Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Janet K. Halfyard, Paul Attinello, Vanessa Knights

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351557016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The intense and continuing popularity of the long-running television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) has long been matched by the range and depth of the academic critical response. This volume, the first devoted to the show's imaginative and widely varied use of music, sound, and silence, helps to develop an increasingly important and inadequately covered area of research - the many roles of music in contemporary television. In addressing this significant gap, this book provides an exemplary overview of the functions of music and sound in the interpretation of a television show. This is done through analyses that focus on scoring and source music, the title theme, the music production process, the critically acclaimed musical episode (voted number 13 in Channel Four's One Hundred Greatest Musicals), the symbolic and dramatic use of silence, and the popular reception of the show by its international fan base. In keeping with contemporary trends in the study of popular musics, a variety of critical approaches are taken from musicology, cultural studies, and media and communication studies, specifically employing critique, musical analysis, industry studies, and hermeneutics.

PART I

Constructing Sound: Music, Noise, and Silence

Chapter 1

Love, Death, Curses, and Reverses (in E minor): Music, Gender, and Identity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel¹

Janet K. Halfyard

Music plays an important role at a number of different levels in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). There is a great deal of diegetic music in the series, mainly issuing from the Bronze, which forms part of the characters’ sense of identity, a youth sub-culture defined by its music.² However, the non-diegetic music also plays a role in the construction of identity in the series, and this process begins in the opening credit sequences of both Buffy and its companion series, Angel (1999–2004), with the theme tunes that are closely identified with not just the series but with their eponymous characters. This music can be looked at from two different perspectives: in terms of the relationship of these themes to each other and to other music associated with horror genres, including vampire films; and in terms of how music itself can communicate information to the audience about the identity of the character it represents.

The Theme Tunes in Buffy and Angel

The importance of theme music lies in its ability to establish and reinforce a series’s identity, positioning it in relation to the cultural musical codes that are a major part of how music generates meaning in film and television contexts. In his commentary for “Welcome to the Hellmouth” (1.1), Joss Whedon reveals that a composer was originally employed to write a theme song for Buffy, but Whedon did not feel that the result effectively captured the essence of the show and of Buffy herself. Instead, Nerf Herder—suggested to Whedon by Alyson Hannigan—was one of several bands considered to write a new theme.³ There are a number of ways in which their theme can be read which illustrate why Whedon chose this one and what he was intending the title music to say about the series and its central character.

The first four notes of Nerf Herder’s theme for Buffy’s opening credits are played on the organ and carry a wealth of intertextual associations (see Figure 1.1).⁴ The organ has long been a signifier for horror, starting with its explicit diegetic use in Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1932), in which Dr Jekyll also plays the organ. The sound of the organ then became synonymous with Hammer Horror in the 1960s and 1970s, and subsequently with the horror genre as a whole. More recently, the use of the organ has become both a comic and ironic gesture, found in films such as the comedies The ’Burbs (1988) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1996), as well as more obvious Hammer successors such as House on Haunted Hill (1999).

Figure 1.1 The theme from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The theme of Buffy starts with this organ horror signifier, but then instantly changes its message. It removes itself from the sphere of both classic horror and its spoofs by replaying the same motif, the organ now supplanted by an aggressively strummed electric guitar, relocating itself in modern youth culture and relocating the series in an altogether different arena. Whedon himself confirms this reading, observing that the title sequence begins

with this scary organ and then devolves instantly into rock and roll, which is basically trying to tell people exactly what the show is in the credits—which is “here’s a girl who has no patience for a horror movie, who is not going to be a victim, who is not going to be in the scary organ horror movie. She’s going to bring her own sort of youth and rock and attitude to it.” … I very much wanted to state the mission up front.⁵

Darling Violetta’s theme for Angel is, on the surface, entirely different from that of Buffy: tempo and texture are certainly noticeably different from the driving forces of Buffy’s music. However, not only are both themes in the same key, E minor, but the first four notes, which in Buffy are the notes from which the entire theme tune is derived, are also the first four notes of Angel’s theme, the fourth note (D) being transposed up an octave in Angel’s music, rising instead of falling as it does in Buffy (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 The theme from Angel

Buffy’s basic theme is too short to really be called a melody; rather, it is a four-note motif. Angel’s theme is a considerably longer melody, and where the opening four notes echo the pitches of Buffy’s motif, the final four notes echo its shape. The similarities of key and motif between Buffy and Angel might be read as a thinly disguised means of reasserting the eternal bond between the two characters—although they are separated (into two series, apart from anything else) they will always be connected. The shared motif stands as a symbol of their common mission, of the emotional connection between them and also of their separation. The differences between these themes, however, are just as interesting and speak more clearly to the idea of music as identity.

