Noted Television Themes

 

Bruce Broughton (1945-) is an American orchestral composer of television, film, video game scores and concert works. He has composed several highly acclaimed soundtracks over his extensive career. Broughton has won eleven Emmy Awards and has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Silverado. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series, Hawaii Five-O, Dallas, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, to name three. Boughton won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Theme Music in 1995 for JAG and was nominated for the same award in 2002 for First Monday.

JAG theme

First Monday theme 

Bruce Broughton bio

A Noted Television Composer

 

Jerry Goldsmith (Jerrald King Goldsmith 1929-2004) was an American composer and conductor known for his vast work in the film industry but also for television scoring and concert works. He composed scores for five films in the Star Trek franchise and three in the Rambo franchise, as well as for Logan's Run, Planet of the Apes, Patton, Chinatown, Alien, Poltergeist, Gremlins, Hoosiers, Air Force One, and many others. His 1997 opening fanfare for Universal Pictures debuted with the release of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. His silver screen compositions continued into the Twenty-first Century. "Among his many other works" is synonymous with Goldsmith. His film scores were not always identified with him, ranging from light and melodic to very dissonant scores in a style where the melody is nearly non-existent, like many of his influences of early 20th-century composers.

Goldsmith found early work at CBS in 1950 as a clerk typist in the network's music department under director Lud Gluskin. There he began writing scores for radio shows, later progressing into scoring live CBS television anthology series. As the decade progressed, he scored multiple episodes of the television series The Twilight Zone and Dr. Kildare. Goldsmith composed the theme for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in 1964 and later added his touch to the James Bond parody, Our Man Flint, 1966, and its sequel In Like Flint, 1967. His military/action flare with snare drums was sometimes a giveaway during this period. His most notable television theme in the Nineties was the theme for the UPN series Star Trek: Voyager in 1995. He won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Theme Music. It is the most beautifully constructed theme of any Star Trek television series. His score and theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1979, was later used on the popular television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987 with an arrangement by Dennis McCarthy.

Note: Goldsmith was good friends with fellow composer, Morton Stevens, of Hawaii Five-O theme fame. Stevens also wrote the theme to television's Police Woman. Goldsmith confessed he used that theme for his Derek Flint character film series. He turned Steven's theme "inside-out" but the melody is lifted intact. Both composers were amused by the reuse.

Low Profile. High Output.

George Duning (1908-2000) was an American musician and highly respected film composer, working on over 300 film and television scores. Nominated five times for an Academy Award, Duning never won. Born in Richmond, Indiana, Duning played trumpet and piano for the Kay Kyser band in the 1940s, later arranging most of the music for Kyser's radio program, Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge. His name may not come to mind as readily as a few other film composers, due to his early uncredited stock music supplied for countless low-budget films of the Forties and Fifties. 

Duning signed on with Columbia Pictures in 1946, where he worked almost exclusively through the early Sixties, collaborating often with director Richard Quine and actor, Glenn Ford. His scores for the original 3:10 to Yuma, and Cowboy are two of the best examples of the western genre. His diversity is displayed in such notable films as Picnic, From Here To Eternity, The World of Suzie Wong, The Devil at Four O'Clock, and Bell, Book, and Candle. Though too numerous to mention, other notable films include his first film score for Johnny O'Clock, followed by Lust for Gold, The Mob, The Brothers Rico, That Touch of Mink, and The Man with Bogart's Face. His work for television, notably The Big Valley, is nearly as prolific, spanning the Fifties through the Eighties.