With flashing lights bright colors and big money game shows have been an integral part of
American culture since the days of radio. While the music that accompanies game shows is
charming and catchy it presents two unique opposing challenges: first it must exhibit unity
in its construction so that at any point and for any length of time it is a tuneful
recognizable signifier of the show to which it belongs at the same time it must also possess
the ability to be started and stopped according to the needs of gameplay without seeming
truncated. This book argues that game show music in particular from 1960 to 1990 deploys a
variety of shared techniques in order to manage these two goals including theme-derived vamps
saturation of motivic material and harmonic rhythmic and formal ambiguity. Together these
techniques make game show themes exciting memorable and perfectly suited to their role.
