The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Peak TV

The Palgrave Handbook to Music and Sound in Peak TV charts the transformation of television’s sonic storytelling during the new “golden age” of televisual narrative from the late 1990s to the early 2020s. Grounded in close analytical, critical, and theoretical work identifying the key traits of music and sound in this “peak TV” period, the book casts its critical net wider to develop interpretations of significance not just for screen music studies and musicology, but for screen and media studies too. By theorizing “peakness” with respect to sound and music, and by drawing together contributions from a diverse collection of prominent musicologists, media scholars, and practitioners, this handbook provides the authoritative guide to the role music has played in creating the success of some of the most culturally and commercially significant popular art of the early twenty-first century.

Thevolumecontains 25 essays in three main sections—Concepts and Aesthetics, Practices and Production, and Audiences and Interpretations. Topics discussed include peakness, complexity, ostentatious scoring, antiheroes, memory, franchises, worldbuilding, nostalgia, maternity, trauma, actor’s voices, title sequences, library music, branding, queer/camp scoring, kids TV, captioning, industry practices, HBO, and sound design. Shows examined include The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica, Westworld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stranger Things, The Bridge, Dexter, Killing Eve, Mad Men, American Horror Story, Rings of Power, Fargo, Peaky Blinders, Call the Midwife, Twin Peaks, and Twin Peaks: The Return.

Janet K. Halfyard (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, UK) is author of Danny Elfman’s Batman: a film score guide (2004), Sounds of Fear and Wonder: Music in Cult TV (2016) and has edited the collections Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2010) and Music in Fantasy Cinema (2012).

Nicholas Reyland (Royal Northern College of Music, UK). His books and edited collections include Music and Narrative since 1900, Zbigniew Preisner’s ‘Three Colors’ Trilogy: A Film Score Guide, Lutosławski’s Worlds, Music, Analysis and the Body, and a special issue of Music Analysis dedicated to film music.