Sounds of Fear and Wonder

Music in Cult TV

Janet K. Halfyard

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857729408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Characters and plot developments, similarly, are enhanced by their musical accompaniment. The different scoring strategies employed in supernatural and horror-based genres, comprising for example True Blood and Supernatural, are considered alongside cult shows set in our reality, such as Dexter, The Sopranos and 24. These discussions are complimented by in-depth case studies of musical approaches in two high-profile series: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Hannibal. Written from a musicological standpoint but fully accessible to non-musicologists, the book significantly advances television and music studies.

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 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 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. 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 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’.

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 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.

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 dan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author bio
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Series Information
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Music and its Means of Production: Film versus TV
• 2 Early Cult Television Scoring Strategies
• 3 Intros and Outros: The Changing Nature of Opening Titles and End Credits in Cult TV
• 4 Listening to Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• 5 Scoring Television Vampires
• 6 The Bells of Hell go Tingalingaling: Diabolical Genre Games in Supernatural TV
• 7 Music, Fantasy and Subjectivity in ‘Real World’ Dramas
• 8 The Rest is Noise: Music and Sound in Hannibal
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• TV and Filmography