Sounds of Fear and Wonder: Music in Cult Tv 9781350988088, 9780857727367

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Janet K. Halfyard is Associate Professor at Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University, where she teaches film music, twentieth-­ century music and contemporary music. She is the author of Danny Elfman’s Batman: A Film Score Guide (2004) and co-editor of Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2010).

 ‘This introduction is also an argument – for the importance of music within cult TV; for a new understanding of musical numbers in cult/quality shows; for the recognition of cult’s sonic complexity. Ranging from Star Trek to The Sopranos, and Twin Peaks to True Blood, Janet K. Halfyard has an enviable ear for detail. Say it once more, with feeling: this is musical scholar-fandom at its finest.’ Matt Hills, Professor of Film and TV Studies, Aberystwyth University, and author of Fan Cultures and Triumph of a Time Lord ‘Television scholars need this book. Others will simply want it. … Halfyard combines a musicologist’s understanding of technique with a rich comprehension of the series she analyzes. Her discussions of formal structure enlighten larger meaning. She begins by examining the difference between film and TV music. From historical background on earlier cult classics such as Star Trek, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files, and investigations of changes in opening themes and end credits music, she moves on to in-depth explorations of series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with its extraordinary scoring, Supernatural, with its genre-shifting, and Hannibal, with its striking incorporation of sound. The inclusion of illuminating selections of scoring strengthens her case for our need to pay real attention to the importance of music and sound in television art. We should all applaud Halfyard’s lucid, literate work.’ Rhonda V. Wilcox, Professor of English, Gordon State College ‘Halfyard’s book is a triumph of scholarship. It offers a fascinating and illuminating history of music and sound in television; a wealth of comparative analyses between television and film, and between different types of television shows; and it provides detailed, exquisite readings of the use of music in a range of programmes. Its clear and unambiguous focus on cult TV means that not only do we learn a huge amount about the specifics of music (from live versus synth recordings; scoring; technological and aesthetic shifts; motifs and themes; and stock sounds, for example) but this also serves to re-invigorate and re-cast more general questions about the development of TV in general and cult TV in particular. The discussion of the uses of music in intros, as an aspect of the role of intros at all in the age of streaming, is exceptional in this regard and also demonstrates the breathtaking range of knowledge this book has to offer. Intellectually stimulating; erudite, generous and deftly written this is a book every student or scholar of television drama – cult or otherwise – should read.’ Matthew Pateman, Professor of Popular Aesthetics, Sheffield Hallam University ‘A remarkable and compelling demonstration of just how complicated and nuanced the construction of music and sound has become in cult television shows – which (even more remarkably) Halfyard does in a clear and methodical style, making nuanced observations while still providing careful explanations to those without musical backgrounds.’ Neil Lerner, E. Craig Wall, Jr. Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Music, Davidson College, North Carolina

SOUNDS OF FEAR AND

WONDER MUSIC IN CULT TV JANET K. HALFYARD

Published in 2016 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2016 Janet K. Halfyard The right of Janet K. Halfyard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Investigating Cult TV Series ISBN (HB): 978 1 78453 028 0 ISBN (PB): 978 1 78453 029 7 eISBN: 978 0 85772 940 8 epdf: 978 0 85772 736 7 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by Newgen Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J, International Ltd

To my other family, the members of the Whedon Studies Association

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Series Editor: Stacey Abbott The Investigating Cult TV series is a fresh forum for discussion and debate about the changing nature of cult television. It sets out to reconsider cult television and its intricate networks of fandom by inviting authors to rethink how cult TV is conceived, produced, programmed and consumed. It will also challenge traditional distinctions between cult and quality television. Offering an accessible path through the intricacies and pleasures of cult TV, the books in this series will interest scholars, students and fans alike. They will include close studies of individual contemporary television shows. They will also reconsider genres at the heart of cult programming, such as science fiction, horror and fantasy, as well as genres like teen TV, animation and reality TV when these have strong claims to cult status. Books will also examine themes or trends that are key to the past, present and future of cult television. Published and forthcoming titles: Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit and Steel edited by Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy The Cult TV Book edited by Stacey Abbott Dancing with the Doctor: Dimensions of Gender in the New Doctor Who Universe by Lorna Jowett Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television edited by Douglas L. Howard I’m Buffy and You’re History: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary Feminism by Patricia J. Pender Investigating Alias: Secrets and Spies edited by Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown Investigating Charmed: The Magic Power of TV edited by Karin Beeler and Stan Beeler Investigating Farscape: Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction by Jes Battis Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present by Miles Booy Sounds of Fear and Wonder: Music in Cult TV by Janet K. Halfyard True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic by Brigid Cherry Ideas and submissions for Investigating Cult TV to [email protected] [email protected]

Contents Figures and Tables Acknowledgements

ix xi

Introduction

1



1 Music and its Means of Production: Film versus TV

10



2 Early Cult Television Scoring Strategies

24



3 Intros and Outros: the Changing Nature of Opening Titles and End Credits in Cult TV

44



4 Listening to Buffy the Vampire Slayer

73



5 Scoring Television Vampires

93



6 The Bells of Hell go Tingalingaling: Diabolical Genre Games in Supernatural TV

114



7 Music, Fantasy and Subjectivity in ‘Real World’ Dramas

135



8 The Rest is Noise: Music and Sound in Hannibal

162

Conclusion

185

Notes 188 Works Cited 195 TV and Filmography 203 Index 209

vii

Figures and Tables 2.1 The opening pitches of the Star Trek fanfare (a) and variations (b and c) in the original series’ score

27

2.2 Main theme from ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’

34

2.3 Allusion to Saint-Saëns’ ‘Aquarium’ from Carnival of the Animals

35

3.1 Bumper motif from 24

54

3.2 Opening of Dexter’s title music

56

3.3 Rhythmic layers in the descending scale passage

58

3.4 Repeated tritones in Dexter’s theme tune

58

3.5 1980s style deviant titles in Fringe

65

4.1 Christophe Beck’s ‘Hopeful’ theme from Buffy, season 3

75

4.2 Robert Duncan’s ‘Slayer’ theme from Buffy, season 7

75

4.3 The ‘Buffy–Angel love theme’

79

4.4 The ‘Giles–Jenny’ theme from ‘Passion’

81

4.5 Allusion to the Loss theme in ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’

83

4.6 ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ theme

84

4.7 ‘This is What is Left’ theme

87

4.8 Relationship of Loss theme to ‘This is What is Left’

88

4.9 Interpolation of Loss theme and ‘This is What is Left’ in ‘Amends’ 89 4.10 Over-romanticized version of Loss theme in ‘Beer Bad’

91

4.11 Major key version of Loss theme in ‘I Will Remember You’

91

5.1 Dracula ‘waltz’ theme

100

5.2 Piano and cello theme for first sight of Bill

110

5.3 ‘Bill’s Theme’

111

5.4 Similarity of Bill’s and Stefan’s themes

112

ix

Sounds of Fear and Wonder

6.1 Allusions to James Bernard’s Dracula theme (a) in Jay Gruska’s score for ‘Monster Movie’ (b) 129 6.2 Ed Brewer as the Phantom of the Opera in ‘Monster Movie’

131

7.1 ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’: Claire’s Broadway fantasy

148

7.2 Dexter’s M-Theme

157

7.3 M-Theme waltz variation

159

7.4 M-Theme ‘quirky’ version

159

7.5 Dexter’s Blood theme

160

8.1 ‘Gentle’ Motif in Hannibal

164

8.2 Season 2 finale motif

169

8.3 ‘Vide Cor Meum’ (a) and the season 2 finale motif (b)

169

8.4 Hannibal’s ‘human cello’

181

Tables 3.1 Length of TV title sequences

50

4.1 Appearances of the Loss theme in second half of Buffy, season 2

85

5.1 A summary of Tagg’s observations of male and female characteristics in music

105

7.1 Mapping Dyer’s Utopian musical categories against dystopian TV musicals

142

x

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Stacey Abbott for her support and encouragement of this project, and everyone at I.B.Tauris for their help in bringing it to completion. I am very grateful to Birmingham Conservatoire, and its parent institution, Birmingham City University, for providing the research leave that made watching 400 hours of television possible, and supporting me financially in attending conferences in Vancouver, Edinburgh, Northampton and Sacramento that allowed me to try out and develop my ideas. My thanks also go to my colleagues at the Conservatoire for their friendship and support throughout the two years that I  have worked on this: David Saint, Ron Woodley, Christopher Dingle, Peter Jarvis, Shirley Thompson and Carrie Churnside; and especially Duncan Fielden, for the loan of DVDs and production of the music examples. Not only have my colleagues supported me in this, but also the students who took my ‘Hearing Film’ module, and I am particularly grateful to Olesegun Akinola, Anna Palmer, Alec Roberts and Linsday Wright for their enthusiasm and thought-provoking contributions. Above all, I  am profoundly grateful to the members of the Whedon Studies Association for the welcoming community they have created and with whom I have been sharing ideas about music and television on paper and in person since 2001. This book would never had happened without them: Rhonda Wilcox, David Lavery, Stacey Abbott (again), Lorna Jowett, Bronwen Calvert, Michael Starr, Marcus Recht, Nikki Stafford, Matthew Pateman, Neil Lerner, Ian Dawe, David Kociemba, Julie Hawk, Alyson Buckman, Tanya Cochran, Cynthea Masson, K. Dale Koontz, Ensley Guffey and all the many others who have been both friends and colleagues on my journey through television music.

xi

Introduction

This book has its origins in a chance discussion with Richard Dyer over breakfast in the student halls of residence at a conference on film music at Southampton University in 2001. On learning that the paper I was presenting that day was on music in Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire, he leapt to the (entirely correct) conclusion that I must also be interested in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and pointed me toward the academic community that had very recently sprung up around that show. ‘There’s even an online journal’, he said, and that was how I discovered Slayage: The International Online Journal of Buffy Studies as it was then called (now the Journal of the Whedon Studies Association). Slayage published my first paper on music in television in December that year. Since then, I  have found myself increasingly engaged with cult television studies, initially through Slayage, and latterly in wider contexts of gothic and horror television, and studies of the music framing shows: the titles, teasers and trailers. The most striking thing for me has often been finding myself the only musicologist in the room. Musicologists have a tendency to stick together, in part because our discipline involves a great deal of technical vocabulary. We use this and musical notation to explain our ideas to each other in ways that are potentially off-putting to non-musicological audiences. As the musicologist in the room, I have 1

Sounds of Fear and Wonder

developed a two-pronged mission over the years: to find ways of talking to non-musicologists and non-musicians about music in meaningful ways; and to persuade my fellow scholar-fans to listen to and think (more) about the music in the shows they are watching and studying. This volume is the latest stage in my ongoing mission to seek out new ways of talking and thinking about music in cult TV that aim to include non-musicians in the discussion. This book examines how music in cult TV shows supports and constructs narrative, and how, in doing so, it becomes part of what makes the show cult. Cult TV is not a genre: as Matt Hills argues so deftly in his essay on defining cult TV, the ‘cult’ attribute ultimately lies with its audiences, and with the practices and activities of the fans (Hills, 2004: 510). However, he acknowledges the parallel importance of the intention of the writers and producers to create a show that encourages what Reeves, Rodgers and Epstein call avid fans, who ‘enthusiastically purchase or consume ancillary texts related to the programme and often join interpretative communities that have formed around the show’ (1996: 26). As a result of the process whereby a show’s creators design something they hope will tap into a cult/ avid audience, cult shows tend to share certain features, in particular what Hills describes as hyperdiegesis, the construction of ‘immensely detailed, often fantastic, narrative worlds which we as viewers can never fully encounter’ (2004: 511). This is, in essence, Tolkien’s idea of the immersive experience that he felt the fantasy writer should aim to achieve: ‘he makes a Secondary World, which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the law of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside’ (Tolkien, 1966: 37). The type of fan behaviour that is associated with cult shows tends to respond to this secondary world in three ways: finding forums, online or in person, for sharing ideas about the show; cataloguing its details, from micro- to macro-levels; and creating ancillary texts to both complement and, indeed, subvert the primary text of the show itself (e.g. through slash fanfiction). Both of these latter two activities are found in relation to music in cult TV shows. Cataloguing tends to focus primarily on identifying the popular music used in shows, but there are also fan sites dedicated to mapping the use of the specially composed musical themes across episodes in shows including Supernatural and Lost. Musical ancillary texts are found 2

Introduction

in fan-created music videos, which take footage from the show and edit it to (usually) a popular music track that may or may not have been used in the show. As Rob Cover (2010) discusses, these mostly explore relationships between characters, often raising them to heights of ‘cheesy’ romance not necessarily found in the show itself. The music video will intensify the relationship by concentrating clips from different episodes into a single sequence, combined with the lyrics of the chosen song to create ‘a narrative story … which cannot in fact be found in the text with its original score’ (138). Although musical fan activity tends to focus on popular music, much of my argument in this book is that the specially composed music is an essential part of the construction of the hyperdiegetic world of a cult TV narrative drama, and that one of the features that cult shows have in common is the attention paid by the creators to this music. In this, it is similar to quality TV, and there is substantial crossover between these two non-genres. If its audiences primarily define cult, quality is defined by its production values, and there is evidently no conflict of interest in a show therefore being both. Robert Thompson’s definition of quality television (1996) is, in many respects, a good definition of most cult television too, but the following from Thompson’s list of twelve attributes of quality TV are particularly salient to a discussion of cult TV and, indeed, its music: 1. Quality TV … is not ‘regular’ TV… Quality TV breaks rules 6. Quality TV has a memory 7. Quality TV creates a new genre by mixing old ones 8. Quality TV tends to be literary and writer-based. The writing is usually more complex than in other types of programming. (Thompson, 1996: 13–15)

Where music comes into this as a definition of contemporary cult television is very much to do with rule-breaking, memory, mixing genres to create new ones, and the parallels with the writing:  the music of cult TV also tends to be intensely ‘musical’ in the same way that the writing of quality and cult TV tends to be intensely ‘literary’, and one particular development in twenty-first century cult TV music is an increased similarity to film music in terms of use of thematic material and instrumental 3

Sounds of Fear and Wonder

resources. Nonetheless, music has come rather late to the quality party. Thompson describes the situation in the 1980s where the ‘high-budget, cinematic look and sound of HBO and Showtime’ was aimed at attracting ‘liberally educated and conspicuously consuming viewers’ (1996: 38). However, despite Thompson’s inclusion of sound in this description, the music at this time was not often cinematic in production quality or indeed the aesthetics of its use. This music was much less likely to use live instruments and more likely to rely on synthesizers instead; it was more likely to appear in quite generic blocks of sound; and it was most likely to occur as brief bursts of segue music for transitions between scenes rather than cinematic, thematic underscoring. This might be argued as part of Thompson’s point 11 that ‘Quality TV aspires toward “realism”’ (1996: 15). In a show like L.A. Law, for example, there is very little underscore, even in the montage-like Previously On segments. In film, music is routinely used in montage sequences, where it adds a sense of continuity to sequential shots covering several different places and points in time, but quality TV of the 1980s, in its quest for realism, avoided music in general: the most common musical elements in L.A. Law are the brief fragments alluding to the theme tune used for transitions between scenes. Most other music heard is source music, occurring diegetically within the drama; music tends to be heard in the background at parties and in social settings as an aspect of the scene’s realism rather than coming from the underscore. Likewise, thirtysomething also uses very little music as underscore and again regularly places music in relation to act breaks and other structural transition points, sonically smoothing the way in and out of the narrative, but avoiding any ‘interference’ with the dialogue that drives the story. One of the distinctive elements of cult that differs from Thompson’s quality TV is the engagement with fantasy rather than a verismo reality and the way that music is then used to construct and inform the ‘reality’ of the fantastic world in a way that draws the viewer in and lends credibility to the narrative. There are two main consequences of this. The first is that there is a lot of music in cult TV:  three-quarters of an episode may well have musical scoring. Secondly, the music written for cult shows, especially since the late 1990s, has become increasingly thematic, employing complex networks of musical themes that may extend over the entire run of a multi-season show. This use of musical themes goes against the general character of 4

Introduction

much television music as distinct from film music, and part of the innovation found in scoring cult TV involves developing distinctively televisual strategies for constructing and organizing the musical material. Examining these strategies and how they inform the narrative accounts for the larger part of the work this book aims to do via an empirical study of some of the more interesting and innovative cult TV scores written during and since the 1990s. In trying to find a coherent way of presenting my ideas about the work that music does in cult television, I have organized my chapters to primarily separate out distinct genres within cult, and I have done this by defining the nature of the fantastic within a particular show. This is because firstly, the fantastic is a common thread connecting much of what becomes cult in television, owing to the way that fantasy tends to create space for viewers to exercise their own creativity and engage more deeply with a series; and because music itself frequently operates as a means of constructing the fantastic. Music lends a concrete identity to the things we cannot see or which lie so far from our own experience that they might otherwise be difficult for us to identify or identify with. Music allows us to gain insight into the nature of things beyond the information contained within the image. Michel Chion describes this as sound’s ‘added value’: the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself. (Chion, 1994: 5)

To dispel the illusion that information lies naturally within the image, the very first thing I do with my students in my film and television music module every year is show them a short clip from the film The Sting with its original soundtrack removed and a new one dubbed in. In the clip, Robert Redford waits on a deserted street at night, watching a woman as she closes the diner where she works and walks the short distance from the diner to a doorway. As she disappears inside, Redford stands and crosses the street, then looks up as he sees a light come on in the building the woman has entered. He pauses, then walks toward the doorway. The shot cuts to an 5

Sounds of Fear and Wonder

interior view of the building: we see a staircase, and first a moving shadow and then Redford as he climbs the stairs. He walks along the landing, and knocks on a door; the woman opens it and they exchange a look. I play my students several versions of this short scene: because the pace of the scene is slow in terms of both the length of shot and the movements of the characters, I use music with a slow tempo. One version uses the slow movement of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.2; one is set to the main title music from the film Interview with the Vampire; another version uses Philip Glass’ Glass Piece No 2. After each version, I ask the students to tell me what is happening:  what is Redford doing or feeling, what is the relationship between him and the woman? What type of film are we watching? Their responses are extremely consistent. In the Rachmaninov version (a piece used in Brief Encounter, a film very few of my music students have seen), Redford is in love with the woman. It is a melancholy love: perhaps something has happened between them, perhaps they are no longer together, but he certainly still loves her. In the Interview version, he intends to kill her: unequivocally, every year, this is the response. My students have commented on the way that the expression on his face changes as he watches her in the Interview version compared to the Rachmaninov, and what was lovelorn now looks deeply sinister. The Glass is a piece of minimalist music that is slow and sustained, in a minor key, with a plaintive oboe ‘melody’ (mostly consisting of a single pitch) and it lacks the types of clearly readable musical gesture of the other two. This is much harder to interpret, but nonetheless students tend to arrive at a common view that he knew her long ago, and has come to give her bad news. What is most impressive is the consistency with which successive groups of students arrive at the same interpretation of what is happening in each version, which I  have used every year since I first started teaching this class in 1996. Claudia Gorbman refers to this phenomenon as ‘mutual implication’ (1987: 15): there is a set of potential meanings in the image and a set of potential meanings in the music, and when a particular image is juxtaposed with a particular piece of music, that juxtaposition will mutually imply a usually quite narrow range of meanings with the result that audiences are strongly encouraged through the choice and use of music to interpret what they are watching in the same way. As Guido Heldt points out, ‘it would not make much sense to claim that assumptions about audience reactions do not influence the 6

Introduction

way films are made, and that in turn films do not condition audiences to approach them with certain expectations’ (2013: 15–16). Music’s capacity to guide an audience into a particular interpretation is one of the main reasons why music is used in film and television, and the composer’s job is in large part a process of translating into musical terms what it is that the director or writer wants a scene to communicate to the audience. This in turn relies on the audience members all sharing a set of ‘cultural music codes’ (Gorbman, 1987: 3) that allow them to read the audio-visual text in similar ways. It is no coincidence that many art-house films use almost no music at all and so demand that the viewer work much harder to arrive at an understanding for themselves, rather than having interpretation imposed upon them by the score. In cult television, music works in a variety of ways in relation to constructions of the fantastic and draws on our shared cultural musical codes to do this. In supernatural shows, fantasy lies in magic, myth and monsters; in science fiction, it lies in futuristic technologies and aliens; in quality/cult TV, it lies in what is ostensibly the real world where some aspect of the narrative has been pushed to such an extreme that it effectively operates as fantasy, even though we may not immediately perceive it as such. What makes examining music in relation to the fantastic interesting when divided up generically this way is that some fundamental aspects of the scoring strategies operate quite differently in the different genres. In the supernatural genres, the music often stands in for the fantastic and helps to construct the often intangible supernatural, sometimes even appearing as a manifestation of the fantastic itself. In science fiction, especially since 2000, it sometimes does the complete opposite, reconstructing the musically familiar to help the audience negotiate the alien world, drawing on existing musical codes from our cultural history as a counterbalance to the strangeness of a fantastic environment. Meanwhile in ‘real world’ cult series, music allows us insight into a central, quasi-fantastic character, and serves to normalize and make sympathetic someone who is psychopathic and/or criminal. Rather than constructing a world (not needed in shows such as Sherlock, Hannibal or Dexter, where the world is essentially already known) the music constructs the fantastic individuals at the heart of the drama and guides our understanding of and reactions toward them. 7

Sounds of Fear and Wonder

The following chapters, therefore, look at the differences between film and television composition (chapter one); explore the strategies of early cult programmes, in particular Star Trek, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure and The X-Files (chapter two); and look in particular at how cult TV has altered our expectations in titles and end credit music (chapter three). I  then turn to an examination of music in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show that marks the beginning of a flourishing of composed television music in 1997. From here, I examine music for sympathetic and romantic vampires (chapter five); music as a manifestation of the fantastic in supernatural TV (chapter six); and music and subjectivity as a particular concern in the ‘real world’ fantasies of quality TV shows (chapter seven). The final chapter closes the frame opened by Buffy, and brings my examination of TV music as up to date as I am able, looking at Hannibal. Science fiction cult TV is not discussed in depth here: although shows such as Babylon 5, Firefly, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica and Lost are all musically very interesting shows, there is already a fair amount of literature examining science fiction TV music and so my focus remains primarily on supernatural and quality/cult shows. Cult TV as a whole is, in fact, the focus of a disproportionate amount of what has currently been written on TV music in general: in addition to the various essays published on music in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Dollhouse in journals and edited collections, there are two complete collections dedicated solely to music in the work of Joss Whedon (Attinello, Halfyard and Knights, 2010; Leonard, 2011). Donnelly (2005) includes a chapter on TV music focusing on Star Trek, Doctor Who and Space 1999; another collection of essays on music in science fiction TV (Donnelly and Hayward, 2013) includes Star Trek (Lerner), Doctor Who (Butler), Babylon 5 (Niebur) and Lost (Elferen); and there are also earlier essays on music in collections on Twin Peaks (Kalinak, 1995), and The X-Files (Stilwell, 2003a), and Buffy (Dechert, 2002). While Deaville’s edited collection (2011) and Rodman’s monograph (2010) have more inclusive agendas in their consideration of TV music, both dedicate significant space to Star Trek. Deaville’s collection also includes another essay on Doctor Who (Stilwell); while Rodman devotes his final chapter to Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Northern Exposure as examples of ‘postmodern’ TV music. Doctor Who’s music is further covered with two essays by Butler and Donnelly in Butler’s edited 8

Introduction

collection on original Doctor Who (2007); in Niebur (2010) and his history of the BBC’s radiophonic workshop; and in a chapter by Matt Hills (2010) in his monograph on the new Doctor Who series. What has been written on just Star Trek, Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer probably accounts for most of what has been written about television music in English to date. This focus on cult TV’s music on its own suggests that it is distinctive and interesting; that scholar-fans are consistently finding things they want to say about it and that other types of television are, as yet, not inspiring the same level of engagement. Stacey Abbott identifies innovation as a fundamental characteristic of cult television and ‘that innovation is largely achieved through experimentation with the stylistic, narrative and generic conventions of mainstream television’ (2010: 91). She notes the ‘innovative visual flourishes’ (ibid.) that are a key feature of cult TV, and what I hope to show in the following chapters is that the innovative musical and sonic flourishes and strategies of cult TV are equally significant and worthy of our attention.

9

1 Music and its Means of Production Film versus TV

Scoring for television is not like scoring for film for a number of reasons, some practical and some aesthetic. One very practical difference between film and TV music is that while Los Angeles has several archives and libraries where one can study the orchestrated scores of Hollywood films, much TV music of the last twenty years does not exist as a physically written-down score, and this is a consequence of differences in its means of production. Film generally has a bigger budget for music than TV, and TV music is historically one of the first places to feel the cuts when budgets need to be tightened: as has been noted several times in relation to original Doctor Who’s scoring for live instruments (Cook and Herron, 2003; Butler, 2007; Niebur, 2007, 2010), music was one of the easier areas in which economies could be made during production; you asked the composer to write the score using fewer instruments. Nonetheless, up until the end of the 1970s, TV music was generally written down by a composer and given to instrumentalists to play, just as in film, although TV ensembles tended to be much smaller than the symphony-sized orchestras often found playing film scores; the Doctor Who ensembles in the 1970s rarely had more than ten instrumentalists adding musical material on top of electronic ‘special sound’ (see Butler, 2007: 198). Once synthesizers became commonplace in the 1980s, it became common for TV scoring to be a one-man show1 with 10

Music and its Means of Production

the composer sitting at the keyboard in front of a monitor, playing and recording the music directly to the image. When the music is written on and recorded using synthesizers and samplers (and, more recently, using various types of music software on computers), conventionally notated scores become minimal or non-existent; all the musical examples in this volume have been aurally transcribed directly from DVD. The composer may have made some sketches, but often the music will have gone from imagination to keyboard without going through the medium of written notation en route. In most other musical practices, the ‘score’ equates to the pieces of paper on which the music is written, a physical artefact. In contemporary TV, the score is often the sonic artefact recorded onto the show’s soundtrack. This is not a problem, as such, but it is unusual in relation to the classical musical practice to which TV scoring owes a great deal of its allegiance, and the absence of written notation places it much closer to popular music as a practice. Another issue that arose from the move away from instruments to synthesizers was a perceived loss of quality in the sound itself:  a synthesizer produces a sound that is constructed from electronically generated sound waves to imitate an existing instrumental sound. From the 1970s, when synthesizers became common in TV, and through to the 1990s, synths were probably at their most effective when they were not trying to imitate real instruments; the twangy synth sound in The Rockford Files theme, for example, makes little attempt to sound like a specific instrument. At the end of the 1970s, samplers came along to complement synthesizers: rather than trying to synthesize a sound electronically, a sampler records a sound and then programmes a keyboard to play it back. When synths attempted to recreate instruments, these sounds could be timbrally unconvincing due to the high number of variables in live instrumental playing that were very difficult to account for effectively. Samplers solved some of this problem, but until the 2000s, the amount of memory and processing power needed to store and use samples limited the range available. Film also dallied with synthesized scores at the same time that they started being used in TV; The Terminator (1984), for example, has an entirely synthesized score that now dates it very precisely to that period. Although there are some iconic scores from the 1980s, including Chariots 11

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of Fire (1981) and Blade Runner (1982), the fashion did not last: between John Williams’ revitalization of a classical Hollywood symphonic sound in the late 1970s with Star Wars (1977) and Superman (1978), and Danny Elfman’s darkly gothic orchestral score for Batman (1989), the live orchestral sound of Hollywood’s Golden Age, as established in films such as King Kong (1933) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1936), reaffirmed itself during the 1980s as the identifying musical signature of the blockbuster feature film. Synthesizer scores, so much more economical for TV, remained firmly in place for most US shows through the 1980s and 1990s (the various new incarnations of Star Trek were a rare exception) and this is one factor affecting the reputation of TV music as lower quality than film music. However, the issue of forces and finances is only one factor in the knotted issue of the quality of TV music. Donnelly (2007) comments that the ‘sparer’ textures of TV music owe themselves to both ‘the cost restrictions on television production … [and] to television’s more intimate character’ (200), but one should also acknowledge the limitations of domestic television speakers which even now can be of relatively low quality, leading many people to buy separate speakers, sound bars and surround sound systems. Televisions’ built-in speakers have generally been able to cope with speech very well, but the more sounds competing to be heard simultaneously over relatively poor speakers, the less satisfactory the experience will be, especially at the highest and lowest end of the sonic frequency spectrum.2 Sparer textures keep the overall sound cleaner, but mean that TV music can seem limited and undeveloped compared with more aurally impressive orchestral film scores. Film is often regarded as a primarily visual medium, in which an orchestral score provides a sonic foundation for viewing the spectacle but commands varying degrees of attention from its audience and is often not actively listened to by cinema-goers.3 Television, meanwhile, particularly as broadcast, is regarded as driven more by speech and sound; as John Ellis says, television ‘engages the look and the glance rather than the gaze’ meaning that ‘the role that sound plays in television is extremely important’ (1992: 128) in holding the viewer’s attention. However, by sound, Ellis does not really mean music, and certainly not scoring, which could find itself in sonic conflict with speech on the average TV’s limited speakers. 12

