Buffy, Ballads, and Bad Guys Who Sing: Music in the Worlds of Joss Whedon

Edited Collection of essays on music in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blo

“The Sound of Whedon: the influence of Joss Whedon’s early television series on TV scoring”.

The innovations Joss Whedon promoted in the musical strategies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly have had a lasting influence on subsequent scoring strategies, especially in cult TV. Key ideas here are the use of thematic scoring, introduced as a key element of Buffy’s music from season 2 onward; and the use of contrasting idiomatic scoring, heard in Firefly’s use of American folk, Eastern modes and ‘supercultural’ orchestral scoring (Slobin, 2008) for Mal/ Serenity, Inara and the Alliance respectively as a means of defining and delineating areas of narrative space. This, in itself, is an extension of Buffy’s own strategy where the narrative slippage between genres (horror, romantic drama, teen drama) is signalled musically, classic horror tropes contrasting with thematic scoring focusing on the emotional lives of characters, and popular music in the Bronze creating a third musical space. My main example is Supernatural, which closely parallels Buffy’s overall strategy in the use of subtly thematic writing focused on love and loss, particularly associated with Dean’s emotional vulnerability, contrasting with gestural horror scoring and the third space of the Impala and its associated rock music. Furthermore, like Buffy, Supernatural regularly plays genre games involving music, in episodes that never merely imitate Whedon's playful approach to genre (e.g. ‘Hush,’ ‘Once More, with Feeling’), but extend, develop and reinvent ideas of musical playfulness in scores that build on the legacy of Whedon and contribute significantly to furthering the work that Whedon’s composers began in establishing a genuinely televisual rather than filmic approach to music

“Crimson Peak: Monstrous Women and their Music”.

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) employ the classic gothic trope of the decadent (if dilapidated) domesticity of a castle and the dank and dangerous cellars beneath it in which lurk blood-soaked secrets. Other aspects of the film defy gothic conventions, however, in particular in the female characters, who possess far more agency than any of the men. The innocent heroine, Edith, ultimately rescues herself, both by unpicking the puzzle of the castle and its ghosts and by some handy defensive wielding of a large shovel; all of the ghosts are female and turn out to be helping rather than threatening Edith; and the true threat is revealed to be Edith’s sister in law, Lucille. The music and sound design of the film also play against the grain of gothic horror, and present the listener with a serious of double bluffs by both employing and then subverting our culturally coded expectations of what the sounds of score and soundtrack mean. This paper explores two aspects of sound and music in the film: the use of a child’s voice singing in the opening credits, a use which normally operates as a symbol of innocence under threat in film scoring, but which here is eventually revealed as representative of the monstrous; and the contrast of orchestral film scoring for the world of the living and electronic sound design for the world of the monstrous dead; a binary which again, in conventional scoring, would normally construct the ghosts and the ‘unnatural’ sounds of electronica as a threat to the ‘natural’ (and tunefully scored) living world. Like Edith, we are tricked by the scoring strategy into assuming that the ghosts are the problem and, like her, we are gradually led to a better understanding that what is unfamiliar may not be dangerous, and that it is behind the attractive and conventionally beautiful music that the real monster lurks

‘Listen to the Bloody Music: Scoring Women in Vampire TV from Buffy to Hemlock Grove.’

Examination of how female characters are scored in Vampire TV shows 1997 to 2015, with reference to models of gender in music from Kalinak (1982), Tagg (1987) and Kassabian (2001). Examining in particular Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Vampire Diaries, True Blood and Hemlock Grove

Poverty and Breastfeeding: Comparing Determinants of Early Breastfeeding Cessation Incidence in Socioeconomically Marginalized and Privileged Populations in the FiNaL Study

Purpose: Infant feeding differences are strongly tied to socioeconomic status. The goal of this study is to compare determinants of early breastfeeding cessation incidence in socioeconomically marginalized (SEM) and socioeconomically privileged (SEP) populations, focusing on birthing parents who intended to breastfeed. Methods: This cohort study includes data from 451 birthing parents in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador who reported intention to breastfeed in the baseline prenatal survey. Multivariate logistic regression techniques were used to assess the determinants of breastfeeding cessation at 1 month in both SEM and SEP populations. Results: The analysis data included 73 SEM and 378 SEP birthing parents who reported intention to breastfeed at baseline. At 1 month, 24.7% (18/73) in the SEM group had ceased breastfeeding compared to 6.9% (26/378) in the SEP group. In the SEP population, score on the Iowa Infant Feeding Attitude Scale (IIFAS) (odds ratio [OR] 3.33, p=0.01) was the sole significant determinant. In the SEM population, three significant determinants were identified: unpartnered marital status (OR 5.10, p=0.05), <1 h of skin-to-skin contact after birth (OR 11.92, p=0.02), and negative first impression of breastfeeding (OR 11.07, p=0.01). Conclusion: These results indicate that determinants of breastfeeding cessation differ between SEM and SEP populations intending to breastfeed. Interventions intended on improving the SEM population's postpartum breastfeeding experience using best practices, increasing support, and ensuring at least 1 h of skin–skin contact may increase breastfeeding rates