Steve Halfyard
Steve is Head of BMus and teaches modules on Music History and Performance Practice after 1900; Film Music; Television Music; and Music in the Horror Film. They also coordinate the Public Performance Project module for BMus4 students and teach the BMus4 Research Paper.
Dr Steve Halfyard is Head of BMus programmes at RCS. They graduated with First Class Honours from the BSc in Music at City University in 1997; and from there went on to complete an MA (1991) and PhD (1997) in experimental music theatre at the University of Birmingham. Writing as Janet K. Halfyard, they have published on extended vocal technique (which they perform as well as research) and edited a collection of essays on Berio’s Sequenzas (Ashgate, 2007). As a performer, they have collaborated with a number of composers on new works, including Joseph Hyde, Ed Bennett and Simon Hall. Steve was a founding member of Ed Bennett’s contemporary music ensemble, Decibel, with which they performed until 2007.
Steve’s current research is mainly focused on music in horror/ supernatural and superhero films and TV, and publications include Danny Elfman’s Batman: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow Press, 2004), Sounds of Fear and Wonder: 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). They are currently co-editing the Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Peak TV with Nicholas Reyland as the first publication in a new series on Television Sound and Music for Palgrave, and working on projects around the lasting influence of HBO in contemporary television, and the music of Game of Thrones. Recent horror/sound/ music essays include “Rock, Pathos, Shivers: the music of Supernatural” (Monstrum, 2020), “Sounding the Abject in Contemporary Horror Scoring” (Horror Studies, 2022) “Music and the Sympathetic Vampire” (Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, 2023), and “Horror Music: the Abject and the Uncanny” (Routledge Companion to Horror, forthcoming).
Awards & Achievements
Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was awarded the Whedon Studies Association’s ‘Long Mr Pointy’ for the best book in Whedon Studies in 2010, and the chapter on music in Buffy in Sounds of Fear and Wonder won the ‘Short Mr Pointy’ for 2016.