Music and its Means of Production

That potential danger is also present in film: when (visual) action drives the narrative, the music is often at its grandest; when people speak, the music either disappears or turns to lighter textures. In TV, therefore, where speech tends to dominate anyway, sparer textures are more common in order to prevent the sound from becoming too cluttered. This suggests that the differences between film and TV music are perhaps less an issue of ‘quality’ (with an underlying assumption that the Western classical symphonic sound is somehow innately better) and much more to do with differences between the technologies of the media themselves and how they are viewed and heard by their audiences in different environments. In recent years, the issue of ‘cheap’ synthetic timbres has largely disappeared from quality and cult TV music for several reasons. Firstly, while TV speakers are still relatively poor, the ability to attach better sound systems or to listen through headphones means the listening experience can be of very high audio quality; and audio quality of DVDs and Blu-ray is higher than that of broadcast. Secondly, the electronic technology used to create and play the music itself has got much better, in particular with the use of samples. There are a variety of companies such as 8dio, Vienna and Spitfire Audio that specialize in the creation of complete virtual instruments and orchestras with thousands of individually sampled sounds, available as libraries that can be installed on the composer’s computer and used to ‘orchestrate’ the music in a way that will sound thoroughly convincing almost all the time to the vast majority of listeners:  how many, for example, would be instantly aware that the theme tune of Game of Thrones is not being played by live string players, especially the solo cello? Composers can create their own samples as well, particularly when they want an unusually specific sound: the sound of an out-of-tune, honkytonk piano that features in Battlestar Galactica’s ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ (4.17) is not being played by the actor we see but by the series’ composer, Bear McCreary, on his own keyboards, using a virtual version of the same piano that he spent a night painstakingly sampling in order to be able to synch the piano music he had written with the actor’s miming hands in the final footage (see McCreary, 2009). Thirdly, as cult TV has started to invest more in its music, there has been a noticeable increase in the amount of live instrumental playing in a score. The practice never entirely vanished in early synthesizer 13

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scores: Mike Post, the ubiquitous TV composer of a remarkable number of drama series of the 1970s to 1990s, played guitar as well as keyboards for his own scores, and several of his scores have specific live instruments in them, such as the saxophone in L.A. Law. In the late 1990s, live instruments began to appear more frequently in cult TV scores, most often a solo woodwind or string instrument being added to an otherwise synthetic/sampled cue to ‘sweeten’ the sound; but in the 2000s, it became increasingly common for some or all of an episode’s score to be recorded by larger live ensembles. Battlestar Galactica, where much of the music was recorded by instrumentalists (rather than by Bear McCreary at the keyboard) is one standout example, but others include the live folk ensemble used by Greg Edmondson in Joss Whedon’s Firefly, and the live orchestra used by Michael Giacchino in J. J. Abrams’ Lost and Fringe. Given a decent set up, with high quality samples, there is nothing inherently better about live instruments than virtual ones, but they do different things, and that is something that can be exploited. Samples often work well for orchestral writing for TV: Michael Suby’s score for The Vampire Diaries, for example, is written primarily using sample libraries. These allow his score to tap into a cinematic orchestral horror idiom on one level, but also to explore a range of textures from the full orchestral down to much sparer music, facilitating a seamless blending with the popular music also prevalent on the soundtrack. At the other extreme, Nathan Barr is a multi-instrumentalist and plays almost all the music heard in his scores for True Blood, producing an intimate ‘chamber music’ feel that focuses the sometimes claustrophobic intensity of the drama.4 Firefly’s music, meanwhile, uses the differences between live and synthesized music as part of how it constructs opposing sides of the narrative’s basic conflict. The music used for Serenity’s crew needs live players, especially for the violin:  the improvisatory, double-stopped, folk-inflected, note-bending gestures of the country-music inspired score could not be achieved without a human player. The music of the Alliance, however, uses synthesizers recreating orchestral brass and strings that sound obviously synthetic, inflexible and lifeless compared to the vibrant folk music of Serenity and her crew. This sonic difference plays directly into how the music encourages us to identify with the crew as attractively ‘authentic’ and regard the Alliance as unattractively ‘false’. 14

Music and its Means of Production

Another important difference is that film composers usually start to work at the point that they have a complete cut of the film: they know the whole narrative, see each character’s journey through it, and they know how it ends, all of which puts them in a position to create a score that coherently responds to the narrative in its entirety and can introduce musical ideas at the start of the film that will work alongside the developing story. TV composers, on the other hand, are usually working episode by episode; they may have some idea of where the overall narrative arc is going, but this is not set in stone, and it is common for episodes to be written as the production schedule is in process. The composer may have very little idea of what is going to happen in a few episodes’ time, and this potentially limits the extent to which music can be used to connect events across episodes the way it connects events within a film. Many of the shows I look at in this volume achieve an approach to constructing musical material that allows them to make connections, to have the memory that Thompson (1996: 14) prizes as an aspect of quality TV by using music to remember previous events and connect them to current ones. In the context of how TV series are created, the fact that this can happen at all is impressive. The process of making musical connections between events tends to be done through the use of themes. Themes are often but not always melodic: a particular rhythmic figure, texture or instrumentation can also work thematically, although melody is the most common type of thematic material. Thematic scoring as a strategy in TV music is not without certain problems, however, and again it is worth looking at what different scoring strategies and techniques are available and how they are used, and used differently, in film and TV. Thematic scoring has formed the backbone of film scoring since the beginning of the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s.5 Musical themes in film (often referred to as leitmotif, borrowing a term from opera) sometimes run the risk of becoming rather pedestrian: a character appears on screen and we hear the theme associated with him or her. Adorno and Eisler (1947/2005) detested this kind of scoring, asserting (not without some justification) that this reduces the leitmotif ‘to the level of a musical lackey, who announces his master with an important air even though the eminent personage is clearly recognizable to everyone’ (6). While Adorno and Eisler saw this as pointless duplication of information (we see the character and 15

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hear his or her theme), they nonetheless oversimplify the work that themes do. Music in the context of both TV and film not only identifies but also interprets. These are interlinked functions:  in the process of identifying something, the music tends also to impose an interpretation on it. This is particularly true of themes written to represent a character. The theme will not only identify the character (the calling-card function) but his or her role within the narrative. In doing so, it offers an interpretation, telling us what type of character this is (hero, villain, love interest, femme fatale) and how we should therefore respond to them. This is important in a film because the story must be told in one go in the space of around two hours, with no rewinding (certainly not in the cinema) and with everything made as clear as it needs to be for the viewer to get the experience of the film that its creators want. When the desire is for interpretation to be left open, as in many art-house films, little music may be used; but mainstream films will tend to use a great deal of music. As Sarah Kozloff observes, following Metz’s argument that if there is a narrative, there must also be someone narrating, ‘music, in film and TV, is a key channel through which the voiceless narrating agency “speaks” to the viewer’ (2005: 61). In this process, a theme does not merely serve as a sonic label for a character, but also gives us a great deal of information about them. So, for example, in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones’ theme tells us that he is a daring and loveable action hero by means of the upbeat march tempo, the upwardly rising melodic phrases, the stable harmony and the jaunty dotted rhythms that we often hear when we see him on screen. These form part of a cultural musical code that taps into ideas of the military (brass instrumentation and a march tempo pointing to militaristic action and bravery), whilst also suggesting the energy and sense of optimism that make him an attractive and engaging hero. There is nothing dark or conflicted about him, to judge from the theme that identifies him throughout all of his four films.6 Marion’s music, meanwhile, taps into different cultural codes that cast her as the romantic heroine, with a gentle tempo, soft strings and flute playing a yearning melody: this is a very typical style of scoring (and establishing) romantic heroines. Belloq, Indiana’s professional and romantic rival, is the villain with chromatic Eastern-inflected music that casts him as an exotic, alien and by extension dangerous Other. 16

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Would we understand these characteristics and relationships without the music? Perhaps, but as audience members, we would have to work harder and the results would be more open to interpretation. Indiana might well come across as much more of a one-dimensional American Imperialist and Marion considerably less winsome. She is, after all, a hard-drinking woman who is quite ready with her fists, but the music colludes with the frothy white dress of the second half of the film to encourage us to forget this. The way the music for each character is written taps into an existing cultural code that ‘anchors the image in meaning’, as Gorbman has put it (1987: 84). Music allows the story to be told more quickly and with greater certainty that individual viewers understand the narrative in the way the director wants them to. Kassabian (2000: 2) refers to this as the classical film score’s assimilating function, that particular ability of orchestral scores (as opposed to pop compilation scores) to assimilate the audience into a single interpretation of what they are seeing and in particular to identify the music as ‘belonging’ to the white heterosexual man at the centre of the story. We therefore ‘hear’ the other characters from his perspective: he is the hero, the girl is his romantic trophy, and someone else is his enemy. We hear Belloq through Indiana’s ears – Belloq himself is unlikely to think of himself as the evil, exotic Other, any more than quick-tempered Marion’s music is likely to reflect how she thinks of herself. Themes, therefore, especially character themes, are an essential part of the film score because of the economies they offer in streamlining a story that is being told in a quite compact form. The reverse applies to TV. Here, a series can extend over a hundred or more episodes and in this context themes could potentially become problematic, something Robynn Stilwell notes in her discussion of leitmotif in the relaunched Doctor Who. Given the much shorter series length in British TV (the 2005 season of Doctor Who had thirteen episodes), Stilwell suggests that this ‘makes possible a meaningful use of leitmotifs, which would almost necessarily be too repetitive and/or too superficial in an open-ended, twenty-two-episode-per-year series’ (2011:  136–37). Given how heavy-handed overuse of a theme in a two-hour feature film can be, there is a clear danger that within the extended timeframe of a TV series the consistent use of a film-style, small group of musical themes could become extremely wearing, especially in the era of the box-set or streaming-service 17

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binge, where one lacks the week-long break between episodes imposed by broadcast schedules. Although cult TV composers writing thematic scores are generally very careful in their strategies for employing themes, the risk of over-repetition remains. Even in a score as outstanding as that of Battlestar Galactica, I became heartily sick of themes for Boomer/Athena and Starbuck during season four, themes which are so consistently used every time the relevant character appears that they rapidly become nothing more than the calling-card labels described by Adorno and Eisler; but I do not doubt that this effect would have been much ameliorated had I been watching episodes a week apart rather than three or four a day, or had I not been listening so intently to the music. The uncertain trajectory of a TV narrative is a significant reason why we tend not to find returning themes in earlier TV; but they are more likely to occur in TV drama after the late 1990s in shows employing the long-form, complex narrative structures identified by Jason Mittell (2006) ‘as an alternative to the conventional episodic and serial forms that have typified most American TV since its inception’ (29). An episodic structure tends to lead to shows with limited memory, where whatever happens one week will tend to have been forgotten by the next. As Eaton says, talking about the sitcom, ‘nothing that has happened in the narrative of the previous week must destroy or even complicate the way the situation is grounded’ (1981: 33), and the same is true in early cult TV: Kirk, Spock and McCoy do not develop or change as characters as a result of their experiences on original series Star Trek in the 1960s; nor did the Doctor or his various assistants in original Doctor Who. Episodic narratives lend themselves to episode-specific musical themes: while Star Trek might use a recognizable musical cue where the same type of situation recurs in different episodes (e.g. fight scenes or shots of the ship in orbit) it would make little sense to use musical themes across episodes that potentially recall specific events the rest of the narrative has essentially forgotten. Where shows make a feature of remembering their history, as Mittell’s complex narratives do, there is great potential to exploit the way in which music can recall events, including those from episodes a very long time in the show’s past, a facet of music that balances out the potential ‘waste’ of writing a theme that may never return because of the direction the narrative later takes. For example, in the final season of True Blood, Sookie 18

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and Bill’s relationship begins to heal after several seasons in which Sookie has been gradually getting angrier with him as the depth of his deceptions become apparent. In ‘Fire in the Hole’ (7.3), she and Bill set a trap for the Hep-V vampires using Sookie as bait, and as they wait for their trap to be sprung, Bill asks her how things are with her new boyfriend, Alcide, saying that they need to be able to talk about such things if they are going to be friends. Sookie then talks at length about her fear that she does not love Alcide as much as he loves her, and that this makes her feel so bad that it may well be the end of them. As she says this, we hear the music from the very first episode of the series when Sookie saw Bill as he walked into Merlotte’s, a series of dark, sombre, almost sultry chords on piano. This was an important theme in season one but at this point we, the broadcast audience, have not heard it for more than a year. Brought back at this point it performs a truly Wagnerian leitmotivic function in that it tells us what Sookie is thinking and feeling but does not say. It reminds us of the overwhelming attraction and fascination she felt for Bill when she first laid eyes on him, suggests that she does not love Alcide the way she loved Bill, and further suggests that this is precisely what she is thinking, remembering, as she talks about Alcide. A final notable difference between film and TV scoring practices, one which is ultimately again financial, is the recycling of music in a TV series, something which rarely occurs in feature films. A theme from an earlier scene, or even from an earlier film in a franchise may be re-used in a newly composed cue, but the wholesale re-use of a cue already recorded for another part of the film, or another film entirely, would be unusual in mainstream Hollywood. Recycling previously recorded material in TV is historically much more common, as has been discussed by other writers in work on original series Star Trek and Doctor Who. Donnelly (2005) identifies three basic categories of TV scoring: original music written for a particular episode; stock music; and block music, and these three categories are a useful way of starting to examine cult TV’s scoring practices. Stock music is taken from a library of music either written for other films or shows, or written as general-purpose music. It dates back to the era of silent movies, where music publishers produced catalogues of scores suitable for different situations and emotional affects. Stock or library music has a rather bad name in quality TV. Although it can be a 19

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relatively cheap option, it will not have been written for the show; the editor will need to edit the visuals to the music rather than vice versa; it is, by its very nature, generic. Nonetheless, on occasion, it crops up in quality and cult TV: in The X-Files episode ‘Triangle’ (6.3), in which Mulder finds himself onboard an ocean-going liner, transported back to the 1940s, various chase sequences are set to what is clearly a piece of stock music, a big band, jazzy cue with solo clarinet, played on real instruments and in an attention-grabbingway, unlike the synthesizer/sample-based music of series composer Mark Snow.7 However, the very anomaly of the music fits with the anomaly of the time-travelling episode, which may well all be Mulder’s hallucination. So, while stock music is perhaps the least ‘valued’ music found in TV, it too can function successfully in the construction of an episode, here by making a virtue of its difference. A musical block, meanwhile, might start life either as an original cue for a series or, indeed, as a piece of library stock music, but that same block is then used and re-used throughout the series in ‘equivalent’ moments. Donnelly identifies the way that Star Trek began with new music written for each episode but increasingly re-used cues in later episodes (2005: 119) as a means of providing music at no extra cost in the days when music was mostly being played by live musicians; but the musical block has continued to be a feature since the shift to different working practices in the 1980s. The piano motif that segues between scenes in Friends, for example, is a reusable block, as are many similar cues on other sitcoms that provide musical continuity through a scene change, sonically pasting over the visual crack as the show moves from one set to another. Arguably the quasi-musical whoosh that precedes each flashback in Lost functions in the same way, as does the ‘Ship in Orbit’ cue that recurs throughout season two of the original Star Trek. These are all transitional points with a fixed sonic signature signifying the act of transition itself (coffee shop to apartment, present to past, ship to planet), and points to the fact that this kind of musical recycling is not merely a matter of budgetary economy but also one of musical aesthetics that is distinct to TV, a form of sonic navigation through the structure of the episode. Notably in a variety of cult TV shows, recycled pieces of music act as meaningful signifiers in the same way that a musical theme is assumed to in film, the main difference being the means of production. With thematic 20

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scoring, the assumption is that a new cue is written every time, but the cue uses a musical theme established in earlier music. The new cue can therefore be sonically sculpted to fit precisely to the scene it is for. A recycled block is written and recorded and then re-used as needed; it is a fixed sonic block that cannot adapt to the visual material. However, both involve the repetition of a musical idea; and the mechanics of the repetition are less important than its function; the viewer will come to associate certain musical ideas with certain images or narrative elements, and these may be passing but similar events in a series or they may be highly significant, dramatically central ones. At the ‘incidental’ end of the scale, we have the Lost whoosh. At the other end of the scale, the use of ‘Carry On, My Wayward Son’ in the penultimate episode of season one and every other finale to date since season two of Supernatural means that in practical terms, it is a musical block, but operating thematically to signify the climax of that season’s conflict, and the relentless suffering and determination of the Winchester brothers to complete the mission given to them by their father (as the lyrics say, ‘There’ll be peace when you are done’). The block, in this instance, becomes a key element of how each season reaches its climax, a musical signal combined with the intertitle ‘The Road So Far’ that forms a specific, ritualistic pleasure for fans through its repetition and recognition; a pleasure further acknowledged when the song is performed as a slow ballad as part of a show-within-the-show in ‘Fan Fiction’ (10.5), the two-hundredth episode. Block scoring, then, is a type of scoring that is almost entirely the preserve of TV, occupying a territory partway between the cheap and cheerful use of stock music and the more costly unique scoring. This third category, the specially written score, is the type most like film scoring overall, but the stock-in-trade of the film score, the melodic theme, has historically been absent from TV. As mentioned above, in a TV series extending over many episodes, the received wisdom for many years seems to have been that identifiable melodic themes were a potential problem, for which there were two principal solutions: 1) use variations on the series theme tune as thematic material throughout all episodes to allow for a very specific sense of musical unity in the scoring; and 2) restrict any other musical themes to a particular episode. The theme can be repeated within the episode but is then ‘forgotten’ in subsequent ones. These are the 21

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strategies seen in TV from original Star Trek in the 1960s through to The X-Files in the 1990s. Original series Star Trek’s scoring strategy used both approaches, with the fanfare motif that opens the Star Trek theme tune being subjected to multiple variations (shortened, lengthened, the intervals contracted or expanded, the whole fanfare inverted, etc.) that provide an important element of the scoring of each episode, alongside otherwise episode-specific themes. A fourth category of music has become more prevalent on TV since the late 1990s, and that is the use of licensed popular music, something that has been common in film since the 1960s. (Easy Rider, 1969, is an early, influential pop compilation score.) On one hand, this is a form of library scoring (use of pre-existing music not specifically written for the show), but not a cheap option: where library cues are written to be purchased as library cues, licensing existing, often well-known popular music as heard in shows such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Dawson’s Creek requires much more financial investment. The benefit lies in the way that specific genres and specific pieces of popular music can communicate specific information about a character, and lyrics can operate as commentary on what we see. Supernatural’s use of classic rock music, therefore, both utilizes the meanings of the lyrics, as in the repeated use of ‘Carry On, My Wayward Son’; but also locates Dean, in particular, in the anachronistic musical environment of 1970s rock, in which Stan Beeler sees Dean’s ‘unshakeable confidence in the rectitude of his own choices  – both aesthetic and moral – that enable [him] to adopt the lifestyle of his father’s generation with enviable panache’ (2011:  20). If 1970s music (alongside his 1969 Chevvy Impala) indicates Dean’s commitment to continuing his father’s mission and his adherence to Hunter traditions, Sam’s reluctance to surrender himself so fully to this worldview is demonstrated by greater engagement with the modern, including music. The most overt confrontation between ‘old ways’ and the contemporary is Sam’s ‘abuse’ of the Impala whilst Dean spends a season break in hell, installing an iPod jack so that he can play his contemporary popular music in a contemporary way. On his return, Dean instantly rejects this, ripping out the offending item and its music when he retakes possession of car and soundtrack in ‘Lazarus Rising’ (4.1). 22

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The principal differences between film and TV scoring often stem from the impact of financial constraints on the music’s production; and the need to take a different approach to the nature and use of the musical material in a show due to the period of time over which the audience experiences the narrative and that narrative’s level of completeness at the point the score is composed. These factors result in some specific decisions in the way that cult TV is scored, with strategies employed that either attempt to circumvent the constraints of TV’s resources or commit to greater financial investment; and cult TV has explored ways of scoring shows whose narratives can extend over many years of their audiences’s lives, but which are also increasingly being experienced in highly concentrated viewing sessions, where multiple episodes are watched in sequence. The following chapters explore the diverse and innovative scoring strategies that have emerged from these developments.

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2 Early Cult Television Scoring Strategies

One of the common features of cult TV shows is that they tend to have distinctive scoring strategies: that is, the music will have a set of aims in relation to the narrative that it fulfils using particular musical tools. In practice, this means that the production team agrees both the type of music heard in a show and the way in which it is used. This strategy is, in turn, an important aspect of television style: as David Bordwell says of film style: what people call content comes to us in and through the patterned use of the medium’s techniques … Style is the tangible texture of the film, the perceptual surface we encounter as we watch and listen, and that surface is our point of departure in moving to plot, theme, feeling – everything that matters to us. (Bordwell, 2005: 32, my emphasis)

Jeremy Butler argues that this is no less true of television style (2010: 3), and both acknowledge the role music plays in communicating mood and marking emotion (see Bordwell, 2005:  34; Butler 2010:  55). However, as an aspect of style, music does more than this. It can develop the tone and character of the show as a whole, locating it and its characters in a specific time, geographical place or socio-cultural setting, and a strong musical identity often contributes to a show becoming cult. Fans regularly engage with a show through its music, whether identifying the music in particular 24

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episodes, making music videos or cataloguing and discussing soundtracks and scores; and through exchanges on composers’ own websites where fans can, if they are lucky, engage with the composer directly: Bear McCreary is a prime example of the contemporary TV composer who both allows and encourages this type of engagement. All TV shows will have a musical strategy, even if the strategy is to use no music as such, which occasionally happens: the British drama, Southcliffe, is a relatively rare and interesting example of the latter. Given that music’s presence can often help to create a sense of continuity between otherwise disconnected visual moments (as seen most specifically in a montage sequence), the lack of any music in Southcliffe beyond infrequent diegetic moments contributes to the quasi-documentary and temporally fragmented style of the show, and this helps create its distinct, unsettling tone. Chief among the early cult shows – by which I mean the shows that predate the TVIII era that has seen such a dramatic flourishing of quality television – are the original series of Star Trek in the US and Doctor Who in the UK; and then a trio of shows in the early 1990s that introduced their own distinct approaches to music: Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Northern Exposure, which have all had a lasting influence on the development of cult television’s musical practices.

The music of Star Trek Star Trek is the grandfather of cult television, the first show where it was the activity of fans that initially saved it from cancellation, encouraged and orchestrated by creator, Gene Roddenberry (see Reeves et al., 1996: 28). The staggering success of its post-broadcast syndication – by 1977, Star Trek episodes were being aired 308 times a week in US and overseas markets (ibid.) – later persuaded Paramount that making a Star Trek movie was commercially viable, leading in 1987 to a new generation of Star Trek television shows and providing the model of ‘avid’ fandom (26) that other television networks have pursued ever since. It would be impossible to begin a discussion of music in cult television without some discussion of this show. Original series Star Trek (STOS) was on one hand, very much of its time, reflecting ‘the subtly jazz-influenced, percussive style of writing that 25

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dominated film and TV-scoring in the 1960s’ (Bond, 1999:  15). On the other, it has bequeathed us a body of extremely memorable music, in large part because of its ubiquity in schedules in the 1970s: the sound of STOS may be the sound of 1960s TV scoring, but now it is probably the best known example of 1960s TV scoring, meaning that for many people, the 1960s’ idiom is the sound of STOS.1 STOS emerged into a television landscape dominated by sitcoms and westerns. Nonetheless, science fiction was becoming well-established in cinema, and STOS was by no means the first sci-fi TV show, with The Jetsons animations starting in 1962, and Lost in Space in 1965. Music was, therefore, already developing a set of pseudo-cultural musical codes, typified by the use of the theremin in Bernard Herrmann’s score for The Day the Earth Stood Still and electronic music in Bebe and Louis Barrons’ score for Forbidden Planet as a means of making scoring sound both futuristic and alien. This film strategy was picked up by television. In the UK, original series Doctor Who went down a similar electronic route as Forbidden Planet, while Lost in Space re-used several cues from The Day the Earth Stood Still in its scores. This same strategy was also used in the original STOS, where synthetic and obviously electronic  – as opposed to instrumental – sounds are often used in relation to futuristic technologies (e.g. the sound design signatures of communicators, phasers, doors and the transporter), alien environments and aliens themselves, as in STOS’s first aired episode from 1966, ‘The Man Trap’. Here, we find a musical ‘shimmer’, a sound created using several layered, high electronic tones, all of them moving in constant, microtonal, sliding patterns. This cue is used in relation to the salt-devouring, shapeshifting creature that takes on the role of monster-of-the-week for this episode, alongside other, obviously electronically produced chords in other cues when it boards the Enterprise in the form of one of the ship’s personnel. The use of electronic sounds for aliens, found particularly in Alexander Courage’s STOS scores, contrasts with the use of instrumental sounds for the ship and her crew. While Courage made frequent ‘use of electronic effects to convey the “otherworldliness” of the show’s plots’ (Bond, 1999: 15), variations on the famous fanfare from his theme tune are used regularly for images of the ship in orbit and for Kirk himself, especially his voiceovers, which are often coupled with images of the ship in space. Much of the instrumental score for the human characters 26

Early Cult Television Scoring Strategies (a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 2.1  The opening pitches of the Star Trek fanfare (a) and variations (b and c) in the original series’ score

tends to be atonal, drawing on musical ideas from both bebop jazz and from composers such as Schoenberg and Webern who were still exerting considerable influence on contemporaneous concert-hall composition of the 1960s. Even the variations on the theme tune tend to emphasize tritones, the least tonal interval (see fig.  2.1) within something that we remember in tonal form from the opening titles. The use of instrumental in contrast to electronic music responds to a fairly clear coding of human versus alien; the use of atonal music, however, avoids much of the potential problem of needing to locate the ship and crew’s music in a particular time or place. In film, atonal music came to be very strongly associated with horror (and, indeed, sci-fi-horror); but here it combines a degree of Otherness (the futuristic setting located far from Earth) with the use of live instruments and the fanfare variations to construct the largely human crew as much more like us than any electronically or exotically characterized aliens.2 Musically, post-1987 Star Trek was very different from STOS and moved away from not only the classic sound of electronica but also the 27

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distinctively thematic and dramatic music that characterized the original series, although this is somewhat disguised by strong theme tunes. The theme for The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space Nine (DS9) and Voyager all adopt a common approach, abandoning the upbeat Bossa Nova that Alexander Courage wrote for STOS and instead taking their lead from his opening fanfare that corresponds more closely to the later orchestral style of sci-fi found in Star Wars, resulting in three theme tunes that allude to the sound of Aaron Copland’s music for an idealized pioneer America. Neil Lerner (2013:  56)  hears this already in the large, open intervals of the Star Trek fanfare from the original series, re-used in Jerry Goldsmith’s theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which in turn became the theme for TNG. This very ‘American’ sound – American pioneer translating into space pioneer  – can be heard even more clearly in the theme tunes of DS9 and Voyager, with their tendency to use large interval leaps in their melodic lines. The episode scores, however, adopt a different strategy, one promoted by Rick Berman, one of the two producers on the first season of The Next Generation, alongside Robert Justman, who had worked on the original series. As Jeff Bond reports, Justman ‘favoured the kind of up-front dramatic music that had been a hallmark of the [original] show’ (1999: 167). Berman took over as sole producer in season two and had a quite different view of the role of music, feeling that ‘the scoring style of the original series was too melodramatic, and that the use of this same approach in the new show was undermining the carefully-constructed reality of the program’ (168). He therefore strongly encouraged his two principal composers, Dennis McCarthy and Ron Jones, to write in a much more unobtrusive way, avoiding percussion, loudness and memorable melodies, and most especially avoiding the re-use of themes from one episode to the next. His opposition to thematic scoring was as much to do with unobtrusiveness as with wanting the music to communicate a sense of quality and originality rather than it appearing to be stock library music. Themes sometimes appeared to emerge in a TV score because of the process of ‘tracking’ (which Donnelly (2005:  119)  describes as ‘block scoring’:  see chapter one), reusing music from other episodes in the same season, which for many years a production company was allowed to do without having to pay the recording musicians a second time. As a result, cues connected 28

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with recurring events and shots such as Kirk’s ‘captain’s log’ recordings or the ship in orbit would find themselves being used many times across the season as there was no additional production charge and it allowed the maximization of often limited studio recording time.3 Even though after 1980 US Musician’s Union rules forbade this practice without additional payment to the players, Berman specifically did not want to hear recognizable melodies from episode to episode in TNG: ‘he felt that the repetition of melodies … made the show sound “tracked” like its predecessor and he very much wanted music that would support the show’s drama and atmosphere without drawing attention to itself ’ (Bond, 1999: 168). This required a careful balancing act between the music creating a distinctive identity for the show without being so obtrusive or repetitive as to distract from the drama. A burgeoning thematic approach to scoring in TNG season one under Justman was largely abandoned as a result from season two onward. Season four of TNG marks a particularly interesting moment in Star Trek’s musical history, at the mid-point of the first of the spin-offs, as well as first airing at the same moment (1990–91) that the new generation of cult TV began to emerge with Twin Peaks (1990–1991), Northern Exposure (1990–1995) and The X-Files (1993–2002). There is often not very much music as compared to cult scoring of the late 1990s onward. The shortest episode score in season four is ‘Family’ (4.2) at just seven and a half minutes. ‘Remember Me’ (4.9) is one of the longer scores at about seventeen minutes, but ten–twelve minutes is quite common. Within this, cues are also often short: many cues are between ten and twenty-five seconds long, mostly acting as segues across scene changes. Most episodes have no more than four cues that last in excess of a minute. Distinctively characterized music does appear, and a common feature across TNG, DS9 and Voyager is the use of a very specific and limited pool of thematic material, most of which stems from the title theme of whichever series the score is written for, but also making occasional reference back to the original fanfare. Thematic writing is generally absent from situations where its use might seem obvious in a sci-fi context, most notably in relation to aliens, who are largely musically uncharacterized and are instead absorbed into the same general orchestral sound as the Enterprise and her crew. Almost anti-intuitively in a series in which we constantly encounter aliens, and quite unlike STOS, the later Star Trek scores only rarely musically 29

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characterize difference or Otherness. Instead, the score is written to the context of the scene, and underpins pace and emotion but seldom attempts to build any identity beyond the default character of the Federation itself, as represented by the theme tune and the motifs derived from it. The ‘smooth-sounding brass instruments and massed strings [that create] a very unified sound’ (Bond, 1999: 168) in the Star Trek scores mean that the memorable scores on which much of the franchise’s musical reputation was built were often the ones that conformed least well to Berman’s preferences. One of these is Ron Jones’ TNG season four score for ‘Devil’s Due’ (4.13), in his music for the devilish Ardra, a being who appears in the form of a glamorous goddess. Although she is eventually revealed as a fraud, Jones’ music steps out of the usual strategy and returns to something far more akin to STOS, with exotic scales and violin and woodwind trilling that sounds very much like the self-consciously exotic music of Rimsky-Korsakov and Debussy from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her music shimmers and teases, tapping into orientalist codes to present her as sexualized, exotic and distinctly Other in comparison to what Mark Slobin (2008) would describe as the ‘supercultural’, normatively authoritarian orchestral sound of the Federation. Star Trek in the 1980s was definitely trying to ally itself musically with quality television, manifested by usually quite small amounts of music in order to preserve the sense of realism, a score mostly recorded by live orchestral musicians rather than played on synthesizers, and a conscious decision to limit thematic writing so that the music remained inconspicuous and scores did not sound tracked. When the new generation of cult television sprang up in the early 1990s, it is significant that all three of these basic principals were comprehensively rejected as cult TV shows chose very different modes of story-telling and carved out distinctive musical niches for themselves quite unlike the quality television production values that Star Trek sought to emulate.

