A Correction

I must have been more dazed than usual to suggest, as I did in the previous post, that the famous ABC news theme ('Majestic Fanfare') was scrapped only a year ago (from TV - it still plays on radio). It was, of course, scrapped some eighteen years ago. This only emphasizes the point I was trying to make, but it shows that to blog in haste is to repent at leisure. More than one person agrees with me that the current ABC TV theme is an over-orchestrated bucket of musical slop, the work of Martin Armiger, a one-time leading light of Melbourne's 'alternative' rock scene.

News bulletin music is an interesting sub-genre. The mandatory element, like a trill in a funeral march, is some kind of syncopated staccato figure, usually in the tuned percussion (e.g., xylophone), intended to evoke morse code: the current GTV-9 news theme is a perfect example. Now, morse code has not been a medium of news communication for about seventy years, and 99 percent of the people who hear a TV news theme today have never heard morse code for real, only as a sound effect in an old movie. A fascinating example of the persistence of aural iconography - the symbol lives on long after the underlying reality has disappeared.