Janet K Halfyard
Dr Janet K. Halfyard is Director of Undergraduate Studies at Birmingham Conservatoire, part of Birmingham City University,where she teaches courses on film and TV music, and on twentieth century and contemporary music. Her publications include Danny Elfman’sBatman: a film score guide (Scarecrow Press, 2004), Music in Cult TV (IB Tauris, 2016) and the edited collections Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Ashgate, 2010) and Music in Fantasy Cinema (Equinox, 2012).
She has also published on extended vocal technique (which she performs as well as researches) and edited a collection of essays on Berio’s Sequenzas (Ashgate, 2007). She is a member of the Whedon Studies Association and has presented at all but one of their biennial conferences, including delivering the opening keynote at the St Augustine (Florida), conference in 2010 on Christophe Beck’s scoring for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her paper on Buffy and the Orpheus myth, originally written in response to a request from Opera North as part of their celebration of the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, was included in The Joss Whedon Reader (Syracuse, 2014).
Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was awarded the WSA’s ‘Long Mr Pointy’ for the best book in Whedon Studies in 2010. Her film music research focuses particularly on music in horror and superhero films, with the 2004 Batman monograph followed up with an essay on the role of technology in the changing strategies of superhero scoring between the 1980s and the 21st century published in the Oxford Handbook of New Audio Visual Aesthetics (OUP, 2013), and contributions to the screen media series published by both Routledge and Equinox. Performing as Steve Halfyard, she has collaborated with a number of composers on new works, including Joseph Hyde, Ed Bennett and Simon Hall, and was a founding member of Ed Bennett’s contemporary music ensemble, decibel, with whom she sang until 2007.
