All posts tagged with 'The twilight zone'
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Reba Wissner is a Ph.D. Candidate in musicology at Brandeis University with a dissertation on Francesco Cavalli’s 1659 opera, L’Elena. She received her B.A. in Music and Italian from Hunter College of the City University of New York and her M.F.A. in Musicology from Brandeis University. She is the author of several articles and a recipient of numerous awards and grants including a dissertation research grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition to early music, Ms. Wissner’s other research interests are Music and Politics, Music and Immigration, and the role of music in The Twilight Zone.
Sounds and Silences: Affective Use of Music and Silence in The Twilight Zone
In various episodes of The Twilight Zone, what is on-screen often contradicts what is heard, thereby setting the viewer up for the series’ trademark twist ending. While the music that was composed for the series served to heighten the anxieties that the episode sought to invoke, it also was often used to convey insight into the episode’s subtext. But one other aural element contributes to this: the lack of music.
In studies of film and television music, one of the most prevalent dualities often overlooked is that of music and silence. Like the use of music, the absence of music appears at dramatically crucial moments. This paper examines the use of silence, or absence of music, in various episodes of the television series The Twilight Zone and how the absence of music plays as crucial a role in the interpretation of the episode as the music.