MSMI 11:2 autumn 17
https://doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2017.10
On 18 July 1944, Columbia Broadcasting System aired a notorious murder
confession created for the public’s entertainment. This confession came
in the form of a radio drama called ‘Moat Farm Murder’ that aired on
the Columbia Presents Corwin radio series with music composed by Bernard
Herrmann. This was not simply a radio drama but a verbatim confession
of a real-life 1903 London murder by Samuel Herbert Dougal, played
by Charles Laughton. Elsa Lanchester played his victim, Camille ‘Cecile’
Holland. The play re-aired two years later on The Mercury Summer Theatre
on the Air on 26 July 1946. In this re-airing, Orson Welles played the role
of Dougal and Mercedes McCambridge played the role of Cecile. Fifteen
years after the second airing, The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) aired
The re-use of storylines from radio plays on early television was not
uncommon; indeed, much of the television programming of the 1950s
and early 1960s consisted of repurposed radio scripts. Columbia Presents
Corwin ‘Moat Farm Murder’ (Bernard Herrmann, 18 July 1944) was
among the many radio programmes from the 1940s that had music
featured in The Twilight Zone. Of the radio plays to feature music in
the series, ‘Moat Farm Murder’ provided more cues than any other
CBS radio score.
Cues from ‘Moat Farm Murder’ are found in eleven episodes of The
Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964). The use of music from radio dramas
and their re-uses in television has thus far not been examined. This
essay looks at the composition of the ‘Moat Farm Murder’ radio score
and Corwin’s collaboration with Herrmann in it, as well as the re-use
of radio music in The Twilight Zone. Through this case study of ‘Moat
Farm Murder’, better knowledge of how the CBS Stock music library
was used, in tandem with the way in which other similar network
and production company cue libraries worked.
Music for Murder,
Machines, and Monsters
‘Moat Farm Murder’, The Twilight Zone, and
the CBS Stock Music Library
REBA A. WISSNER
Music for Murder, Machines, and Monsters
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the first of its episodes to use music cues from the ‘Moat Farm Murder’
radio drama. This episode, ‘The Rip Van Winkle Caper’, featured a
story about greed, science, and murder. Of the radio dramas that had
their music re-used in The Twilight Zone, ‘Moat Farm Murder’ provided
more cues for the series than any other CBS radio drama with a total
of eleven episodes featuring its cues.
In The Twilight Zone, as well as other television series of the day, cues
from various sources were often pieced together to form a new score.
Sometimes these cues came from radio dramas. Similar to the cues
from other radio dramas and even television shows, the cues from ‘Moat
Farm Murder’ were associated with specific situations that merited their
re-use. The re-use of cues from CBS radio dramas in The Twilight Zone,
therefore, can form a coherent picture of the ways in which we aurally
associate certain music with specific events as well as contribute to an
understanding of the ways in which those behind the network music
libraries worked to create many scores from one. By using these libraries,
music editors and supervisors functioned as hidden authors that allowed
the music to add another layer of meaning through their re-use.
Although Bernard Herrmann’s scores for radio and television have
received some attention, studies of the ways in which his music from
one medium was re-used in another have been neglected. This essay
discusses the appropriation of radio music in The Twilight Zone, using
Herrmann’s cues for ‘Moat Farm Murder’ as a case study. To do this,
I first examine radio aesthetics, followed by the creation and use of the
CBS network music library, where the ‘Moat Farm Murder’ cues were
kept for television re-use, and concluding with the composition and role
of the music in ‘Moat Farm Murder’. I then analyse two cues from
‘Moat Farm Murder’ that were re-used in The Twilight Zone to elucidate
the ways in which the original cues’ context mattered in their re-use.
Through this case study of ‘Moat Farm Murder’, better knowledge will
emerge about the use of the CBS Stock music library in the 1960s, in
tandem with the workings of other similar network cue libraries during
the same period.
Music and Radio Drama Aesthetics
Dating as far back as the 1920s, radio dramas incorporated music and
sound eects in order to achieve a sense of aural realism (VanCour,
2008, p.353). This is because every script direction – dialogue and action
– results in sound (Cummings, 2013, p.72). As a result, radio dramas
are fully written in sound and require writers to work in two media –
literature and sound – at once (Smith & Verma, 2016, p.4). Writing on
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radio dramas in 1936, Rudolf Arnheim said that the theme of a radio
drama must be one that can be realised sonically (Arnheim, 1936, p.44).
Both music and drama have a similar communicative function in that
they both convey a message through sound (Tannenbaum, 1956, p.93).
In fact, radio drama is the only dramatic medium to use a combination
of sound sources in order to create imaginary illusions (Rattigan, 2002,
p.126).
Radio positions sounds that occur simultaneously and are related to one
another, establishing their context (Arnheim, 1936, p.121). For this reason,
music that accompanies dialogue in radio is considered representative of
it, creating a ‘melodramatic counterplay of music and text’ (p.122). Neil
Verma describes the two predominant styles of radio sound from roughly
1930 to 1946: kaleidosonic, in which there is an aural leaping from one
scenario to another, and intimate, in which the listener is positioned
around a single character for the majority of the drama (2012, p.13).
Intimate sound focused on places while kaleidosonic focuses on events
(p.73). Audioposition achieves this (p.35). Sound, therefore, can serve an
indexical function in radio drama (Crisell, 1994, p.52).
