JAVS Spring 2014

C ASTING S OME D ARK S HADOWS : T HE V IOLA M USIC OF R OBERT C OBERT

list in the Dakota String Quartet, I was slated to play a concerto with the orchestra the next year. I decided to pursue commissioning a new work from Robert Cobert, my childhood idol. I was involved in Dark Shadows fandom at the time when I contacted Shadowgram , the official newsletter of the show. They forwarded my letter to Mr. Cobert, and much to my amazement I received a very enthusiastic call back from him regarding my proposal! In the mean time, he sent me a string quartet that he had written a few years earlier, and my quartet gave the world premiere. The following summer, I received a draft of the score for Concert Piece for Viola and Small Orchestra , which I premiered on December 5, 1992. While readers may not be familiar with the name Robert Cobert, he has had a very long and successful musical career. Born in 1924, his early jobs included playing saxophone and clarinet in New york hotels and night clubs, and he was educated at City College of New york and Juilliard. While in his twenties, he began composing for radio and theater, eventually expanding into television music. During the 1950s and 1960s he composed original music for some of the most popular game shows including To Tell the Truth, Password , and The Price is Right , and his music was heard on other shows including Ben Casey and The Defenders . In 1966 Cobert met Dan Curtis, who had created a new television show called Dark Shadows . The distinctive music that Cobert com posed for the show was “one of the many elements which made Dark Shadows so memorable.” 1 Cobert and Curtis would collaborate on numerous produc tions together, mostly in the horror genre. But it was in a non-horror genre where Cobert would earn his most memorable film credit in a production for Dan Curtis. In 1983 the eighteen-hour television minis eries Winds of War premiered, for which Cobert had spent a year writing a two-thousand-page score. Reflecting on that experience, Cobert commented that “I don’t mean to suggest that the quality is in any way comparable, but

From left to right: composer Robert Cobert and violist John Peskey

by John Peskey

Like many kids growing up in the sixties, I ran home from school to watch a supernatural soap opera called Dark Shadows. Dark Shadows was not your usual daytime melodrama. It was filled with vampires, ghosts, witches, werewolves, and even a Frankenstein-type monster. One afternoon a ghost appeared accompanied by a haunting melody for violin and piano. That melody, “Quentin’s Theme,” became a big hit when the soundtrack was released in 1969. After saving every penny, I bought the recording for less than $4.50. I learned from the LP’s jacket that the composer, Robert Cobert, was a Juilliard graduate. While staring frequently at the grainy little black-and-white photo of him, I dreamed of meeting him some day. I was so smitten with the sound of the violin that I begged my parents to get me one, and I soon started taking lessons. Many years later—in 1991—as prin cipal violist of the South Dakota Symphony and vio

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