TWILIGHT ZONE THEME

www.karlstraubmusic.com/twilight zone.mp3
I've always wanted to be able to play the legendary "Twilight Zone" lick, and I've fooled around with it since I was a teenager. I finally decided to figure it out for real. it turns out I had it pretty close as a teen, but not exactly right--

(NOTE: see comment for one visitor's correction to my rhythmic notation. I haven't had time to check what he's saying to any great extent, but he could well be right. I maintain that his suggestion that the composition really begins on the "and" of 4 may be correct, but since the accents are on that first note, it's hard to hear it as a pickup, and if you play it as written here it will sound correct, regardless of Marius Constant's original intention. I hope I've understood his comment correctly, but I'm certainly willing to hear more about it if he wants to comment further.) TIPS-- I've written it out as two guitar parts, because that's presumably the way it was played originally. it can be played by one player, though, and it sounds good but you have to tweak your guitar a bit to play it in the same key as the show.

tune your two highest strings, B and E, up a half step to C and F. (this enables you to play both parts at once. if you try to play both parts in standard tuning, there's a note that's off the guitar neck. at least on my guitar it is! if you have 22 frets you can play what i have written, in standard tuning, but all of it one fret higher. you also have the option of not retuning, and playing as written, but it will be one key lower than the show. many of you may say, as i would have in my lazier early days, that it's not worth the effort. it really does sound better in the same key as the show, though. you'll also have to play the G string note one fret LOWER if you play it in standard tuning. in the end, I think it's easier to do it with the retuning. )

once you get the retuning out of the way, and puzzle out where the 17th fret is, etc. it's time to think about how the parts fit together. the trick is to play the top part in quarters and the bottom part in eighths. i play it with pick for the bottom line (eighths) and ring finger for the top line (quarters). this means you hold the top notes as long as two notes of the bottom part. this was the detail I missed when i tried to learn it years ago-- I was playing all of it as eighths, and if you do that it's almost right, but not quite.

INCIDENTAL MUSIC
I threw these in for fun, because I heard them on the dvd while I was trying to find the main theme of the show.
the first of the two is two double stops-- not too tricky as long as you use the right fingering. try left hand index and pinky for the first double stop, and middle and ring for the second. (I'm again using pick and ring finger. You could use thumb and finger if you want-- it will sound a little different.) this is a relatively simple example of a George Van Eps or Jimmy Wyble type contrapuntal fingering situation. (lest I appear pretentious by dropping their names, I'll admit that while I have tried some of their exercises, I'm pretty much in the kindergarten stage with their stuff. Still, I dipped into it far enough to have an easier time with the Twilight Zone lick. )

the second is a single note line-- use extreme muting, and observe the odd fingering where the last three notes are just moving the pinky up one fret at a time. originally I tried it with a more efficient fingering, playing those notes on different strings, but it somehow didn't have the right sinister quality.

A LITTLE THEORY AS TO WHY THE TWILIGHT ZONE MUSIC SOUNDS SO CREEPY

the three main kinds of dissonant intervals are whole step (two frets away), half step (one fret away), and tritone (the equivalent of six frets away). although my composition and theory teachers would shake their heads at my oversimplifying here, dissonance is when two or more notes together sound a little off, even wrong. this doesn't necessarily mean bad-- I like to think of dissonance as a strong spice rather than a rank smell-- but these kinds of dissonances would be out of place in a catchy pop song, or a nursery rhyme. the Twilight Zone theme has all three of these dissonances, and basically just alternates between them. there's more to the theme than just this little excerpt, but this is the guitar part-- everyone knows this part, and it sounds good by itself.

the first short incidental lick is a whole step dissonance followed by the more consonant (or the more musical, to the narrow-minded) interval of a major third. the alternating of the two intervals causes an appealing tension and release effect. It's interesting to listen to the contrast between this short idea and the more famous "theme" lick, which is all tension and no release.

My research says that the famous theme was composed by Marius Constant. He may have written these other two short "cues", as well. Bernard Herrmann and others also wrote music for the show, so the authorship of these short excerpts is not clear to me from the stuff I read online, but here's the link.
(Another tantalizing tidbit-- according to one source I found online, Howard Roberts was the session cat who played the TZ theme.)
www.classicthemes.com/50sTVThemes/themePages/twilightZone.html
for a relatively sane presentation of Twilight Zone info, see Sci-Fi.com website http://www.scifi.com/twilightzone/gallery/
index.php

if you feel comfortable with a much more obsessive Twilight Zone experience, check out http://www.twilightzone.org/index2.html (the episode index is really demented.)