- Date: 1957
- Composer: Bernard Herrmann
- Period: Modern (1910-1949)
Review
This little-known suite of 11 short movements, totaling 25 minutes of music, displays Bernard Herrmann's versatility in making music dealing with the Strange.Bernard Herrmann (1911 - 1975), now a legend among film composers, got his start as a conductor-composer for CBS Radio in the 1930s. His Hollywood career began due to his work for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. When Welles filmed Citizen Kane, he took Herrmann to work with him.
Even after winning the Academy Award Herrmann kept his "regular job" with CBS for as long as the radio network had its own orchestra and needed a supply of music on a constant basis. Thereafter, he did some other work for the network. Part of his job included writing "stock music" for the network's music library, all-purpose cues that could be pulled out and played, or even simply inserted from recordings, literally on a moment's notice.
Later Herrmann arranged some of this stock music into suites: Western Suite, The Desert Suite, and Outer Space Suite. These are all-purpose cues for television series, written from 1956 to 1959. Outer Space Suite is for woodwinds, harp, and percussion, mostly bell-like. Most parts of its music appeared in episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. One notable use was in People are Alike all Over, written by Serling after a story by Paul Fairman, starring Roddy McDowell, who finds that Martians are distressingly like humans, particularly in their propensity to put other species in a zoo.
The "Prelude" is nearly four minutes of Herrmann's trademark eerie, floating space music, with strange cross relations in the chords and oscillating patterns in shimmering instruments like harp, vibes, and glockenspiel.
"Signals" is a toccata for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and celeste in terse, overlapping Morse-code-like patterns. It makes a brilliant and humorous scherzo.
"Space Drift" is lonely music for flute and other woodwinds over a typical mystical major minor harp figuration. Later, dark low woodwinds make the hostile vastness of space apparent.
"Space Stations" is dissonant and mechanical, and does not add new musical ideas. However, the subsequent movement, "Time Suspense," is a remarkable cut, the longest in the suite. Not really intended for "foreground listening," this music remarkably explores, in a variety of combinations of harp, woodwinds, and pitched percussion, a series of chords that goes nowhere.
"Starlight" is a lyrical nocturne for various lonely woodwinds, over a constant rising and falling harp or celeste pattern. Danger is a series of "stinger" cues, lasting two and a half minutes. It isn't really convincing as sustained listening.
"Moonscape" could serve for any hostile, alien environment: heavy chords with highly inventive woodwind scoring, a mood and sound that continue in the next movement, "Airlock." Obviously, people get into and out of danger through airlocks.
"Tycho" is, of course, the name of a famous astronomer, but it is also a prominent lunar crater that inspires lyrical, lost woodwind themes, with occasional very deep harp notes. A fanfare for woodwinds returns us to Earth the final movement, providing normality and resolution. ~ All Music Guide
