Main Titles/Episode Intro to “Them, Robot” from The Simpsons.
The Main Title theme for the series (and movies) was composed by Danny Elfman; the underscoring for each episode, however, has been composed by Alf Clausen. The Intro to this episode is in A B A’ form, featuring the Main Title theme in sections A and A’, while musically diverging in the B section. The B section accompanies the scenes introducing the subject of the TV episode and establishes both the time and place in which the episode takes place. In “Them, Robot” (and in The Simpsons in general) the notion of the “passage of time” is depicted with a particular scale, as you will discover in this assignment.
These are some of the excerpts you will encounter throughout the book. For this assignment, you will identify whether each excerpt is in major or minor, when the singer arrives on the tonic pitch, and whether the pitches before and after the arrival on the tonic generally fall above that tonic or below it.
