The score sets the tone of 'Horror'

What makes 'The Simpsons' Halloween special great is music, show creator says.

- TIM GREIVING

BART welcomes back a Halloween tradition.

20th Television

Matt Groening knows what a real theremin sounds like.

As a kid who grew up on the celluloid junk food of the 1950s and '60s, “The Simpsons” creator heard the ghostly wail of that early electronic instrument in sci-fi film scores and in albums by his beloved Frank Zappa.

Its cousin, the ondes martenot, was featured in one of Groening’s favorite classical pieces — the “Turangalila-symphonie” by Olivier Messiaen — which would inspire the name for a lead character in "Futurama," Turanga Leela.

So, when composer Alf Clausen was recruited in the sophomore season of Groening's popular new show about a yellow nuclear family and answered a request to use theremin - a small lectern with two metal antennae sticking out, which a musician plays by moving their hand in the space between-in the inaugural "Treehouse of Horror" episode in October 1990, Groening immediately recognized it was a fake; it was bouncing around the scale in a way a real theremin can't do.

"And [Clausen] admitted, yeah, it wasn't a theremin; it was a keyboard," Groening recalls. "And it took many years for us to get a real theremin. The downside of the theremin is that it can't play all the notes-but it's got a feel to it that is so great." Clausen quickly became a fixture of "The Simpsons," scoring every episode from that first "Treehouse of Horror," now an annual Halloween tradition, all the way through the end of the 28th season, which wrapped in 2017, as well as composing many unforgettably funny songs with the show's writers. Groening often referred to Clausen as the show's "secret weapon." The show's producers were always pushing to save money, Groening says, and to have the show scored with synthesizers and a drum machine par for the course for TV music in the 1990s. But Groening felt differently.