Music and Memory in Peak TV

In March 2021, television critic Alan Sepinwall wrote an article for Rolling Stone bemoaning the amount of non-linear storytelling in peak TV. Music holds these chronologically twisted plots together, helping an audience know where they are in a show’s timeline and how to connect with the often-disoriented characters. And since these plots often hinge on a character’s memory of an event or an object, music has come to be a code for memory and an aspect of its construction. In recent media studies, explorations of how memory works have largely focused on technologies of memory such as the photograph. As Marita Sturken has argued, “The question of mediation is thus central to the way in which memory is conceived.” This chapter will build on those studies by detailing how music mediates memory in three televisions shows from throughout the Peak TV era, particularly through the technology of the piano. In Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), Philip Glass’s piano composition “Metamorphosis One” serves as an important marker of memory for Starbuck as she journeys metaphorically and physically into unknown territory. In Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s Westworld (2016–2022), robotic Host and brothel owner Maeve slowly begins to gain self-awareness and develop memories between the “reveries” where her memory is wiped. This process is given physical form in the player piano that sits in the Mariposa Saloon where she works. And in Dan Erickon’s Severance (2022–present), a piano digitally manipulated to create notes that build from decay to pitch and back again come to symbolize the fraying line between work memories and personal memories for Mark Scout. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates the ways in which television music uses its strength of connecting with a viewer’s own memories and cultural familiarity with music to produce a multiplicity of resonant meanings.