“An
invitation to imagine: theme tunes and the construction of identity in
contemporary
Janet K Halfyard (2003)
This paper looks at issues of gender identity,
narrative agency and audience positioning in the theme tunes of contemporary US
TV series, focusing in particular on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel,
and with reference to Star Trek, Charmed, Alias and Dark
Angel.
TV theme music works in a way not unlike the main
title music, the music played at the start of a film, usually before the
narrative has properly begun. Giorgio Biancorosso describes main title music as
“an invitation to imagine”[1]:
it invites us in to this imaginary space, the main title itself effecting a
transition between our reality and the diegesis of the film.
Like main title music, the importance of TV theme
music also lies in its ability to inform us what the nature of that space is,
establishing and reinforcing a series’ identity by positioning it in relation
to the cultural musical codes that are a major part of how music generates
meaning in both film and television contexts. For example, the theme music of
the original Star Trek and its
offshoots of the 1980s and 1990s (The
Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager), all make a direct or indirect
allusion to the same introductory fanfare, which itself is referring to the
character of the music of Aaron Copland,
giving an identity not just to each individual series but to the Star Trek brand as a whole.
Copland’s music has become deeply associated with the
sound of pioneer
Carolyn Bermer’s reading of Jo LoDuca’s theme music for Xena:
Warrior Princess discusses the ways in which the harmonic, melodic and
rhythmic characteristics of the
theme “embod[y]
the defining principles - duality and completeness - of the show’s major
characters,”[2]
while the rhythmically and melodically quirky music of Danny Elfman’s theme for
The Simpsons, can equally be read as
a musical metaphor for the disfunctionality of the Simpson family. The
Simpsons theme is one of the best known pieces of TV music, but very few
people can spontaneously sing it, as the melody is built around the augmented
fourth, an interval which because of its various associations as the “diabolus
in musica” and its disruptive tonal function, is often used as a very
specifically musical code for ideas of deviance from normative behaviors – the
supernatural, crime and The Simpsons.
The theme tunes in BtVS and its spin-off series Angel
are an interesting pair both in
terms of cultural musical codes and the series identity of the “Buffy
franchise,” partly because, unlike Star Trek, they are very different from each
other.
The first four notes of Nerf Herder's theme for BtVS's opening credits are played on the
organ, and carry a wealth of intertextual associations:
The organ has become a signifier for
horror, starting with its explicit diegetic use in Phantom of the Opera, and then becoming a feature of horror in its
own right, with Dr Jekyll playing the organ in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1932) and the sound of the organ becoming
synonymous with Hammer Horror in the 1960s and 70s. In more recent times, 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 like House on Haunted Hill
(1999). The theme of BtVS starts with
this organ horror signifier, but then instantly changes its message. It removes
itself from the sphere of both classic and spoof horror 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. This reading is confirmed by Whedon himself: in the
a DVD commentary he observes 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.
The theme for Angel is, on the surface, entirely different from that of BtVS: 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, F minor, but the first four notes, which
in BtVS are the notes from which the
entire theme tune is derived, are also the first four notes of Angel’s theme, the fourth note (E flat)
being transposed up an octave in Angel’s
music, rising instead of falling as it does in BtVS:
Whereas Buffy’s basic theme is only four
notes and Angel’s is much longer, the similarities of key and motif between BtVS and Angel might be read as a thinly disguised means of reasserting the
eternal bond between the two characters - although these two lovers 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 for 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 within the series. Angel, meanwhile, is an 18th
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. However, what cannot be ignored about the two themes is that 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 Annahid 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
The test generated a large amount of data
and various analyses have resulted from it, including Tagg’s 1989 paper, “An
anthropology of stereotypes in TV music?”[4]
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 ‘female’, in that
they produced significantly more female VVAs than male; that the VVAs of four
of the other tunes were predominantly male; 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 BtVS
and Angel, below is a summary of some
of Tagg’s findings:
|
Musical parameter |
Male characteristic |
Female characteristic |
|
Tempo |
Faster |
Slower |
|
Note values[5] |
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, synths, percussion |
Strings,
piano, woodwind
|
The above 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 BtVS theme is around 200 beats per minute, whilst that of Angel is closer to 126. Note values in BtVS are noticeably shorter than those
in Angel. The basic pulse of BtVS is subdivided throughout the
accompaniment (most noticeably in the drum track) and also in the final stages
of the melody line, making the music seem to increase in tempo towards the end.
