Sounds of Fear and Wonder : Music in Cult TV
- Submitting institution
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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2856272
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- I. B. Tauris
- ISBN
- 9781784530280
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- There is a body of film music literature, and a similar body of TV studies literature, but notwithstanding the work of Philip Tagg and Ron Rodman, television music studies did not exist as a discipline until very recently (and arguably, does not yet exist in any coherent way). I began publishing on music in the TV shows of Joss Whedon in 2001, which led to the edited collection 'Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (Ashgate, 2010). When I began working on the present book, most of the material in print about TV music focused either on TV shows by Whedon or on Star Trek, Doctor Who and other cult sci-fi shows. The particular focus on cult TV in the various essays and edited collections that came out between 2010-2013 confirmed my sense that cult TV needed thorough examination as a site of innovation in TV scoring practices.
Two main questions for this monograph were, therefore: 1) In what ways are the forms, functions and means of production for television music distinct from film music? 2) How, in particular, have scoring practices in cult TV contributed to the development of that distinctiveness?
My argument is developed through analysis (via critical listening and transcription) of the music of around 600 hours of television from the early 1990s to 2014. The main obstacle (and probably the reason why there is relatively little work done on TV music) was the absence of scores. it is not that they are inaccessible but that very often they do not exist at all due to the working methods and tendency for TV composers to write using synths and sample libraries.
This monograph won a Short Mr Pointy award from the Whedon Studies Association in 2017.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -