From the rattling charge of The Lone Ranger to the slick, warbling vocals of White Lotus, music for television has been beckoning us to the couch for the best part of a century.
In Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring, Jon Burlingame has charted the history of music for telly in the form of an elegiac sort of look back at the medium as streaming overtook network TV and the 2007 writers’ strike looked to have changed the medium forever. Now a new edition, released in the context of a new and bitterly long writers’ and actors’ strike, may serve as an elegy for the streaming age too.
Jon joins Andy from Los Angeles to fire up the cathode ray and listen to the music of the medium, with plenty of memorable tunes in the mix.
Featuring themes and music from:
The Lone Ranger
Rawhide
The Twilight Zone (Bernard Herrmann)
The Twilight Zone (Marius Constant)
Peter Gunn
Hawaii Five-0
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
Mission, Impossible
Get Smart
The Jetsons
The Flintstones
Gilligan’s Island
All In The Family
Cheers
Hill Street Blues
The West Wing
Pride & Prejudice
Jeeves & Wooster
Deadwood
The Sopranos
Game of Thrones
Succession
White Lotus
The West Wing (closing credits)
The Music Show is made on Gadigal and Gundungurra Country
Technical production by Russell Stapleton on Gadigal Country
Maanyung on saltwater, sand, and sound & Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth
Pits, picket lines and pop music: the 1984-5 UK miners' strike
Sir Andrew Davis remembered, and Martha Wainwright returns to Australia
Beethoven and Webern with Timo-Veikko Valve and Aura Go, and Alison Cotton's Engelchen: how opera-loving sisters helped evacuate Jewish refugees
Ann Savoy: a life in Cajun music and Wilbur Whitta's Wildfire
Recorders, Fiddles, Clogs and Swords
Benjamin Northey on conducting and community & remembering Clarence 'Frogman' Henry
The Music of Remembrance with Jeremy Eichler
Sam Anning's earthenware and Beethoven's Missa solemnis at 200
Víkingur Ólafsson's infinite variety, and remembering Maurizio Pollini
One Queen of the Cross, two Finnish fiddlers and a century of women composers
Peter Garrett's unwavering optimism and Jo Davies' first season at the helm of Opera Australia
Corinne Bailey Rae on Black resilience and the freedom of a career left turn
Simone Young conducts Gurrelieder and Eleanor McEvoy hits the road
Lisa O'Neill and Cormac Begley live at WOMADelaide
Marta Pereira da Costa, The Good Ones and Katanga Junior live at WOMADelaide
Polyphony and protest with Windborne, loops and language with Allara
Dancing across the world with Angélique Kidjo & Maatakitj, and from opera to cabaret with Anna Dowsley
Jazz Money's poetic ventures into music and Cameron Undy's ghostly rhythms
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