Angel’s music is smooth and flowing, with a dynamic shape to the phrases and a
melodic line than 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 male and female qualities in that it is
characterized by ‘male’ repeated notes (strumming) and ‘female’ regularity,
although there is some 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 the 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 BtVS, but it might
feasibly 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 “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 motives
which often end on a note lower than the starting note, the theme as a whole
has an unquestionably rising tendency, so while the melodic shape does not
altogether fit the male pattern, it does not have the obviously female
qualities that Angel’s has.[6]
Gender reversals within the narratives of BtVS
This musical gender reversal leads to the
question of whether it is a reflection of similar reversals in the characters’
coding within their narratives: are Buffy and Angel gender-reversed in the way
their characters are positioned and portrayed?
The representation of Buffy herself
highlights a variety of observations in relation to her as a hero, and how she
rewrites the rules of the heroic in relation to the female. In fact, some of
the innovative positionings in BtVS
as a whole become more apparent when it is set alongside a superficially
comparable series such as Charmed.
Both have strong female protagonists with special powers and a mission to protect
the world from evil; both are supported by supernatural men whose very nature
makes normal romantic relationships highly problematic.
Musically, there are similarities too:
the theme tune of Charmed is a rock
song, sung by a man, the lead singer of Love Spit Love. However, this song is
extraordinarily deceptive on a number of levels. Written and recorded by the
British group The Smiths, it was originally released in 1985, but later used in
the 1996 film, The Craft, to which Charmed has an obvious connection, both
being concerned with teenage witches in California.
However, the theme song of Charmed uses only extremely carefully
selected sections of the song, pasted together in a cover version to make it
appear a coherent lyric. If one does not know The Smiths’ version, what one is
likely to hear when one watches the opening sequence of Charmed is:
I am the sun
I am the air
I am human and I want to be
loved
Just like everybody else does
See I’ve already waited too
long
And all my hope is gone.
Notwithstanding that it is sung by a male
voice, and quite aggressively in the style of American rock songs from the
third line onwards, this is still a seemingly apt lyric for the Halliwell
sisters with its invocation of celestial bodies and elements (even if “moon”
might have been more obviously mystical than “sun”), and the sense of wanting
to be normal despite the abnormality of magical gifts. However, the actual
lyric is “I am the son/ I am the heir/ Of shyness that is criminally vulgar,”
which has very little to do with the three sisters who are clearly not sons,
and are anything but shy. It would seem that the sisters have appropriated a
masculine music, as Buffy can be argued to have done, but they have had to
alter and manipulate it to make it fit them, whereas Buffy’s appropriation is
much more direct and less contrived. There is also an almost immediate retreat
from the masculinely coded music of the opening credits in Charmed: very consistently, the theme song is immediately followed
by a second song at the start of each episode. This second song is usually more
lyrical and ballad-like, and also usually sung by a female voice, as if to
balance and even counter any lingering possibility that the sisters might be
seen as too masculine or too aggressive. The second song serves to alter the
tone of the series, softening it back into a more obviously female model. The
end credits of Charmed, unlike BtVS, do not return to the opening theme
song, but substitute a much gentler and more lyrical piece of instrumental music.
BtVS re-establishes its male-coded,
heroic musical identity at the end of each episode, but Charmed retreats from it.
These musical codings are also reflected
in the narrative positioning of Buffy in comparison to the Halliwell sisters.
While Charmed's heroines are a trio
of young women who work in collaboration, their powers mutually complementary,
the nature of Buffy’s calling means that essentially she must work alone. This
idea is suggested in the credit sequence where the final image is always of
Buffy on her own, and referred to directly in the narrative, from Giles in
season two, saying to Willow and Xander that “your help will be greatly appreciated, but when it comes to battle,
Buffy must fight alone.” (“School Hard”) to Buffy
herself in “Selfless” (season seven):
Buffy: […] at some point, someone has to draw the line,
and that is always going to be me. You get down on me for cutting myself off,
but in the end the slayer is always cut off. There’s no mystical guidebook. No
all-knowing council. Human rules don’t apply. There’s only me.
