Elmer Bernstein’s National Geographic Theme (Full Length)

By Nicholas Stix

July 11, 2009
The Critical Critic

I’d call this, “Ode to Copland in Four Movements.”

Note that it has the structure of a fanfare (allusion to “Fanfare for the Common Man”) and, at 0:32, it hits its musical climax, in an allusion to the musical climax that comes early in the first movement of Appalachian Spring, in what my mom calls Copland’s “wild sweetness.”

If there’s a more brilliant, ambitious, and at the same time, touching—since the whole thing is an homage to Copland—TV theme, I hope someone will tell me.

(A word of warning: The guy who put this together went a little nuts with images of the weird. Some of them might be relevant to the theme of National Geographic, but most either express his own preoccupations, or resulted when he went in a certain direction, and just kept going.)