Cult TV scoring in the early 1990s Three very different and notably innovative shows appeared in the early 1990s: Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure in 1990 and The X-Files in 1993. 30

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Each of these shows holds a particular place in cult TV which rests on a combination of narrative complexity and the quirkiness of its characters. Twin Peaks took ideas from melodrama and soap opera and combined the gradual revelation of the darkness of its characters with a considerable amount of offbeat humour that worked its way firmly into popular culture; Northern Exposure used the trope of the outsider finding him or herself in an isolated community to explore the considerable quirkiness of the residents; The X-Files combined conspiracy theory and the police procedural to create a sci-fi/horror hybrid detective show that ran for nine seasons. Each of these shows developed a very distinctive scoring strategy that went on to influence the scoring of subsequent cult TV shows. The extent to which block scoring can function as thematic scoring was explored rather strangely in Twin Peaks, where the result is a strategy that, as Kathryn Kalinak observes, seems to parody the thematic scoring of film (1995: 89). The music is composed in recurring blocks, some of which are able to loop ad infinitum:  a slow ostinato cue, a repeating phrase of slowly moving chords, tends to mumble, dirge-like, under scenes in preference to musical silence. This is the first music we hear in the pilot episode after the titles and it is used extensively in relation to the discovery of Laura’s death and Agent Cooper’s investigation of it; but its looping, static nature effectively destroys any sense of pace a scene might possess without it or might have been imbued with if different music had been used. The score overall is characterized by a near-constant use of a relatively small group of blocks, many of which are very similar. ‘Laura’s Theme’ is very like the main title theme (they have in common their melodic shape, specific melodic phrases, tempo, instrumentation, texture, key and affect). There is a second group of bluesy cues with walking bass for the teenagers (which have elements of key, texture, tempo and melody in common and can also loop for long periods of screen time). The music creates several very specific, contrasting tones within the narrative – the mystery and unease of the ostinato; the romantic longing of the Laura/main title group; the edgy character of the jazz-based music – lending it a (very literally) melodramatic quality. The results of this are sometimes so extreme that rather than allowing the audience to experience the music as a signifier of a character’s emotion, the music seems more ironic than sincere, such as during Leland’s uncontrollable sobbing 31

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when he learns of Laura’s death in the pilot episode. The music moves from the slow ostinato into the elegiac ‘Laura’s theme’ as he cries. As Kalinak says, the music ‘short circuits the flow of affect between the spectator and the screen by sending mixed messages for emotional reaction … at such moments [the music effects] a kind of distantiation’ (1995: 89). In Leland’s case, it is the level of duplication between the excessive emotion visible on screen and audible in the music that pushes the melodrama of the scene into parody. The restriction of the musical material coupled with its almost constant use can become quite oppressive in its blocky lack of variety and although it is hard to identify many shows that specifically emulate this aspect of its scoring (Utopia is a recent example), the idea of music as parody and ironic commentary is one that can be seen in the use of music in a great many shows, especially those discussed in chapter seven where ideas of excess and hyper-stylization in the music undercut the apparent realism of quality-cult dramas such as The Sopranos and its successors. By contrast, The X-Files, with very few exceptions, uses episode-specific thematic scoring, refraining from repeating musical ideas from one episode to the next. In this, Mark Snow, who scored every one of the nine seasons and the 1998 film, is very much the successor of the Star Trek approach, including the way he occasionally refers to the series theme tune in the score, such as when Scully sits by Mulder’s hospital bed at the end of ‘Triangle’ and the theme tune appears on piano as a love theme for the couple, a direct musical counter and normalizing of the show’s musical identity after the intrusion of the equally unusual stock jazz cue earlier in the episode. Otherwise, The X-Files followed the episode-specific approach almost exclusively, with only rare examples of a theme returning, such as a motif for ‘Deep Throat’ in season one that was used in several episodes. What was unusual in the scoring of this show was the amount of music used, and here it shows perhaps an influence from Twin Peaks’ near-continuous soundtrack rather than Star Trek’s sparser one. Where Twin Peaks used a large amount of music, nonetheless, it was mostly the same music being used in repeated blocks. The X-Files regularly had around thirty minutes of new music composed for each episode, without the luxury of old cues or themes to fall back on. In the first season, thematic writing within episodes was quite tentative. Typical scoring includes droning ambient synth-pads (sustained sounds that typically have both a long attack and long decay to 32

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give it a very ‘smooth’ feel) that add an uneasy atmosphere to the scene, especially where there is little dialogue; edgy, erratic musical gestures, often with distinctive timbres, that indicate tension or danger; and busy ostinato (repeating) figures that add pace to a scene. Although the specific ostinatos, gestures and synth-pads change from episode to episode, these types of music form a basic sonic vocabulary that is then combined with the ‘theme of the week’, often a motif no more than three or four notes long. Part of Snow’s strategy in season one appeared to be following the Star Trek mantra of making the music relatively unobtrusive. Short melodic motifs, especially where the notes are relatively close together in pitch, will not attract the viewer’s attention in the same way as a longer and more expansive melody. Even when Snow does use longer sequences of notes, as in ‘Eve’ (1.11), they are often so rhythmically indistinct that the ear does not register them as coherent musical objects; the notes are temporally too far apart for them to be heard as a single melody. By season three, the basic strategy is essentially intact but has developed: the writing by this point is more melodically expansive and Snow employs a particular technique of beginning a cue with an unaccompanied melody, typically from a synthesized clarinet, bassoon or string-pad, and allowing this to develop into two, three or four instrumental lines that gradually fill out the texture. However, one of the most interesting developments in the series that Snow’s music responded to was the way episodes started to play with genre, what Snow describes as ‘boutique episodes’ that frequently verge on black comedy and allowed him to be more adventurous than in the musically ‘fairly drab’ episodes that concentrate more on the conspiracy narrative (Larson, 2013). Although by no means the first show to do this (Moonlighting, in the 1980s, played regular televisual games involving genre), these episodes became a notable feature of The X-Files, counterbalancing the seriousness of the conspiracy storyline with sudden flights of fantasy. One of the most musically adventurous of these episodes is ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’ (5.6), which breaks away very strongly from the established musical strategy of monophonic melodies, ambient drones, tense ostinati and anxious gestures. Shot in black and white, the episode itself makes strong allusions to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’. Other references to Shelley are found in the central 33

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b6 & b b 8 œ ™ #œ ™

œ ™ œ™

œ œ œ™ œ ™ œ™ œ œ œ œ™ ‰

b œ™ & b b nœ ™ bœ ™ nœbœ nœ ˙™

Figure 2.2  Main theme from ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’

character, the episode’s monster, the result of a misguided genetic experiment; the name of the evil scientist who conducted that experiment, Dr Polidori (the historical Polidori participated in the house party that led to Shelley writing Frankenstein); Mulder’s various references to Frankenstein; and the mob that pursue the monster toward the end and burn down a barn in the process. However, the music makes its own allusions, and not one but a whole network of them, encompassing three ideas in particular: magic, animals and other Frankenstein-related stories. The first music we hear in the episode, as Shawna Burkowitz sees her son drive off in the teaser, is a minor-key waltzing melody played on bell-like synths, similar to a celeste or glockenspiel (fig. 2.2).4 All three musical allusions are present here. The sound of the celeste has been strongly associated with magic for well over a hundred years, starting with Tchaikovsky’s use of it in his ballet, The Nutcracker (1892). It later became closely associated with ideas of magic in cinema, in particular with John Williams’ ‘Hedwig’s theme’ in the Harry Potter films, but before that in Danny Elfman’s score for Edward Scissorhands. Although Disney’s Pinocchio is also a clear reference, this is another story that has strong resonances with Frankenstein. An essentially benevolent inventor dies before his creation is finished, leaving Edward struggling to escape from the Gothic environment he inhabits and find a place in the outside world. Elfman’s music for the film is among his best known, widely re-used in temp tracks and trailers and imitated to within a hair’s breadth of plagiarism in adverts for Disney theme parks and, more often than not, Christmas advertising that wants to evoke ideas of the magical. The main Edward Scissorhands theme is a waltz in a minor key with the melody carried by celeste and voices, so the overall structural and sonic resemblance to the waltz in this episode is quite overt, although 34

Early Cult Television Scoring Strategies (a)

(b)

Figure 2.3  Allusion to Saint-Saëns’ ‘Aquarium’ from Carnival of the Animals

the X-Files version has a more circus-like quality to it, emphasized by the way the monster transforms the homes he invades into a sort of Big Top, draping and encasing them in striped canvas. Meanwhile, the actual melody evokes the seventh movement of SaintSaëns’ Carnival of the Animals, ‘The Aquarium’ (1886). Given the final revelation that many of the inhabitants of the town are the result of genetic experiments involving animal DNA (Shawna’s son was fathered by a pig, something hinted at with a gleeful lack of subtlety from early in the episode), there seems to be a quite intentional pun in the resemblance between the opening of the two melodies (fig. 2.3), not least because ‘The Aquarium’ was also used in the anthropomorphic film Babe in 1995.5 Very unusually for an X-Files episode, this waltz theme recurs several times in a very clear and block-scoring fashion at the start of the first three acts. Even more unusually, the same theme appears in several different but easily recognizable forms, either in much faster or slower versions, or in more substantially varied forms: we have a speeded up version for clarinet and piano as Mulder and Scully chase the monster through woods, and again later as the mob runs around chaotically while the barn burns. A slow version of the theme on xylophone, accompanied by tremolo strings to add mystery and suspense, appears as Mulder and Scully search the Doctor’s house; and we hear a dramatic variation of the theme on horns as Dr Polidori leads the mob to hunt for the monster at the end of act three. Alongside this, Snow writes yearningly tragic-romantic music for the monster, used when he buries Polidori’s father (murdered by Polidori) and again when he tells his story to the vengeful mob; while horror movie music involving dramatic ‘stinger’ chords and mysterious arpeggios punctuates and parodies the action. 35

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There is an enormous amount of music in this episode: in almost 45 minutes, there is a little over seven minutes of musical silence, and most of that is a single block immediately after the titles as Mulder and Scully begin their investigation. After the end of act one, there is no musical silence at all in the next thirty-two minutes other than a couple of seconds at each of the act breaks. However, not all of the music we hear was written by Snow. Again, unusually for an X-Files episode, there are around four and half minutes of music by one particular artist, Cher, whose music is listened to and sung-along to by the monster during his home invasions. Cher’s music has particular significance for the monster: he loves the film Mask in which she starred as the caring mother of a facially deformed boy, and she has evidently become the monster’s ideal woman. The presence of existing music by a single artist alongside the specifically composed music of the score is arguably another allusion to Edward Scissorhands, in which Tim Burton paired Elfman’s score with a range of songs by Tom Jones. In that film, Elfman’s music represents the gothic domain that Edward inhabited, while the popular songs represent the (alleged) normality of the middle class community located adjacent his castle. A rather less well-defined and more complex binary operates in ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’. Cher’s music represents the monster’s own fantasy of a normal life, acceptance and a mate; while the circus music of the score points to the fantasy that permeates the entire episode, and in particular to the elements of magic and fairytale evoked by its musical allusions. Neither type of music credibly points to the ‘real’. The end of the episode makes this point even more strongly. Mulder objects to having to arrest the monster, asserting that this is not how the story should end: Frankenstein’s monster is supposed to escape, not be captured. In a dramatically post-modern moment, he demands to speak to the writer; and evidently, his negotiations are successful because the episode ends with Mulder and Scully driving the monster (along with most of the townsfolk, who have embraced him as one of their own) to a live performance by Cher of ‘Walking in Memphis’, intercut with Shawna and the Doctor’s wife – who have both now given birth to their own little monsters – on the Jerry Springer Show, avowing their love for their offspring. The episode finishes with Mulder and Scully dancing in each other’s arms, as the 36

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monster ecstatically bops along to ‘Cher’s’ performance. To seal the quite outrageous fantasy of this excessively happy ending, the final shot, and the only one in colour in the whole episode, is Chris Carter’s writer’s credit, presented in the style of a classic Disney animation, with gold gothic lettering on a sky-blue background as the last notes of Cher’s song come to a close. Music in this episode is doing several different types of work: supporting the moment-by-moment action of the scene; invoking ideas of magic and fantasy; and playing intertextual games with genre in its Burton/ Elfman-esque allusions to gothic horror and fairytale. While this kind of musical intertextuality is relatively common in cinema, The X-Files is one of the first places we see it used so boldly in television and the series set something of a precedent for genre games involving music that I will return to in chapter six. Both Twin Peaks and The X-Files are high-status and musically admired series that thoroughly resist a filmic approach to musical theme:  principal characters and major plot elements in a series arc do not have their own consistently identifying themes or leitmotifs. (In Twin Peaks, themes migrate from one character to another: see Kalinak, 1995: 87.). Both shows are highly significant in their own right but are also indicative of some of the ways cult TV uses music differently from quality TV. Notably, there is a lot of music: as observed in the introduction, quality TV of the 1980s often used almost no underscore at all except for transitional moments at act breaks and between scenes; these two cult shows use music throughout episodes as underscore in a way that one might liken to TV soap opera on one hand or film on the other. However, the third show that forms part of the early 1990s cult triptych brings some distinctively different and very important additional elements into the cult TV music mix. Northern Exposure is superficially more like a quality TV show, with relatively little underscore for long stretches of each episode, and instead a much larger amount of diegetic music heard in public spaces such as the bar. This music, however, issues from the local shop-front radio station, and this itself at times becomes a feature of the show: in the second episode, Maurice, the owner of both radio station and local newspaper, sacks his resident DJ and inflicts non-stop show tunes on the town, causing a great deal of discontent amongst the populace. This is 37

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the first cult TV show to feature a considerable amount of popular music, and a notably eclectic mix, the majority of which is apparently diegetic. However, it also brings the idea of diegetic music as an element of the fantastic into cult TV, and it is hard to think of an earlier programme that treats music with such consistent quirkiness. Some examples are relatively low-key, such as several dream sequences. These include ‘Russian Flu’ (1.5) in which Joel, the New York doctor who has found himself assigned to the Alaskan town of Cicely, dreams (under the influence of the flu) that he is back in New York, but surrounded by the inhabitants of Cicely recast as surreal New  York versions of themselves. Throughout this sequence, we hear Benny Goodman’s swing classic Let’s Dance, the authentically scratchy sound of the recording adding a sonic element to the sense of difference created by the dream, with its metropolitan setting and newly glamorized characters. Rather more extreme is the dream sequence in ‘Spring Break’ (2.5), where Joel dreams himself into Robert Palmer’s video of his single Simply Irresistible. Joel lip-synchs Palmer’s voice, surrounded by a chorus of unsmiling dancing girls, with the scraped back hair, short, figure-hugging dresses and very red lipstick that are distinctive features of Palmer’s own video. Part way through the song, the backing track suddenly cuts out, leaving Joel singing briefly in his own, rather less powerful voice, before the girls cluster around him and tell him that they want him. The second half of the scene, where Joel negotiates the proposed liaison with the girls (‘something with maybe a Roman motif?’) is entirely silent apart from their voices, but nonetheless the girls continue to gyrate gently as if the music is still playing. Music also helps construct other types of fantasy in the series, one notable moment being in ‘Burning Down the House’ (3.14). Chris, who is the town’s local DJ, minister and performance artist, stages the flinging of a piano. His original intention is to fling a cow, until he learns that Monty Python has already done this, so he alights on a ruined piano instead. In a lengthy speech preceding the fling, he cites Descartes, Kierkegaard and James Joyce before using a colossal trebuchet to fling the piano. It arcs into and through the air in slow motion to an underscore accompaniment of Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz, and in doing so evokes Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in which we also watch a man-made object fly through 38

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space in elegant slow motion to this music as a shuttle approaches and docks with a space station. The slow motion and repetition of several shots mean that our experience of Chris’ fling lasts much longer than it would in reality, allowing the piano to seem to fly rather simply be flung. Unlike the perfect docking in 2001, this flight ends in an almightily crash as the piano disintegrates on impact. Nonetheless, this is music as fantasy, with the relatively rare use of an existing piece of (classical) music that has no diegetic source within the scene itself but comes purely, it seems, from the collective imagination of the onlookers. In terms of fantasy, however, nothing can compare with ‘Old Tree’ (4.25) in which Shelly, wife of the bar’s owner, wakes up one morning and finds she can no longer speak, only sing. This was, as far as I am able to tell, a uniquely original televisual moment when it was first broadcast in 1993. Other shows before this (and Northern Exposure itself) have had characters sing in the context of some kind of performance that takes place within the story line, and have even invoked notions of fantasy in doing so – often, again, in dream sequences. For example, in 1985, Maddy, in ‘The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice’ (Moonlighting, 2.4) finds herself as a nightclub performer singing ‘Blue Moon’ in a film noir dream. These episodes, however, are not musicals, nor do they evoke musicals: they involve characters who, for whatever reason, are performing in a diegetic context where performing is not exceptional. When Shelly sings in ‘Old Tree’, she takes a radical step in the direction of the musical where our understanding of where the singing exists within the diegesis shifts significantly: we accept that singing is occurring in a context that would be highly peculiar were it to happen in real life. Nonetheless, this is exactly what happens in ‘Old Tree’: without actually crossing the genre boundary into a musical, Shelly sings in a way that makes no diegetic sense at all, certainly not to her. She is not performing – unlike Maddy’s nightclub, or Joel’s music video, there is no performance context. Instead, she is in her usual environment (the bar) and simply expressing herself but doing it in song rather than speech. There is invisible but thoroughly audible accompaniment from a piano that absolutely no one comments on at any point. However, where this differs from a regular musical is that she is completely aware that she is singing and that singing in these circumstances is really rather odd. One of the most unusual aspects of this episode is that no proper explanation is ever 39

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offered for why she is singing: it is suggested that there may be some medical problem causing it, but this is not confirmed either in this episode or the next (when her normal speaking voice finally returns) and the invisible piano that everyone else also appears to be able to hear suggests that the episode has crossed into the fantastic. Certainly, Cicely seem to lie quite close to the fantastic border in other respects, with its oddball residents and bizarre events, such as deaths by falling satellite, haunted cabins and revelations that Napoleon Bonaparte may have been ice fishing in Alaska at the time of the Battle of Waterloo. Nonetheless, one of Northern Exposure’s most interesting and ultimately long-lasting contributions to cult TV is the introduction of involuntary singing as a signal that something – possibly medical, possibly purely fantastic – has intruded into the narrative.

And onwards … As the twentieth century ended, the final years saw some important developments in television drama in two particularly groundbreaking shows:  quality TV’s cult show, The Sopranos and cult TV’s quality show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it is this era of television and its successors on which my study is focused from here on. One of the features of contemporary cult TV and, I would argue, one of the things that contributes to a show gaining cult status, is the increased resources producers are willing to invest in the music for a show, and the level of interest that fans show in the music itself as a distinct object both within and without the show. Initially, the increased investment in music was most obviously found in the size of the licensing budget – that is, the amount of money available to buy licenses to use existing popular music. This is clearly seen in the compilation score of The Sopranos; while Richard Marvin, the composer on Six Feet Under, also commented on producer Alan Ball’s intention, from the beginning, that the licensed music budget should be substantial and much closer to the level of film than TV (Kaye, 2005:  204). Buffy the Vampire Slayer, slightly earlier than both of these, pre-empted this use of popular music but in a quite different way: the popular music was largely diegetic, via bands playing in the Bronze, the nightclub frequented by Buffy and her friends. John C.  King, the music supervisor on the show, developed a distinctive strategy of using non-mainstream, up-and-coming unsigned 40

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bands – bands, which for the most part, might credibly be playing a gig in a suburban nightclub like the Bronze.6 The use of popular music in all these shows reflects the sense that ‘music happens in real life’ and also ‘adds quickly readable sociological/psychological signs about the people playing or listening to the music’ (Kaye, 2005: 193). Popular music within the narrative serves purposes beyond lending verisimilitude, both for the narrative and for the fans. Identifying and cataloguing the popular music used in series from Buffy to Supernatural and from The Sopranos to Grey’s Anatomy is a common fan activity, resulting in fan-developed websites that allow other fans (not to mention musicologists who need to identify a particular song) to access this information. On one level, the information is somewhat redundant: the song will tend to function in the context of the show as a form of commentary either in terms of the sociological/psychological positioning and identifying of a character through their diegetic choice of music that Kaye identifies, and/or acting as a direct commentary on the narrative. Regardless of what characters may think, their musical choices are never as arbitrary as a non-fictional person’s might be, and the songs characters hear tend to have an uncanny correspondence to the situation they find themselves in; but identifying the song itself may not have any great significance in understanding the narrative. For fans, however, peripheral information such as identifying the specific tracks in an episode has currency: the knowledge embedded in the fan’s music catalogue gives them a special relationship with the show, a form of ownership, especially where the information is difficult to track down. The completeness of the catalogue gives the fan a specific expertise, knowledge of the show that is deeper and richer than most, and the best sites will be regarded as authorities within the fan community. However, although it is an important aspect of fandom surrounding cult shows, this book is not primarily about the use of popular music in cult TV but about the original scoring, the music written specifically for a show; and it was at the end of the 1990s that this area also showed significant development away from the then dominant theme-of-the-week strategies. In the process, a different kind of fan emerged: the musical scholar fan. While many musical scholar fans are primarily interested in television’s uses of popular music, the underscore has also inspired a relatively small but enthusiastic band of scholar fans, myself among them. The result 41

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of this is that television music rapidly gained ground as the subject of academic study in the first decade of the twentieth century: until the 2000s, publications on television music in English were dominated by discussions of popular music programming, with a very small number of essays on music in individual shows occasionally appearing in journals and edited collections in the 1990s, and Philip Tagg as a lone voice from the 1970s onwards presenting ideas on television and musical semiotics. In the first decade of this century, chapters on music in edited collections on particular shows began to appear, alongside increasing numbers of articles in journals. By 2012, several books had appeared dedicated in whole or in part to television music, but what was striking was the dominance within the literature of attention to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created and in significant part written and directed by Joss Whedon. The amount of academic literature in general surrounding Buffy is unprecedented: in 2012, a group of writers for Slate.com researched a fairly light-hearted literature review of television shows (Lametti et al., 2012). They found twenty-nine papers and books on The Simpsons, eighty-five on The Wire; and by their own admission stopped counting when they got to 200 on Buffy. Whedon’s particularly intense relationship with music also explains why his shows are mentioned in almost every chapter of this volume; certainly, there is no one else in television drama who has been so involved with the music. He wrote the theme tune for Firefly; he wrote the book, music and lyrics for Buffy’s musical episode, ‘Once More, with Feeling’; he co-wrote other songs for episodes in both Buffy and Dollhouse; and created what is probably the world’s first web-based musical, Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, as something to do during the writer’s strike of 2007–2008.7 Buffy, the subject of chapter four, marks a key moment in cult television as a show that paid a great deal of attention to its music and quietly began to change the rules about what was considered feasible in television scoring, particularly in relation to the idea of writing thematically. The end of the 1990s saw a remarkable flourishing in quality and cult television drama in the USA, and with it a host of new scoring strategies that took advantage of two simultaneous developments: a great deal more interest in music from television programme makers that led to greater financial investment in music budgets; and the increasingly sophisticated libraries of sampled sounds that allowed the one-man band composer-performer 42

Early Cult Television Scoring Strategies

(still common in television) access to a much wider range of polished and convincingly ‘real’ musical sounds than the composers of the 1980s and 90s were able to work with. One of the markers of shows that went on to become cult is an approach that combines both wit and imagination in developing innovative scoring strategies that draw viewers in and insist that we listen.

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3 Intros and Outros The Changing Nature of Opening Titles and End Credits in Cult TV

Whilst it is logical to start an examination of music in cult TV by looking at the music heard at the start of a show, this is one aspect of TV music that has been regularly examined.1 Whether it is Lawrence Kramer (2002) suggesting that the insistence on one specific musical note in the melody of the X-Files theme acts as a musical metaphor for the obsessiveness of Mulder’s inevitably unresolved search for the truth, Neil Lerner (2013) methodically unpicking the influence of Aaron Copland in the title music of Star Trek, Nicholas Reyland (2010) analysing constructions of masculinity in the theme tunes of Postman Pat, or myself (2001/2010) hearing the construction of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as hero rather than heroine in her theme, musicologists looking at music specifically composed for television programmes have often focused on title themes more than on the scoring of a series. In comparison, the visual aspects of title sequences (e.g. David Kociemba’s analyses of the title sequences of Buffy [2006] and Dollhouse [2014]) are just one topic among many other concerns for scholars in other disciplines. This is in part because, just as a film’s main title normally draws on visual and musical cultural codes to identify the film genre and set the specific tone of the narrative, so too TV title sequences draw on these same codes to position its own longer-spanning narrative in terms of genre and tone. However, another 44

Intros and Outros

reason for the tendency to focus on the title music is the sheer difficulty of studying music in a hundred or more episodes in the absence of a written score. Like the use of individual popular songs in shows, theme tunes are succinct and localized: they can be pinned down and discussed in a way that the scores – frequently thirty minutes of music in a forty-four minute show – often resist, especially if one wants to look at a complete season or even series. The particular importance of TV title tunes and end credits, and a significant difference between film and TV, is repetition: over the course of a series, the title sequence and the end credits will potentially be viewed and heard dozens of times, and these repetitions present both a problem and an opportunity for the show’s makers. The existing literature largely focuses on the titles and end credits of individual shows. However, the way that these segments in general have developed in recent years in response to changes in how shows are viewed reveals some very distinctive patterns that are worth examining in relation to how music and sound are positioned at the boundaries of programmes. In this chapter, I outline some of the problems title and end sequences face and the innovations in cult television that arguably counter those problems. Historically, the title tune has performed a function that Jeremy Butler, in his discussion of television style, would call hailing (2010: 14); that Rick Altman would include as part of his ‘italicising’ function for television sound (1986: 45); and which John Ellis sees as part of the way that in television ‘sound is used to ensure a certain level of attention, to drag the viewers back to looking at the set’ (1992: 128), what might be termed the ‘honey, your programme’s starting’ effect. This was – and in a broadcast context still is – an important function of the title tune as a call to attention, a sonic signal for the start of the programme; and there are many programmes that adhere to this traditional approach of a title sequence that may last a minute or more occurring either at or very near the start. However, it does not always mean that the viewer will pay much attention to the title sequence itself: the music functions within the flow of broadcast television as an alert to the fact that the programme is starting, not that the titles themselves need be attended to; and because of that, there has historically 45

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been no need for the titles to vary from one episode to the next; it might actually be self-defeating to do so. In the case of cult and quality TV in particular, broadcast has rapidly become just one of the ways in which a viewer may watch a programme; and as Matt Hills notes, a feature of the TVIII era is that for some viewers, broadcast may not form part of the viewing experience at all, viewers now ‘choosing to download material, watch online … or choosing to consume a show entirely on DVD boxset’ (2007:  44–45). This is perhaps a particular phenomenon when watching non-domestic shows:  Annette Davison’s study of UK viewers’ interactions with US serial dramas notes that for some participants ‘the decision to view via DVD box sets was primarily due to frustration over [broadcast] availability’ (2013a: 12). Hills discusses the way that DVD production privileges particular types of television, especially those that are seen as ‘authored’ (2007: 46), and which have the complex narrative structure Jason Mittell identifies that ‘invites audiences to engage actively at the level of form as well [as content]’ (2006:  38). This means that game shows, news, current affairs, soaps and reality TV are relatively unlikely to find themselves issued as DVD box sets, but cult and quality, two types of television with a very significant overlap (see Johnson 2005a), are comparatively over-represented, not just in DVD production but in their availability on the streaming services offered by companies such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. In a context where one can binge on sequential episodes of shows through DVD, download or streaming, without any broadcast restrictions or interruptions, the function of the title sequence is called into question. It is no longer part of the broadcast flow, losing its hailing function. As Robin Nelson observes, ‘[high end] TV drama has become increasingly “cinematic”‘ (2007: 11), more subject to cinema’s gaze than to Ellis’ idea of broadcast television’s ‘glance’ (1992:  128). Viewers watch this new kind of TV drama ‘in a more concentrated way’ because it ‘seem[s]‌to reward a more concentrated viewing response’ (Nelson 2007: 15). However, this kind of concentration is potentially frustrated by an unchanging title sequence that occupies a minute or more of a programme and which is the same every single time. It rapidly becomes redundant in a binge context where one might watch three or four episodes at a time; there is 46

Intros and Outros

no obvious reward offered by watching the same title sequence repeatedly in a single evening. Titles are also potentially disruptive on another level, creating ‘a divided focus of attention, the separation of the inside from the outside, of what is the play of the narrative from what is documenting the production’ (Stanitzek, 2009: 45). The fictional world and its means of production effectively collide, the actors’ names standing alongside images of the characters they portray, the names of writers, directors and producers foregrounded against images from the narrative they have created. Titles are a ‘liminal moment’ separating ‘the real and the fictional’ (Karpovich, 2010: 29) but again, in the binge context, that intrusion of the real is far less welcome and more distracting than when episodes are viewed in isolation. Likewise, the end credits are potentially dead time in an episode. In broadcast, they function to signal the boundary of the programme, to take the viewer out of the drama and back into the schedule, as it were – the reverse of what Biancorosso terms the ‘invitation to imagine’ presented in opening titles (2001: 2). They indicate, among other things, that this might be a good moment to put the kettle on before something else begins, but again offer no clear reward to the viewer in their traditional form. Outside broadcast, end credits may seem to occupy time to little useful purpose in terms of narrative, something identified by Netflix who brought in an update in 2013 to their service which automatically cuts the end credits and jumps to the start of the next episode, cutting the ‘previously on’ segment of that episode in the process. Although viewers can circumvent this automatic jump if they wish, the fact it was introduced recognizes the way that end credits can potentially disrupt how a show is experienced outside broadcast viewing. It promotes instead a new ‘flow’, even more streamlined than the ‘play all’ option sometimes available on DVDs. To judge from the changes that have occurred to titles and end credits since around 2000, the altered function and potential problem of titles and end credits in those narrative dramas most likely to end up in box sets and on streaming services are issues of which their makers are well aware, with two particular strategies emerging to address the ‘problem’ of the title sequence and some similar strategies in end credits. 47

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Title sequences The first of the new, TVIII title sequence strategies to emerge is an ident approach. Although the sitcom, Frasier, replaced the title sequence with an ident lasting just a few seconds in the 1990s, 24 (2001) is the first cult television show to dispense with a conventional title sequence and start each programme with a segment lasting just ten seconds. This established the pattern for other shows: including surrounding silences and black screen, ident title sequences generally last a standard ten seconds. The show’s title appears accompanied by what is often more sound effect than music, and credits appear on screen whilst the narrative is in progress, an approach subsequently adopted quite regularly by cult and would-be cult TV programmes including Lost, Supernatural, The 4400, Eli Stone, Pushing Daisies, Heroes, Jericho, Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Idents solve the redundancy problem by making the titles sufficiently distinctive that they can still function as titles in broadcast but so short that they are not worth skipping outside broadcast viewing: on DVD, and especially on a streaming service, it could potentially take longer to skip the titles than to watch them. One participant in Davison’s study makes exactly this point, noting ‘that she would “tend to watch them” if the titles were “actually quite short”‘ (Davison, 2013a: 15), while other participants ‘expressed irritation over situations where a failed attempt to skip takes longer than watching the sequence’ (ibid.). The second new strategy involves making the titles sufficiently interesting to encourage the non-broadcast viewer to watch rather than skipping forward, usually by making changes, regular or occasional, to the visual material, the music or both. There are various historical instances of programmes varying their titles for either comic or dramatic effect, but some distinct trends have emerged since the 1990s, especially in cult TV, where differences in the titles of particular episodes give them a direct relationship to that episode’s narrative. Categorizing title sequences based on the stability of their content, three main types emerge: fixed, deviant and variant titles.