The principal members of the Scooby gang
support her, but their role is often peripheral or takes the form of providing
distractions, particularly in seasons one to three. In contrast, the Charmed trio’s mutual interdependence
(they can only perform advanced magic together, drawing on “the power of
three”) reinforces the idea of women as sociable, working best in cooperative
groups, while Buffy’s fundamental aloneness corresponds more closely to
classical ideas of the male hero. Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones and even
Superman (particularly in his 1990s TV incarnation) all have their support
networks of friends who provide them with information, technical and emotional
support, as well as providing distractions to create opportunities for the hero
to act, but when it comes down to the moment of confrontation, the hero must
prevail alone. This scenario is repeated in the relationship between Buffy and
her gang as well as in the perpetual problem of her super-powers being a source
of friction in her relationships.
The whole question
of power and agency is differently defined between the Halliwells and Buffy.
The sisters’ strength is supernatural, magical, a power of mind and spirit
which seems a more obvious type of power for a woman to possess, as in terms of
physical strength, women cannot compete with men - except, of course, that
Buffy can. Her power lies in physical strength: she is superhuman, not a witch.
Her agency lies not in the mind - there is always a measure of surprise when
Buffy gets good grades - but in physical strength, again putting her more
clearly in the realm of male action heroes.
Gender reversals in Angel
Angel’s equally unconventional
positioning is also reflected in the ambivalence of his music. The profile of Angel’s season one trio is surprisingly
similar to that of Charmed’s.
“Seriousness” runs in direct correlation to age with the oldest characters as
the most serious characters, holding the position of most responsibility and
authority within the group. The two youngest characters in each trio, are both
viewed (without necessarily a great deal of evidence) as the most prone to
irresponsibility.
The same pattern runs true on an active/
passive power scale. Angel and Prue have the most developed powers and greatest
physical strength derived from supernatural sources, Prue being able to move
objects (e.g. hurl people against walls), while at the other end of the scale,
Phoebe and Cordelia share a near-identical and entirely passive gift: each is
subject to visions of innocents in need of help.
Where Buffy ultimately acts alone, Angel
is more dependent on his group in order to be able to act. Cordelia’s visions
provide him with the impetus for action before events have occurred, whereas
Buffy tends to respond to danger after it appears. Likewise, where Buffy’s
group tends to shift to include temporary and ‘part-time’ members, Angel’s is
much more of a fixed entity, established in season one as a group of three. In
subsequent seasons, new characters are gradually added to the team: but once
joined, characters do not leave, nor do they bring their partners into the
group as temporary members as happens in BtVS. In fact, Angel’s group works more like the
cooperative female group of the Charmed
sisters. This is also an explicitly female construct: although there are some
clear exceptions, heroes tend not to
work with each other in permanently formed groups, whereas trios of
supernatural sisters have been working in groups of three since the Greeks. Even
the familial aspect of the various ‘three sisters’ can be carried over to
Angel’s realization at the end of season one that he, Wesley and Cordelia are
themselves a family unit.
This formation of a cooperative, mutually
interdependent group, then, is one aspect of female coding in Angel that can be seen mirrored between
the musical and narrative constructs. However, like Buffy, the combination of
male and female qualities is also apparent at other levels of his character’s
construction. In addition to his distinctly gender-ambivalent name, some of the
atypical qualities for a male hero that are most obviously attributed to him
relate to his curse, which simultaneously prevents him from functioning either
as a vampire or as a human. His moral code, imposed on him by the acquisition
of a soul, means that he cannot bite, and he cannot have sex with the woman he
loves lest it make him happy and turn him evil. Given that the vampire’s bite
is conventionally seen as a sexual metaphor, a sublimation of the erotic
impulse, Angel is made impotent twice over which, whilst not making him female
certainly does not permit him to act as a classically male heroic character. He
is forbidden both his primary functions as vampire and as the romantic lead -
in both cases “getting the girl” is not an option he can allow himself. Yet,
just as Buffy is all woman, if a new kind of heroine, so Angel is clearly a
romantic-heroic male figure within both narratives; and the music does, in
fact, remind us of this. During the title sequence of Angel, at the point where David Boreanaz’s own name credit is shown
over several shots of Angel in action, the (female) cello is replaced as the
principal melodic instrument by the (male) electric guitar. This substitution
lasts exactly as long as Angel/Boreanaz’s personal credits, the cello taking
back the melody after four measures as Cordelia’s image appears.[7]
The ambivalence of Angel’s various dualities - man/ vampire, lover/ celibate,
vulnerable/ immortal - are clearly reflected in the male/female duality of his
music’s construction.
