From On Call: The Official Newsletter of the St. Elsewhere Appreciation Club, volume 2, number 2, July 1998.
It is not whistled nearly as much as the opening cue from the Andy Griffith Show, nor does it have memorable lyrics such as those from Gilligan's Island, but the St. Elsewhere theme is, nonetheless, one of the most recognized in the history of dramatic television. Still, the music of St. Elsewhere is a story that is less about theme, and more about the daily grind of scoring and production, and of the creative people (one in particular) who helped make the show great.
J.A.C. Redford
Jonathan Alfred Clawson Redford (known as J.A.C.) was born into a "show biz" family. His grandmother was a Ziegfield girl, his mother a classical singer, and his father an actor. After graduating from BYU, J.A.C. and whie LeAnn (his childhood sweetheart) moved to Los Angeles where Redford picked up work as a ghost writer. He assisted on Starsky and Hutch, and other series, but he was destined to make his mark for scorin emotional, dramatic music in the classical tradition.
Redford's agents arranged for him to meet with Bethany Rooney (then Beth Hillshafer), who was Bruce Paltrow's Associate Producer for a new medical drama. Soon after, Redford met directly with Paltrow and the St. Elsewhere brass.
YouTube video of an excellent fingerstyle guitar rendition of Dave Grusin's theme from St. Elsewhere.
I recently set up a Google Alert to report on mentions of "St. Elsewhere", which mostly gets you pages using "elsewhere" and the abbreviation of "street". It turned up this brilliant performance of Dave Grusin's theme music for St. Elsewhere arranged for solo guitar.
He had to trim down the original synth arrangement to make it playable for guitar, and he made all the right choices. I play guitar myself, and I am very impressed by his ingenuity and chops. Bravo, sir!
Information about the composerof the St. Elsewhere theme music, plus various versions of the tune courtesy of YouTube and some of his other theme songs.
The opening theme music to St. Elsewhere was composed by jazz pianist, film composer and twelve-time Grammy winner Dave Grusin. Grusin won an academy award for his original score for The Milagro Beanfield War(1988). He started getting TV scoring work in 1965, and got his first film score gig in 1967, shortly thereafter composing music for the soundtrack to The Graduate. Click these links for his IMDB profile and the Dave Grusin Archive.
Grusin's other notable TV themes include the shows The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, It Takes a Thief, The Name of the Game, The Bold Ones, Maude, Baretta, Good Times, and One Life to Live. His film scores include Three Days of the Condor, The Goodbye Girl, Heaven Can Wait, The Champ, ...And Justice For All, My Bodyguard, Absence of Malice, On Golden Pond, Tootsie, The Goonies, Ishtar, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Havana, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Firm, Selena, and Hope Floats. (I don't feel like linking to all of these.)
It was the eighties, so as was common for the time, the theme music is performed entirely on synthesizers. I noticed that the theme for season five is a either a new recording or a remaster, probably a new recording; the synth sounds are less harsh, cleaner. The arrangement is exactly the same. There currently isn't a video for season five's theme on YouTube, so you'll have to take my word for it. Update, August 19, 2012: Season six's arrangement has a really annoying synth-triangle-like track that hits some really unpleasant high frequencies. By far my least favorite version.
The opening theme, season 1.
Here's a clip of the man himself, Dave Grusin, playing the theme on the piano with an ensemble of jazz musicians, the GRP All-Stars (GRP Records is the label he founded in the 70s). Featuring Lee Ritenour (guitar), Dave Valentin (flute), Ivan Lins (keyboards, vocals), Larry Williams (keyboards, sax), Abraham Laboriel (bass), and Carlos Vega (drums).
Here's a guy playing the St. Elsewhere theme with the pipe organ preset on a Roland Juno-G synth. I enjoy his arrangement. It's hard to capture all the polyphony with just ten fingers on two hands. On his YouTube post he warns that his improvised modulated outro at the end is his own improvisation.
This kid does a great arrangement of the St. Elsewhere theme for solo piano. I myself would have kept trying until I did a cleaner performance before putting it up on YouTube, but that's just me. And it's still good.
More Grusin...here are two pieces from his Oscar-winning score to The Milagro Beanfield War. I can totally understand why it won.
Grusin and Morgan Ames's theme to Baretta, "Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow" sung by Sammy Davis, Jr. The first is from the actual Baretta opening credits; the second is an extended single that went to #1 in the Netherlands.
One more...here's Grusin's theme from Robert Altman's revisionist film noir Philip Marlowe movie, The Long Goodbye, with vocals by Jack Sheldon. This movie was featured in a film studies class I took. Various versions of the theme keep popping up through the film.
At one point during the film, Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is in a piano bar during the day, and there's a pianist practicing the tune because it's the latest hit that everyone wants to hear. That pianist is played by Jack Riley, who revived his character from The Bob Newhart Show, Mr. Carlin, in the season 4 St. Elsewhere episode, "Close Encounters", which crossed over the two series into the same fictional universe. He's in the psych ward when John Doe #6 decides that his true identity is Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and he dubs Mr. Carlin as Rhoda.
