Jerry Goldsmith composed seven original scores for The Twilight Zone in 1960 and 1961, all for half hour episodes. Goldsmith originally served as a scripts typist at CBS, eventually working his way up to composer. As Goldsmith recounted, he began his composition career at CBS when he “started writing music for radio shows where cues only 25 seconds long had to sound like a symphony, you had to say so much in such a condensed period of time.” It is likely that his approach to conveying a clear message in a short cue stemmed from his early experiences in radio.

From radio, Goldsmith moved to television, where he was essentially self-taught in writing dramatic music: “My teacher was myself. I studied composition, theory, harmony, and counterpoint with teachers, but coming in film scoring you teach yourself. You can't really teach it! I was fortunate… I worked in the ‘50s for five years on live television: you screwed up, came back next week and again had another attempt at it.” He also was accustomed to working with small orchestras on radio until he scored his first feature using an ensemble of 26 musicians in 1958.

The late 1950s and early 1960s was a formative time in Goldsmith's composition career and from the beginning Goldsmith was a self-proclaimed serial composer. As he stated publicly on more than one occasion, he strived to create “emotional penetration instead of simply describing the action.” His Twilight Zone scores tend to synthesize elements from both the symphonic and jazz genres, even though, as he said, he could write music in any genre. He stressed that he often used standard orchestral instruments in unconventional ways. For example, he cites one instance in his score for Planet of the Apes (1968) in which he had the French Horn players blow air through their mouthpieces without producing any sound, pointing out that when “you combine that with some other effects and sounds, then you put it in a musical context and it does marvelous things.” He clarified this approach to composing music, remarking that “you really have to bring something emotionally to the picture that's not there. Otherwise, the music is redundant.”