Opera Chic has the utmost respect for the men and women who have the gift of creating music that, however popular and simple, is so catchy and effective you can't really forget it, even after decades (one of our talented conductors, Nicola Luisotti, likes to point out that if Beethoven were alive today he would also compose film scores because movie scores are all about effective story-telling with musical means).
It's sad to learn of the passing of a composer of, well, immortal TV themes such as the one for "Perry Mason".
Composer Fred Steiner, who wrote the themes for "Perry Mason" and "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and who later became a respected film-music historian and musicologist, died of natural causes Thursday at his home in Ajijic, Mexico. He was 88.
Steiner was Oscar nominated for his contributions to Quincy Jones' 1985 score for "The Color Purple." He also scored, on his own, a handful of features including "Man From Del Rio," "Time Limit," "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre" and "The Sea Gypsies." But it was in television where Steiner made an enduring mark, with memorable scores for seven early-1960s episodes of "The Twilight Zone" and a dozen scores for the original "Star Trek" including such now-classic episodes as "Charlie X," "The Corbomite Maneuver" and "Balance of Terror."
And also:
Steiner's 1974 essay on Bernard Herrmann's "Psycho" was the earliest known musicological analysis of a film score, and he earned a Ph.D. in 1981 after writing a dissertation on the life and music of Alfred Newman -- believed to be the first about a film composer to result in a doctorate in musicology in America.