Like other science fiction television series of the time such as Dr. Who (1959- 1964), The Outer Limits (1963-1965), and Lost in Space (1963-1965), The Twilight Zone “had signature tunes and incidental music that were strongly evocative of their genre.” As Chapter 1 explained, there were two ways that music scores would be compiled for The Twilight Zone: using the tracking system by utilizing cues pre-placed in the CBS Music Library and through the composition of original scores, the topic of this chapter and much of the rest of this book. As the previous chapter discussed, the music for The Twilight Zone falls into three categories and composers sometimes wrote pieces specifically for The Library with no show or theme in mind. As Fred Steiner reminds us, the music of each episode bore no relation between them aside from the opening and closing themes with the exception of the revised tracks.

The majority of original scores do not receive onscreen credit and overall, only roughly one-third of the 156 episodes credited the composer at the end of the episode. As James Wierzbicki points out, the majority of newly-composed scores that do receive onscreen credit—seventeen out of thirty six—aired in the first season. 4 It is important to remember that simply because an episode premiered before another, it does not mean that that episode was composed, or even reached the scoring session, first. This all depended on both the composing time and the final process of assembling an episode. For example, as we will see later, we know from Fred Steiner's testimony that his first score composed for the series was “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim,” but the first episode to air that contained an original score by him was “King Nine Will Not Return.”

While some of the composers for the series did not speak publicly about their experiences writing for the show, several did. These accounts allow us to understand the composer's process when writing the music for a moving image. As a result, some of these composers provided insights on how they wrote the music for individual episodes, as well as the decisions about which episodes received the music that they did.