Second longest-running theme tune Dutch TV

Today is the 1000th anniversary broadcast of the longest-running TV quiz on Dutch television: Per Seconde Wijzer by BNNVARA. In 1989, Stephen Emmer was commissioned to create the new theme tune, about which lies the following short anecdote, which could also serve as a quiz question.

Composer Stephen Emmer on the origins of the theme tune, briefly: “When I first heard the name of the program back then, the idea immediately started bubbling up inside me to do something with the quiz’s concept of time in the tune, since music, after all, also has a time-related system. I chose a tempo of 60 beats per minute (the average rhythm of the human heart) and divided the duration of the whole into different time units, like a stopwatch. This way, you hear an accent pulse every second, and I further subdivided those seconds into milliseconds, to which another rhythmic pattern could be linked. A hidden rhythmic effects layer is the sound of winding a cuckoo clock, and the melodic part is a version, timed differently here and thus phrased, of what Big Ben plays every hour, and we end with a percussion sound meant to illustrate the turn of a sports finish. So, a kind of musical Sudoku that you have to solve within a certain time.” The theme tune has by now more than stood the test of time. And for 32 years already, as another Dutch song also says, making it the longest-running theme tune on television after Studio Sport.

[Spreekbuis - Editorial]