Chapter 2 - From Stoney Burke and One Step Beyond to The Outer Limits: Cue Reuses

Summary

As David Byrne, front man of the band Talking Heads, wrote so eloquently, “the same music placed in a different context can not only change the way a listener perceives the music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning. How music works, or doesn't work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation, but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it, and when you hear it.” The reuse of music cues allows the music to become recontextualized and permits further recontextualization. While other contemporary shows such as The Twilight Zone utilized music from their respective network music libraries aside from commissioning multiple composers to write original episode scores, The Outer Limits used one composer per season, using that composer's previously written cues as library music. For season one, Dominic Frontiere relied on his cues from the Western Stoney Burke, while for season two, Harry Lubin reused and retrofitted many of his cues from the science fiction anthology show, Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond and The Loretta Young Show. Thus, the reuse of stock cues in other episodes and series allows the viewer with an acutely tuned ear to associate the cue with any previously associated uses.

Appendix 1 contains all of the cues used in each episode of The Outer Limits, noting from which series and episode each originally came. The reuse of cues in multiple episodes and multiple series was possible because viewers rarely made any connections between their reuses. All of the music for Daystar Productions’ shows was the work of a single composer, Dominic Frontiere, with a few exceptions by Robert Van Eps (which I will address in Chapter 4) and Harry Lubin, which I will discuss in Chapter 5. The same musical production team that created Stoney Burke worked on The Outer Limits: John Elizalde as music supervisor, Dominic Frontiere as composer and production executive, and Roger Farris as music coordinator and copyist.