BtVS’s
musical and narrative influence on recent TV shows
Two other post-BtVS
series that bear a strong imprint of its influence are Alias and Dark Angel.[8]
Both these series have a central female character who takes on the
characteristics of a hero in the same way that Buffy does, possessing
“superpowers” in the form of technological gadgets or genetically engineered
advantages,[9]
isolated by their differences, unable to be with the men they love, acting
alone but supported by friends, and battling the supernatural and the occult in
the form of prophecies (Alias) and
mystical evil organizations (Dark Angel),
despite both series being positioned as much more “scientific” in their general
approach than BtVS.
In terms of gender roles and their subversion, both
have central female characters who, unlike Buffy, have gender-ambivalent names,
Sydney and Max; but like BtVS their
theme tunes also deflect straight-forwardly feminine coding. Alias uses extremely fast, repetitive
techno music both for its titles and for much of its underscore, putting it in
a very similar musical category as BtVS
in terms of its gender implications. Dark
Angel is more obviously electroacoustic in approach, reflecting its
futuristic setting, using a sample that sounds much like an accelerating
motorcycle engine, a fast drum track and layers of other sampled sounds
including environmental sounds such as breaking glass rather than
conventionally musical ones. This places it more in the realms of musique concrète, implying an idea of
masculinity if only because the realm of electronic music is still so dominated
by male composers and technicians. However, the most prominent conventionally
musical sound is a wordlessly singing female voice and in terms of gender
coding, this theme is much more ambivalent than BtVS or Alias. In fact,
like Charmed, there is a musical
deception at work. The full theme, as heard on the series album, is written and
performed by Chuck D (from Public Enemy) and the female rap artist, MC Lyte,
and it has extensive spoken lyrics from both male and female voices. German
electroacoustic composer Hannah Bosma has observed the tendency in electronic
music for female voices to be used more often than male voices, and that when
used, female voices tend to be singing, often wordlessly, whereas male voices
tend to speak.[10]
By eliminating the speaking voices altogether and leaving only the female
singer, the theme for Dark Angel
potentially falls into a form of gendered coding much associated with
electronic music, where the female voice is frequently rendered inarticulate
within a male-coded electronic sonic environment. Here, however, both the
masculine and feminine characteristics of the theme can be attributed to Max,
because the use of the motorcycle acceleration sample is a sound that obviously
belongs to her, both with the image of her on her motorcycle in the credits and
the fact that this remains her favored mode of transport during the series. The
dynamic is different to Buffy’s. There are no obvious elements of “femininity”
about Buffy’s theme tune, but the extreme femininity of her name, with its
assonant and alliterative allusions to “fluffy” and “bunny”, acts as an
effective counterbalance to the masculinity of her music. In Dark Angel, the theme embraces both
Max’s femaleness through the use of the voice, and her appropriation of
masculine territory through the sonic image of the motorcycle. Despite the
differences, in both Dark Angel and Alias there is a clear positioning of
Max and Sydney in terms of character and series identity as established in the
theme music that owes a debt to BtVS
and the appropriation of male musical codes by a female hero.
One of the
most interesting things about contemporary American TV, particularly in the
last 10 years, is the increasing sophistication of its narratives. In the 70s
and for much of the 80s, American TV was very much Hollywood’s poor relation,
but with the advent of series such as Xena, Due South, Ally McBeal, The
Sopranos, Six feet Under, and the other series mentioned here, American
television drama has rapidly grown up. As the sophistication of the narrative
themes and the characters’ positioning has increased, so too has the extent to
which the music has had to rise to the challenge of accurately representing the
nature of the narratives and the series identities. The reversals, deceptions
and ideas of duality that are encoded in the music of the theme tunes examined
here are all symptomatic of these changes.