Fixed sequences The fixed sequence, using a single musical cue and, usually, a montage of images is the most traditional type of title sequence and remains prevalent 48

Intros and Outros

in many types of television programme. Soap operas, along with sports shows, news programmes and reality TV shows, for example, all tend to have fixed musical and visual sequences announcing the start and end of the programme, and may also have fixed sequences marking different segments within the show. When serial dramas use fixed sequences, they normally remain visually and musically stable throughout a series, apart from textual alterations in episodes (e.g. cast members, production personnel), and visual alterations or musical remixes at structural breakpoints (typically, the start of a new season but occasionally mid-season too). This was the historical norm: the titles and end credits of cult shows such as Star Trek, Doctor Who, The X-Files, Northern Exposure, Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Charmed all conform to the same typical length and fixed musical and visual format as mainstream, ‘non-cult’ television, reflecting the role of the title sequence when a show is seen primarily as a broadcast. The titles retain their sonic function in the context of broadcast flow as a call to attention, the music becoming familiar through weekly repetition and often becoming an iconic sonic signifier of the show; this is indisputably the case with the high recognition factor attached to the distinctive Star Trek fanfare, the Doctor Who ‘wail’ and The X-Files whistling theme. Until 2000, the standard length of fixed titles was 40–60 seconds, but longer sequences were not uncommon, including several prominent cult shows: Twin Peaks (ninety seconds), Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager (both 100 seconds), and Quantum Leap, where the titles are preceded by a forty second exposition of the premise of the show in seasons one and two, extending to fifty seconds in season three, resulting in a sequence lasting more than two minutes (see table 3.1). After 2000, the length of opening titles started to fall: the ten second ident appeared in 2001 and was quite common by 2006. Meanwhile, thirty seconds started to become the new normal for the ‘long’ title sequence around 2005 and was firmly established by 2010. Included in this trend toward shorter sequences are several shows which used season breaks to edit the title sequence into something more compact: Grey’s Anatomy (2005) reduced its twenty-five second sequence to an eight second ident without any music: elements of the sound from the preceding scene are, instead, heard alongside a title card that fades in and out. Likewise, A Town Called Eureka (2006) reduced 49

Table 3.1  Length of TV title sequences Show

First broadcast

Titles duration (seconds)

Star Trek (Original Series) Star Trek: The Next Generation Quantum Leap Twin Peaks Northern Exposure The X-Files Xena: Warrior Princess Star Trek: Voyager Buffy the Vampire Slayer Stargate SG1 Angel The Sopranos CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Queer as Folk (US) 24 Alias Firefly Battlestar Galactica Stargate Atlantis Lost The L Word Criminal Minds Supernatural Prison Break Grey’s Anatomy Jericho Heroes Grey’s Anatomy (revised) Dexter A Town Called Eureka Weeds Damages Pushing Daisies Breaking Bad Fringe Sons of Anarchy A Town Called Eureka (revised) Terminator: SCC: Season 1 Terminator: SCC: Season 2 True Blood The Vampire Diaries Castle The Vampire Diaries White Collar Warehouse 13 Dollhouse

1966 1987 1989 1990 1990 1993 1995 1995 1997 1997 1999 1999 2000 2000 2001 2001 2002 2003 2004 2004 2004 2005 2005 2005 2005 2006 2006 2006 2006 2006 2007 2007 2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009

50 100 75 90 45 45 60 100 50 60 50 90 30 25 10 25 50 60 60 10 10 30 10 30 25 10 10 ˙

˙ bœ # œ œ n œ b˙ ™ 3 3 Œ ˙ ™ #œ nœ #œ œ bœ˙nœ œ # œ œ b œ œ œ #œ nœ

œ bœ

? #œ & n#˙˙ ™™ ? Œ

nœ #œ œ bœ nœ œ 3

3

Figure 6.1  Allusions to James Bernard’s Dracula theme (a) in Jay Gruska’s score for ‘Monster Movie’ (b)

as Horror of Dracula8 and The Kiss of the Vampire. The opening, dramatic and atonal motif of the episode bears a distinct resemblance to Bernard’s 1958 Dracula theme (fig. 6.1). Both are characterized by a slow chromatic ‘melody’ that gradually rises, harmonized by movement in parallel tritones (the diabolus in musica, again) with dramatic rising gestures interspersed with a secondary ­figure: the pair of low chords in Bernard’s score, the rising chromatic scurry in Gruska’s. That the scoring is technically from the wrong period is unproblematic for audiences. Koven and Thorgeirsdottir point out that that even where viewers have not ‘seen the classic monster movies the episode is referencing, the image of these monsters has permeated popular culture’ (2011: 188) and so has the music, but the ‘iconic’ sound of monster movies was established more by Hammer in the 1950s and 60s than by scoring of the 1930s, and this is the sound that has entered the popular imagination. As we come out of the titles and into the start of the episode, the music dissolves into solo atonal string lines as we see the Impala coming down the lonely road through the forest; and then shifts to a thumping, threatening string ostinato (a little reminiscent of another black and white horror film, Psycho) as the car drives past the ‘Welcome to Pennsylvania’ sign, the 129

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gothic script momentarily turning into ‘Welcome to Transylvania’ as lightning flashes. The ostinato then transforms acoustically as the shot switches to the car’s interior, and Dean comments that ‘the radio round here sucks’ as he switches off both the radio and the ostinato now apparently coming from it. This plays with a convention throughout the series whereby music apparently coming from the car radio moves acoustically between sound authentic to the car interior and the fuller sound of the underscore. If the titles set up the new musical world of the episode, this moment confirms that something very odd has happened to the music, with Dean’s rock ousted from the Impala and the soundtrack along with the usual score. This oddness is re-confirmed in the next scene where Oktoberfest is in full swing and the town is saturated with a variety of German folk-style polkas, all of which is stock library music, itself a highly unusual occurrence on Supernatural. The episode then plays out a series of scenes that recreate classic horror movies from the 1920s to 1940s: The Wolf Man, The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera; but most especially the 1931 Dracula with the shapeshifter, the episode’s monster-of-the-week, identifying strongly with Bela Lugosi’s version of the role. The Phantom of the Opera scene, where local cinema owner Ed Brewer is seen playing the organ silhouetted against a back-lit curtain, reproduces the claw-like hands and extreme gestures of Lon Cheney’s playing (fig. 6.2), but the music itself in turn references several other horror films: the 1925 film was silent, and it is in the 1962 Hammer version that the Phantom plays the Toccata and Fugue in D minor attributed to Bach that Ed Brewer plays here.9 The piece, however, was well-established as horror music by that point, being used in both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Black Cat in the 1930s. Likewise, the Wolf Man episode presents us with a veritable catalogue of classic horror sonic signifiers. The scene begins with a wolf howl (cf the use of the wolf howl as a sonic signifier of horror at the start of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme). As we pan across the woodland scene, we have low strings and a chromatic melody on bassoon, placing us back into the same atonal territory as the title music. A series of swirling glissandi on the harp add magic and mystery – harp glissandi are often used as precursors to the mysterious, signalling a transition between the real and the imaginary – and are followed by another classic horror sound, upward glissandi 130

The Bells of Hell go Tingalingaling

Figure 6.2  Ed Brewer as the Phantom of the Opera in ‘Monster Movie’

on tremolo strings. The tremolo acts as an aural analogy for shaking or shivering, an instability in the sound; the glissando adds to that instability as it is in the nature of a glissando to have an unknown end point – it just keeps going up (or down) taking us who knows where. The glissando is most frequently heard in horror at the end of a scene, usually a cliffhanger; the lack of predictable end point for the upward motion aims to take the suspense at the scene’s end to a nerve-rattling peak. Supernatural, Fringe and Lost all use glissandi in this way. The brothers’ interview of Brewer, witness to one of the mysterious attacks they have come to investigate, also reinforces Dracula’s dominance and control of the soundtrack: although the polka music is diegetically present in the background, it fades in and out to make aural space for classic horror stingers and tremolo strings as Brewer describes his encounter with the Prince of Darkness, leaving the brothers mostly bemused and disbelieving. The music constantly reminds us that this has ceased to be their story: they are players in Dracula’s show. More than that: the music tends to actively undermine them. All the overt horror gestures associated with Dracula are offset by contrasting musical ideas that question Sam and Dean’s effectiveness. Robbed of their usual score and rock music, Sam and Dean are left as the comic light relief, the rock music supplanted by oom-pah Bierkeller music, and their remaining scored music tending 131

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toward the comic, with pizzicato strings and woodwind trilling that take the music into the realms of quirky comedy, such as when they interview the girl who witnessed the wolf man attack: her noisy slurping of her soda through a straw also does nothing to make them appear authoritative in this scene. Later, when Sam sees Brewer playing the organ, he believes he has found the monster: just before he makes his move, we switch to a new view of Brewer in his underwear; and Brewer himself switches his playing, turning on a drum track on the organ and shifting out of Bach into a cheesy Bossa Nova. The audience realizes immediately that this cannot be the monster – Brewer has entirely slipped out of any musical horror coding – but Sam does not seem to understand the sonic signals and proceeds to make a fool of himself by attacking the clearly feeble Brewer. Not all the undermining of the brothers’ agency is done sonically: Dean in lederhosen is perhaps the ultimate humiliation for the man who loves Metallica. As the episode progresses, Dracula’s control breaks down with a variety of visual and sonic intrusions into the coherence of his persona, not least that he flees from his first encounter with Dean on a moped. Pizza also becomes a problem in maintaining his image: emerging from his dungeon into a very normal suburban home to answer the door, he nonetheless successfully introduces terms like ‘repast’ into his conversation with the pizza delivery boy, and checks for the presence of garlic; but the production of a coupon to pay for the pizza rather undermines any sense of mystery or threat. Musically, his control of the soundtrack is also gradually eroded. Firstly, Dean starts to reassert some control of his own when he acquires a love theme for his developing relationship with the ‘bar wench’, Jaime, who is also the object of Dracula’s affections, a sweet rising theme played on a honkytonk piano. Later, when Dracula loses his temper with Jaime and then apologizes for having frightened her, he slips completely out of character for the first time:  he drops his exotic eastern European accent and speaks in an American accented voice, soft and vulnerable, as he tells Jaime a little of his childhood. The music also drops out of the classic horror-coded orchestration, with a tonal, melodic theme on a standard piano, both accent and music marking a shift out of his horror fantasy and back into the real. Nonetheless, when Jaime shoots him in his climactic battle with the Winchesters at the end, he dies in character: the piano 132

The Bells of Hell go Tingalingaling

theme from before – which is strongly reminiscent of the music for a man who periodically turns into a monster, the David Banner/Hulk theme from the 1970s TV show – now returns on a solo violin played with a great deal of emotive vibrato, rendering it sentimental and melodramatic whereas before it seemed much more sincerely emotional. Dracula accepts that this may be the right ending for his movie, and dies in a final fanfare of swirling strings and dramatic brass. The epilogue shows the boys with Jaime in the town square, for the first time without the German polka music, suggesting that perhaps things have returned to normal: but no – the show ends with a text card (‘The End …?’) and an optimistic, tonal passage using the same orchestral textures of brass and strings as before that nonetheless gives the episode a sense of closure, and of good having triumphed. Then, very much like a film, this is followed by an end credit sequence that revisits some of the music from the episode, in particular the sentimental violin theme from Dracula’s death. Even in death, Dracula has not fully relinquished his hold on the narrative’s music. Although there is never an attempt to present Dracula as having used some specific spell or other supernatural means to alter the nature of the show in this episode, there is nonetheless a sense that he is responsible for what has happened to its visual and musical character. On one level, this is profoundly illogical: the changes exist outside the diegesis as such and are instead all elements of style. It is the shift in style that allows the episode to enter into a world that is substantially different from the one the series normally occupies, even though both worlds are defined by horror, one the horror of television in the 2000s, the other the horror of film in the 1930s to 1960s. Bordwell comments that style is normally invisible: ‘as we watch [a show], we absorb its images but seldom notice how they are lit or composed’ (2005: 33), but in this episode the stylistic shift is so dramatic that it is not only highly visible but becomes the story. Certainly, for the shapeshifter himself, style is of overriding importance, as his decision to die in character demonstrates. The process of bending rather than breaking the terms of the audio-visual contract is a key element in episodes that experiment with genre within a series narrative: bend them to the point of breaking, and no matter how enchanted we may be by the willingness to step into another genre, the episode is likely to suffer in the long term from 133

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its lack of coherence with the rest of the narrative. There is no single way of readdressing the terms of the contract, as demonstrated by my two main examples, but the idea of a deus ex machina is common to all the examples examined here to some extent, such as Buffy’s spell suspending the normal rules of behaviour. ‘Monster Movie’ lacks the spell, but the unnamed antagonist effectively takes on the role of the deus ex machina. More than anything, the episode’s style seems to have leaked metadiegetically from his imagination, his obsession with old monster movies manifesting itself in the visual and musical style of the episode: we experience it as a classic horror movie through the power of his imaginings. These episodes and, in fact, Supernatural as a series, exemplify cult TV’s narrative elasticity, with shows (whether supernaturally oriented or not) where ‘the generic boundaries tend to be more malleable and audience expectations more flexible’ (Abbott, 2010: 95). Fans are not only prepared but frankly eager to accept occasional breaks in the overall generic and aesthetic contract of a show’s narrative, the pleasure to be found in recognizing the playful aberrance of these episodes enhancing the intimate relationship the devoted fan has with a show overall.

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7 Music, Fantasy and Subjectivity in ‘Real World’ Dramas

Most cult TV series, certainly those I have discussed so far, fit the conventional idea of what constitutes cult TV, namely shows that position themselves in ‘one or another of the fantastic genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or speculative fiction’ (Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson, 2004: xii), in contrast to quality television which, as Thompson puts it, ‘aspires toward “realism”’ (1996: 15). In defining types of television, Thompson’s notion of ‘quality’ mostly describes a set of production values and aspirations while cult status may be the producers’ desired outcome for a show but ultimately depends on audience behaviour (Hills, 2004: 520). In that light, that some of what is considered quality television crosses over into cult is not at all contradictory. In an age where internet access is widely available, as are the types of software needed, for example, to create a music video on a domestic computer or write and post fanfiction, almost any TV drama is likely to have fans engaging in these types of activity to greater or lesser degrees. The West Wing, for example, is a show that fits the model of quality rather than cult, but fans demonstrate some typical cult TV behaviour. It has inspired large amounts of fanfiction, and there are hundreds of videos posted on YouTube that preserve favourite clips from the show. More creative musical interactions such as fan-created music videos are 135

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comparatively rare:  overall tributes to the show, and montages of Josh and Donna’s relationship set to romantic pop songs are the most common, along with specific tributes following the death of John Spencer, who played Leo McGarry. West Wing merchandise mostly consists of T-shirts and mugs that playfully recreate the actual merchandise produced during presidential election campaigns, although an independent company, Figuoronomy.com, also produced some action figures in the early 2000s. In terms of fan activity and engagement, the line between quality and cult is distinctly blurred in places. Music, however, often operates differently in quality television drama and the most immediate observation is that there is often very little of it. The West Wing had 15–20 minutes of music per episode in season one, when characters and the tone of the series were being established. While this was already rather less than in contemporaneous cult TV shows such as The X-Files and Buffy (typically using around thirty minutes of music per episode), the amount of music was nonetheless reduced down to around eight minutes of scoring per episode from season two onward, according to the series composer, W. G. ‘Snuffy’ Walden (Kaye, 2007: 225). This small amount of music therefore means that the aural focus is on dialogue and on the interplay of ideas, a key factor in quality values (‘Quality television tends to be literary and writer-based’ [Thompson, 1996:  15]), and this is a fairly consistent characteristic of any show aspiring to be a quality drama. The Sopranos, for example, uses no original score as such, and the majority of the music heard in the show is diegetic. Music is often heard only very briefly (e.g. as a car passes with its stereo playing) or indistinctly (e.g. music in the club heard through the walls of Tony’s office), with no more than one or two moments in any episode where music comes into the sonic foreground as more than just an aspect of what these environments would realistically sound like. Whilst they do use original scoring, shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Damages use very little of it, and it rarely plays under dialogue in comparison to most of the cult shows looked at in previous chapters. Perhaps most interestingly, Game of Thrones also fits this pattern, for whilst it does use original scoring, there tends to be much less music, particularly under dialogue, than one finds in most fantasy/cult dramas: to take an episode more or less at random, there are 136

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just over fifteen minutes, including both titles and end credits, in ‘What Is Dead May Never Die’ (2.3), accounting for approximately 30 per cent of the episode’s running time of fifty-one minutes, compared to, typically, 70 per cent of an episode having music in shows like Supernatural and Buffy. The relatively small amount of very distinctive music, comparable to the similarly small amount of distinctive (as opposed to ambient) music in The Sopranos, suggests that in creating Game of Thrones, HBO as producers were primarily aiming at a dialogue-led, quality TV show that just so happened to have an overtly fantastic narrative; but audience behaviour in relation to Game of Thrones is thoroughly cultish, and the show is no more and no less quality/cult crossover than many other HBO productions. Catherine Johnson sees The X-Files as ‘a new form of “quality/cult” television’ (2005b:  99)  that self-consciously exploited the visual possibilities offered by the ‘representation of the fantastic … for visual flourishes and stylistic distinctiveness which were particularly valuable to Fox as markers of difference and indicators of quality’ (101). Where Johnson sees cult TV moving toward quality values in the 1990s, one can increasingly see quality adopting some cultish characteristics, closing the gap from the other direction; and it is on the issue of realism that this again pivots. The TV dramas (not soap operas) of the 1980s and 1990s, quality or mainstream, are dominated by narratives set in the context of medicine and the law (police, private investigator or legal drama), very much in the real world but all offering the ‘procedural’ narrative that allows a ‘case’ to be investigated and solved in the course of an episode. Quality shows of this kind continue to be made very successfully, such as the CSI franchise, House and The Good Wife. In the later 1990s, quality television began to be more experimental and subversive with the nature of its narratives, very probably influenced by cult shows such as Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure and The X-Files. In some cases, notably Ally McBeal and Six Feet Under, this involved a wholesale engagement with the fantastic operating within an ostensibly realistic setting; but more prevalent are the shows that subvert the procedurals in a way that moves them closer to the fantastic without overtly becoming fantasy. This can occur in more than one way, such as the use of a specific environment that appears to be the real world, but one that its 137

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makers can reasonably expect their audience to have no knowledge of at all, allowing a great deal of freedom in establishing and exploring how this world works. The stand-out example of this is The Sopranos, where the assumed well-educated, white-collar audience is invited into a world inhabited by career criminals living a life that may or may not be presented realistically – how would we know? – and where the narrative is so far beyond our own lived experience that it might be thought of as ‘real world fantasy’. Another way in which an ostensibly realistic, quality narrative is pushed toward fantasy is through specific characters who live within a realistic world but who are or become so extreme in their behaviour that they, again, become fantastic without us necessarily noticing: Dexter Morgan, for example; both Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham in Hannibal; Walter White in Breaking Bad; even ostensibly wholly realistic characters such as Mad Men’s Don Draper push at the boundaries of realism. Unlike the fantastic narratives of most cult TV where we know full well that there is a significant element of the fictional world which is completely unlike the world we inhabit (be it vampires or faster-than-light travel), this kind of quality/cult television works hard to make the fictional world seem realistic at the same time as making room for fantasy – and with it, the imaginative engagement of fans. This has consequences for music, and my discussion of music in ‘real world’ narratives, some of which use very little music at all, focuses on one principal theme in the way music is used in these shows, namely as an indicator of subjective experience that allows the fantastic into the narrative in some fashion. I  explore three connected manifestations of this:  fantastic musical moments appearing in narratives that otherwise aspire to realism; music and sound that allow us access to a character’s subjective experience; and the use of music to normalize the aberrant Other.

Quality television’s fantastic musical moments The idea of narratively integrated musical numbers occurring in television shows has a long history, primarily in the sitcom. Robynn Stilwell traces this history from I Love Lucy in the 1950s and The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s through a period of expulsion from the narrative in the 1970s in shows like The Partridge Family and The Monkees, where musical numbers 138

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acted as ‘islands of music’ that were usually ‘completely unrelated to the what was happening’ (2003b:  53), to the re-emergence in the 1980s and 90s of narratively integrated musical numbers in sitcoms and ‘dramedys’ as diverse as Murphy Brown, The Simpsons and Third Rock from the Sun. Although Stilwell does include some examples of more fantastic appearances of music, the history of musical numbers that she traces is more part of the tradition of the backstage musical, using the performance mode rather than the less diegetically straightforward lip-synch mode: the sitcom musical number, in particular, is almost always positioned as a performance rather than a subjective or fantastic moment, and Stilwell specifically excludes the musicals of Buffy and Xena from her discussion for this reason. There is, however, a small but significant number of musical numbers and complete musicals occurring in realistic rather than supernatural narratives that are significantly different from the performative musical numbers in sitcoms. One of the key differences is that they are usually in the lip-synch mode, with music appearing from the invisible source of the underscore in response to spontaneous outbursts of song. These moments tend to occur in one of two ways but with the same net result: only one person is usually aware of the music, which therefore represents a subjective experience as the music erupts from within the mind of that character. The two most common scenarios for these moments are the medical storyline, where an entire episode may turn into a musical as the result of some kind of illness affecting a character’s perceptions; and what might be classed as the subjective-fantastic mode, where isolated musical numbers result from a particular character imagining them. The medical scenario as the basis for a musical episode is surprisingly popular. It originates in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, discussed in chapter six, in the famous hallucinatory episode of doctors and nurses breaking into a rendition of Dem Bones. This type of musical number subverts Feuer’s myth of spontaneity and her equation of apparently spontaneous and effortless performance in musicals, with the natural and good (1981: 162). The singing here does indeed tend to issue spontaneously but is more likely to indicate that something is badly wrong with the individual perceiving it. Chicago Hope’s ‘Brain Salad Surgery’ was directly inspired by The Singing Detective, and has a surgeon named Denise Potter in acknowledgement 139

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of that debt, but here the origin of the music is directly attributed to an aneurism, causing a neurosurgeon to have neurological problems of his own. Similar causes of musical episodes are found in the children’s show, Even Stevens in ‘Influenza:  The Musical’ (2.21) where singing and dancing result from fever-induced delirium; Fringe’s ‘Brown Betty’ (2.20), where the hallucinatory musical numbers are caused by narcotics; Grey’s Anatomy, where a head injury sustained in a car accident is given as the reason for Callie’s out-of-body experience and the fact that she hears those around her singing rather than speaking in ‘Song Beneath the Song’ (7.18); and House’s ‘Bombshells’ (7.15) where initially anxiety causes House and Cuddy to have bizarre dreams in the style of different film and television genres, and finally Cuddy hallucinates a musical number under the influence of anaesthetic, a surreal and slightly nightmarish Busby Berkeley extravaganza. One of the most musically ambitious television musicals since Buffy is Scrubs’ ‘My Musical’ (6.6), which draws on both the aneurism of Chicago Hope as a cause for the music and the playful and inventive approach to musical genres that helped make OMwF such a success. Scrubs also regularly features subjective-fantastic episodes, musical or otherwise, that almost invariably originate in the narrator and central character, JD, and one of the most unusual things in this episode is that it is a patient rather than JD who is the source of the fantastic intrusion. Here, more than in any other example, the movement from subjective to objective positions allows the episode to emphasize strongly that the music is in the patient’s head: it vanishes the moment she leaves a scene.1 The non-medical, subjective-fantastic scenarios are more likely to be brief intrusions of the fantastic rather than sustained periods of musical activity that stem from an ongoing medical condition; but like the medical musicals, each moment tends to issue from one character. Scrubs’ JD is therefore a sitcom figure who regularly has such fantastic moments; Ally and John Cage are most often the source of the fantastic visual and sonic (and sometimes musical) intrusions in Ally McBeal; Dewey is the source of the more protracted, spontaneously composed opera in ‘Dewey’s Opera’ in another sitcom, Malcolm in the Middle (6.11); Emmett is the focus for a musical fantasy sequence in Queer as Folk (1.20), where he plays out a brief but intense romance to a combination of West Side Story and Tchaikovsky’s ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’; and in Six Feet Under all the members 140

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of the Fisher family have subjective-fantastic moments, although fewer of them are musical than in Ally McBeal. In understanding how these musicals and fantastic moments work, it is useful to look at the film musicals to which they so often allude. Richard Dyer argues that one of the reasons the classical Hollywood film musical was so outstandingly successful when it came to prominence in the 1930s–40s was that it represented a ‘utopian solution’ to social tensions. He identifies five specific ‘categories of entertainment’s utopian sensibility’ (Dyer, 1981: 182) that musicals fulfil: energy, abundance, intensity, transparency and community, solving respectively the social problems of exhaustion, scarcity, dreariness, manipulation and social fragmentation that consumers of musicals living in capitalist societies may experience (183–84). Singing and dancing, the ‘spectacular’ musical number, the transparent outpouring of emotion, the triumphs over adversity and success in love that musicals tend to centre around, and the cooperation involved in performance activity all contribute to the sense of the musical as Utopian ideal, eliminating all the social ills we might see standing in the way of a perfect society. In fulfilling Dyer’s categories, the musical presents ‘temporary answers to the inadequacies of the society which is being escaped from through entertainment’ (183). Television musicals superficially embrace many of the same sensibilities in their allusions to the film musical, but the context in which these moments occur tends to point to an underlying problem, shifting the musical moments from a Utopian to a dystopian sensibility. Table 7.1 summarizes how Dyer’s categories translate into these television contexts, and they map most specifically against the medical musicals, with intensity (Utopian excitement), transformed into danger and anxiety caused by knowledge of the problem, something seen clearly in Cuddy’s anxiety in House, and the life-threatening condition of the aneurism patients in Scrubs and Chicago Hope. In many respects, excess is an underlying characteristic of all the other categories, the sense that the eruption of musical numbers into the diegesis is itself excessive, but the use of intertextuality and multiple musical genres also contributes to the sense of excess. The sight of characters we know are doctors, one of them female, dressed in outlandish zoot suits and wearing extravagantly quiffed wigs, miming and dancing to Frankie Valli’s ‘Walk Like a Man’ contrasts in Chicago Hope with 141

Sounds of Fear and Wonder Table 7.1  Mapping Dyer’s Utopian musical categories against dystopian TV musicals ‘Real life’

Utopian

Dystopian

Scarcity (poverty, unequal distribution of wealth) Exhaustion (work, labour, pressures of life)

Abundance

Excess

Energy (work = play)

Dreariness (monotony, predictability) Manipulation (advertising, bourgeois democracy, sex roles)

Intensity (excitement, drama) Transparency (open, spontaneous and honest communication and relationships) Community (togetherness, collective activity)

Over-exuberance; inappropriate playfulness or cheerfulness Danger, anxiety, crisis

Fragmentation (job mobility, high rise flats, legislation against collective activity)

Excessive honesty, involuntary spontaneity, incomprehensibility Isolation, illusion of community, insincerity

some of the same doctors in their usual surgical scrubs actually singing and dancing their way through Guys and Dolls’ ‘Luck be a Lady’ as Dr Aaron Shutt (played Adam Arkin) leads the performance whilst his unconscious body lies on the operating table. In a similar way, Scrubs provides a catalogue of musical styles and direct allusions to other musicals, including 42nd Street (‘Welcome to Sacred Heart’), Gilbert and Sullivan (‘The Rant Song’), Les Misèrables (‘When the Truth Comes Out’), Rent (‘For the Last Time, I’m Dominican’) and Grease (‘Friends Forever’). The idea of a dystopic take on transparency is clear in OMwF, where Buffy sings the secrets she has said she would never reveal, specifically that her friends dragged her out of heaven, but excessive honesty also appears comically in Scrubs, with the astonishingly over-specific ‘Everything Comes Down to Poo’. Chicago Hope goes in the other direction, including various musical numbers that are confusing and surreal, in particular a scene involving Aaron’s colleague Jeffrey, played by veteran Broadway performer, Mandy Patinkin, singing ‘I’ll Be There’. Jeffrey is the first person in the episode to sing rather than mime, something Aaron notices; as Jeffrey’s singing voice continues in the background, he speaks to Aaron, confirming that yes, it is his own voice, 142

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but therefore undermining the authenticity and spontaneity of his singing in that it is now suddenly not coming directly from him. He encourages Aaron to sing (leading ultimately to the Guys and Dolls number) but first we have a moment that is more surreal than most audience members perhaps realize. Aaron has a flashback to his bar mitzvah and sees himself as a child, singing a folk song, ‘When I’m on My Journey, Don’t You Weep for Me’, alluding to the life-threatening nature of his current condition. The child we see is miming; the voice we hear is actually that of Adam Arkin in a recording he made when he was about ten years old.2 We have Patinkin and Arkin as real-life singers from outside the narrative, providing fantastic voices for the characters they play, creating a complicated set of relationships between the singers and their songs that is anything but transparent or spontaneous. The climax of this comes when we see the adult Arkin miming to the thirty-year-old recording of his own voice when it appears that Aaron may not survive his surgery. The sense of community in the film musical shifts to a sense of isolation and the illusion of community in television medical musicals: the patient in Scrubs, like Aaron in Chicago Hope, is well aware that she is isolated in her perception of the musical numbers, whilst all around her the doctors and nurses apparently sing and dance together in perfect rhyme and rhythm. In fact, no one is actually singing or dancing at all: we ‘eavesdrop’ on a hallucination of something that has not genuinely occurred, and so the cooperation evident in these complex musical and choreographic performances is not real or genuine within the diegesis of the episode. This is also true of Chicago Hope: we cannot trust that any of what we see reflects things that actually happen. Whereas in Scrubs we know the patient is conscious and interacting with those around her even if the singing is hallucinatory, in Chicago Hope we have no confidence that even this much is true, and it seems a great deal of what we see is occurring only in Aaron’s mind. At one point, after initial treatment, he wakes and hears the sound of the piano being played: taking his drip-stand and walking through the deserted hospital corridors in search of the sound, he finds one of his colleagues in straw boater and striped waistcoat, playing and singing ‘Bob Bob Bobbing Along’. It seems more likely that Aaron is still asleep and dreaming at this point, rather than awake and misinterpreting what he sees and hears. Ultimately, as in the supernatural musicals, in these medically based musicals, no matter how much fun or how moving a song is, it remains 143

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symptomatic of the dysfunctional and dystopian, and a happy ending can only be achieved by escaping from the musical, not by finding community and harmony within it.

