Next Stop...Willoughby:
Film Music Voyages in The Soundtrack Zone 1998

Introduction

by Kerry J. Byrnes

Over the last 50 years, "time travel" has been a recurring plot motif in television shows, Hollywood films, and even Lerner and Loewe's Broadway show Brigadoon, which was made into the 1954 film of the same title. In the time-travel genre, voyagers travel to the past or forward to the future, without necessarily intending to book a trip through time. Numerous television series have been based on a time-travel premise--Quantum Leap (scored by Velton Ray Bunch), Time Trax (Garry McDonald and Laurie Stone) and, most recently, The Visitor (theme by David Arnold, score by Kevin Kiner), Timecop (Brad Fiedel), and Early Edition (W.G. Snuffy Walden). In the mid-1980s, Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories dabbled with time in "Ghost Train" (John Williams). Star Trek and its spinoffs have included numerous time-travel episodes: Voyager ("Time And Again"), Deep Space Nine ("The Visitor"), The Next Generation ("Yesterday's Enterprise"), and Star Trek ("Tomorrow Is Yesterday," "The City On The Edge of Forever," and "A Piece of the Action"). Even the contemporary television western, Walker: Texas Ranger, jumped on the bandwagon in "Flashback" (Christopher Stone), a two-part time-travel yarn of the old and new west.

Nowhere has time-travel appeared more frequently as a plot premise than in The Twilight Zone, which aired on CBS television from 1959 to 1964. It was Rod Serling's script for a time-travel fantasy, "The Time Element," which aired on CBS' Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse on November 24, 1958, that convinced CBS to make The Twilight Zone pilot. During The Twilight Zone's five seasons, the series aired many time-travel episodes, including 1959's "Walking Distance" (Bernard Herrmann), 1960's "The Trouble With Templeton" (Jeff Alexander); 1961's "Once Upon A Time" (William Lava), "Back There" (Jerry Goldsmith), and "100 Yards Over The Rim" (Fred Steiner); and 1963's "No Time Like The Past" (stock). Even 1983's Twilight Zone-The Movie had a time-travel segment, "Kick The Can" (Jerry Goldsmith), a story first airing on The Twilight Zone in 1962 but which was tracked with Bernard Herrmann's music from the earlier "Walking Distance."

While these examples point to the popularity of the time-travel plot motif, time-travel films and their original scores have not been the subject of "scholarly" debate in publications aimed at soundtrack collectors or film score aficionados. There is no question that soundtrack collectors could quickly identify specific film composers who pioneered scoring other film genres--biblical epics (Ben Hur, Miklós Rózsa), silver screen swashbucklers (The Sea Hawk, Erich Wolfgang Korngold), Hollywood westerns (The Big Country, Jerome Moross), and Italian "spaghetti westerns" (A Fistful of Dollars, Ennio Morricone), to cite only a few of the different genres that could be identified.

However, do time-travel films and their scores comprise a distinct genre? To propose one answer to this question, this article proposes as its thesis that time-travel films comprise three distinct sub-genres, with each sub-genre (more simply, genre) placing its own unique demands on the composer who receives an assignment to score a film in a given genre. To explore this thesis, this article surveys films and film scores across the three time-travel genres, providing an empirical basis on which to compare major trends in how composers have approached scoring films from one time-travel genre to another. Based on this survey, have composers approached scoring films in one time-travel genre differently than how films in the other two time-travel genres have been approached by composers?

In the first time-travel genre, a film's protagonist is confronted by the challenge of moving through or overcoming space, encountering that he or she has traveled through time to another place either in the past or future. This genre generally covers films in which the protagonist's time travel is accidental as distinct from purposive. In the second genre, the protagonist is challenged to overcome time by finding a way to go back to the past or forward to the future, often building a machine or employing another device to facilitate travel through time. The distinction between this genre and the former is that time travel is purposive in the latter. Films in this second genre often, but not always, include a touch of romance, a love angle that is a significant element of the film's plot. In the third genre, the protagonist faces the ultimate challenge of overcoming death. Here the plot hook is man's desire to transcend both space and time, the motive typically being to recapture a love lost as the result of a loved one's death.

Presented in three sections, this article will take you on a film music voyage during which, paraphrasing Rod Serling, you will travel through a sixth dimension, a dimension not only of story lines (a film's dialogue and visual images) but also background musical scores, a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are limited only by a film composer's imagination and creativity in scoring each of the films to be reviewed. That's the signpost up ahead -- your next stop, The Soundtrack Zone! On each leg of our film music voyage into The Soundtrack Zone, we'll focus on a specific time-travel genre, exemplified by 10 films and their scores illustrative of that genre. In Section 1, we launch our film music voyage into The Soundtrack Zone with a Sojourn Across Space. Looking ahead, in Section 2 we'll embark on a Sojourn Across Time, followed in Section 3 by a Sojourn Across Death.

Sojourn Across Space
Sojourn Across Time
Sojourn Across Death
Epilogue