Music, Sound, and Silence in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." (review)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer began life as an offbeat and attractive cult film created by Joss Whedon; grew into a television series with a cult-like following of viewers, bloggers, and internet fans; and has had more books, articles, and critical analysis than almost any other television series. The latest book to come out on this subject, Music, Sound, and Silence in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," is by a trio of British academics. Paul Attinello is a musicologist based in the School of Arts and Cultures at the University of Newcastle, Janet K. Halfyard is Head of Undergraduate Studies at the Birmingham Conservatoire, and Vanessa Knights was a senior lecturer in Hispanic studies at the University of Newcastle. She was the one whose idea it was to study the music in this series, and her death in 2007 was the impetus to complete this volume of essays by some of the foremost academics in the field of music and media studies. Some of the contributors to this volume are familiar names in the field: Anahid Kassabian, Renee Coulombe, and Louis Niebur, while others, including all three editors, are less well known.

The book starts with a tribute to Knights, which is both touching and well deserved. Then, Keith Negus situates the argument in the area of television studies, outlining why this area (music in series television) has been neglected, and positing methodologies for remedying that neglect. His idea is that music on television can function in many ways, but typically either as representationally (of moods, background descriptor, or cultural specifiers) or non-representationally. This second definition includes a number of cultural, sensual, subconscious means by which music, sound, and silence can lead a viewer to experience the series by means that are difficult to pinpoint. That, in effect, is the goal of this volume: to identify the areas that function in new ways in this and other new series that use diegetic and non-diegetic music. There are also several prefaces, with insider views of how it was to work on the series, both from the music supervisor John C. King, and Christophe Beck, the series composer.

The first article in the volume, which serves as something of an introduction, is by Knights, and deals with a specific episode in which music is repeatedly referenced as a cultural placeholder. However, she also notes that intertextuality in television music in general has been little studied, and that it now requires closer observation (something that, I should add, has been done since this article was written, possibly inspired by this and other similar work).

Part 1 is entitled "Constructing Sound: Music, Noise and Silence," and begins with Janet Halfyard's paper "Love, Death, Curses, and Reverses (in E Minor)" a paper that discusses theme music in Buffy and Dark Angel, introducing the idea that music can be gendered by content and by audience response (she uses Philip Tagg's observations on male and female characteristics in music as a basis for this assertion). Of course, where there is gender, there is confusion, and so gender reversals and ironic musical employment need to be itemized as well. These elements and advances are influential in later television programs, including Dark Angel and Alias, and the new world of transgressive gender roles is well itemized in the paper, as are the corresponding transgressions of the series, which are many and various. Since Buffy has long been viewed as a ground-and mold-breaking series, this is hardly surprising from the perspective of 2011, but nevertheless, the paper leads nicely into Louis Niebur's paper on genre in Buffy.

Niebur points out that the strength of Buffy as a television series, and, by extension, of the music used in the series, is the ability of the writers to mimic specific genres, and then turn...