![]() ![]() Although the underlying animation changed from season to season-the floating door didn’t appear until the fourth season-the theme for The Twilight Zone stayed more or less the same from then on. One person who didn’t get to appreciate the first appearance of The Twilight Zone theme over the air was Marius Constant, who wouldn’t find out until years later that his music had been used as a theme song. If that sounds like something out of The Twilight Zone, well, where else would the theme have come from? Throughout the late 1950s, Gluskin traveled to Europe, where the AFM’s rules didn’t apply, commissioned musical cues from European composers at cut-rate prices, recorded them there, and shipped the tape back to CBS with all rights secured in perpetuity and no need to worry about providing workers with a dignified retirement. Gluskin and CBS responded by seeking out cheaper, more easily exploitable labor-first, allegedly, with whatever happened that got him kicked out of the union, and then abroad. He denied that he’d done anything wrong, but his incentive to do so wasn’t hard to understand, because he helpfully explained it in a 1956 congressional hearing: Recording music for television cost too much money because the AFM required studios to contribute to its pension fund. Gluskin was accused of recording music under false pretenses, ostensibly hiring session musicians to make a commercial record, but then using the recordings as television cues instead. At the time, AFM’s contracts with television stations were built around a live music model-a holdover from radio days, according to Gluskin-and specifically forbade networks from building reusable music libraries that could be shared among shows. In 1956, the American Federation of Musicians took the extraordinary recourse of fining him $5,000 and expelling him from their membership for a related violation of union rules. Here’s that original version-the theme from The Twilight Zone that nobody knows how to hum-as seen in the show’s pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody,” on Oct. The original theme for The Twilight Zone was written by legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann, but was sent to the memory hole for decades in favor of a new introduction with Constant’s royalty-free music. Marius Constant, the original composer, was unaware for years that he’d accidentally written the theme to a popular television show, and for decades was paid nothing beyond his original fee, even as the show lived longer than Walter Jameson in syndication. It’s two pieces of music spliced together from a stock library CBS built as part of a cost-saving and union-busting campaign. The problem is that the music we all know as the theme from The Twilight Zone isn’t, in fact, the theme from The Twilight Zone. Its creepy-crawly charm transcends all cultural barriers in Twilight Zone: The Movie, it even ignores cross-species boundaries, much to Albert Brooks’ dismay. The theme from The Twilight Zone is one of the most easily recognizable pieces of music of the 20 th century, a four-note motif for electric guitar with hair-raising dissonances that conjure up the uncanny and the unknown in an almost Pavlovian way.
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