Ally McBeal The briefer moments of subjective-fantastic musical performance that occur in non-medical contexts share many of these elements, but articulated rather differently. Rather than self-contained ‘special’ episodes, they form part of a body of self-conscious eruptions of subjective fantasy into the narrative, and in the case of Ally McBeal, Scrubs and Six Feet Under, they become a significant stylistic feature of the overall show. Music has a very strong presence in Ally McBeal because of the important ‘third space’ shared by the characters, the bar on the ground floor of the law firm’s building where resident singer Vonda Shepard performs to, with and, it often seems, about the series’ main characters. As Julie Brown points out, ‘Shepard is not simply an entertainer in a bar; her lyrics are relevant as annotations to the drama, and her own role as carrier of the lyrics – narrating presence, simple entertainer, disembodied sung voice-over – changes’ (Brown, 2001: 280). One might think of her more as a Greek chorus, operating both inside the drama (when she appears on screen with characters) and outside it (when her songs provide commentaries on the action) but not actually an actor in the drama; like the chorus, she has no agency, no ability to affect events. Moreover, she is not even a character in the drama; she is genuinely Vonda Shepard. The stage she occupies and on which characters sometimes join her is a liminal space where the extra-diegetic penetrates the diegetic, reality meeting the fictional, fantasy world of the show. Barry White also achieves this, his music heard metadiegetically by John Cage on many occasions, but White himself appears in a season two episode where Nell presents him, performing in the bar as a birthday present for John. As Greg Smith says, ‘the magic of the music in Ally McBeal lies in its refusal to separate the sound track of the series from the soundtrack of the characters’ lives’ (2009: 37). John, Ally and Elaine are probably the characters most involved with music in the show, and also the most obviously insecure characters, all using music as part of the way they variously control and negotiate their 144

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environments. Elaine’s involvement is primarily performative:  she is an intensely vulnerable character who combines an extrovert nature with a need for love, approval and attention, and musical performances in the bar are a primary way of achieving this. John, on the other hand, has purposefully built his sense of confidence and self-worth by projecting his subjectively heard music into the environment around him, using Barry White to create a personally and professionally confident self-image. Both we and various other characters are able to hear these projections, giving John a metadiegetic power over the soundtrack and over the behaviours of others: a fully choreographed version of ‘My First, My Last, My Everything’ (2.12) in the unisex bathroom of the law firm is one of the most extreme of these projections, with most of the principal characters taking part, even though there is no source for the music they all dance to except John’s imagination. For both Elaine and John, in their different ways, musical performances are moments far more Utopian than dystopian, in which they have control over their potentially difficult and anxiety-inducing working environment. Ally, by contrast, is largely not in control of the music she hears. Where Elaine chooses to perform and John deliberately invokes Barry White, music tends to inflict itself on Ally even when she does not want to hear it. This lack of volition reflects the general way that Ally’s subjective experience is made audible and visible to us through the sound gags, sonic punctuations and visual-metaphor gags that Brown identifies permeating the series: The cartoon-like sound of a needle scratching across vinyl as the musical soundtrack screeches to a halt … the sound of rushing wind when we are supposed to speed our thoughts … the sound of a balloon deflating when computer-morphed images deflate, screeching Psycho strings to melodramatize a strong reaction to something, and so on. (2001: 286)

Music plays a particular role in constructing Ally’s anxieties, to the extent that at times it terrorizes her in her apartment, chases her down the road and inflicts itself on her like a maddening earworm that she cannot block out. In the first season, she repeatedly imagines a dancing baby 145

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in her apartment, its appearance presaged by the chant ‘ooga chucka’ that then leads into the song ‘Hooked on a Feeling’. Ally does not enjoy the baby’s performances but also cannot escape them or the music: this involuntary metadiegetic manifestation is largely presented as symptomatic of her anxieties about marriage and motherhood, and whether she will ever achieve them, but her inability to control the manifestation is clear when she assaults her opposing counsel on a case, a child genius who she initially thinks is another version of the imaginary baby (‘The Playing Field’, 1.18). In a similar vein, after her childhood sweetheart Billy dies, Ally wakes up to the sound of Vonda Shepard singing on her radio: turning this off, Gloria Gaynor then appears in her bedroom singing ‘I Will Survive’ (3.17). Like an earworm made visible, Gaynor and her song refuse to be banished, following Ally into the shower and then pursuing her down the street as she attempts to escape. In the excessiveness of the manifestation, the unwelcome and unstoppable spontaneity, the intense anxiety it induces in Ally and the way it appears to impose a message of hope that Ally does not necessarily wish to hear, this, like the dancing baby, is a comic but nonetheless dystopic subjective-fantastic moment. Where subjective-fantastic music is often a negative experience for Ally, when she takes control of her fantasies they have a more Utopian effect, but even this is not unproblematic. Her therapist (played by Tracey Ullman) instructs her to develop a theme song to counter the dancing baby; the song she eventually chooses is ‘Tell Him’. She originally hears it in a slow, romantic version but is instructed to make it fast. Even in the upbeat version, it says something rather dangerous about her ongoing obsession with the (happily married) Billy (‘Theme of Life’, 1.17): the music may present Ally’s Utopian solution to the Billy problem, but it would create a new set of problems if she ever acted upon the song’s instructions (as indeed later happens). Likewise, when Ally suspects Georgia, Billy’s wife, is pregnant, Tracey tells her to use a ‘silly’ theme song to trivialize (and therefore put into perspective) her pain. When Georgia’s pregnancy is confirmed, Ally implements this advice with a subjective-fantastic staging of ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ involving all the office staff in both singing and exuberant choreography. The subjective-fantastic nature of this sequence is further highlighted by a short break near the beginning of the number as we come out of Ally’s perspective and return to a view of the office seen from John’s 146

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point of view, with only the normal office sounds and activities apparent. He notices Ally regarding the scene and ‘tunes in’ to her subjective position: after we switch back to the musical number we see him smiling and nodding in time to the music that Ally is imagining, apparently observing and approving of her fantasy. Yet it is merely fantasy, and it is not at all clear that it helps her to put things into perspective, only that it compounds her romantic fantasies. The energy, intensity, emotional transparency and community offered by this musical number may seem Utopian but they reveal an unhealthy romantic obsession. As Brown notes, the music ‘suggests that Ally, and perhaps other women, might literally have been listening to the wrong kind of music’ (2001: 292), music that encourages and, in this show, sometimes literally manifests in unrealistic romantic fantasies. In this way we are presented with the Utopian solution offered by the musical but simultaneously reminded that it offers no genuine solution to real problems. Later, Ally sees Billy again and the ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ introduction restarts, but it seems that Ally has learnt, at least for now, that it is not the answer: ‘Oh, who cares’, she sighs, as the needle-scrape brings the music to a halt.

Six Feet Under Six Feet Under also explores the tensions between the energy of Utopian fantasy and the dreariness of real life, regularly including moments where the Fisher family’s subjective fantasies intrude into the narrative. Dana Heller sees these moments of fantasy as the counter to the often ‘buttoned-up, dour’ impression that the family can give (2005:  77), and certainly they seem to work in inverse relation to how repressed and controlling a character is. In the first season, David, initially the most repressed character, has the largest number of fantasies, with the more easy-going Nate’s largely restricted to conversations with his late father, and Ruth and Claire both having a relatively small number of particularly vivid episodes. Not all of these involve music, and relatively few involve performance, but some do. When they are not about death and the dead, they are often connected to sex in some way, the thing about which all of them other than Nate are most anxious and/or excited, and so it is perhaps natural that it is in their fantasies that those anxieties are variously realized, dealt with or escaped from. 147

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Figure 7.1  ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’: Claire’s Broadway fantasy

Ruth imagines one of her competing suitors, Nikolai, romancing her in pantomime Cossack garb with stereotypical, lyrically improvised ‘Russian’ music and this helps her understand that she is, on some level, attracted by his slightly frightening attention to her, in contrast to Hiram’s sweet but safe romance. Her anxieties about David’s sexuality lead to a particularly disturbing fantasy (‘The Trip’, 1.11) when she sees a young man leaving David’s apartment one morning and imagines a giggling David being whipped in a highly performative BDSM scenario with thrash metal music blaring in the background, music it seems unlikely he would ever listen to, which points to how unlikely the rest of the scenario is. Claire has some of the most surreally extravagant fantasies, including using the power of her thoughts to explode her teacher’s head (‘Brotherhood’, 1.7), and a full Broadway rendition with spotlight and sequinned dress in the kitchen the morning after she has had toe-sex with Gabriel, singing ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’ to us, her audience, as David and Ruth provide back-up vocals and dancing (‘The Foot’ 1.3) (fig. 7.1). Her taste for performance comes to the fore again in season five (‘The Rainbow of Her Reasons’, 5.6) where she performs 148

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a storming version  – again with spotlight and now an appreciative audience of cigarette-lighter-waving office workers – of ‘You Light Up My Life’, rewritten as ‘You Ride Up My Thighs’, her tribute to being seriously uncomfortable wearing pantyhose in her new office job. While Claire’s musical fantasies are celebratory and expressive, David’s are most often connected to his anxiety about his sexuality and therefore mostly appear in season one. David regularly talks to the corpses he is working on, but also has a variety of often musical and performative romantic fantasy moments, such as in ‘Crossroads’ (1.8) when he dances with Kurt, the square-dance caller who hires out the funeral parlour for his classes. David imagines being first encouraged to kiss Kurt by a middle-aged male square dancer as they promenade, and then enthusiastically applauded by the whole group when he does so. ‘A New Person’ (1.10) presents a sequence of musically charged moments as he prepares to come out to his mother. First, whilst vaccuming the dimly lit and rather drab funeral parlour, he breaks into a Broadway show version of ‘Got a Lot of Livin’ To Do!’ from Bye Bye Birdie, which he sings and dances with a chorus line of bare-chested young men amid the pink glow of stage lights. Proclaiming in song that he is ‘Gonna break out / Gonna go wild / Have my way’, he is brought back from his moment of celebratory fantasy by his mother calling to him, revealing him motionless by the vacuum cleaner, alone in the dark. The second episode occurs as he is handing out food trays to the homeless with his church group. This is not immediately clearly fantasy:  there are clues, however, one of which is the music, a sultry saxophone solo that locates the scene in a 1980s pop ballad (George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’ seems the closest model). A homeless man with long blond hair has a flirtatious exchange with David that ends by slipping into pornography, only for David then to be jolted back to reality as the man, his hair now considerably more lank and dirty, demands to be given his food. The final episode takes a third musical model:  we have progressed from the brash and glitzy exuberance of a show tune through the soft porn/soft romance of pop and now enter the high stakes emotional drama of opera. Having come back to work at the outreach group on a night when he knows his former (and future) lover, Keith, may well be there, he fantasizes that the blond homeless man stabs him, only to be shot dead by Keith (suddenly in his police 149

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uniform), who then cradles the dying David and says they need to make love one last time. The operatic tenor voice is synched in a way that makes it David’s voice – the first long, sung note matches David’s silent, open-mouthed cry as he is attacked – and even though he is not singing himself, this synchronization allows the music to function comparably to the show tune, an escapist wish-fulfilment of his repressed and frustrated desires. From this point of view, his subjective-fantastic musical moments fit Dyer’s model of the Utopian solution much more closely than the medical musicals or Ally McBeal’s fantastic intrusions, as do Claire and Ruth’s:  the categories of exhaustion, fragmentation and dreariness that they experience in their day to day lives are countered by the energy of the performances, the (albeit illusory) tendency for others to be seen joining in and appreciating their performances, and the intensity and drama they allow the characters to both express and experience. However, unlike the film musical, where the dystopia of real life is concealed, masked by the Utopian solutions of the musical number, here both the real and the ideal are set along side each other, the movement back and forth between them an important dynamic in the way we understand and empathize with the Fisher family members. Their subjective-fantastic moments allow us insight into them as vibrant characters rather than ‘buttoned-up, dour’ ones. For David, however, the distance between the real and ideal closes in the course of the series: hand in hand with becoming increasingly comfortable with his sexuality and his developing relationship with Keith, he starts to sing in real life rather than only in his imagination, so leaving behind the illusory Utopian solution offered by the fantasy performance and encountering the real communal, participatory pleasures offered by music when he joins the Gay Men’s Chorus – although for us as audience, his performances (whether on stage with the chorus or exuberantly in a hotel room with Keith) continue to allow us to access the Utopian counter to our own (dreary and exhausting) lives offered by watching musical performance.

Sound and subjectivity Music in both film and television has a tendency to represent a particular point of view, sometimes that of a particular character but sometimes 150

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a projection into the narrative from the outside, the music acting as an extra-diegetic commentary on what we see: the lyrics of songs used in the end credits of much quality television, for example, often perform that function. A third and rather more literal way of representing point of view is to use sound to present a ‘point of audition’, a term introduced by Rick Altman to describe instances where the soundtrack alters some aspect of the sound – its volume, the use of echo, reverberation or distortion to represent ‘sound as it would be heard from a point within the diegesis, normally by a specific character or characters’ (1992: 60). Where the sound is an external, objectively audible sound, the effect of point of audition is that we hear that sound from the perspective of where characters are located (so the volume of an explosion is matched to how it would sound from where the current shot is located in relation to the noise). However, the point of audition can also be highly subjective. This may involve the soundtrack being dominated by the sound of a character’s breathing when they are frightened or out of breath, which we then hear from their perspective, as if we were inside their head. Musically, this kind of subjective point of audition often corresponds to what Robert Walker describes as ‘cinematic tinnitus’ where ‘the impairment of a character’s hearing has allowed cinema to explore “subjective” or “point of audition” sound in formally inventive ways’ (2012: 133). This tinnitus effect, which may portray ‘pain, confusion, dislocation [or] removal from temporal reality’ (ibid.) is one found in television as well as cinema, frequently as a sonic representation of subjective distress of some kind. In The Sopranos, for example, we find it in ‘Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office’ (2.1) when Tony realizes in the course of a poolside conversation that, although Big Pussy Bonpensiero’s story about where he has been checked out, apparently clearing him of talking to the FBI, the record of his flight out of the country could have been forged by hacking the airline company’s computers. We hear this realization dawning on him: the sound of the conversation around him becomes distant and develops a distorting echo, all the ambient sound drops out; and a roaring, pulsing sound – as if his ears are covered and he is hearing the interior sound of his blood circulating – gradually increases in volume as he understands that he cannot trust his friend. Tony is briefly dislocated from his sonic surroundings and transported into a sonically subjective space. 151

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Similar uses of a tinnitus effect to communicate a character’s subjective experiences are found in other shows: Hannibal uses a quite literal tinnitus effect in ‘Fromage’ (1.8) after Will Graham shoots Tobias, the serial-killing cellist, in the basement workshop where he makes his human-gut strings. The shooting is at such close range, so close to Will’s head as he and Tobias struggle, that the following moments are sonically transformed to represent his point of audition, which is now muffled and full of ringing tones. In Mad Men’s ‘The Crash’ (6.8), the ‘energy boosting’ stimulant that Don is given to help him work through the weekend first makes its effects known through sound. Voices are acoustically too loud and close for where they are coming from in the visible scene, but they are also too reverberant for the acoustic of the office; and as he stands on the stairs, trying to puzzle out why he feels he knows a secretary from somewhere else, Don is assailed by a series of abnormally loud sounds – a typewriter, phones, voices, laughter – which suddenly dissipate into equally abnormal silence with no sound other than the soft ring of a high-pitched tinnitus effect. Breaking Bad also makes use of the tinnitus effect on more than one occasion: in ‘Cancer Man’ (1.4), as Walter listens to his doctor list the possible side-effects of his cancer treatment, as in other examples, the doctor’s voice becomes distant and develops an echo, and a metallic ringing tone increases in volume, further masking the doctor’s voice until it is impossible to hear what he is saying. The tinnitus effect acts like interference, as an aural representation of Walter’s inability to take in what is being said, as well as his sense of being overwhelmed in the way that the sound takes over and blocks out all other sound. Something very similar is revisited in ‘ABQ’ (2.12). Throughout season two, various episodes have started with a black and white sequence centring on the White’s swimming pool, and various objects being fished out of it, in particular a child’s toy, a pink cat, the only coloured object, burnt on one side. The recurrence of these mysterious and unexplained sequences point toward something that is yet to happen, and events catch up in the season finale, when an air traffic controller, father of Jesse’s girlfriend, returns to work after her death from a drug overdose. He sets two aircraft on a collision course over Albuquerque; what we have been seeing in the black and white sequences is the debris from this disaster. As the shot moves ever closer toward his face, an insistent, electronic sound builds in volume, developing as a chord with a piercing top note, 152

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this time blocking out his own voice as he speaks. This shift from the ambient sound of the control room and his voice to a separate, dislocated sonic space marks his loss of concentration on what he is doing and saying. Again, we hear him being overwhelmed, and this is a common feature of the tinnitus effect in television.

Normalizing the aberrant Other The Sopranos was a groundbreaking series, and the first of the new generation of quality television shows to garner an audience of avid fans outside the usual genre realms of cult television. It began a trend in quality television for dramas centring on characters that are criminal, usually murderous and often exploitative. These are not the type of people with whom television has traditionally encouraged us to identify and empathize in serious drama: the procedurals have always placed the heroes on the right side of the law, aiming to save lives rather than take them. Music, I would argue, has played a significant role in allowing us to develop empathetic feelings for morally reprehensible characters and again, this comes down to the way music can represent a point of view. Given that people in general do not think of themselves as evil, where music works to construct the diegesis from the point of view of a criminal, one of the things that results is that the ‘evil’ character will sound much more normal in terms of the underscore accompanying his or her (more usually his) actions than they would if the same character were being constructed from the musical point of view of a more conventional hero. Musically, The Sopranos set a number precedents for the new style of quality television:  the use of a long opening credit sequence with an existing popular song for a show that is neither a sitcom nor aimed at a younger audience; the use of different music in each end credit sequence to carry the narrative musically beyond the final image of the individual episode; and the absence of an original musical score, the musical soundtrack instead constructed almost entirely from an eclectic range of existing popular and classical music.3 This has been a common practice in cinema for many years, and indeed the nature of the soundtrack chosen for The Sopranos strongly reflects the soundtracks used in Scorsese’s mob-focused films, Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) – The Sopranos has a variety of 153

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tracks and artists in common with these – and The Godfather films’ uses of opera. The producers of The Sopranos made a conscious decision not to use conventional scoring both because they felt it was potentially too manipulative but also to enhance the realism of the drama (Droney, 2001). Instead, the series music editor, Kathryn Dayak, was responsible for all the music placed in the show, although she reports that many specific ideas for tracks to be used also came from David Chase, with whom she had previously worked on Northern Exposure (ibid.). I  would contest the idea that this music does not manipulate the audience, but it certainly does so differently from a composed underscore which can impose an interpretation on viewers without them consciously realizing that this is happening. With popular music, especially where lyrics are involved, the listeners often needs to notice and make the connection between the soundtrack and the action in a more active and conscious way. The Sopranos’ soundtrack uses music in two main ways:  as diegetic ambient sound in the background of scenes, and as often non-diegetic, foregrounded music that provides an additional level of meaning to the drama in some way. The ambient diegetic music relies on there being a credible source for the sound, meaning that some episodes have almost no music at all, whereas others have a significant amount, but rarely in the foreground. The foregrounded music, meanwhile, sometimes operates as an extra-diegetic commentary on what is happening, and at other times reflects the point of view of a particular character, usually Tony Soprano himself; and sometimes both of these levels are present simultaneously. Perhaps the first moment that the music makes its presence felt as more than ambient background is in the very first episode when, in recounting to Dr Melfi the day he collapsed, we watch Tony’s flashback of how he chased down (with his car) a man who owed him money before beating him up further. The version of events he tells Melfi is much more innocent than the scene we watch, as he intentionally avoids mentioning any violence. Meanwhile, the scene is largely played out to the upbeat doo-wop song, ‘I Wonder Why’. Although Tony’s target is clearly terrified and runs in panic from Tony’s car as he is relentlessly pursued along the pathways of a leafy, campus-style business park, the effect of the music and Tony’s evident enjoyment of the chase make it seem playful rather than ruthless, 154

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and make the fleeing figure seem comic. We experience the chase from Tony’s perspective; and the added level of hearing his sanitized version of events as told to Melfi intercut with the chase (‘we had coffee’, he tells her, referring to the coffee that his victim drops as the chase begins) adds to the playfulness. Although the latter part of the scene after the music stops is much more evidently violent, as he beats up the already injured man, this does not change the fact that the audience has been manipulated into seeing the chase itself as a bit of fun rather than simply appalling. The use of music that we as an audience are likely to enjoy in conjunction with Tony, regardless of what he is doing when we hear it, conspires to make him likeable. When he collapses as the ducks fly away, the event that sets the series in motion, we hear astonishingly beautiful music (an aria from Puccini’s La Rondine) to underpin first the pleasure that Tony feels in watching the ducks and his heartbreak as they leave; it positions him romantically, a cultural marker of beauty and emotion that renders him a sympathetic figure, capable of appreciating beauty and feeling emotion. Tellingly, the music stands in for Tony being able to describe why this moment was so emotionally powerful for him. For Akass and McCabe The Sopranos’ non-diegetic music is ‘used to indicate male emotional excess … [Tony uses] the soundtrack to articulate his bewilderment as he struggles to find a language to adequately express his emotions’ (2002: 158). Season three then begins with another very unusual and playful repeated use of a piece of music, or rather, of two quite separate pieces of music that are merged into one by Dayak, although the original idea came from Chase (Droney, 2001). The theme tune written by Henry Mancini for the 1958 TV detective show Peter Gunn is musically juxtaposed with ‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police. On the face of it, this is a very strange thing to do, but the results are remarkably successful. The Mancini theme is very James Bond-like in its use of a jazzy big band sound and electric bass ostinato. However, not only is it in the same key as ‘Every Breath You Take’ but the theme tune’s bass riff is very similar to the song’s, meaning that they are able to merge via that musical common ground. The resulting cue is used four times in ‘Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood’ (3.1) for the FBI attempting to bug Tony’s basement. The jazzy James Bondish music points to and spoofs the FBI agents’ sense of their own cunning as they stake out the house and follow all the family members to ensure their agents will not be disturbed 155

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as they assess and then place their equipment, a process which takes several weeks. The Police song, meanwhile, ironically (given the group’s name) belongs more to Tony: even though the lyrics may describe how the FBI feel (‘Every move you make, I’ll be watching you’) nonetheless it is always heard most clearly when Tony is the one being followed, and the agents, like us, are aware that he knows they are there. The song from that perspective represents Tony exerting his control over the soundtrack, undercutting the FBI’s sense of old-fashioned daring with the interjection of the modern song that turns the tables on them. The soundtrack therefore constructs Tony’s subjective point of view in several different ways:  as sound he imagines, as music that indicates his point of view; and as music that presents him to us as profoundly normal in his musical tastes – perhaps it is a little old-fashioned, but the music that surrounds him personally in the non-diegetic soundtrack does nothing to indicate that he is someone we should not like. Akass and McCabe link his connection to the non-diegetic music to the idea of gangsters as narcissists (2002: 157–59), which in turns lends the music a metadiegetic function, as if it emanates from Tony’s own imagination, the soundtrack of his life, as he casts himself musically as sympathetic, romantic, tragic and nostalgically glamorous in contrast to the violent, criminal narcissist we frequently see on screen.

