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'Love, Death, Curses and Reverses (in E minor): music, gender and identity in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel"'

This chapter is a revision of an earlier, shorter essay published in _Slayage: the Online Journal of the Whedon Studies Association_ (ISSN 1546-9212) in 2001. It was the first published essay on music in the work of Joss Whedon: Matthew Pateman, in his editorial for _Slayage_ 22 (2006) described this first version as “an essay that ranks as one of the most impressive in the whole corpus of _Buffy_ studies”. The present substantial revision was able to take a wider and more complete view of the position of the theme music in the two series as a whole: in 2001, _Buffy_was in its fourth season (of seven) in the UK, and only the first season of the spin-off, _Angel_ had aired: both series completed their runs by 2004. The collection, _Music Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer_, was originally proposed in 2003; following Vanessa Knights’ death in 2007, Halfyard assisted in bringing the collection to publication – the first such collection dedicated to television music. As a result of her involvement, she was invited to deliver the opening keynote at the Whedon Studies Association (WSA) biennial conference in Florida, USA that year; and the collection subsequently won the WSA award for the best monograph or edited collection in Whedon Studies of 2010. Halfyard was also, as a result of this work, invited to contribute to the blog of popular cult TV author Nikki Stafford (http://nikkistafford.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/great-buffy-rewatch-archive.html), providing commentary on the seven seasons of _Buffy_as a fan community rewatched it over the course of a year in 2011. The work done on _Buffy_that started with this essay continues to inform Halfyard’s current research, notably a forthcoming monograph on music in cult television for IB Tauris, and her ongoing project to make music a more prominent area of discourse within television studies.