TV Themes, A Book & Remembered Music

 by whiteray

Readers of last week’s post here might recall that the list of artists that take up the most space on my hard drive devoted to music included the names of three composers of soundtracks: John Barry (who scored the first swatch of James Bond movies and many other films during a long career), Ramin Djawadi (who scored, among other projects, the Game Of Thrones series), and Trevor Morris (who scored, also among other projects, Vikings, The Tudors and The Borgias). 

I began my listening career in 1964 as a soundtrack nerd, and fifty-eight years later, I still am one. In my mp3 library, I have the soundtrack to many, many films (forty is my first guess), and I have a couple hundred original television themes from series aired in all decades from the 1950s through the 2000s. I also have copies of many albums by famed popular conductors – think of Hugo Montenegro and his ilk – offering cover versions of famous television themes. The number of original versions and cover versions likely approaches five hundred, at a guess.

(I mentioned last week the search functions of the RealPlayer, the software I use to keep track of and play mp3s. When I searched this morning for “tv,” among the results was a listing that reminded me how wide-ranging and sometimes odd my musical interest are, as the RealPlayer offered in its findings the 1998 album Beyond The River: Seasonal Songs of Latvia, finding the “tv” in “Latvia.”) 

I’ve not watched all the related television shows, of course. I think I likely watched less TV during my childhood than did my peers; I was always a few steps behind in hallway and lunchtime conversations about TV. (The same held true for talk of music, too. On the other hand, had my peers in, say, August of 1968 ever asked me what I thought about the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact, I would have been in good shape.) The same held true for my college years and adult life. I had music to listen to, news to read, and things to write, and – as an adult – I sometimes had work, which we’ll get to in a bit. 

So, what do I do with five hundred television themes? Some days when I am involved in my tabletop baseball and want music in the background, I ask the RealPlayer for television themes (on other days I’ll ask for music from 1970 or music tagged “classical” or some other category) and let the music roll. I hear things I recall, like the majestic main theme from the relatively recent The West Wing, and I hear things I likely have not heard for years, like the theme to Branded, the mid-1960s western detailing the adventures of a cavalry officer (Chuck Connors) dismissed from the service for cowardice. 

All of this came to mind because the other week, I found a copy of The Winds of War, the 1971 Herman Wouk novel, at one of our local thrift stores. I recalled reading the Reader’s Digest condensed version of the book when it came out, and I thought that even after more than half a century, it might be a good idea to read the whole thing. (I did read the full version of Wouk’s sequel, War & Remembrance, when it came out in 1978.) 

And as I’ve been reading The Winds of War, I’ve been pondering the eighteen-hour miniseries of the book that was aired in early February 1983. At the time, I was working as a reporter in Monticello, Minnesota, and not every evening was my own. Mondays, I had city council meetings, either in Monticello or nearly adjacent Big Lake; Tuesdays brought newspaper paste-up; Thursdays, Fridays and maybe Saturdays brought sports events to cover. I don’t remember how much of those eighteen hours of The Winds of War I saw in 1983. (Conversely, when the television version of War & Remembrance ran in November 1988 and May 1989, I think I saw all thirty hours, as I was teaching at a university and no longer required to work nights.) 

And, as I’ve pondered in recent weeks the miniseries The Winds of War, I’ve also thought again about the score for the miniseries written by Bob Cobert. I remembered the first time I heard the series’ main theme, likely during a promo for the miniseries, as I was not paying attention to the television. The first few strains of the main theme caught my attention, and my head jerked toward the television to see what the music was. 

When I got a chance to get to a piano – back then, I did not have my own keyboard – I worked out the chords, although I do not ever remember playing the piece for anyone. I wondered about a soundtrack but did not seek it out (probably for financial reasons). And years later, when I went out on the ’Net, I was lucky enough to find at a music-sharing site a version of the theme to The Winds of War recorded by an orchestra from Cincinnati and, a few years later, the original version. 

And now that nearly everything ever recorded is available at YouTube – well, not quite, but it feels that way – I can listen to all the tracks released as the score to that 1983 miniseries. And I’ll begin hearing them again, as well, later this week as I watch the miniseries on discs I’ve begun to reserve at the local library.

Here’s the main theme. I find it as stirring in 2022 as I did in 1983.