Dexter Another character of deep moral dubiousness is Dexter Morgan, Miami’s loveable psychopath serial killer. Where The Sopranos inverts the police procedural, taking the story from the criminals’ point of view, Dexter doubles back again with a character who is both criminal and police investigator. Again, music is profoundly important in allowing us to like and empathize with Dexter, and the thematic material of the score is often strongly connected with his monologues, adding to the sense that the music represents his point of view. The first music we hear in Dexter is not the title theme discussed in chapter three. Instead, in the pilot, the word ‘Dexter’ appears on screen and from that we move into the first scene, Dexter driving past bars and restaurants in Miami, delivering his first monologue, starting with the evocative words, ‘Tonight’s the night.’ 156

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w ˙ ∑ ˙ & ‹ œ ? œœœœœœœœ œœœœ œœœ œœœœœœœœ w ˙ ∑ b˙ & ‹ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ ? bœ œ œ œ bœ œ Figure 7.2  Dexter’s M-Theme

The theme in this cue (fig. 7.2) establishes the basic block on which Dexter’s music is built and is referred to hereafter as the M-theme. It is used frequently in conjunction with Dexter’s monologues; especially when he is thinking about or planning his murders (although less frequently when he is enacting them); it also features when he meditates on his nature as a monster, and is convincingly the ‘Dexter Morgan’ character theme. M here, therefore, stands for several things: monologue, murder, monster, (Dexter) Morgan himself; and mediant. The mediant refers to its purely musical characteristics, a musicological way of referring to the harmonic function of the third degree of the scale. The mediant and submediant (the notes a third above and below the tonic) are considered particularly interesting harmonically, and the idea of a ‘mediant shift’ describes the way that moving by thirds away from the tonic throws up some unique modulations that we hear as unusually emotive. The third degree of the scale most strongly and immediately indicates whether the key is a major or minor one:  in A  minor, the third degree is a minor third away; in A major, it is a major third. However, it is quite possible to subvert that expectation and move to one of the potential mediant or submediant chords that is not the one immediately suggested by the key. So, in A minor, the mediant chord is C major and the submediant chord is F major. However, the composer might shift one or more notes by a semitone and, for example, substitute C major with C minor by flattening the E; or turn F major into F minor by flattening the A itself, as happens in the M-theme. 157

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None of these shifts sounds ‘wrong’, because they are achieved by simply letting a single note slip to the note next to it, a small step that does not perturb the ear where a large chromatic leap might; but the sheer number of possible shifts available to a mediant or submediant chord of one description or another (there are eight different varieties of mediant shift achieved through these semitone alterations) makes mediant shifts slippery, flexible: they pretend to be stable but they are actually very unpredictable. The mediant shift is, in musical terms, an excellent metaphor for the nature of Dexter Morgan himself, and his music explores several different versions of it. The M-theme as we first hear it immediately starts playing with mediant shifts when A minor shifts to F minor. The A flat in the F minor chord is technically a profoundly wrong note, altering the tonic itself, but, while we may hear it as a richer harmony than we perhaps expected, it does not expressly sound wrong, thanks to its mediant shiftiness: it hides its aberration in plain sight, just as Dexter does. There are several other versions of the M-theme in the first episode: a waltz variation that we hear as Dexter contemplates the artistry of the Ice-Truck Killer’s first body (and which is regularly used in season one when Dexter thinks of or is with Brian) that repeats the same shift from a minor tonic key to its minor submediant (fig. 7.3); and a quirkily ‘tiptoeing’ version with both shifting harmony and metre, using pizzicato strings and celeste as Dexter breaks in and searches his intended victim’s home (fig. 7.4). These types of variation persist throughout the whole series and their frequent use reinforces the sense of Dexter as non-threatening and even rather fun, despite the fact that we know he is a killer. Pizzicato strings, in particular, communicate a quirky comedy, similarly used by Christophe Beck in scoring Xander’s misadventures in Buffy’s ‘The Zeppo’ (3.13), for example. The first use of Dexter’s quirky cue is then followed by the first appearance of the Blood theme as Dexter finds evidence of his target’s proclivities, contrasting the quirky with something musically much more serious. The Blood theme takes the minor thirds from the accompaniment of the M-theme as its starting point:  we hear a similar minor-third motif in the accompaniment of this theme too (fig.  7.5), but now Licht uses a different mediant shift, to the submediant major, the ‘correct’ chord for the key, using only notes that normally occur within the key of G sharp 158

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Sounds of Fear and Wonder

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Figure 7.5  Dexter’s Blood theme

minor. However, this apparent conventionality is offset by a slidingly chromatic melodic line that emphasizes tritones (D natural against G sharp in bar 2; A sharp against E natural in bar 4), the specific dissonance of the diabolus in musica also found in the theme tune. The timbres of the Blood theme are important too, and we really only ever hear it played in this one way, with a deep, darkly sensual accompaniment from electric bass, lower strings and piano and a high, yearningly taut melody carried by violins playing harmonics, giving them a soft, thin, eerie quality. Not unlike the themes for the romantic vampires discussed in chapter five, the sequence of pairs of notes falling by single steps encodes a well-established musical idea of sighing; and the final rising notes at the end of each phrase then tug yearningly upward. If the accompaniment is dark and sensual, like the pool of blood that so obsesses Dexter, we hear how he feels about blood and, by extension, about killing in the fragile, uncanny sounds of the melody. The cue is haunting, actually quite dissonant yet delicately beautiful, and in responding to the sensuality of the music, we are seduced into understanding Dexter’s feelings: he becomes a sympathetic monster. The Blood theme is used for the end credit sequence and with all the DVD menu cards, heard outside the narrative rather more than it is heard within it. Uses of the Blood theme itself in the score are relatively infrequent; it does not appear in every episode, for example, except for in the end credits. Its position as part of the frame and conclusion of each episode points to its 160

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importance in relation to Dexter’s identity, as much as the opening credits. In very different ways, the cues that frame each episode represent two sides of Dexter in ways that encourage us to like and be amused by the quirky, performing, circus Dexter of the titles; and to be seduced by the sensual, yearning, mysterious Dexter of the end credits. All three of the ways that I  have discussed music in relation to ‘real-world’ dramas here are applicable to my final case study, Hannibal, where, although there are no overtly fantastic moments, the hallucinatory nature of Will Graham’s experiences, and Hannibal’s self-aggrandizing fantasies of superiority and control respond to the ideas of both the fantastic and the subjective; while music and sound are used not only to normalize the aberrant Hannibal, to some extent, but to destabilize Will, the ostensible hero.

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8 The Rest is Noise Music and Sound in Hannibal

Hannibal:  You stood in the breathing silence of Garret Jacob Hobbs’ home; the very spaces he moved through. Tell me, Will, did they speak to you? Will: With noise and clarity. (‘Roti’, 1.11)

If Buffy marks the beginning of the flourishing of television scoring in the late 1990s, Hannibal is one of the most recent innovators: at the time of writing, season three is still in production. This show presents the listener with television music that is unusual for several reasons. The ones I focus on here are the amount and type of music; the way that music constructs Hannibal and Will along sharply contrasting lines; and the elision of music and sound design. One cannot ignore the sheer amount of music used in each episode of this series. While around 75 per cent is not unusual in cult TV, Hannibal comes close at times to 100 per cent of scored screen time. In any given episode, there may be no more than one or two sequences of less than a minute where the soundtrack falls into musical silence, notably during intimate conversations between two of the central characters, Hannibal, Will, Jack, Alana and Bella; and the frequency and duration of these silences reduces in season two. The sometimes overwhelming presence of 162

The Rest is Noise

the musical soundtrack also reflects an unusual approach in the production process. Usually a film or TV episode is ‘spotted’ – that is, the music editor and composer sit down with the director and/or producer and watch the edited footage together, deciding where either source or composed music is needed, where it will start and stop, and the work it will do within the scene. The composer then composes, the music editor chooses the source music. On Hannibal, Brian Reitzell is both composer and music editor, and the spotting session is frequently skipped altogether. Talking about the first season of Hannibal, Reitzell reveals that: I spotted the first two episodes back to back and then did a few without any spotting … I think we spotted only about half the ‘Hannibal’ episodes. The rest I just did what felt was right to me, and if I missed something, it was always a pretty minor revision … [Bryan Fuller and David Slade] had the confidence to let me just take charge of the music once we were rolling. (Reitzell in Schweiger, 2013)

This is an unusual degree of freedom for a composer in either film or television, although Fuller and Slade were evidently happy with the amount of music that Reitzell was writing. Much of this is actually very gentle, especially in season one, and meets Claudia Gorbman’s ‘inaudibility’ criterion in that the audience may not register its presence in any significant way (1987: 78). There are many cues, especially associated with the female characters (Alana Bloom, Abigail Hobbs, Bedelia DuMaurier and Bella Crawford) that are characterized by soft, tonal resonance or gentle mobiles of sustained instrumental notes and musical motifs, especially on strings and woodwind, that fade in and out of the texture.1 These cues tend to have no clear sense of pulse or metre and instead drift and float, allowing the scenes in which they occur to have a much slower sense of pace than the more dynamically scored reconstructions and action scenes. Similar soft textures, often using gong resonances and low hums that might be taken for ambient sound, are used in many scenes where Hannibal and Will talk in Hannibal’s apartment, although this is not consistent: there is an enormous amount of variety in the way these scenes are scored which, given how frequently we find ourselves observing these two characters in static, studied conversation with each other, is part of how their dialogues are 163

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Figure 8.1  ‘Gentle’ Motif in Hannibal

kept varied, unpredictable and engaging. The ‘gentle music’ category also produces a recurrent melodic theme, a three-note motif (fig.  8.1) heard usually on cello and harp that is primarily associated with Alana and her relationship with Will, but which also occurs in connection with Abigail’s relationship with Will – for example, in one of his fantasy fishing sequences in season two, when he teaches the imaginary Abigail to fish (‘Takiawase’, 2.4)  – and so it acts as a theme for Will’s emotional involvement with both women. The music that draws attention to itself, on the other hand, is far from gentle, but is also a long way from being conventionally dramatic or even conventionally musical. It is sometimes very theatrical, conveying a sense of stylized ritual, whilst at other times it is extremely aggressive, an assault on the ears exploring textures more akin to noise than what is generally thought of as music. Reitzell employs a wide variety of textures, from the sparsely pointillistic to the densely frenzied. The palette of sounds itself is also unusual in television scoring, dominated by percussion. Reitzell’s musical performing background is as a drummer, and this directly influences the timbres that dominate his scores. A  feature instrument is what he calls the ‘Toru’, a tongue drum made from thirty pounds of bronze that he had custom-built based on an instrument he had seen in a documentary about the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu (see Burns, 2014). The instrument looks like a large bronze box with the top split into more than a dozen ‘tongues’; when struck, each tongue produces a different pitch and set of harmonics based on its precise size and shape.2 The resonant qualities of bronze are well known: most bells are made from bronze for this reason. The Toru is capable of producing a very wide range of sounds, naturally sustained by the resonating box that forms the bulk of the instrument, but in addition Reitzell places it onto 164

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a forty-inch bass drum in order to enhance the resonance (ibid). The metallic reverberation of the Toru is complemented by a variety of other metallic instruments (cymbals, gongs, gamelan metallophones, Balinese hand cymbals or ceng ceng); and contrasted with other percussion sounds from skin and wood: drums of different sizes played with either hard or soft sticks to create a full range of timbres from almost inaudibly soft and resonant timpani to driving snare-drum rolls; wood blocks, marimba, xylophone and claves for the wooden timbres. Where the soft instrumental textures are mostly associated with the female characters, the sounds derived from the percussion instruments, sometimes played ‘straight’, sometimes subject to various electronic manipulations, dominate Will’s soundscape, and are frequently used in his conversations/therapy sessions with Hannibal. Reitzell also introduces other specific ‘feature sounds’ in particular episodes, the most dramatic of those being in the two season finales. In ‘Savoureux’ (1.14) the unique sound is that of a bullroarer, an ancient instrument consisting of a wooden aerofoil (a wooden slat in the shape of a wing or blade, thinner at the edges than at the centre) attached to a cord. This is rapidly swung in a circle and the ‘roar’ is produced by the aerofoil vibrating, the pitch changing depending on the speed of the swing: as the cord is swung faster, the pitch of the vibration rises. In this episode, the bullroarer signifies the stag that has haunted Will’s imagination since the start of the season. Hobbs, the serial killer known as the Minnesota Shrike, mounted his victims on a stag’s antlers; but Hobbs the hunter ends up dead at Will’s hands early in season one. One reading of the stag therefore is that if the hunter becomes the hunted, perhaps the hunted becomes the hunter, and so the stag becomes a symbol of the greater threat that Hobbs’ death concealed: Hannibal and his manipulations. During season one, the stag transforms into a man with pitch-black skin and antlers, who is very specifically a version of Hannibal in Will’s increasingly hallucinatory state. In the opening scene of ‘Savoureux’, we see Will at night in the woods hunting the stag, and hear the bullroarer as he sights it. He shoots and pursues it through the wood to clangourous and chaotic music, and we hear the bullroarer again as Will raises his head and sees not the stag but the Stag-Man. We hear the same sound when Will dreams/hallucinates 165

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seeing the Stag-Man in the one-way mirror of the interview room after he has been arrested; and also when we see one of the fishing lures that Hannibal has planted in Will’s home, made from the human remains of his victims, being unwound in the FBI lab. Here, the bullroarer operates as a form of mickeymousing,3 the circular unwinding of the lure mimicking the physical action of the way the instrument is played. In the denouement of the episode, Will and Hannibal return to the house where Will killed Hobbs, and he attempts to kill Hannibal, the sound of the bullroarer appearing as Will raises his gun to shoot; instead, Will is shot by Jack Crawford, and as he lies bleeding on the kitchen floor, precisely where Hobbs died, he speaks Hobbs’ final words: ‘See? See?’ The bullroarer sounds for the final time in this episode as we look where Will directs us and see the Stag-Man standing in Hannibal’s place next to Jack. The bullroarer is not a conventionally musical sound: it is extremely ‘noisy’ and, as the name suggests, sounds not unlike the call of some enormous animal, meaning that there is an element of mimesis, a musical onomatopoeia at work in the use of this sound in association with the stag and the Stag-Man; but the noisiness of the sound itself is also important in constructing the stag as the product of Will’s disintegrating mind. Noise, as Goddard, Halligan and Hegarty describe, is often considered ‘disorganised or, more appropriately, “unorganised” sound. In this respect it functions as the “other” to both language and music’ (2012: 2), a significant observation here because conventional musical sounds are most strongly associated with Hannibal through his love of classical music. Music, in particular, is a system ‘for organising noise into meaningful or even beautiful modes of expression’ (ibid.), and it is no coincidence that the music Hannibal listens to is drawn from the repertoire widely regarded as the most beautiful of the Western canon:  Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin. Noise, on the other hand, is culturally considered ugly and destructive of meaning or, in other words, functions as the disturbance or interference of a meaningful sonic system. In this way noise, which remains a pejorative term, would typically be

166

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The noise that permeates the score frequently appears to represent Will’s perceptions:  if Hannibal’s internal soundscape is accompanied by classical music, then Will’s is increasingly saturated with noise. As his mental state becomes ever more fragile, the sense that the noise is operating as disturbance and interference becomes more pronounced, the bullroarer becoming the final symbol of his mental collapse in season one. Yet, rather than corresponding to the straightforward destruction of meaning, this intrusive proliferation of noise into Will’s soundscape is indicative of his insight into Hannibal’s true nature: the problem is that he cannot control it. It intrudes and interferes, welling up from his unconscious mind, contributing to his mental disorientation at the same time as a revealing the truths that Hannibal strives to control and conceal. The bullroarer continues as a musical motif for the Stag-Man in season two, but there is a final piece of music in season one that is revisited in season two as well. In the last scene of season one, Hannibal comes to visit Will in his cell in the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. As he walks down the dungeon-like passage and turns to see Will in his cell, we hear ‘Vide Cor Meum’, the piece of music composed by Patrick Cassidy for a scene in the film, Hannibal, where Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal attends the performance of an opera. Its appearance at the end of season one musically and visually overlays three different Hannibal texts in one fell swoop: a reversal of the meeting on either side of bars between Hannibal and Will Graham in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, in which Mann worked hard to line up the bars as we switch between shots from one side or the other, just as happens here; the recreation of the dungeon set where Hannibal first meets Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, again with the positions reversed (remembering that there were no bars to Hannibal’s cell in that film); and the soundtrack of the sequel film, Hannibal. As an intertextual and arguably supradiegetic display of Hannibal’s power over the narrative, this is a profoundly strange moment, inviting the audience to recall his other screen versions as our Hannibal appropriates them, subsumes 167

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them into this incarnation: he ‘performs’ all the versions of himself simultaneously, drawing this music in as the aural manifestation of his display of power. ‘Vide Cor Meum’ then returns to the score in unusual circumstances in the final act of ‘Mitzumono’ (2.13) as a second demonstration of Hannibal’s control as Will works with Jack Crawford to catch Hannibal, whilst also ostensibly working with Hannibal to kill Jack and then leave the country. This episode, like season one’s bullroarer, introduces a new musical idea but this time, rather than it being a specific musical timbre that emerges from Will’s unconscious, the season two sound appears to adopt the more conventional role of extradiegetic narrating voice. The sound is that of a steady, hard, percussive pulse – in essence, a ticking sound that draws in a group of culturally associated readings, much like the bumper of 24: time passing, countdown, time running out. It is a curiously unusual sound in Reitzell’s scores, which often avoid a consistent sense of pulse: the gentle music drifts, the dramatic music sometimes punctuates, sometimes maintains a steady state, sometimes accelerates or slows, but rarely maintains a steady and consistent pulse that might allow the listener to hear it as metrically organized into audible and regular groups of beats. There are occasional moments where the music behaves metrically, but they are almost always furiously fast, so that what we hear is the driving impetus more than the regularity of a metrical structure. In ‘Mitzumono’, the first three acts of the score are dominated by a variety of ticks of different speeds and timbres, and the insistence of this idea becomes a question: what happens when the ticking stops? This impending moment is acknowledged in the first scene when, using a split screen that merges half of Jack’s face with half of Hannibal’s, they simultaneously ask Will ‘When the moment comes, will you do what needs to be done?’ The ticking, therefore, represents the countdown to the moment when Will reveals, finally, whose side he is on; and the point the ticking stops is at the end of act three, just before he arrives at Hannibal’s house. At the end of this act, Alana is pushed from an upper storey window by Abigail, who until this point we suspected had been killed by Hannibal in season one. Alana falls amid a shower of glass. Act four begins with a shot of the night sky and of glistening objects falling from it, no longer glass but rain: this is essentially a point-of-view shot as Alana lies, alive but 168

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#4 œ œ œ œ œ ˙ ™ & 4 Slow

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Figure 8.2  Season 2 finale motif

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Figure 8.3  ‘Vide Cor Meum’ (a) and the season 2 finale motif (b)

unable to move, on the path outside Hannibal’s house, and this is where Will finds her when he arrives. The music, however, has radically changed over the act break. The ticking pulse, the noisy resonances and erratic musical gestures that have characterized the score so far are silenced and in their place we hear high, tonal, shimmering music characterized by slow descending melodic lines (fig. 8.2) that meander around a central musical motif for eight and a half minutes. The music is wholly in Hannibal’s musical territory:  not only is it conventionally beautiful, free from noise, but the instrument carrying the melody is a metal-stringed instrument, played with a tremolo; it effectively sounds like a tremolo harpsichord, quite possibly created electronically by sampling, but very much one of Hannibal’s timbres. Even more importantly, the melodic line is taken from the opening of ‘Vide Cor Meum’ (fig. 8.3) and the entire cue might be thought of as a fantasia on Hannibal’s musical moment from the season one finale.4 As the final scene plays out, Will is stabbed in the stomach, Abigail has her throat cut, Jack bleeds out in Hannibal’s pantry and Alana lies injured in the rain, but this tranquil, transcendent music keeps going, indicating Hannibal’s absolute command of the situation. In season one, the bullroarer and the direct quotation of ‘Vide Cor Meum’ both seem to emanate 169

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subjectively from Will and Hannibal respectively; in season two, there is again the balancing of music relating to Will (the ticking) and Hannibal (this final cue). In terms of narrative structure, the two finales also parallel each other musically, with most of the episode dominated by Will’s music and the closing section of the episode allowing Hannibal to reassert control of the soundtrack. This is further underlined in the credits and epilogue of ‘Mitzumono’ as we hear again the piece of music most regularly associated with Hannibal, the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

The soundscapes of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham The relationship that Hannibal has with music, compared to the relationship Will has with noise, is one of the most important sonic dynamics of the series as a whole. The two types of music split precisely across the two characters’ constructions and respond to the same kinds of coding of noise and classical music found in cinema. The use of textural/noise scores is something found in post-2000 films, such as Thomas Bangalter’s for Irreversible (2002) and Jonny Greenwood’s score for We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011), where noise often signifies dysfunction, aggression and anxiety;5 and likewise classical music is found in film scores (and notably in the film soundtrack for the character of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal) as a particular signifier of either Europeanness, evil or, more often than not, evil Europeans.6 In the television series, Hannibal is played by a European actor, Mads Mikelsson, and speaks accented English that identifies him as non-American – although Will is also played by a European (British) actor, Hugh Dancy, disguised by an American accent.

Will Graham and noise In the first episode, the link between noise and what is going on inside Will’s head is established from the outset, although what is striking is the profound control that Will demonstrates over his internal and external soundscapes, compared to his lack of control by the end of the season. The opening scene begins with shots of police at a murder scene. The sound here is immediately unusual in TV terms in that it has more 170

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in common with electronic dance music than either instrumental or pop scoring. It consists of three main layers of sound: at the bottom is a synthetic-sounding bass line, a steady four-note ascending pattern; over this, in the middle of the texture, is a fast drum pattern. The highest pitched material is ‘noise’. Emerging from the reverberant sound of a police siren, we hear flanging metallic sounds: there is no stable sense of pitch that might result in a sense of melody, and these sounds are constantly changing and distorting. This (segment A) builds over about fifteen seconds. The shot then moves from the busy officers to Will, framed and motionless. A new, low, distorted, ‘dirty’ sound effectively cancels out the segment A material and initiates segment B. Although the same basic tempo is maintained, there is an acoustic shift that makes the sound seem much closer to us, indicating a tighter focus from the wider scene to the specific character, and presaging the more subjective position for the sound in relation to Will. Segment B has a new rhythmic bass pattern constructed from a sound being played backwards, which gives it a distinctively different character from segment A and foreshadows what is about to occur; that is, Will is about to rewind events in order to understand what has happened. The next sound we hear is one that remains firmly associated with all Will’s reconstructions of crime scenes: we hear three metallic ‘swipes’, accompanied by a black screen across which a yellow-orange bar of light swipes like a windscreen wiper, the sound apparently emanating from this visual swiping. The combined image and sound, here and on later occasions, represent Will ‘clearing’ his current surroundings from his perception in order to be able to enter the scene from the perspective of the killer before the murders have happened. Segment B’s bass line then continues, smoother (less noisy) than before, with other sounds surrounding it, such as a high, fast, tapping sound like an electronic glitch, and other high and mid-range flanging, swiping and juddering sounds, as he surveys the scene and rewinds it, the murder victim disappearing, blood pool retreating, blood spatter lifting away from the wall.7 He then walks backwards out of the house, and the bass line from segment A returns as he emerges into the throng of police officers outside that we saw when segment A was heard the first time. We hear a police siren again and police radio chatter but these seem to operate more as part of the musical soundtrack, there being 171

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no other ambient sounds coming from the scene at this point, no vehicle noises, no conversation. Although the ambulance lights are flashing, all the police officers are motionless: they are not ‘real’ but are part of Will’s construction of the environment as he rewinds events. The sounds are apparently located inside Will’s head, not in the visible scene. He eliminates the officers and vehicles from his perception and as he does so, segment A’s bass line once more disappears from the soundtrack. Again, the camera frames Will in a head and shoulders shot, focusing in on him; and then, perfectly synched with him closing and opening his eyes, the segment B pulse is also ‘cancelled’ by a low, cleaner sound, a single note that very briefly clears all other noise from the soundtrack, revealing the ambient sounds of insects chirruping in the garden foliage. Almost immediately, the ambient sound is drowned out by segment C, rapid, harsh, very noisy electronic and metallic sounds with a driving drumbeat as Will takes on the role of the killer and breaks into the house, the sound of the burglar alarm joining the frenetic soundtrack. All of this, including the apparently diegetic alarm, then cuts out as Will shoots the first victim and narrates the killer’s actions in the first person (‘I shoot Mr Marlow twice, severing jugulars and carotids with near surgical precision’). The previous noises are replaced by a low, reverberating sound that slowly slides downward, mickeymousing the shot of Marlow falling in slow motion amid the spray of his own blood. This forms the basis for the final sonic segment of the scene (D), which consists of a pervasive drone, constructed from reverberant sounds (including metallic gong sounds, low strings and drum sounds), that builds and retreats and builds again, with quasi-melodic fragments at the top of the texture. After Marlow’s shooting, first the sound of Mrs Marlow’s sobbing and then the sound of the alarm fade back into the soundtrack; segment D crescendos as Will approaches and shoots her, then retreats (taking the alarm sound with it) as he narrates her shooting too. It builds again, and the alarm sound fades back in, as he then cancels the alarm himself; if this were a realistic scene, the alarm sound would logically be continuous to this point, but Will only subjectively focuses on it at specific points in his metadiegetic reconstruction of events, and it is therefore only at those points that we too hear it. Segment D continues to the end of the scene with its pattern of intensifying and retreating as we move between Will’s reconstruction (signified by his 172

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solitary presence in the house and a warm, amber wash to the image) and ‘reality’ (signified by police officers being visible and a cold, blue wash). The opening scene, then, establishes various ways that this noise-based music operates in relation to Will’s thought process: as interference (segment A); as a process of cancelling interference (the various sonic gestures that act as transition points between segments); as a preliminary process to enable him to enter the killer’s mind (segment B); as part of the reconstruction of how the killer acts (segment C) and of then describing that process (segment D). The particular sonic segments used in this first scene do not themselves become recurring cues (although elements from them do reappear, especially from segment B), but they establish both an overall sonic language for the music of the series, and a set of relationships between Will’s thought-processes and the soundtrack. The reconstructions are a regular occurrence in both seasons one and two: there is at least one in every episode in the first half of season one, although they are less frequent after that, and increasingly Will is drawn into reconstructive moments rather than intentionally initiating them. Nonetheless, they follow a generally predictable sonic pattern incorporating the following elements: 1. An initial low, slow static-like sound of distortion/interference that often cancels out existing musical sound; 2. The sonic swipe gestures that often cancel out other (musical and/or ambient) sound; 3. Backwards sounds, used in a steady rhythmic pattern to indicate time being rewound to an earlier state; 4. The high, rapid, irregular tapping sound that marks the start of the reconstruction; 5. Will’s voice narrating the reconstructed events in the first person, and his catch-phrase, ‘This is my design’; 6. In later episodes, a drum sound imitating a heart beat. In addition to this, the most violent parts of the reconstructions are likely to be accompanied by sounds of great intensity and volume (as heard in segment C), and this type of music starts to spill out into non-reconstruction moments. Initially, this is strongly associated with Abigail Hobbs. In 173

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‘Potage’ (1.3) Will is with her, Alana and Jack at Hobbs’ cabin. As Abigail is encouraged to talk about what happened with her father, the resonant sounds from the music become so loud, they threaten to drown out the dialogue. As she says ‘he was feeding them to us’, the resonance is almost too loud for her to be heard clearly; and when they discover the body of her schoolfriend in the attic, we can barely hear Will’s phone call to summon help or Abigail’s scream. The soundtrack noise operates as a metaphor for being mentally overwhelmed. This is actually a very static scene, but the oppressive sounds make it seem intensely busy and it is Abigail’s distress (stemming from being forced to remember, analogous to Will’s reconstructions) that seems to initiate the build up of intensity in the soundtrack. Later, when she finds that the cushions in her family home are stuffed with the hair of Hobbs’ victims, the heavily textured resonant drones again overwhelm all the ambient sound in the scene; and there is further sonic overload when she more or less accidentally kills the young man she believes may have murdered her friend. Later in season one, Will also becomes subject to this kind of sonic overload as his mental health deteriorates and his ability to keep the reconstructions and the real world separate breaks down. This begins in ‘Trou Normand’ (1.9) with the discovery of a totem pole on a beach constructed from multiple bodies. The reconstruction music here is particularly unusual and indicates that something has changed in Will, that he has reached a critical tipping point. Although it starts with the same distorted ‘cancelling’ sound, swipes and high tapping, the usual swiping sound is then replaced by a distinctive low drum and high woodblock motif (onomatopoeically, ‘boom-chick’), an ethnically coded sound that responds to the parodic ethnic appearance of the totem pole. As Will enters the reconstruction, for the first time we have the heart-beat sound that becomes a normal part of the reconstruction soundscape from this point on, an added layer of subjective sound that has not been present before, signalling his deeper and unhealthy level of engagement with the reconstruction. Just as in the heartbeat motif of 24, this is slow and steady: it is not the sound of the panicked victim but of the ruthless killer that Will becomes when he reconstructs these scenes, the change suggesting that now he identifies even more strongly with these killers. During the scene, we have the same development of intense and noisy textures that are normal to these 174

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reconstructions as he enacts the murder; more unusually, the scene ends with a musical ‘cadence’ to give a strong sense of closure, the boom-chick motif used several times. This cadence is, however, ironic, indicating not the end of the events on the beach but a line being drawn across Will’s perceptions and memory. From the apparent sense of closure at the end of this scene, Will finds himself at Hannibal’s apartment, at least three hours drive away, and with no memory of how he got there. After this, a combination of losing time and reliving his reconstructions is the trigger for sonic-sensory overload and uncontrolled hallucinations. In ‘Buffet Froid’ (1.10) Will wakes up at a murder scene and initially believes he has murdered the victim, finding himself kneeling astride a dead girl, knife in hand, covered in blood: it is unsurprising that the music here is chaotically noisy, launching straight into segment-C material without preamble. Later, as he has an MRI scan, he retrieves his reconstruction of the crime scene and is then sonically overwhelmed by more C-type material, furious drumming and screaming metal, as he is also visually overwhelmed by rapid images from his reconstructions of murders from half a dozen episodes. In ‘Roti’ (1.11) another intensely noisy, drum-driven cue accompanies Will’s nightmare about the human totem pole, and later in the episode, in a briefing at the FBI, he hallucinates the room full of antlers and Jack Crawford shouting at him, while the soundtrack is penetrated by the heart-beat drum again, along with howling, buzzing and wailing noises: the sonic is always as much part of these hallucinations as the visual. The noise of the soundtrack gives us insight to what it is like to be inside Will Graham’s head, and it is clearly not somewhere any of us would wish to be.

