Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring by Jon Burlingame (review)

Reviewed by: Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring by Jon Burlingame Paul Allen Sommerfeld Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring. By Jon Burlingame. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. [viii, 467 p. ISBN 9780190618308 (hardcover), $35; also available as e-book (ISBN and price vary).] Illustrations, bibliography, index. In Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring, Jon Burlingame provides a much-needed survey of the genre, with a particular focus on the 1950s–1970s. To deliver an overview of US television music and its significant contributors in one text is ambitious, and Burlingame has published the first of many historical studies hopefully to come. In his previous book, TV's Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes from "Dragnet" to "Friends" (New York: Schirmer, 1996), he presented a detailed historical study of the theme music for core television programming. In Music for Prime Time, Burlingame has revised and substantially expanded that text to cover topics previously omitted and to chronicle developments since the 1990s. Previous scholarship by Ron Rodman, Reba Wissner, Jessica Getman, Robynn Stilwell, Liz Giuffre, Philip Hayward, and many others delves into the musicological study and analysis of specific television programming, but Burlingame stipulates that his text "is not a musicological treatise" (p. 3). Instead, he offers a historical overview that simultaneously foregrounds the many creators involved and the myriad of television projects they developed. Some of the history Burlingame describes has been previously available, but piecemeal in anecdotal interviews found online and musicological or film studies analyses focused on specific productions or creators. This fragmentary information has, according to Burlingame, contributed to rampant factual inaccuracies and apocryphal stories that plague television history. In Music for Prime Time, Burlingame reverses that trend by detailing industry practices to highlight how creators fit into and created those very practices. He accomplishes this feat by relying on "more than 400 interviews with composers, producers, orchestrators, and music editors; a thorough review of what little previous literature existed in the field; and viewings of countless series episodes, documentaries, tele-films, and miniseries with a critical eye toward the scores as they were heard by viewers over the past 70 years" (p. 3). In so doing, Burlingame explains how the television music industry has operated throughout its history, lending necessary context to the aesthetics interpreted by viewers and scholars alike. His extensive interviews serve as an essential counterbalance, grounding this historical survey with concrete examples of the many roles that composers, arrangers, orchestrators, and music supervisors have taken. Although a welcome addition for music specialists wishing to understand the ecosystem that governed much of television music production in the twentieth century, Music for Prime Time does not require specialized knowledge. Readers with a background in music may more easily understand Burlingame's discussion of specific title themes and their scoring differences within television genres, but nonspecialists will still comprehend general concepts through his abstention from musicological jargon. Readers of all backgrounds will breeze through Burlingame's approachable, almost conversational prose. He peppers the book with engaging stories distilled from his interviews, with a particularly entertaining one regarding Bernard Herr-mann scoring an episode for Cimarron (1967–68; p. 112). The index, focused [End Page 649] on show titles and creator names, likewise helps readers who wish to focus on specific shows or composers rather than read each genre-based chapter in its entirety. The sixteen-page bibliography provides further information to readers who want to research individual productions. After an alphabetical listing of relevant and reliable texts, for example, sources are grouped by chapter and therein by major topics, like "Disney and 'Davy Crockett,' " or specific program titles. The greatest strength of Music for Prime Time is, first and foremost, Burlingame's thorough distillation of how studios produced television music from the 1950s onward—that is, how the entire system operated. In the first chapter, " 'Hi-yo, Silver!': The Birth of TV Music," he offers an excellent, condensed history, enabling any reader to understand the basics of the mid-twentieth-century television music ecosystem. But pithy nuggets that summarize the production process appear throughout the book...