Many producers noted the importance of music in radio dramas and
that it ‘is completely subservient to the ideas in the script’ (Crews, 1944,
p.154). Radio dramas typically used music to establish atmosphere and
sound eects to establish setting, but the signification of each of these
types of sound sources can be combined to create even greater narrative
meaning, with or without dialogue (Huwiler, 2010, p.133). There is,
however, a constant polarity between the meanings ascribed to words and
those ascribed to sound in radio drama. These meanings do not always
coalesce (Porter, 2016, p.19). Music in radio drama must be strategically
played at a specific volume level: background or bridge music must be
maintained at a certain volume level so as to not overpower the dialogue
and confuse the audience as to its purpose (Arnheim, 1936, p.69). The
music of radio drama is constructed such that, while not inherently
representative, it does refer to or involve the narrative, objects, and
events from the drama to help aid the viewer in what some refer to as
the medium’s blindness (Cazeaux, 2005, p.158).
Those who wrote about radio drama agreed that music should sound at
appropriately dramatic moments; that is, the times when no other device
– sound or voices – can create the proper emotional eect (Mamorsky,
1946, p.61). Radio dramas are filled with what Clive Cazeaux calls
potential appearances of characters or events, but we can only visualise
them through dialogue, sound eects, and music and the distance from
which each is placed from the microphone in order to give listeners
a sense of perspective. For this reason, ‘radio drama seeks to avoid
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representing events whose nature is not evident from their sounds’ (2005,
p.159). Cazeaux calls this a sound-opening-onto-a-world in which sound
allows the listener to visualise the images in their mind’s eye and creates
an intersection and overlapping between the senses (p.163). As we will
see, this occurs in the context of ‘Moat Farm Murder’ and is carried
over into the cue re-uses in television.
Radio dramas were just as famous for their strategic underscoring
as their judicious use of musical punctuation that created unique and
intriguing soundscapes. Radio music, unlike television music, must carefully
create dramatic eect since it ‘work[s] its magic through hearing alone’
due to its lack of any visuals (Kremenliev, 1949, p.75). Therefore, carefully
crafted scores that were originally conceived for a radio drama could be
used to great eect to enhance a television drama.
There are three categories into which sound for radio dramas fall:
evocation, psychological sound, and voice. Evocation is the use of sound
and music to create a meaning, action, or event that the listener cannot
see. Psychological sound is the manipulation of sound to convey emotion.
Voice merges evocation and psychological sound through eloquence or
urgency (Crook, 1999, p.24). Each of these deals with a very specific
semiotic quality of sound, all of which combine to generate meaning
in radio drama though what Cazeaux calls radio drama’s invitational
structure (2005, p.167). Thus, radio uses sound to generate an interpretive
world into which the listener must be attuned (p.173). Part of this depends
on the drama’s author to construct the work’s sound-character (Arnheim,
1936, p.110). Sound eects in radio dramas create points of audition,
or aural signals, that allow the listener to obtain a sense of location
through sound. However, as Earle McGill wrote in his treatise on radio
directing, ‘by accent, rhythm, and adroit instrumentation, interesting and
telling musical eects attain a mood often beyond the reach of liberal
sound eects’ (1940, p.35). For this reason, the music in radio is often
used to amplify the onscreen emotion.
At the height of radio’s popularity, George Davis wrote a treatise on
how to use music in radio drama. In the treatise’s foreword, he writes
that music cues can aid in the characterisations and ‘can project the
story into perspective, adding extra dimensions. It will infuse cohesiveness
by a direct thematic relation to the central characters and story-idea.
Failing that, music for radio-drama is inept and ineectual’ (1947, p.2).
According to Davis, music functions to clarify the drama’s emotional
quality (p.2). He continues that music need not be confined to moments
of realism, but can be reserved for what he calls idealisation and imagery
(p.10). Most importantly, a radio drama should be scored according to
its plane of emotional intensity, which is the degree of emotion present
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in a scene (p.15). Music can combine with narration to create dramatic
reinforcement (Altman, 1994, p.13).
Radio Dramas, Television, and Music Re/use
Television was not merely illustrated radio as some have proposed (Enns,
2012). Like the radio drama, a half-hour television show during the
1950s and 1960s averaged twenty-two minutes without commercials. One
reason for this length was television’s outgrowth from radio, which also
had short programmes with a minimal amount of music. In both radio
and television, the story and the music have little time to convey their
meaning and with very few exceptions, they often do so with relatively
short musical cues. Since the 1920s, television was considered an extension
of radio (Sewell, 2014, p.11). Early guides for television writing, such as
that by Gilbert Seldes, noted that television viewers should be ‘caressed by
musical sound’ (1952, p.21). The 1940 and 1941 hearings of the National
Television Systems Committee demonstrate that the committee ‘literally
conceived of television as an additive combination of radio sounds plus
moving images’ (Stadel, 2016). Radio has influenced many of television’s
features including its ‘basic narrative structures, program formats, genres,
modes of address, and aesthetic practices’ (Hilmes, 2008, p.160). To this
I would also add music, forming one reason why radio music – including
specific music cues – played such an important role in television.
The relationship between television sound and radio sound, while
seemingly related aesthetically, is actually quite complex (Stadel, 2016).
Early television dramatic music was composed in a style termed radiophonic
in that it borrowed heavily from radio conventions. Overlapping with this
period of radiophonic scoring was also a period of both experimentation
with and emulation of the filmic style of composition (Rodman, 2007).
Television composition was touted as unique from that in radio but more
dicult than film composition, mainly because the composer would have
to account for the images that the radio composer would not (Sosnik,
1949, p.95). Nonetheless, the practice of television composition has its
roots in that for radio.
The musical codes from radio, and silent film before it, were
transplanted into television shows and guided the viewer’s understanding
of the music’s role in each scenario. In both radio and television, music
can heighten the intensity of explicit dramatic action, clarify the emotional
quality in scenes where the drama is implicit, comment on the characters’
emotional states, or foreshadow a narrative scene so that the listener
can anticipate the mood of the following scene (Davis, 1947, p.19). The
music must make its point quickly and ‘resembles an epigram: it must be