One of the most striking differences between the two theme tunes is their mood. Buffy’s theme is played by an amplified rock band and the melodic line is carried by an increasingly frenetic electric guitar. Angel’s theme is more obviously lyrical, less frenetic, and although the guitars and drum kit of the rock band are included in the ensemble, they are not foregrounded so dramatically. Instead, acoustic instruments are also present, with the piano and cello dominating the melodic line. One could easily argue the appropriateness of this on the grounds that Buffy is a modern girl, and therefore more likely to listen to the kind of music heard in her theme, identifying with it as well as being identified by it on grounds of her youth and cultural environment, in particular the Bronze. Angel, meanwhile, is an eighteenth-century Irish vampire: rock music is certainly not his music in terms of his somewhat unusual age group or culture and so a more classical and arguably Irish-traditional sounding theme is one that he might identify with more readily. This is also a quite specific aspect of his coding as a vampire in musical terms, and moreover, his coding as a specific type of vampire, the—literally—soulful, tragichero vampire as opposed to the devil-may-care, blithely vicious vampire typified by Spike. This typology of vampires and their music is duplicated in Neil Jordan’s film version of Interview with the Vampire (1994). Louis, referred to in the film as “the vampire with a human soul” is, like Angel, a brown-haired, eighteenth-century vampire whose lyrical musical theme is carried primarily by cellos.⁶ Lestat, like Spike, is a blond vampire who embraces the modern era and its music. One of the underlying themes of Interview is immortality and the problems of surviving it, the difficulty of adapting to the passing of eras; music, both source and underscore, is often used to indicate how well a character is integrated into a particular era. Lestat, thoroughly acculturated into his contemporaneous setting, draws on his ability as a musician and his familiarity with contemporary repertoire as part of his hunting tactics in the early nineteenth century, using music to win the trust of his victims; Louis dances to a nineteenth-century waltz as he embraces the fin de siècle, but after this he seems to get stuck in the romantic orchestral sound world of the score, his music never fully embracing the music of the twentieth-century society he inhabits. The final time-locator is the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil” sung by Guns’n’Roses that closes the film. Lestat, having attacked Louis’s interviewer in a moving car, takes over the steering wheel and switches on the radio, where he finds the rock song. Symbolically, he appropriates not just his victim’s car, but also his century and his century’s music, moving away from an archaic orchestral sound to embrace the new and modern world of pop and rock.⁷

As I have discussed elsewhere, Louis, Dracula in Coppola’s 1992 film version, and Batman, in Tim Burton’s 1989 vampiric version of the superhero, all share a very similar musical theme written in a minor key with classical Hollywood orchestral scoring that marks them out as tragic, romantic heroes.⁸ Angel’s cello connects him to this musical sound world, in comparison to the aggression, youth, and vigor of the rock and punk music that is associated with Lestat and Spike.

However, aside from the temporal codings in the music, it can be argued without much difficulty that Buffy’s music is coded male and Angel’s is coded female. Some of the most systematic work on audience reception of film and television music has been done by Philip Tagg with Bob Clarida and Anahid Kassabian. Tagg’s reception test is impressively straightforward: ten theme tunes taken from a range of film, TV, and popular music are played to an audience who are asked to write down any verbal-visual associations (VVAs) that occur to them in response. This test was carried out between 1979 and 1986 with groups of students in Sweden (92 per cent were Swedish); 70 per cent of them had no formal musical training and had largely not encountered this music before, so could not have been influenced in their responses by knowledge of the films and TV programs for which the music had been written.⁹

The test generated considerable data from which various analyses have resulted, including Tagg’s 1989 paper, “An anthropology of stereotypes in TV music?”¹⁰ This puts forward an analysis of gender-associative responses to certain kinds of music by establishing which tunes produced VVAs of a man or men, which of a woman or women, and which of mixed-sex groups. To summarize, from this it appeared that four of the ten tunes might be characterized as feminine, in that they produced significantly more female VVAs than male; that the VVAs of four of the other tunes were predominantly masculine; and that two could not clearly be categorized. Using the four “male” and four “female” tunes, the music’s characteristics were analyzed to see if there were qualities common to the two groups. Bearing in mind the music of Buffy and Angel, table 1.1 shows a summary of some of Tagg’s findings.

