![]() ![]() "Dave Gordon called me up one day and said, 'I've got an album at RCA. Just once was an entire album devoted to Kahn's music: the 1959 soundtrack for Mike Hammer, arranged and conducted by jazz veteran Skip Martin. The music that Gordon commissioned from Kahn wound up in literally dozens of popular shows from the late 1950s and early 1960s (most of them produced by Revue), including Bringing Up Buddy, Buckskin, Cimarron City, Coronado 9, Death Valley Days, M Squad, The Millionaire, Northwest Passage, The Real McCoys, State Trooper, The Texan, The Thin Man, Wagon Train, Tales of Wells Fargo and more.Īlthough Leave It to Beaver is the best-known of Kahn's TV themes, interestingly it was his folk-flavored theme for John Payne's Western The Restless Gun that was the most-recorded at the time, earning renditions by the Sons of the Pioneers, Lawrence Welk, Mitch Miller and others. That's my claim to fame," Kahn said with a smile. That's the only thing I ever wrote that everybody knows. "I was just told it was a kids' show and a little of what it was all about. "I wrote it without having seen the pilot," Kahn remembered. In fact, Kahn knew nothing of Jerry Mathers or Tony Dow before composing that memorably bouncy tune with just a hint of mischief for Leave It to Beaver. Music editors had to cut them in and make them fit." "I did a lot of what you'd call 'wild' cues ? a bunch of mystery cues for Hitchcock, music for fights or car chases. In addition to the themes, Kahn was also called upon to write underscore music for several of the series, notably Beaver and Hitchcock, but on a "library" basis, not for specific scenes or episodes. It was understood to be part of the deal in that early, less scrutinized, era of TV music. You sent the music over there and they recorded and sent it back."Īll of Kahn's themes, for publishing purposes, were co-credited to "Melvyn Lenard," the first and middle names of Gordon's son, who didn't actually compose music but whose name enabled the Gordon family to collect half the royalties of any Kahn composition used. He used the musicians in the Munich Symphony. "All of the stuff that I did for him was recorded in Munich, Germany. "And in those days, you had to do it out of the country," Kahn explained. "So I wrote a lot of background music for Hitchcock and all the shows had out there. "In those days they were using a lot of track music," he said, referring to pre-existing music not written specifically to any one picture. "When needed something done, he came to me to do it," Kahn recalled in 1993. Gordon, a Southern California music publisher who contracted with MCA-owned Revue Studios (later Universal) to provide music for its TV series. Most of this work fell to Kahn because of his association with David M. He also wrote the first of three themes to adorn the popular sitcom Bachelor Father (1957-62), much of the music for Hopalong Cassidy (1952-54) and, perhaps most significantly, an arrangement of Charles Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette" for the half-hour Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62). In addition to the playful theme for Leave It to Beaver (1957-63), Kahn composed the musical signatures for The Restless Gun (1957-59), Suspicion (1957-58), Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (the half-hour version with Darren McGavin, 1958-60), 21 Beacon Street (1959-60) and Overland Trail (1960). He was also the last of TV's behind-the-scenes composers who frequently worked without screen credit, ghost-wrote for other composers, and was forced to split credit with non-writing partners involved in music publishing deals. Kahn was the last surviving creator of iconic themes and scores from the 1950s. *Dave Kahn, composer of several classic TV themes including Leave It to Beaver, died July 3 at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. ![]() *Composed Leave It to Beaver, Hitchcock TV music* ![]()
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