Hannibal and classical music The central musical twist – almost a musical joke – of this television series is a subversion of the Platonic assumption that the good is beautiful. Fundamentally good if troubled Will Graham is largely associated with often hideous noise, while the fundamentally evil if devilishly attractive Hannibal Lecter surrounds himself with some of the most highly regarded music of the Western classical canon, paradigms of sonic beauty, which we hear almost exclusively in Lecter’s home, usually as accompaniment 175

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to the preparation or eating of meals, an activity he clearly considers equally artistic. The hideous knowledge that Lecter is cooking and eating human flesh (which we are in the privileged position of knowing from the books and films about him) is ironically elided with its elegant preparation to beautiful music. Even without that knowledge, the juxtaposed images and sounds of the elaborate, extraordinarily sophisticated meals and the music to which he chooses to listen become part of how he is constructed as Other in a way that makes his very sophisticated version of evil disturbingly alluring. Hannibal, like his music, is smooth, cultured, clean (we frequently see him drying or wiping his hands): but also alien, unAmerican, elitist, Other. Will is messy, unshaven, wakes from nightmares bathed in sweat, finds himself covered in dirt from walking barefoot in his sleep. Hannibal is a paragon of mental and bodily control, for which his music is an analogue; Will is frequently physically and mentally abject, and the noise of his sonic landscape likewise acts as an analogue for this. Hannibal’s relationship with music, however, is not uncomplicated. The point in the first series in which he most overtly reveals his true nature – the first time we see him kill – is when he murders a fellow music-loving psychopath, the strings-specialist Tobias. Tobias appears in ‘Sorbet’ and ‘Fromage’ in the first season, in what are the most musically driven episodes of the series. ‘Sorbet’ starts with Hannibal attending a recital in an art gallery. This is the first time we see him listening to live music, an operatic aria by Handel, and is highly reminiscent of the opera scene in the film, Hannibal, with the focus on a soprano singer and an audience sitting in what is clearly not a conventional auditorium. Tobias is also in the audience, and he and Hannibal are introduced afterwards. ‘Fromage’ then features Tobias as a serial-killer cello teacher and instrument maker who guts his victims to make cello strings, as is established in the teaser when a pupil asks him if the strings are made from cat gut and he enigmatically replies ‘not always’. To the accompaniment of elegiac solo cello playing over a shimmering wash of orchestral strings, we see the horrible truth of how Tobias makes his strings in a brief montage. The sound of the cello, one of the most clearly instrumental and melodic sounds in Reitzell’s Hannibal scores, has a prominent position in this particular episode’s music as representative of Tobias, his actions and influence. 176

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Initially, there is an attraction between Tobias and Lecter  – Lecter wonders if he has perhaps found a friend – but ultimately he kills Tobias instead. Unusually, we see Hannibal engaged in fierce physical action (normally, the only physical actions we see him performing involve cooking or eating) and the music is almost entirely made up of sliding, tremolando and electronically manipulated string sounds, with only intermittent percussive motifs of the type one would expect in Will’s violent reconstructions. It is, nonetheless, quite unlike the music normally heard in relation to Hannibal. As soon as the fight is over – Tobias’ body has barely fallen to the floor – Hannibal moves to his harpsichord and we see and hear him play two notes. The scene then changes to later when the police have arrived at the apartment, but the harpsichord playing continues in an extended sound bridge between the two scenes. The two notes turn out to be the start of the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, also heard at the end of season two. This is also the piece heard the very first time we see Hannibal in the TV series, as we cut from Will in the morgue announcing that the killer is eating his victims (in this case, specifically the liver) to a shot that slowly pans up from a plate of elegantly prepared and garnished meat, to Hannibal himself, lit against a black background, eating a morsel of it with studied pleasure. We hear the same piece of music in Silence of the Lambs playing on a cassette in Hannibal’s makeshift cell during the scene in which he kills the police officers guarding him and strings one of them up on the side of his cage like a grisly angel; and again in Hannibal, apparently being played by Hannibal himself, during a montage of images as Clarice Starling reads a letter he has sent her – we hear him in voiceover reciting the letter, his voice intertwined with the sound of the Bach. It operates, in effect, as Hannibal’s leitmotif, his personal theme tune, across both the films and the TV series. His apparent need to play it, immediately after killing Tobias, moving to the harpsichord with a peculiar urgency at odds with the meditative tranquillity of the music itself, underlines the importance of this particular piece to him, as if it is able to help him re-establish his physical control and composure in the wake of the violent fight with Tobias. Appending it to this scene also implicates the Bach in Hannibal’s process of killing. In some respects, this particular moment in the TV series seems quite clumsy: Hannibal’s haste in getting to his harpsichord does not seem quite in character. Simply moving more slowly, more meditatively, 177

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more in keeping with the pace of the music he wants to play might have been more convincing. Nonetheless, the decision to follow our first sight of Hannibal killing with our first sight of him playing the keyboard, using the piece that occurs in his film narratives, points to the importance of Bach in understanding Lecter’s character. A ‘cultural reading’ of Bach takes us through several possible interpretations of what the composer signifies in relation to Hannibal:  European high culture; sophistication; the disjuncture of Hannibal’s violence and the tranquillity of the music; but perhaps above all a cultural perception of Bach as a musical genius, the creator of works of music that in their contrapuntal and harmonic architecture are as close to perfection as any art form could aspire. Moreover, playing Bach is also associated with both genius and deviance in the figure of Glenn Gould, whose obsessive playing and recording of Bach’s keyboard works (and notably the Goldberg Variations) juxtaposed both Bach’s and the Canadian pianist’s genius with something bordering on madness. All of these associations, both with Bach and with playing Bach’s music, have a bearing on how we read Lecter as a European, sophisticated, obsessive, controlling, psychopathic genius. Both Hannibal and Will have an arguably metadiegetic relationship with their specific musics and again, this follows the idea of Hannibal fundamentally in control of his environment and Will increasingly losing of control of his. Hannibal chooses his music to accompany his meals the way he might choose his wine, and it is notable that in the case of Alana, who later becomes his lover, he almost always chooses solo piano music by Chopin, as if bestowing on her a musical ‘theme’, much as he appropriates Bach for his personal soundtrack. During his private meals, dinner parties and his meal preparations, one might assume that the music is playing somewhere in the environment, but we never obviously see a CD player, or his CD collection, or an ipod, or even a speaker in the corner of the room from which sound might emit, and sometimes the acoustic of the music belies its audible presence in the physical space of the scene, the sound too close and focused to be coming to us via the acoustic of the room we can see. Given the prevalence of the music in his home, the consistent absence of any evidence of its source is strange: television and film frequently make a point of showing us the source of music in order to remove ambiguity about where the music is coming from (shots of the car stereo being 178

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operated in Supernatural, for example; or James, the ghost, putting the needle on the record in Buffy’s ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’). Concealing the means of production within Hannibal’s home further positions the music as an aspect of him: he is the source of this music. This connects his use of music to the idea of music as an indicator of the fantastic in quality/cult dramas: Hannibal is a fantasist and he uses music in constructing the fantasy world he inhabits, a world of almost unbearable beauty that legitimatizes the crimes he commits, rendering them in his mind as part of a world in which everything he does is elegant and controlled. The beauty of the music is more than just a veneer he places over his actions to conceal their horror: his appropriation of music that primarily has its origins in the high culture of the European aristocracy is a validation of his superiority and, therefore, of his right to act as he wishes. The sense that the music emanates from him and from his imagination is at its most self-conscious at the end of ‘Sorbet’ where he speaks to his dinner guests before they begin their banquet, cautioning them that nothing on the table is vegetarian. As the camera pans along the table, allowing us to see both the food and the applauding hands of the guests, we hear the same operatic aria by Handel that Hannibal and his guests listened to during the concert at the start of this episode. Now, however, the singer’s voice has been stripped out and we hear only the orchestral accompaniment as Hannibal’s audience applauds his artistry rather than the singer’s. In a final moment, his voice replaces the singer’s:  he delivers his final lines to the guests over the accompanying chords of a recitative section, placing and pacing his words in relation to the orchestra’s chords with impeccable timing. This is very clearly his orchestra, and his musical and artistic moment, with the strong implication that the guests are about to feast on his murder victims. Reitzell has ‘recomposed’ the Handel for this scene: this is a piece of music that Hannibal could not possibly own as a recording in the way we hear it here due to both the absence of the singer’s voice and the fact that the following recitative section comes from a point much later in the aria. The nature of the music in this scene, therefore, suggests it may not be diegetic at all, but coming to us directly from Hannibal’s imagination as he scores his moment of culinary triumph. While in the dinner party scene there is a level of ambiguity about whether the music is audible to the dinner guests or only audible, 179

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metagdiegetically, to Hannibal himself, in other scenes the metadiegesis is unmistakable, such as in ‘Sakizuke’ (2.2) where Hannibal discovers the silo in which a killer is creating a mural of colour-coded bodies. Climbing to the top of the silo, he looks down through the circular aperture at the top and sees the ‘eye’ below him. Overwhelmed by this audacious artistry, Bach’s Mass in B Minor bursts into the soundtrack, Hannibal’s favourite composer marking for him this moment of ecstatic recognition of someone not unlike himself, for whom murder is art.

Music as sound design One of the unusual features of Hannibal’s scoring is the way it often merges the categories of music and sound design such that sound within an episode functions simultaneously as both. This is something that has happened in film, a notable example being Dario Marinelli’s score for Atonement (2007) which (among other things) incorporates the sound of the typewriter, allowing moments of merger and transition between the typewriter as a diegetic sound within a scene and as a variously extra- and metadiegetic musical element. Of the five channels of communication in cinema (and by extension, television) that Christian Metz (1974) proposed, three are sonic:  spoken language, music and sound. By often eliding the roles of composer and sound designer, Reitzell collapses these last two categories in the frequent moments where music (Reitzell’s composed noise) goes beyond the idea of mickeymousing, the cartoonish imitation of visual (and innately silent) gestures with musical ones, and instead explores a form of mimesis, the use of a musical sound to stand in place of the expected sound of what we see on screen. One of the first places that this happens is in ‘Fromage’. In what is one of the most startling and surreal images of the series, Tobias kills a trombonist from the local symphony orchestra that he (and as it happens, Hannibal) considered an inadequate musician; and he ‘improves’ his victim’s body by converting it into a musical instrument, the neck of a cello thrust through the victim’s mouth and into his vocal chords (fig. 8.4). Will’s reconstruction of this crime is dominated by cello sounds, both natural and manipulated; and he also attempts to play the ‘instrument’ during his reconstruction of the crime. The sound he produces could not possibly 180

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Figure 8.4  Hannibal’s ‘human cello’

emit from the cello-man:  it is vast and resonant, and a human body is, unlike the body of a cello, not hollow and so not capable of producing a resonant sound as such. Rather, Will metadiegetically reconstructs the sound the killer wanted to hear, a layered combination of both cello and vocal sounds. Composing both the score that accompanies the reconstruction (which is arguably already metadiegetic) and then providing the sound of this imaginary cello as Will plays it is a very clear cut example of the music and sound operating as a single category, certainly in terms of the means of production, although it is unlikely that the audience will consider this particularly remarkable, given that the sound-producing object in the image is approximating a musical instrument. Other particularly notable mimetic instances where the music delivers a sound that appears to (but could not possibly) emit from the visible source are the roaring metallic sounds apparently made by the knife as Abel Gideon cuts into Frederick Chiltern’s abdomen in ‘Roti’; and the sound of the smooth plastic pipe being forced down Will’s throat in ‘Kaiseki’ (2.1). Will retrieves the memory of Hannibal doing this in order to plant Abi’s ear in his stomach as evidence that Will has killed and eaten her. The sound this aggressive action produces could not be produced by a smooth pipe: it is the sound of a corrugated pipe, being used rather like a guiro so that we hear the sound of the corrugations against a scraper as 181

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we see Hannibal forcing the pipe into Will’s mouth and then travel with it down his oesophagus. On one level, it is clear that the pipe could not make this sound; on another, it is equally clear that the image is presenting this sound as stemming from what we can see. In fact, the sound precedes us seeing anything: the first part of the memory that Will retrieves is the sound itself, and this then leads him and us into the rest of the memory. This is a genuine collapsing of the categories of sound and music, with a composed sound that cannot come from the putative visual source nonetheless standing in place of the much less dramatic or interesting sound that pushing a plastic pipe down someone’s throat would actually make. The most extended elision of score and sound is found in ‘Mukozuke’ (2.5), the episode in which FBI agent Beverly Katz is found, sliced and mounted between perspex sheets like a Damien Hirst sculpture, after she is caught by Hannibal in the cellar where he keeps the equipment with which he dismembers the bodies of his victims. A  feature of this episode is a ‘drip’ motif that moves back and forth between being an element of sound design and an element of the score. Freddie Lounds discovers Beverly’s body at the observatory and as she enters the main chamber, she sees something that clearly disturbs her. We hear two musical passages that demonstrate the difference between conventional mickeymousing of a visual image and the elision of sound design and score. We do not see Beverly in this scene: instead we see the corners of the perspex sheets with the camera focus begin pulled to produce a visual ripple down the line of sheets, each corner coming into focus in turn. As this happens, we have a classic musical mickeymousing gesture that creates a sound paralleling the visual gesture with a descending riff from the ‘melodic’ drums that are a key timbre in this episode.8 We also hear a series of sharp, high-pitched strikes on woodblock which initially function as part of the same music. The camera then switches to a shot where two more woodblock strikes are precisely synchronized with two droplets falling into the water pooling at the bottom of the perspex sheets, shifting our understanding of the sound from music to sound design, woodblock as ‘drip’. The camera cuts away again to a shot of Freddie, and the woodblock strikes continue, still functioning sonically more as drips rather than score, their juxtaposition with the water-drip shot having established them as such. The acoustic space of the sound for both drums and woodblocks is highly reverberant, but 182

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there is no contradiction between this and the assumed acoustic of the high-ceilinged observatory. As Jack arrives at the scene, outside the observatory, the drip motif returns to being music, heard first on woodblock and then taken over by a plucked string, the reverberant acoustic of the music not matching the open-air location; but again, as Jack enters the observatory chamber, the woodblock reappears. The assumed acoustic of the room and the regularity of the motif turn it back into a diegetic drip as he surveys the scene. It is, in fact, not always pure woodblock, but sometimes has an additional sound layered onto it – a common practice in sound design – to give it more ‘splashiness’. This motif reappears throughout the episode, often with no obvious diegetic source but firmly connected with dripping. When Jack and Alana go to tell Will of Beverly’s death, we hear the sound of running water, an aural reference to the imaginary river that Will mentally retreats to in order to escape his confinement; but the river sound is now overlaid with the drip motif, again emphasizing its connection to water, even though the sound is very much that of wood being struck. Immediately after this, as Will is trussed up and masked (evoking the way Hannibal is masked in the films) the woodblock moves back to being music, the drip becoming a repeating motif in one of the rare metrical cues. The second half of the episode is concerned with Will discovering that one of the hospital orderlies is the ‘admirer’ who killed a court bailiff in the style of the Chesapeake Ripper in order to have Will acquitted; and in his guilt and grief over Beverly, he encourages this man to kill Hannibal on his behalf. Staying with the watery theme of the episode, the orderly attacks Hannibal at a swimming pool. As this is happening, Will, in his cell, watches water dripping into his sink; and the drip motif returns. Although the sound again precedes our first sight of dripping water, the presence of the sink alone is enough to secure the sound as a water drip although the acoustic is far more reverberant than is possible for the space, placing it ambivalently between real and imagined, diegetic and metadiegetic sound. The timbres are equally ambivalent, some now mimicking the sound of the water drop closely, others more obviously coming from the woodblock; sounds coded as real and sounds coded as music are mixed in together. As the drops of water turn bloody, the sound alters, the pitch bending downwards, and the sounds 183

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proliferate and darken as the pool of blood in the sink grows. The episode ends back with Will in his cell after Hannibal has been rescued by Jack; the sink overflows with blood and the drip motif returns insistently as a remarkably unperturbed Will watches the bloody waterfall, the episode ending with a final, dramatic woodblock drip. It is much too early to say whether Reitzell’s scoring strategies will lead to an identifiable development in television scoring overall, but at the very least, his Hannibal potentially holds as unique a position in the history of cult television scoring as Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks. Whilst Reitzell’s Hannibal is neither the only nor even the first television score to use noise-based sounds, the way he uses them is unusually innovative. Most often, a score will use noise in a pulse-based composition (e.g. Damages), which is how electronic dance music uses noise; and/ or in short or isolated cues where the noise stands out from the rest of the score, frequently indicating an immediate disjuncture or dysfunction in the narrative (e.g. Breaking Bad). Reitzell’s approach borrows from both these approaches but then pushes the way that noise is used as music into a thoroughgoing strategy for the whole series, straddling the assumed boundaries between Metz’s channels of music and sound, and operating as an extended metaphor for Will’s mental abilities and disabilities that is counterbalanced by the equally unusual extended use of classical music for Hannibal. The soundtrack of Hannibal sounds like nothing that has been heard on television before as a result of this extraordinary juxtaposition.

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Conclusion

The amount of television and television music in existence means that no single book could hope to provide a definitive account of it; and even restricting myself to cult television since 1990, I am aware that there are enormous areas that I have either barely touched or not mentioned at all. Lost, for example, got lost in the process, as did Sherlock, Dollhouse and Babylon 5, all of which are worthy of close examination; and of the shows that are covered, I could probably have written the entire book on any one of Buffy, Supernatural or Dexter. My aim, rather, has been to demonstrate the type of work that music and sound do in relation to image, and the particular work that they do in the more-than-usually innovative shows that tend to become cult. There is a clear trajectory in the way that television music has developed in the last twenty years that has increasingly positioned music as a central part of both a show’s identity and its memory. The identity aspect of music’s role has always been important, but cult TV has, especially since Buffy and The Sopranos, increasingly explored ideas of identity and identification, subverting our expectations of the groups and individuals located at the centre of narrative. The ‘heroes’ of cult television are slayers, witches, vampires, serial killers, drug dealers, petty criminals, gangsters and funeral directors. These are not the usual kinds of character that we are assumed to want to identify with and so shows must develop a 185

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range of strategies for drawing us into these series. Most of these strategies are familiar as hallmarks of quality television:  excellent writing, strong ensemble casts, complex and coherent long-form narratives; but music, something that potentially works against realism in quality drama, has also been an important part of the formula. Music can make a vampire terrifying or bewitching, can make a serial killer amusing or vulnerable by turns. Music in television has an increasingly high profile: ‘Inside the Secrets of the Behind the Making of the Music of Battlestar Galactica Revealed’ the lengthy spoof documentary Bear McCreary made about BSG’s music, which was released with the season four DVD, relies on the fact that his music has a very high profile within the show, although DVD features that examine how the music for a show was created a little more seriously are also increasingly common. At the start of the 1990s, television music was very much film music’s poor relation: high-quality musical resources meant live players, and that was expensive. Technology has gone a long way toward levelling the playing field by making high-quality sounds available much more cheaply through samples; but also through ‘home studio’ setups where audio software gives composers such as Nathan Barr, Daniel Licht and Bear McCreary the flexibility in recording live sounds and using samples that would only have been available via professional studios and live players to previous generations. One can hear this process of transformation in a show that has run for ten years at the time of writing, Supernatural. In its early seasons, starting in 2005, the scoring had a tendency to fall back at times into what is sometimes colloquially called ‘mumble music’ in the industry, music that provides a texture and mood but probably does not bear close listening. As the technology and resources have improved, so has the adventurousness of Gruska and Lennertz’s scores, with an episode such as ‘Time After Time After Time’ (7.12) employing live instrumentalists, and no trace of a synth-pad ‘mumble’. The development of technology has led to television’s scoring strategies developing in ways that are distinctively its own, not copies of film scoring strategies but specifically televisual ones. Television thematic scoring, for example, is not like cinematic thematic scoring: with complete narratives often lasting in excess of fifty hours (over 100 hours, in some cases) a television score for a show like Dexter, Lost, True Blood or Battlestar Galactica has the scope to use many more themes than would be possible in a two 186

Conclusion

hour film, and it is the wealth of material that means the score can sidestep the risk of a theme becoming too repetitive. Rather than a group of between, say, two and six distinctive themes in a film, Dexter has around twenty identifiable themes in season one, many of which are still in use in the final season. Lost has in excess of fifty themes; True Blood not quite as many but still well into double figures, and likewise Battlestar Galactica. In the series double-episode finale, ‘Daybreak’ Parts  1 and 2 (4.19/20) McCreary tried very hard to include all of the important themes used in the series and whilst there are a couple missing, there are still around thirty separate themes used within these two episodes as a grand recapitulation of the complete series score. As I come to the end of this project, it has just been announced that David Lynch is returning to Twin Peaks. Television music has come a remarkable distance since his and Badalamenti’s musical experiments in 1990, and it remains to be seen what musical strategy he will adopt when revisiting Twin Peaks. Nonetheless, the flourishing of television composition in cult TV that that show helped to initiate shows no sign of abating, with composers such as Barr, McCreary and Reitzell continuing to focus their careers around television scoring. And I, for one, shall be listening to whatever it is their music has to say next.

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Notes

1  Music and its Means of Production 1 There are, historically as now, a relatively small number of women working as composers in film and TV. 2 See, for example, Herbert Zettl (2011: 296–98) on problems in TV sound. 3 Among film musicologists, Michel Chion in particular would refute this claim, regarding sound as an integrally important aspect of film, placing the viewer in a ‘perceptual mode of reception’ that he describes as ‘audio-vision’ (Chion, 1994: xxvi). Although Claudia Gorbman used the notion of ‘inaudibility’ as a principle of film music composition and editing, claiming that in film scoring ‘music is not meant to be heard consciously. As such it should subordinate itself to the dialogue, to visuals’ (Gorbman, 1987: 73), Anahid Kassabian (2000, 2013) sees music operating along a spectrum of different degrees of attention, and acknowledges than ‘the relationship between listening and attention is anything but clear’ (2013: xix). 4 The main exception in True Blood is the music written for the Vampire Authority and Lilith in season five, which makes overt use of sampled orchestral and chorus effects to convey their Otherness in comparison to the more sympathetic vampires of the core ensemble. 5 In more recent years, a small number of composers have emerged where melodically driven themes are not the focus of their scoring strategy, among them Philip Glass’ minimalist approach which focuses more on pattern and repetition; and a distinctively British approach found in scores by Clint Mansell, The Chemical Brothers and Jonny Greenwood, all of whom started

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Notes to Pages 15–42 out in bands, and all of whom tend to structure their music around ideas of texture and electronica, pioneering an idea of scoring that at times crosses over into sound design rather than conventional music in scores such as Mansell’s Pi, Greenwood’s We Need to Talk about Kevin and The Chemical Brothers’ Hanna. 6 It is worth noting that the opening of the first film (where we see him – but not his face  – moving through the jungle) plays a musical trick on the audience, scoring the scene with tense, atonal gestures that suggest quite strongly that this unknown figure may actually be a villain. 7 The track is ‘Hot Liquorice’ (1993) by the British composer Dick Walter, taken from his production music album Pure Big Band: Part 1 for KPM Music.

2  Early Cult Television Scoring Strategies 1 K. J. Donnelly describes how, listening to a CD of incidental music from Star Trek, he was ‘devastated to realize how familiar I was with music I had heard as a child (admittedly from constantly repeated reruns). This music had made an indelible impression on my musical memory’ (2005: 123–24). 2 In terms of ‘exotic’ scoring, ‘Vina’s Dance’ in the pilot episode for the green-skinned alien slave girl would not be musically out of place in the scores of Jason and the Argonauts or Quo Vadis. 3 For a fuller discussion of tracking/block scoring in Star Trek scores in the 1960s, see Jeff Bond (1999). 4 The celeste and glockenspiel are essentially the same instrument, where metal bars are struck to produce the note, but the glockenspiel is struck by handheld mallets, while the celeste resembles a very small piano, and the player plays keys which in turn strike the metal bars with a hammer. 5 ‘The Aquarium’ has also been used in media in magical contexts: it is the main title theme for Days of Heaven, was used in the trailer for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and was arranged and adapted for the video game Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour. 6 See Kathryn Hill (2010) for a discussion of King’s choices of popular music in Buffy. The use of popular music in a teen drama was not initiated by Buffy, although the show’s use of indie and unsigned bands was significantly different from the more mainstream (and expensive) approach of other shows before and contemporary to it, in particular Beverly Hills 90210, Dawson’s Creek and The O.C. See Dechert (2002) and Driscoll (2010) for further discussion of the popular musical strategies of Buffy compared to other shows. 7 J. J. Abrams is also more interested than most in the music of his shows, working exclusively with one composer, Michael Giacchino, and writing the main title music for the TV shows Alias, Lost and Fringe.

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Notes to Pages 44–78

3  Intros and Outros 1 The other principal area that musicology has focused on to date is the use of popular songs in shows; these are, almost invariably, songs that pre-exist the show rather than scoring specifically written from it. 2 There may be commercial issues driving this change as well: John Ellis (2011) expresses his dismay at the steady encroachment of advertising into broadcast network drama, with nineteen minutes being a common standard amount of time given to advert breaks in a one hour show. In order to encourage viewers not to change channel, the networks have ‘collectively abolished any break at the head of the hour’. This break, which used to happen after one show finished and before the next began, has now been inserted into the following show instead. The result is that the longest single segment with no break is the twelve minutes at the top of the show, and Davison (2014) notes that using a brief ident in this section preserves this space in what Ellis sees as an increasingly disrupted broadcast flow. 3 See Davison (2013b) for a detailed discussion of the titles of The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. 4 The instrumentation in the cue is described by Rolfe Kent in a special feature on the season two DVD boxset. 5 A glass harmonica is a set of tuned drinking glasses played by rubbing the rim. 6 His original intentions and the subsequent change are described by Kent in the DVD featurette. 7 See Halfyard (2004: 23–4) for a discussion of the dark and quirky in Elfman’s compositional style. 8 The expectation of a ‘reward’ is important here, too; anecdotally, it is quite striking how many members of the audience will stay to the very end of a Marvel film, knowing that there will probably be an extra scene at the end of it that indicates where a sequel will take the story.

4  Listening to Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1 This theme does, in fact, reappear in anomalous circumstances. Very unusually, several complete cues from ‘Helpless’ and ‘This Year’s Girl’ reappear in ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ (4.18), in particular two cues using the ‘Bad Father’ theme. This is not re-use of a theme in a new cue but the wholesale ‘cut and paste’ of music from another episode. Given that music written for a previous episode still has to be paid for under Musicians Union rules, the only explanation I have for this is that Beck was, for some reason, unavailable to write all the new music required for 4.18. There is a certain logic to the choice of cues – both ‘Helpless’ and ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ concern Buffy being trapped in a strange house. The result

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Notes to Pages 78–106 of this is that the ‘Bad Father’ theme (originally used for Buffy being let down by her father on her birthday and Giles’ betrayal of her trust in stripping her of her powers) appears in relation to Riley, which sheds an unexpected, very interesting and probably quite unintentional light on what Buffy sees in him. 2 The bass line of the A and B phrases acts as a melodic theme itself later in the cue and rather unexpectedly the B phrase seems to make specific reference to Angel’s theme tune and, as a result, to Buffy’s theme (see Halfyard, 2010). 3 I discuss this scene further in Halfyard (2014).

5  Scoring Television Vampires 1 The original prepared piano was constructed by John Cage in 1938 and formalized in his Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48). Cage’s piano is prepared by having an array of screws, bolts, pieces of rubber and other objects placed on or inserted between the piano’s strings; it has become a more general term for any piano that has had its timbre altered by placing objects on, between or under the wires, hammers or dampers. 2 See Slate, 2013. Even the cinematic version of Dracula (Dracula 2000) which is set in the present day retains the orchestral setting. 3 Morris is very comfortable working electronically as he worked on the technical side of sound production and engineering before focusing on film and TV scoring from 2000 onwards. However, he did use acoustic instruments in his scores for The Tudors and The Borgias, both of which strongly evoked musical ideas of the periods in which they are set. 4 Music by these composers would nonetheless have been quite unlikely to have been heard at the French court in the late eighteenth century, given that composers tended to be forgotten quite quickly after they died – Rameau, the oldest of these, died in 1767, twenty years before the French Revolution. 5 Johann Strauss was the waltz composer par excellence of the nineteenth century: his most famous work, The Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau, Op. 314), dates from 1867, but he continued to write waltzes until 1898, the year before his death. Ironically, given that the 2000 Dracula film is set in the modern day where the television version is set at the end of the nineteenth century, the equivalent opening scene in the film uses The Blue Danube for the waltz to which Mina and Jonathan dance. 6 This time, the waltz metre is intact but the music is far too harmonically chromatic to be authentically from the period. 7 One interesting exception to the rule is a folksy cello melody used for Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, but here the reference is folk music, which, although not often played on cellos, is strongly associated with strings. Massed cellos can sound remarkably aggressive, as Danny Elfman’s

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Notes to Pages 106–124 score for Planet of the Apes demonstrated, but solo cellos tend to be used more lyrically. 8 Although they were the last to be turned into a TV series, The Vampire Diaries books first appeared in 1991. Probably inspired by the Louis/Lestat pairing of soulfully brooding and gleefully wicked vampires in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), they predate Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in film (1992) and television (1997 onwards), the Southern Vampire Mysteries series (2001–2013) on which True Blood is based and the Twilight books (2005–2008), all of which echo The Vampire Diaries’ formula of a pair sympathetic monsters in love with the same girl to some extent. 9 By contrast, film makers will tend to make considerable use of popular music, often with lyrics that act as a commentary on the narrative, when a character who is female, gay and/or black is the central character, or shares that position with another, as in a romantic comedy, or a film such as Thelma and Louise, where none of the male characters have an equivalent agency to the two women. 10 Here and in subsequent early scenes, Sookie is consistently in the superior physical position, looking down on Bill: she stands when he sits; she stands or kneels when he is supine after the attack; she sees him in the garden from her upstairs bedroom window in her dream, putting her in the dominant position until she descends from her bedroom to meet Bill in the garden.

6  The Bells of Hell go Tingalingaling 1 The series Ally McBeal first aired in September 1997, a month before ‘Brain Salad Surgery’ and is another antecedent of OMwF in its imaginative use of musical performance. See chapter seven for a fuller discussion. 2 The model for the ‘War and Peace’ song was, in fact, the idea of the Jets and the Sharks in Bernstein’s West Side Story, for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics. 3 There are various other supernatural musical episodes not included here, among them Sanctuary’s ‘Fugue’ (4.8) which is thoroughly incoherent, in that whatever rules are in place at the start of the episode for why one character is only able to communicate or comprehend anything through song, these are rapidly abandoned. Tod and the Book of Pure Evil includes an episode involving the staging of a musical (‘The Phantom of Crowley High’, episode eleven) that also has a couple of additional lip-synch songs that operate as genuinely fantastic musical intrusions, not unlike those of Pennies from Heaven: they are so separate from all other stylistic and musical aspects of both the episode and the series that they make a similar sideways step into a parallel narrative space. 4 In one instance, this situation is partially reversed: Spike declares himself immune to whatever is causing the spontaneous bursting into song, only to find himself singing a few seconds later  – and the expression on his face at this

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5 6

7

8 9

point implies that he is aware and surprised but can do nothing to stop himself. However, this is momentary: as the rest of the song proceeds, he loses this self-consciousness and apparently loses his awareness that his singing is in any way abnormal until the song has finished. See, for example, Williams (2011). This episode is remembered by the narrative when we revisit it, discovering two of the many songs that the narrative tells us were being sung that we did not get to hear before: Anya’s love song, her expression of hope as she prepares to marry Xander, which we finally hear in ‘Selfless’ (7.5), along with a song that reveals how the mustard got on the shirt in the first place. The 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi did not have a specially composed score and instead used library music including excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and from Wagner and Schubert. The original title of this film was simply Dracula. The attribution of this piece to Bach has been contested since the 1960s by musicologists who observed that the piece is stylistically quite unlike anything else Bach is known to have written.

