PROFESSOR - Samuel Granade
Andrew Granadegranadea@umkc.edu
In December of 2003, Ronald D. Moore’s reimagined version of the 1970s television show Battlestar Galactica premiered as a miniseries that soon led to a full series on the Sci-Fi channel. Composers Richard Gibbs for the miniseries and Bear McCreary for the series set out to create a soundscape directly opposed to the brassy orchestral sound of the original version by embracing what Ron Rodman has termed “multilingualism.” Instead of an orchestra, they employed seven to nine musicians playing a battery of percussion and instruments ranging from the duduk to the electric violin. However, on three occasions, McCreary replaced the newly composed music with pre-existing music that re-centered music in the show’s narrative. Each time, the pieces chosen (Stanley Myers’s “Cavatina,” Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One,” and Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower) acted both diegetically and intradiegetically and served as an anchor for the character’s memories of their home in the Twelve Colonies. For example, in the episode “Valley of Darkness” from Season Two, rogue pilot Starbuck finds a recording of her father playing the piano, supposedly a composition he wrote himself. That work, a diegetic rendering of Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One,” stirs her memories of home, contradictory feelings of wishing to leave her old life behind while simultaneously wanting to hold on to important memories, like those of her father. Throughout the rest of the series, Glass’s work and the notion of Starbuck’s father as a pianist became important markers of memory for the character as she journeyed metaphorically and physically into unknown territory. Similarly, “All Along the Watchtower,” the last- and most-used piece, appeared in various reimaginings throughout the final two seasons, stirring memories of the “Final Five” Cylons before ultimately becoming as a marker and representation for the entire show’s overarching narrative. Using close readings of each of these three pieces and recent frameworks in Memory studies that seek to understand the technologies of memory and the ways in which recorded sounds and musical cues can trigger memories and encode them personally and culturally, this paper will demonstrate the functions of pre-existing music in Battlestar Galactica and the ways in which television music can use its strength of connecting with a viewer’s cultural familiarity with the music presented to produce a multiplicity of resonant meanings.
Jan 21, 2015
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