New chapter publication: ‘Beyond Nostalgia: Hearing Anachronism in Westworld and Television’s New Golden Age’

Dr Alexander Kolassa has published a chapter in a new book, The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Peak TV. The book is the first major piece of scholarship looking at sound and music in the recent popular explosion of major big-budget television show spectacle (often referred to as ‘Peak’ TV). Whilst drawing on well-established scoring traditions associated with film, this new ‘Peak’ TV has been a place for all kinds of interesting new and cutting edge scoring innovations and experimentations.

Kolassa’s chapter is an analysis of the soundtrack in Westworld (2016-2022): that show is a highly self-aware ‘complex’ show that deals in philosophical questions about consciousness, history, and more. Kolassa examines how original music for the show is a hybrid of different times periods, how it draws on preexistent music and ‘rearranges’ that music to fit different periods of history and (TV/film) genres, and how the soundtrack offers clues to highly engaged viewers as to what might secretly be going on. The chapter also explores the use of ‘diegetic’ music, in the form of an onscreen honkytonk ‘player piano’, whose musical commentary means it functions a bit like a character in the story. Kolassa argues that these serialised cutting edge shows (typified by Westworld) are uniquely engaged in cultural dialogue; this particularly innovative soundtrack responds to a wider political and cultural situation that is seeing a ’return’ of history.

Image credit: Book cover image courtesy of Springer Nature Link website.