Roy Webb's Victory Signature

On December 7, 1942, a year to the day from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, audiences at the Rialto Theater in New York City witnessed the premiere of producer Val Lewton's first film, Cat People. The first image seen that night was familiar; the RKO corporate logo with its radio tower spanning the globe transmitting animated radio waves. What the audience heard at the Cat People premiere was new. RKO's vice president for production, Charles Koerner, instructed Roy Webb in his capacity as head of the Music Department to prepare a new “Victory Signature” to accompany the RKO logo as part of the studio's commitment to the war effort. RKO, like all the Hollywood studios, was complying with the newly formed Office of War Information's request to keep things cheerful and promote happy optimism on the home front.

In response to Koerner's request, Webb created a musical signature for the war effort in the form of a trope on the opening bars of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with its short-short-short-long rhythm expressing the Morse code for the letter V, V for Victory and for the Roman numeral five. The BBC had previously adopted Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for its wartime signature in broadcasts to occupied Europe, so the association was not initially Webb’s.

Webb's “Victory Signature” (Figure 1.1) offers a variation on Beethoven’s famous motif. Beethoven's rhythm remains intact, as does the first intervalic descent from G to E-flat. Webb's first modification emerges in his choice to sustain both the G and E-flat while maintaining the “V” rhythm in his upperpedal. From there, Webb introduces more changes. Where Beethoven next presents his motif on F descending to D-flat, Webb drops immediately to D-flat and moves to A. Webb's concluding pitch collection of D-flat, E-flat, G, and A closes his “Victory Signature” with a whole-tone discordancy not present in Beethoven's symphony. This signature would grace all but one of RKO’s releases scored by Webb from late 1942 through the end of the war in 1945.

Why would Roy Webb respond to a request for an optimistic, wartime corporate signature in this way? Why would Webb resist any reference to a victory topic such as fanfare figures, the major mode, ascending lines, or bright timbres all present in the pre-war and wartime corporate signatures for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Universal Pictures?