The Twilight Zone "The Midnight Sun" - score by Nathan Van Cleave

Nathan Van Cleave (1910-1970), usually credited only with his surname - but known around town as "Van", wrote 13 scores for TZ, more than any other composer. Extracts from these can also be heard in other episodes as the years went by, as stock music clips. Van Cleave was one of the few people on the creative end of the show who worked steadily from Season 1 up through Season 5, off and on, as Bernard Herrmann also did. His score for "The Midnight Sun" is outstanding, definitely up with any of the best of the series by Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith as far as candidacy for some of the greatest music ever written/conceived for television. In it, he used simple piano chords, and consonant, sometimes organic splashes of sound from electronic instruments to create the atmosphere of a doomed world. An alto flute plays the forlorn melody.

Van Cleave also wrote incidental music for "Perchance to Dream", "A World of Difference" (both of which used a theremin and a novachord, which were very primitive synthesizers - TZ was one of the first shows where these were heard), "Elegy" (clips of which were used to make up almost all the music in "Twenty-Two" the next season), "What You Need", "Two", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Jess Belle", "Steel" (featuring violas, French horn, and an electric guitar), "From Agnes - With Love", "A Kind Of Stopwatch", and "Black Leather Jackets" (which featured the organ). Some of these scores feed off each other a bit, and to good effect. "Jess Belle" has some whole lines extracted from "Perchance to Dream." Most of these scores were for small ensembles, never full orchestras.

Van Cleave also conducted the recordings all of his TZ scores, as most of the composers of that time also did. Fred Steiner, who also wrote scores for TZ, reported much later that he worked with Van Cleave on some of his TZ scores as far as orchestration, although uncredited.

I am posting this here now because it was for some reason not included on the TZ 40th Anniversary soundtrack 4-CD release in 1999 with five or six of Van Cleave's other scores. This is reportedly the only CD release to date to feature his work. He scored a number of films and radio as well as other TV shows. Some of his scores might've been originally released by Varese Sarabande on one of their records many, many years ago, but not sure as these LPs are obviously long out of print. The man who put this file together for "The Midnight Sun" (not released on the 40th Anniversary set) did a great job. As I remember, he specifically said that he did not lift the soundtrack from the DVDs released by Image Entertainment, where they included isolated scores for some episodes; sometimes you can hear the faint sound of the actors' voices on the DVD isolated score tracks.