Buffy, Ballads, and Bad Guys Who Sing: Music in the Worlds of Joss Whedon by Kendra Preston Leonard (review)

Joss Whedon’s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2005) appealed to many viewers who eagerly wrote about their experiences, including academics who presented their scholarship in a variety of electronic and print forums. Whedon’s later series—including Angel (1999–2004), Firefly (2002–2003), and even an Internet musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008)—have stimulated equally vigorous scholarship.¹

From the outset, the role of the soundtrack emerged as a remarkable aspect of the Whedon productions. Much of Buffy’s action centered around the Bronze, a club frequented by high-schoolers and hip twenty- or thirty-somethings; a succession of bands (both fictitious and real) serenaded the patrons with songs, and alert viewers soon realized that these songs furnished artful commentary on the plot. In the third season—as I have discussed elsewhere—composer Christophe Beck and music editor John C. King used nondiegetic music (or dramatic scoring) to identify characters and situations leitmotivically—sometimes without clarifying dialogue.² “The Body” (B5.16) went further: long stretches without dialogue, accompanied only by ambient sound.³ A similar sensitivity extends to all of Whedon’s other creations and has been amply reflected in the scholarship.

Contributions from diverse fields including English, cultural studies, media studies, and musicology ensure an interdisciplinary spirit in Whedon scholarship, leading to a remarkable variety of approaches to and definitions of “music.” Within this useful essay collection edited by Kendra Preston Leonard, music might mean, for instance, a close reading of song lyrics (Cynthia Masson’s “Concealing Truths: Rhetorical Questions in ‘Once More, With Feeling’”), performance interpreted as characters’ construction of their own identities through vocality or dance (Janet K. Halfyard’s “Singing Their Hearts Out: The Problem of Performance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel”), and more traditional-minded leitmotif studies (Matthew Mills’s “Angel’s Narrative Score”).

Two of the strongest essays—Jacqueline Bach’s “Welcome to the Hellmouth: Buffy’s Music Arc” and Christopher Wiley’s “Theorizing Television Music as Serial Art: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Narratology of Thematic Score”—draw productively from recent scholarship in television studies, applying those ideas to music. Bach appropriates the term arc (as in character arc or story arc) to describe recurrences of music in the series. Although musicologists might simply regard these recurrences as instances of leitmotivic treatment, the variety implicit within television or film music (which includes one or several composers furnishing original music as well as a music editor who selects other cues from libraries of source scoring and a variety of other copyrighted work) suggests the need for new models outside of music scholarship. For example, the principal technical division in an episode, the “beat” (a small two- or three-minute segment that might concern a single scene or interleave two related scenes), does not function in the same manner as an operatic scene.⁴ To illustrate these differences, Bach cites the use of Michelle Branch’s “Goodbye to You” at the Bronze in “Tabula Rasa” (B6.8). The music functions diegetically for shots of Buffy and Spike at the club, but also meta-diegetically (the term is Claudia Gorbman’s)—that is, as dramatic scoring for shots of Giles returning to England and Tara packing her belongings after breaking up with Willow.⁵ Finally, the camera returns to the Bronze, where Buffy and Spike are now kissing passionately. Bach asserts that “ironically, the only pair who hear Branch’s songs are the ones ‘not saying goodbye’” (21); in a way, however, Buffy’s decision to acknowledge her attraction to Spike—a vampire and her natural nemesis—is also a kind of farewell to “everything [she] thought [she] knew,” to quote Branch’s lyrics.

Christopher Wiley combines previous research both in television and in the nineteenth-century serialized novel in exploring the theoretical implications...