Knowing the Score

I've watched enough low rent, dubbed, off beat and sometimes downright scuzzy movies that I've started to recognise certain recurring features of them.  Not just the actors who turn up again and again in these sorts of films,(not to mention the voice artists who dub them in the English language versions of the foreign ones), nor the locations, which also turn up multiple times, but now I even recognise the stock music which plays in the background during action or suspense sequences.  The use of library music of this sort has always been a Godsend for low budget film makers, saving them the expense of actually hiring a composer, then having them record their score with real musicians.  (Which is why, of course, those low budget movies which do employ a composer more often than not have an electronic score, performed by the composer on their synthesiser in order to keep costs down).  But the use of library music has never been confined to low budget film making.  Back in the day, studios would do much the same thing, recycling scores from bigger budget movies for use on their B-movies and serials.  Universal, for instance, reused the score from Son of Frankenstein on another Rathbone/Karloff pairing, Tower of London, with parts of it also turning up in the serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.

In more recent times, television has been a great user of library music.  Many TV themes we think iconic are in fact, library music.  ITV sitcoms from the seventies, in particular, made extensive use of library music - Man About the House, the Doctor series and In Loving Memory, for instance, all used library pieces for their theme music.  The practice also extended to drama, with long-running ITV daytime legal drama Crown Court using a piece of library music originally composed, I believe, by one-man Mancunian film industry Cliff Twemlow.  Actually, Twemlow was a prolific contributor to music libraries, apparently finding it a useful source of extra income.  So it can sometimes feel disorientating when you suddenly hear a piece of library music you have always strongly identified with one particular programme, being used, often incongruously, in a different context.  I found it quite disconcerting, for example, when the traditional ITN News at Ten theme was used over an underwater fight sequence in Beyond Atlantis (1974).  I had even more of a jolt the other day when I caught the last twenty minutes or so of another John Ashley film, Twilight People (1972) on Fright Flix the other evening and heard the ominous tones of the Mastermind theme playing over a chase through the jungle. It was all very disconcerting.  Thankfully, though, the theme from Van Der Valk didn't play as Ashley tirned hairy and bestial in Beast of the Yellow Night, which they were also showing.