Chapter 4 - The Scores of Dominic Frontiere and Robert Van Eps

Summary

The first season of The Outer Limits was known for its monster of the week and bleak yet thought-provoking scenarios. Stefano later recounted in the liner notes to a recording of Frontiere's cues for the series, that Frontiere's scores were something especially unique:

The music Dominic Frontiere writes for film is more than music. It is an alter ego of the film's characters. It is their inner-dialogue. As a rule, film music attempts to provoke a mood. Or else it underscores an action. Not Dominic's music. His, as these tracks from The Outer Limits will show, becomes a scene's sub-text, saying words unwritten. In fact, in Outer Limits episodes I'd written, often I would hear through Dominic's music thoughts and feelings I hadn't even experienced before. A wallflowery line of dialogue would suddenly blossom into a thing of unsuspected beauty. A throwaway remark would take on staggering import. It was aweinspiring. Which was why watching the first scored screening of an episode I'd written always had to be a solitary experience for me. I wanted no assistants around, no other members of the team. I wanted to discover the country Dominic's score had taken my screenplay to. […] The music takes me backward, not forward. Sometimes while listening I'll catch a glimpse of a star's face, an eerie setting, an unsettling effect. Quickly, though, the image dissolves and there remains only the music, free of the film moment responsible for its birth, an entity in and of itself, pure, authentic, soul-meant. It reaches into parts of me that were not yet born when I produced The Outer Limits. This is when I know how truly powerful is the music of Dominic Frontiere.

As Stefano notes here, Frontiere's music for the series took the visuals, dialogue, and the story to another level that Stefano did not always intend. It gave dialogue a different quality and, as such, allowed anyone watching to interpret the onscreen events in a diverse manner due to the power of imagination.