Table 1.1 A summary of Tagg’s observations of male and female characteristics in music

Musical parameter	Male characteristic	Female characteristic
Tempo	Faster	Slower
Note values^*	Shorter (therefore appearing faster)	Longer (therefore appearing slower)
Rhythm	More rhythmic irregularities (e.g. syncopations, repeated notes)	More regular: normal dottings and divisions of note groups.
Phrasing	Staccato, quick repeating notes	Legato, smooth and flowing
Dynamics	Same volume throughout	Phrases get louder, then softer
Instruments (melody)	Electric guitar, synthesizer, trumpet, percussion	Strings (e.g. violin and cello), flute, piano
Instruments (accompaniment)	Strumming guitars, brass, synthesizers, percussion	Strings, piano, woodwind

Note

* Note values refers to how the basic beat of the music is subdivided. If the basic beat is a crotchet (quarter note) this can be subdivided into smaller values such as two quavers (eighth notes) and four semi-quavers (sixteenth notes). The smaller the note value, the more sounded notes there are per measure and the faster the music appears to be.

The summary is, in many ways, a fairly accurate description of the two theme tunes under discussion here, but with Buffy’s corresponding far more closely to the male category and Angel’s to the female. In particular, the audible pulse of the Buffy theme is around 200 beats per minute, whilst that of Angel is closer to 120. The strumming of the guitars in Buffy creates accompaniment note values that are noticeably shorter than those in Angel. The basic pulse of Buffy is subdivided throughout the accompaniment (most noticeably in the drum track) and also in the final stages of the melody line, creating the illusion that the tempo of the music increases toward the end. Angel’s music is smooth and flowing, with a dynamic shape to the phrases, and a melodic line that concentrates on cello and piano; Buffy’s music remains at a similar volume throughout, although it gradually gets higher in pitch, and it uses the rock-band line-up implied by the male side of Tagg’s analysis. In terms of rhythm, it has both masculine and feminine qualities in that it is characterized by “male” repeated notes (strumming) and “female” regularity, although there is some subtle syncopation in the melodic line. Angel’s melody also has characteristics associated with male rhythm, in that it is slightly syncopated (i.e. the note does not fall on the beat but between beats).

Tagg also describes the shape of the melodies in his study. Male-identified melodies tend to have their highest notes on the first accented note of the complete motif, which is hard to argue for the theme of Buffy, and neither does it describe Angel’s melody. However, female-identified melodies, Tagg observes, have either an “up-and-back-down” or “down-and-back-up” contour, and have what he describes as “generally descending tendencies.” Angel’s theme is clearly of the “up-and-back-down” variety and the trajectory of the melody is very much downward, the final note being considerably lower than the starting note. While Buffy’s theme is made up of four-note motifs which often end on a note lower than the starting note, the theme as a whole has an unquestionably rising tendency; thus while the melodic shape does not altogether fit the male pattern, it does not have the obviously female qualities that Angel’s has.¹¹

Gender Reversals within the Narrative of Buffy

This musical gender reversal leads to the question of whether it is a reflection of similar reversals in the characters’ coding and positioning within their narratives, and also highlights other role reversals that surround how the series as a whole positions itself from the outset, reversals that are at the heart of Whedon’s stated mission to counter the figure of the “little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie,”¹² with a little blonde girl who instead takes on the vampires. These inversions of our expectations are apparent even before the theme music is heard for the first time: the opening scene of the first episode presents a nervous blonde girl and an evidently mischievous—possibly dangerous—boy sneaking through the school at night. As Matthew Pateman observes:

This neat and utterly expected opening soon presents its own inversion … the sweet blonde victim turns out to be the vampire and it is she who sinks her fangs into the boy. Apart from debunking the generic expectation of the girl as victim … this opening also ass...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: “Bay City Rollers. Now That’s Music”: Music as Cultural Code in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• PART I CONSTRUCTING SOUND: MUSIC, NDSE, AND SILENCE
• PART II OWNING MUSIC: BANDS, FANS, AND POP CULTURE
• PART III MAKING MUSIC: BUFFY, THE MUSICAL
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index