was not an aging theater star being bossed around by young directors. As Serling says in his intro, “Yesterday and its memories are what he wants. And yesterday is what he'll get.” During the opening scene when Booth muses about his fading past, a music box topped by twirling dancers that plays a romantic theme accompanies Booth's reminiscence of Laura as he says, “Eighteen when I married her […], twenty five when she died. You know there are some moments in life that have an indescribable loveliness to them. Those moments with Laura are all I have left now.” This music box music is not accounted for on the cue sheet but is a fragment of the main theme of Johann Strauss II's classic waltz An der schönen blauen Donau (On the Beautiful Blue Danube), Op. 314. Indeed, the music box is often a symbol that both internalizes and centralizes a past traumatic loss by featuring an aural fragment of a particular musical reality and highlighting a fragmentary part of someone's existence as well.