7  Music, Fantasy and Subjectivity in ‘Real World’ Dramas 1 Psych also presented a musical in a double-length episode (‘Psych: The Musical’, Psych 7.15) but we learn at the end that what we have seen is the musical that has been written about a particular case the team have worked on, a retrospective explanation of extensive singing and dancing that has not been commented on in the episode as unusual apart from one brief aside toward the end. Psych’s musical is therefore simply a musical rather than a moment where fantasy takes over the narrative through either spell or illness. 2 Arkin’s father and other members of his family wrote, arranged and recorded music with The Weavers, a group that included Pete Seeger. Arkin’s recording of this song was issued in 1968 by Appleseed Music, according to the Catalogue of Copyright Entries (1970), vol. 23 (part 5; section 1, part 1) Library of Congress: 725. 3 On the occasions where something was needed, the music editor, Kathryn Dayak, was responsible for composing this, as in the tinnitus effect sequence described earlier (see Droney, 2001).

8  The Rest is Noise 1 Notably, the less sympathetic Freddie Lounds is initially scored using rather abrasive pop textures.

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Notes to Pages 164–182 2 This is a very rare instrument and I am unable to find a useable image of one, but a video demonstrating both its appearance and sound when played was made using another replica of the same Takemitsu drum. This can be found at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=B569Cxj_T2U (accessed 18 October 2014). 3 Mickeymousing is an established term in film and television composition and discussion for music that is precisely and overtly synchronized with on-screen actions in order to reinforce them for comic or dramatic effect. It takes its name from the standard practice of synchronizing musical and visual gesture in early animations. 4 This is, in fact, similar to something that Reitzell has done before: the season one finale of Boss is a twenty minute cue covering the final act and end credits that interpolates an electric guitar arrangement of movement one of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Reitzell’s original music. 5 See for example Laura Wilson’s discussion (2012) of noise in Irreversible. 6 For a more detailed discussion of classical music and the construction of the European Other in US films, see Halfyard (2006). 7 The tapping glitch sound may not be properly audible on standard TV speakers. Reitzell is aware that the soundscapes he creates push the limits of domestic technology, saying ‘I try not to pander to Lo-Fi TV’s [sic]’ and instead recommending listeners ‘[getting] the Blu-Ray when it comes out and playing it through a surround system’ in order to hear the sound properly (Schweiger, 2013). 8 Melodic drums tend to be made by their players rather than purchased, and involve cutting multiple pieces of pipe to different lengths and then placing some form of drum head over the top. The length of pipe acts as a resonator and will dictate the pitch at which the drum sounds; careful cutting of the pipe allows a set of drums to be tuned to a chromatic scale, and one can have as many drums in the set as one has the resources to make. From the sound of the score in this episode, Reitzell, a professional drummer, has either made himself a very large set of melodic drums, or has used sampling to create the set electronically: most likely, the sounds we hear are a combination of the two.

194

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TV and Filmography

TV 24 (Fox, 2001–10) 3rd Rock from the Sun (CW, 1996–2001) 4400, The (USA, 2004–07) Alias (ABC, 2001–06) Ally McBeal (Fox, 1997–2002) American Dad! (Fox, 2005–) Angel (WB, 1999–2004) Babylon 5 (WB, 1994–98) Battlestar Galactica (NBC, 2004–09) Being Human (UK) (BBC, 2008–13) Beverly Hills 90210 (Fox, 1990–2000) Blackadder Goes Forth (BBC, 1989) Blacklist, The (NBC, 2013–) Blood Ties (Chum Television, 2006–08) Boardwalk Empire (HBO, 2010–14) Bonanza (NBC, 1959–73) Borgias, The (Showtime, 2011–13) Boss (Starz, 2011–12) Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–13) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB 1997–2001 / UPN 2001–03) Carnivàle (HBO, 2003–05) Castle (ABC, 2009–)

203

Sounds of Fear and Wonder Charmed (WB, 1998–2006) Chicago Hope (CBS, 1994–2000) Cop Rock (ABC, 1990) Criminal Minds (CBS, 2005–) CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000) CSI: Miami (CBS, 2002–12) Damages (FX, 2007–12) Dawson’s Creek (WB, 1998–2003) Deadwood (HBO, 2004–06) Dexter (Showtime, 2006–14) Dick Van Dyke Show, The (CBS, 1961–66) Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–) Dollhouse (Fox, 2009–10) Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (Mutant Enemy Productions, 2008) Dresden Files, The (Sci-Fi, 2007–08) Eli Stone (ABC, 2008–09) Ellen (ABC, 1994–98) Even Stevens (Disney, 1999–2003) Event, The (Sci-Fi, 2010–11) Fades, The (BBC, 2011) Family Guy (Fox, 1999–) Farscape (Sci-Fi, 1999–2003) Firefly (Fox, 2002–03) Frasier (NBC, 1993–2004) Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) Fringe (Fox, 2008–13) Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–) Good Wife, The (CBS, 2009–) Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–) Grimm (NBC, 2011–) Hannibal (NBC, 2013–) Haven (Syfy, 2010–) Hemlock Grove (Netflix, 2013–) Heroes (NBC, 2006–10) Homeland (Showtime, 2011–) House (Fox, 2004–12) House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–) I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–57) Incredible Hulk, The (CBS, 1978–82) Jericho (CBS, 2006–08) Jetsons, The (ABC, 1962–64)

204

TV and Filmography Justified (FX, 2010–) Knight Rider (NBC, 1982–86) L Word, The (Showtime, 2004–09) L.A. Law (NBC, 1986–94) Lexx (Chum Television, 1997–2002) Lost (ABC, 2004–10) Lost Girl (Syfy, 2010–) Lost in Space (CBS, 1965–68) Mad Men (Lionsgate, 2007–) Malcolm in the Middle (Fox, 2000–06) Monkees, The (NBC, 1966–68) Moonlight (CBS, 2007–08) Moonlighting (ABC, 1985–89) Murphy Brown (CBS, 1988–98) Nip/Tuck (FX, 2003–10) Northern Exposure (CBS, 1990–95) O.C, The (WB, 2003–07) Once Upon A Time (ABC, 2011–) Originals, The (CW, 2013–) Partridge Family, The (ABC, 1970–74) Pennies from Heaven (BBC, 1978) Penny Dreadful (Showtime, 2014–) Peter Gunn (NBC, 1958–61) Postman Pat (BBC, 1981–2006) Prison Break (Fox, 2005–09) Psych (NBC, 2006–) Pushing Daisies (ABC, 2007–09) Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989–93) Queer as Folk (US) (Showtime, 2000–05) Rawhide (CBS, 1959–65) Rockford Files, The (NBC, 1974–80) Rome (BBC/HBO, 2005–07) Roswell (WB 1999–2001 / UPN 2001–02) Sanctuary (Sci-Fi, 2008–12) Scrubs (NBC, 2001–10) Sherlock (BBC, 2010–) Simpsons, The (Fox, 1989–) Singing Detective, The (BBC, 1986) Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–05) Smallville (WB 2001–06 / CW 2006–11) Sons of Anarchy (FX, 2008–)

205

Sounds of Fear and Wonder Sopranos, The (HBO, 1999–2007) Southcliffe (ITV, 2013) Space 1999 (ITC, 1975–77) Spooks (BBC, 2002–11) Star Trek (Original Series) (NBC, 1966–69) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (CBS, 1993–99) Star Trek: The Next Generation (CBS, 1987–94) Star Trek: Voyager (CBS, 1995–2001) Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi, 2004–09) Stargate SG1 (Showtime 1997–2002 / Syfy 2002–06) Stargate Universe (MGM, 2009–11) Supernatural (WB 2005–06 / CW 2006–) Terminator: The Sara Connor Chronicles (Fox, 2008–09) thirtysomething (ABC, 1987–91) Tod and the Book of Pure Evil (Space, 2010) Town Called Eureka, A (NBC, 2006–12) True Blood (HBO, 2008–14) Tudors, The (Showtime, 2007–10) Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–91) Utopia (Channel 4, 2013–) Vampire Diaries, The (CW, 2009–) Walking Dead, The (AMC, 2010–) Warehouse 13 (Syfy, 2009–) Weeds (Showtime, 2007–12) West Wing, The (NBC, 1999–2006) White Collar (USA, 2009–) Whitechapel (ITV, 2009–13) Wire, The (HBO, 2002–08) X-Files, The (Fox, 1993–2002) Xena: Warrior Princess (WB, 1995–2001)

Film 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) Adventures of Robin Hood, The (Michael Curtiz, William Keighley, 1938) Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) August Rush (Kirsten Sheridan, 2007) Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995) Back To The Future Part III (Robert Zemeckis, 1990) Batman (Tim Burton, 1989)

206

TV and Filmography Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988) Black Cat, The (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) Blair Witch Project, The (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995) Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) Bye Bye Birdie (George Sidney, 1963) Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995) Cello (Woo-cheol Lee, 2005) Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981) Corpse Bride, The (Tim Burton, 2005) Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The (David Fincher, 2008) Day the Earth Stood Still, The (Robert Wise, 1951) Days of Heaven (Terence Malick, 1978) Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) Dracula 2000 (Patrick Lussier, 2000) Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990) Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956) Frighteners, The (Peter Jackson, 1996) Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002) Ghostbusters II (Ivan Reitman, 1989) Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The (Sergio Leone, 1966) Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978) Great Gatsby, The (Baz Luhrman, 2013) Guys and Dolls (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955) Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011) Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001) Hilary and Jackie (Anand Tucker, 1998) Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) Hunger, The (Tony Scott, 1983) Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994) Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002) Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963) King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933) Kiss of the Vampire, The (Don Sharp, 1963) Lake House, The (Alejandro Agresti, 2006)

207

Sounds of Fear and Wonder Les Misèrables (Tom Hooper, 2012) Living Daylights, The (John Glen, 1987) Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986) Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) Mask (Peter Bogdanovich, 1985) Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrman, 2001) Mummy, The (Karl Freund, 1932) Mummy, The (Stephen Sommers, 1999) My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) Phantom of the Opera, The (Rupert Julian, 1925) Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1998) Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, 1940) Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003) Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton, 2001) Plunkett & Macleane (Jake Scott, 1999) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) Rent (Chris Columbus, 2005) Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009) Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Guy Ritchie, 2011) Silence of the Lambs, The (Jonathan Demme, 1991) Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donan and Gene Kelly, 1952) Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979) Stargate (Ronald Emmerich, 1994) Sting, The (George Roy Hill, 1973) Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) Swimfan (John Polson, 2002) Terminator, The (James Cameron, 1984) Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) To Die For (Gus van Sant, 1995) Truly Madly Deeply (Anthony Minghella, 1990) Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) Twilight: Eclipse (David Slade, 2010) Twilight: New Moon (Chris Weitz, 2009) We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne Ramsey, 2011) West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961) What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000) Witches of Eastwick, The (George Miller, 1987) Wolf Man, The (George Waggner, 1941) World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006)

208

Index

24, 17, 48, 52–54, 68, 70, 168 2001: A Space Odyssey, 38–39 Abbott, Stacey, 9, 55, 59, 61, 63, 100, 114, 134 Abrams, J. J., 14, 65, 68, 189n7 Adorno, Theodor, 15, 18 agency, 16–17, 54, 68, 94, 101, 108, 132, 144, 192n9 aliens, 7, 26–27, 29, 189n2 allusion, see intertextuality Ally McBeal, 107, 140–141, 144–147, 150, 192n1 Altman, Rick, 45, 151 ambient music, 32–33, 137 ambient sound, 151, 154, 163, 172–174 anachronism, 22, 98–99, 101–102 Angel, 49, 91–92, 93–98, 101, 104, 106–108, 111–112, 191n2, 192n8 Arkin, Adam, 142–143

atonality, 27, 97, 97–99, 116, 128–130, 189 audience, viewing rewards for, 46–47, 62–63, 69, 190n8 audio-visual contract, 115–116, 120–125, 133–134 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 130, 132, 166, 170, 177–178, 180, 193n9 Barr, Nathan, 14, 94, 104, 108, 112, 186–187 Battlestar Galactica, 6, 13–14, 14, 18, 64, 73, 92, 186–187 Beck, Christophe, 73–75, 76–80, 83–84, 86–87, 90, 92, 158, 190n1 Berman, Rick, 28–30 Bernard, James, 128–129 binge viewing, 18, 23, 46–47, 92 block scoring, 4, 19–21, 28, 31–32, 35, 157, 189n3 Blue Danube, The, 38, 191n5

209

Sounds of Fear and Wonder Bond, Jeff, 26, 28–30, 73, 189n3 Bordwell, David, 24, 133 Breaking Bad, 53, 136, 138, 152, 184 broadcast, 12–13, 18–19, 45–52, 72, 190n2 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1, 8, 9, 40–42, 44, 49, 63, 67, 71, 73–92, 93–95, 106–108, 110, 117, 122–126, 130, 134, 137, 139–140, 142, 158, 162, 179, 185, 189n6, 190n4, 191n3, 192n8 Buffy–Angel Love theme, 79–92 ‘Hopeful’ theme, 74–75 ‘Once More, with Feeling’, 42, 63, 117–118, 122–126, 140, 142, 192n1 series scoring strategy, 74, 78–79, 92 Slayer theme, 75–76 ‘This is What is Left’ theme, 86–90 bullroarer, 165–168 Burton, Tim, 36–37 Butler, David, 8, 10 Butler, Jeremy, 24, 45 Carnivàle, 55, 57 celeste, 34, 103, 158, 189n4 cello, 13, 66–67, 94, 101–113, 164, 176, 180–181, 191–192n7 Cher, 36–37 Chicago Hope, 117, 139–143 Chion, Michel, 5, 115–116, 120, 188n3 circus, 35–36, 62–63, 161 classical music, 11, 39, 98, 102, 153, 166–167, 170, 175–180, 184, 194n6 Clement, Shawn K., 76–78, 85 comedy, 31, 61, 115–116, 119, 127, 132, 158 Cop Rock, 117–118 Copland, Aaron, 28, 44

Courage, Alexander, 26, 28; see also Star Trek fanfare motif cult TV, definitions of, 2–3 cultural musical codes, 7, 16, 26, 30, 44, 53–54, 116, 170 Damages, 136, 184 dancing, 36, 76, 99, 101, 117, 124–125, 140, 142–143, 145–147, 149, 191, 193n1 Davison, Annette, 46, 48, 69, 190 Dawson’s Creek, 22, 189 Day the Earth Stood Still, The, 26, 64 Dayak, Kathryn, 154–155, 193n3 Debussy, Claude, 30, 111 deus ex machina, 115–116, 134 Dexter, 7, 55–63, 67–68, 73, 92, 112, 138, 156–161, 185–187 Blood theme, 68, 158, 160–161 M–theme, 157–159 title sequence, 55–63 diabolus in musica , see tritones diegesis, 2–4, 63, 114–117, 124, 133, 141, 143, 144–146, 153, 167–168 diegetic music, 25, 37, 38, 40–41, 70, 95, 99, 101, 120–122, 131, 136, 154, 178–179 Digital Kitchen, 60 Disney, 34, 37, 126, 189n5 Doctor Who, 6, 9, 10, 17–19, 25–26, 49, 70 Donnelly, K. J., 6, 12, 19–20, 28, 120–121, 189n1 Dracula (character), 97, 99, 101, 129–133, 191n2 Dracula (1931 film), 129–130, 193n7 Dracula (TV show), 93, 97–102 dream sequences, 38–39, 90, 110–111, 120, 140, 143, 165, 192n10

210

Index drones, 32–33, 97, 116, 128, 172, 174 drums, 53, 58–59, 67, 99, 132, 134–135, 171–175, 182, 194n2, 194n8; see also percussion Duncan, Robert, 75–76 Dyer, Richard, 1, 141–142, 150 Edmondson, Greg, 14 Edward Scissorhands, 34, 36 Eisler, Hans, 15, 18 electronic music, 10, 26–27, 59–60, 90, 95, 98–99, 171, 184 Elfman, Danny, 12, 34, 36–37, 61, 190n7, 191–192n7 Ellis, John, 12, 45–46, 190n2 end credits, 8, 44–48, 67–72, 104, 107–108, 111, 127, 133, 137, 151, 153, 160–161, 170, 194n4 as ‘postface’, 69–70 excess, 32, 37, 55, 59–63, 141–142, 146, 155 in Dexter, 59–63 extended techniques, see timbre fairytales, 36–37, 52 fans, 2–3, 66, 97, 114, 119–120, 134–136, 138, 153 avid fans, 2, 25, 153 scholar–fans, 2, 9, 41 and music, 3, 21, 24–25, 41, 74, 77, 97, 135–136 fantasy, 2, 4–5, 7–8, 33, 36–40, 57, 63, 90–91, 116–117, 121–124, 132, 135–161, 179, 192n3, 193n1; see also music and the Farscape, 67, 71–72 Feuer, Jane, 119, 121, 124, 139 film music, 12–13, 17, 51, 108

compared to TV music, 3–4, 8, 10–23, 27–28, 37, 44–45, 77–78, 98, 170, 186–187, 192n9 Firefly, 8, 14, 42 flow, 45–47, 49, 190n2 folk music, 14, 57, 130, 143, 191n7 Frankenstein, 33–34, 36 Fringe, 14, 65–66, 67–68, 131, 140, 189 Game of Thrones, 13, 55, 64, 70, 136–137 gaze, the, 12, 46, 109–110 genre, 2–3, 5–7, 22, 33, 37, 44, 63, 114–135, 140–141, 153 gestural music, 6, 33, 51–52, 54, 59, 62–63, 74, 77, 97, 101, 104, 111–112, 116, 129, 131, 180, 182, 189, 194n3 Giacchino, Michael, 14, 68, 189 Glass, Philip, 6, 188n5 glissando, 97, 116, 128, 130–131 Gorbman, Claudia, 6–7, 17, 53, 102, 163, 188n3 Grey’s Anatomy, 41, 49, 140 Grimm, 46, 51–52, 93 Gruska, Jay, 76, 129, 186 Hammer Horror, 128–130 Hannibal (film), 167, 170, 177 Hannibal (TV series), 7, 8, 70, 138, 152, 161–184 ‘Vide Cor Meum’, 167–169 harpsichord, 52, 64, 169, 177 heartbeats, 52–54, 173–175 Herrmann, Bernard, 26, 64 Hills, Matt, 2, 9, 46, 135 Hollywood, 10, 12, 15, 19, 104, 141

211

Sounds of Fear and Wonder horror, 14, 27, 31, 35, 37, 59, 63–64, 93, 97–100, 108, 113, 116, 128–135, 179 House, 137, 140–141 House of Cards, 51, 55, 70 hyperdiegesis, 2–3 idents, 48–54, 63–65, 68, 127, 190n2 see also title sequences inaudibility, 163, 188n3 intertextuality, 33–39, 98, 126–129, 133, 141–142, 167–168 Interview with the Vampire, 1, 6, 106, 192 Irreversible, 170, 194n5 jazz, 20, 25, 27, 31–32, 55, 126, 155 Johnson, Catherine, 46, 137 Jones, Ron, 28, 30 Jowett, Lorna, 55, 59, 61, 63, 90, 100 Justman, Robert, 28–29 Kalinak, Kathryn, 8, 31, 32, 37 Karpovich, Angelina, 47, 55, 59, 61–62, 72 Kassabian, Anahid, 17, 108, 188n3 Kent, Rolfe, 60–61, 68, 190n4, 190n6 L. A. Law, 4, 14 leitmotif, 15, 17, 37, 73, 177 see themes Lennertz, Christopher, 76, 186 Lerner, Neil, 8, 28, 44 Lexx, 118–120, 122, 125 library music, 19, 28, 130, 193n7 see stock music Licht, Daniel, 68, 158, 186 liminality, 47, 62, 66, 68, 144 Lost, 2, 8, 14, 20–21, 48, 52, 64, 68, 71–72, 73, 92, 116, 131, 185, 186–187, 189

Lugosi, Bela, 130, 193n7 Mad Men, 55, 69, 136, 138, 152 magic, 7, 34–37, 119, 122, 124, 130, 189n5 McCreary, Bear, 13–14, 25, 186–187 mediant shifts, 157–158 melodrama, 28, 31–32, 133, 145 melody, 15–16, 21, 28–29, 31, 33–35, 57–58, 62, 76, 78–80, 82–84, 87–89, 92, 94, 96, 99, 105–108, 110–112, 130, 132, 160, 164, 169, 171–172, 176, 191; see also thematic scoring memory, 3, 15, 18–19, 21, 73, 84, 92, 185, 193n6 metadiegetic music, 90, 111, 134, 144–146, 156, 178–181, 183 Metz, Christian, 16, 180, 184 mickeymousing, 166, 172, 180–182, 194n3; see also music and action; memesis mimesis, 166, 180, 182–183 mimetic participation, 87 Mittell, Jason, 18, 46 monsters, 7, 26, 34–37, 62, 81, 93, 100–101, 113, 157, 192n8 montage, 4, 25, 48, 136, 176–177 Monty Python, 38, 118–119 Moonlighting, 33, 39 Mummy, The, 101, 130 Murray, Sean, 76–78, 85 music, and action, 13, 16, 35, 37, 59–60, 76–78, 94, 97, 102, 107, 118, 125, 145, 153–154, 163, 166, 177, 181–182 amount in cult TV, 4, 29, 32, 36, 125, 136–137, 154, 162–163

212

Index as commentary, 22, 32, 41, 117, 144, 151, 154, 192n9 and continuity, 4, 20, 25, 98, 127 and emotion, 32, 74, 79–81, 102, 104–105, 108 and exoticism, 16–17, 27, 30, 57, 76, 189n2 and gender, 16, 44, 104–109, 121, 165, 192n9 and point of view, 81, 85, 109, 147, 150–151, 153–154, 155 and ‘quality’, 11–13, 11–14, 28 and subjectivity, 8, 109–110, 138–152, 156, 161, 169–172, 174 and ‘tone’, 24–25, 31, 44, 52–53, 55, 99, 108, 136 music budgets, 10, 12–13, 19–20, 22–23, 40, 42 musical silence, 31, 36, 94, 162 and death of major characters, 70–72 musicals, 21, 39, 115–126, 138–150 as dystopian, 141–147, 150 film musicals, 120–121, 141–143, 150 mutual implication, 6, 53 narrative, 15, 18, 23, 114, 137 narrative complexity, 18, 31, 46 narrative elasticity, 114, 119, 134 Nelson, Robin, 46, 55 Netflix, 46–47, 55, 70 Niebur, Louis, 8–10 noise, 90, 103, 105–106, 112, 151, 162, 164, 166–176, 180, 184, 194n5 Northern Exposure, 8, 25, 29–31, 37–40, 49, 137, 154 notation, 10–11, 45

Once Upon A Time, 46, 52, 64, 68 opera, 15, 118, 140, 149–150, 154, 176–177, 179 ostinato, 31–33, 97, 99, 129–130 Other, the, 16–17, 27, 30, 99, 138, 153–161, 176, 188n4, 194n6 parody, 31–32, 35, 63–64, 115, 118, 127, 174 Patinkin, Mandy, 142–143 Pennies from Heaven, 117, 121–122, 192n3 percussion, 53, 58–59, 76, 103, 105, 164–165, 168, 174, 182–184 performance, 36–39, 59–63, 116–126, 139–150, 192n1, 192n3 and spontaneity, 119–122, 124, 139, 142–143, 146 Phantom of the Opera, The, 130–131 piano, prepared, 94, 191n1 Plunkett & Macleane, 98–99 popular music, 2–3, 11, 14, 22, 36–38, 40–42, 45, 55, 57, 68–70, 73–74, 95–98, 108, 117, 144, 153–155, 189n6, 190n1, 192n9 lyrics as commentary, 22, 41, 144, 151, 192n9 scource music, 95–96 Potter, Dennis, 117, 121, 139 procedural drama, 31, 57, 66, 93, 117, 137, 153 Psycho, 64, 129, 145 quality television, 3–4, 8, 15, 25, 30, 40, 46 and music, 3–4, 19–20, 30, 32, 37, 40, 68, 92, 135–138, 151, 153 quality/ cult TV, 7, 32, 137–138

213

Sounds of Fear and Wonder quirkiness, 31, 38, 53, 61, 74, 132, 158–159, 161, 190n7 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 16–17 realism, 30, 32 recitative, 118, 179 Reitzell, Brian, 70, 163–165, 168, 176, 179–180, 184, 187, 194n4 Rockford Files, The, 11, 64 sampling, 11, 13–14, 20, 94–95, 97–98, 103, 106, 108, 169, 186, 188n4, 194n8 sample libraries, 13, 42, 103 science fiction, 7, 26, 27, 29, 31 scoring, orchestral, 12, 14, 17, 94, 97 scoring strategy, 3–4, 7, 15, 22–25, 28–29 Scorsese, Martin, 98, 153 Scrubs, 140–144 segues, 4, 20, 29, 37 serial killers, 152, 156, 165, 176, 185–186 Shelley, Mary, 33–34 Sherlock, 7, 62, 185 sighing, 81, 87, 112, 160 silence, 38, 48, 70–72, 109, 130, 152; see also musical silence Silence of the Lambs, The 167, 170, 177 Simpsons, The, 42, 63–64, 139 Singin’ in the Rain, 119, 120 singing, 38–40, 63, 87, 96, 105, 116– 125, 146, 148–149, 192n4, 193n1 as fantastic intrusion, 40, 115–118, 121, 140, 147–150, 192n3 lip–synching, 38, 117, 120–124, 139, 192n3 medical explanation for, 40, 117–118, 139–144, 150 Singing Detective, The, 117–118, 139–140

sitcoms, 16, 20, 26, 48, 138–140, 153 Six Feet Under, 22, 40, 55, 70, 137, 140, 144, 147–150, 190n3 Snow, Mark, 20, 32–33, 35–36 soap opera, 31, 37, 46, 49, 137 Sondheim, Stephen, 118, 192n2 Sopranos, The, 22, 32, 40–41, 55, 68, 70–71, 136–138, 151, 153–156, 185, 190n3 sound, 4–5, 12, 38, 45, 72, 109, 115–116, 136, 138, 161, 166–167, 188n2, 188n5, 191n3, 194n point of audition, 151–152 and subjectivity, 150–154, 170–175 sound design, 10, 26, 38, 48–49, 52–53, 60, 109, 145, 162, 165, 171–174, 180–184, 194n7 Star Trek, 8, 9, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25–28, 30, 44, 189n1 fanfare motif, 22, 26–29, 49 scoring strategy, 25–30 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 28, 29 Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 25, 28 Star Trek: The Next Generation, 12, 26, 28, 29–30, 49 Star Trek: Voyager, 28, 29, 49, 51 Stilwell, Robynn, 8, 17, 73, 117, 138–139 stingers, 35, 51–52, 77, 97, 116, 131 stock music, 19–22, 28, 32, 73, 85, 130, 193n7 Strauss, Johann, 38, 191n5 streaming services, 17–18, 46–48 style, 9, 24–25, 37, 45, 61–63, 98, 116, 127, 127–128, 133–134, 137, 140 Suby, Michael, 14, 96 Supernatural, 2, 21, 22, 41, 48, 52, 63, 68, 76, 93, 115, 126–134, 137, 178–179, 185, 186 ‘Monster Movie’, 127–134

214

Index Twin Peaks, 8, 28, 29, 30–32, 37, 49, 92, 137, 184, 187 series scoring strategy, 31–32

scoring strategy, 128 synthesizers, 10–14, 20, 26, 30, 32–34, 66, 76, 94, 98, 101–103, 105–106, 128, 171, 186

uncanny, the, 71, 116, 160 Tagg, Philip, 42, 105–108 Tchiakovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 34, 140, 193n7 thematic scoring, 3–4, 15–21, 28–32, 37, 42, 60, 73, 76–92, 94, 156–161, 186–187 theme tunes, 21, 26, 28–31, 44–45, 107; see also title sequences themes, episode–specific, 18, 21–22, 32, 41, 76–79, 82, 84, 92 theremin, 26, 64 Thompson, Robert, 3–4, 15, 135–136 timbre, 11, 13, 33, 53, 59–61, 94–95, 99, 103, 106, 108, 160, 164–165, 168–169, 182–183, 191n1 tinnitus, 151–153, 193n3 title sequences, 8, 27, 44–67, 72, 77, 104, 107–108, 126–128, 130, 189n5, 190n3 hailing’ function, 45, 49, 62 length of, 49–55 and redundancy, 46, 48, 72 Town Called Eureka, A, 49–50 tracking, 21, 28, 31, 35 see block scoring tremolo, 35, 59, 60, 131, 169 tritones, 27, 58, 61, 112, 129, 160 True Blood, 14, 18–19, 55, 92, 93, 94–95, 101, 104, 108–112, 186, 187, 188n4, 192n8, 192n10 TV sound quality, 11–13, 45–46, 194n7 TVIII, 25, 46, 48, 72, 92 Twilight, 93, 95, 97, 108

Vampire Diaries, The, 14, 93, 95–97, 101, 103–104, 107–108, 111–112, 192n8 vampires, 1, 8, 19, 90, 93–113, 129, 138, 160, 185–186, 188n4, 192n8 voiceovers, 26, 51–52, 82, 115, 144, 156, 173, 177 voices, 12–13, 34, 38, 40, 82, 96, 105, 111–112, 115, 117, 121, 127, 132, 142–144, 150, 152–153, 173, 177, 179 waltzes, 1, 34–35, 38, 99–101, 158–159, 191n5 West Wing, The, 135–136 westerns, 26, 53, 57, 59, 98, 127–128 Whedon, Joss, 1, 8, 14, 42, 78, 92, 106–107 Whitechapel, 66–67 Williams, John, 12, 34 world music, 57, 59, 174 X-Files, The, 6, 20, 22, 25, 29, 30–31, 32–37, 44, 49, 67, 76, 93, 94, 103, 115, 127, 136, 137 ‘The Post–Modern Prometheus’, 33–37, 115 series scoring strategy, 32 Xena: Warrior Princess, 49, 118–119, 122, 139 yearning, 16, 35, 81, 87–88, 111–112, 160–161

215