Associate Professor
Music
Davidson College
Faculty
PO Box 7131
Davidson, NC 28035-7131
USA
Christophe Beck and Buffy's First Romances: Paradoxes of Musical Scoring in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
[Click on the link above to see this paper's placement in the SCBtVS Program.]
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Among the myriad charms and contradictions
within the Buffyverse, the show's attitude towards music marks one of its
greatest mysteries. A stylistic analysis of Christophe Beck's recurring
musical love themes for Angel (season two) and Riley (season four)
provides an insight into music's privileged position within the diegetic
and narrative world of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Occasionally
foregrounded as a unique conduit to emotional truth (e.g.,
"Hush" and "Once More With Feeling"), the treatment of
music as a concept in the series retains and promotes an elevation of
music that would have pleased nineteenth-century musical thinkers like
Wagner and Schopenhauer. Beck's musical style combines clear, memorable
melodies and reassuring moments of tonal stability with occasional
passages of intensely discordant instability and an absence of distinct
melody. Relying upon both commercial and personal interviews with Beck,
this presentation will examine the process behind the production
(specifically, who makes some of the musical decisions? producer, writer,
music editor, composer?) as well as offer a close study of the Buffy/Riley
love theme as a demonstration of Beck's nuanced musical readings of
character and plot.
equipment: VCR/monitor, overhead projector, and CD player (I assume a piano is probably out of the question? if at all possible, even to roll in some old clunker, it would help to demonstrate at a keyboard, but any other sound playback technology would work-anything to keep me from having to sing the examples). |