Event Lectures and Symposia Heard on the Small Screen: Music in Jack Arnold's and Henry Mancini's Episodes of Peter Gunn

Best known for his science fiction films, Jack Arnold also directed television episodes in different genres, not only science fiction but also westerns, comedies, and detective shows. Among all of his television works, “Peter Gunn” provides an important example because this is the first television series that has an original score rather than library music for every episode (Withey, 2001). This meant that the score would be composed specifically based on the rough cut of the episode, considering the director’s choices.  

 Before “Peter Gunn ,” television networks were required to have 13 original scores for a television season and any additional shows relied on music libraries to piece together cues for a complete score (Wissner, 2013). Further, the series was in a style of television noir (Glover, 2019) that Arnold had to account for when directing and which series composer Henry Mancini had to consider when writing the score. Mancini responded by composing a rock-jazz hybrid he deemed as West Coast Cool Jazz and this was the first television score to use jazz throughout, pioneering a new style of television scoring in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of the hallmarks of the series was that its music was inseparable from the show and often, even its narrative, and the show's creator, Blake Edwards, noted that the series' music was responsible for at least half of its success (Burlingame, 2002). 

 Reba Wissner traces Mancini’s compositional process vis-à-vis the directorial decisions of Jack Arnold, and shows how a study of the music composed by Mancini under one director can lead to insights about Mancini, the directors, and the series as a whole. 

 Presented in cooperation with the American Musicological Society.