Celebrating Twenty Years of Battlestar Galactica
Chair(s): Eftychia Papanikolaou (Bowling Green State University)
Battlestar Galactica (hereby BSG) revolutionized science fiction television. The series, which ran from 2004 to 2009, synthesized commentary on politics, gender, race, and religion in a story of warring humans and machines. Created in the shadow of September 11th, producer Ronald D. Moore’s reimagining of the eponymous 1978 series won critical praise and endured as a cult classic. The show’s legacy continued to grow following the series finale in 2009, leading Entertainment Weekly to place Battlestar Galactica on its list of “26 Best Cult TV Shows Ever.” It is, as producer Simon Kinberg described, “one of the holy grails in science fiction.” Despite the series’ success, however, minimal published scholarship exists on BSG's innovative soundtrack.
Bear McCreary eschewed traditional sci-fi brass fanfares and symphonic scores for BSG. Instead, the soundtrack featured unusual instrumentation for American television, such as the Armenian duduk, Indonesian gamelan, and Japanese taiko drums. This choice placed non-Western instrumentation as the dominant soundscape while the orchestral timbre was, as Eftychia Papanikolaou suggested, “meant to startle.” Furthermore, music functioned inside and outside of the series’ narrative, establishing moods and characters while simultaneously foreshadowing future events.
This paper session will explore McCreary’s landmark score for BSG from the perspectives of various disciplines and theories. The first paper analyzes the rarity of common music-making by the characters of BSG and the real-world implications of grounding visions of religiously and politically pluralistic society on speech in unison rather than the multivocality of singing. The second paper explores the show’s anachronistic use of the piano and how the instrument acts as a memory technology for Galatica’s crew and passengers. The third paper analyzes the role of music within the religious plotline, focusing on the layers of diegesis and the innovative narrative function of musical predestination. In this twentieth anniversary year of BSG, our paper session will reflect on how this series forever changed the interplay of music, politics, memory, and religion in science-fiction media.
Presentations of the Symposium
So Say We All: Common Music-Making as an Absent Signifier of Religious and Political Pluralism in Battlestar Galactica
Isaac Arten
Saint Louis University
Common music-making (choral singing or group instrumental performance) offers a powerful metaphor for religious and political pluralisms in society. Premiering in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the early days of George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror,” Ronald D. Moore’s 2004 sci-fi television series Battlestar Galactica takes the possibility of these pluralisms as one of its thematic questions. This paper will analyze the rarity of common music-making by the characters of BSG, and the implications of the show’s focus on speaking in unison for its vision of a religiously and politically pluralistic society.
Bear McCreary’s soundtrack is one of the most notable aspects of BSG. Character themes, incidental music, and instrumentation in McCreary’s scores for the series evoke familiarity and heritage as well as distance and otherness, creating what Donna Haraway refers to as a “mechanism inducing affinity” in the audience. Yet this use of music to highlight the ways that music and music-making permeate the practices of religion and politics is engaged primarily by the audience and not the characters of BSG. In the world of the show, authoritative pronouncements, ceremonies, and invocations of shared values and purpose are affirmed with the phrase “So say we all” spoken in unison.
Responding to Hannah Arendt’s assertion in The Human Condition (1958) that politics—people relating themselves to each other in shared space via discourse rather than conflict—is the distinctive human activity, this paper will argue that BSG reveals how the possibility of a truly pluralistic political community is betrayed by the show’s apparent goal of univocity (a betrayal that expresses itself in nationalisms and fundamentalisms). The paper will further propose that the absent signifier of common music-making in the politics and religion of Battlestar Galactica provokes the activist question of how our own common life would be different if it were premised metaphorically on common music-making (in which multiple voices express harmonies without defaulting to uniformity) rather than speaking together.
Music and Technologies of Memory in Battlestar Galactica
S. Andrew Granade
University of Missouri-Kansas City
In March 2021, television critic Alan Sepinwall wrote an article for Rolling Stone bemoaning the number of fractured timelines in storytelling. Although he was discussing the program The Serpent, Sepinwall could have just as easily been discussing Battlestar Galactica. Both series regularly begin in media res, feature flashbacks (and a famous flashforward), and use music to hold together their chronologically twisted plots together. But BSG used music not just as a code for memory and an aspect of its construction, but also as a technology of memory, a feature that has influenced television music since its finale in 2009.
In recent media studies, explorations of how memory works have largely focused on technologies of memory. As Marita Sturken argued, “The question of mediation is thus central to the way in which memory is conceived.” This presentation builds on those studies by detailing how music mediates memory in BSG through the technology of the piano. Beginning with the second season episode, “Valley of Darkness,” Bear McCreary introduced the piano as a nexus of memory for rogue pilot Starbuck. In the episode, Starbuck finds a recording of her father playing one of his compositions on the piano. That work, a diegetic rendering of Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One,” stirs her memories of home and contradictory feelings of wishing to leave her old life behind while simultaneously wanting to hold on to important memories. The piano returns towards the end of the series in the episode “Someone to Watch Over Me,” serving as an essential marker of memory for Starbuck as she journeys metaphorically and physically into unknown territory, which ultimately propelling the show’s final revelations. After close readings of these episodes and explorations of recent frameworks in memory studies that seek to understand how technologies of memory can trigger memories and encode them personally and culturally, this presentation concludes by outlining reverberations of the piano’s use through later television programs, including Westworld and Severance. Ultimately, it demonstrates the ways in which television music uses its strength of connecting with a viewer’s cultural familiarity with the piano to produce a multiplicity of resonant meanings.
"Life Has a Melody": Musical Predestination in Battlestar Galactica
Megan Francisco
Wake Forest University
The debate between free will and predestination has long captivated theologians. Battlestar Galactica's narrative takes on this discussion, depicting its characters as predestined to their fate by God. Indeed, producer Ronald D. Moore described the series—which features monotheism and polytheism—as "an exploration of ideas and the basis of faith." The overall narrative of BSG parallels the Jewish exodus from Egypt as a human remnant flees the Cylons and seeks the promised land of Earth. In a particular instance of innovation for its time, Moore and composer Bear McCreary worked closely together to build music directly into the series' narrative to depict God's will. In doing so, they transformed the fundamental rules of engagement between narrative and music in science-fiction film and television.
The theological framework of BSG is complex, and McCreary's musical treatment is equally intricate. This paper will explore how God communicates with His creations through music, drawing upon Ben Winters's theory of intradiegetic music and Michel Chion's acousmêtre. Two critical musical themes reveal God's plan. The first—an intradigetic orchestral passacalgia first heard in an opera house—serves as an underlying message from God to humans and Cylons. As the series progresses, this theme undergoes a vital transformation, migrating from the invisible orchestral score to the realm of the characters. The second theme is initially an acousmêtre but evolves through Robynn Stilwell’s “fantastical gap” into purely diegetic music. McCreary uses the melody from Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" for this theme, amplifying the series' Biblical parallels through its lyrics and placing the melody directly into BSG's narrative.
This paper will highlight the many ways that music functions alongside religious plotlines in the series and ultimately predestines the characters to fulfill God’s will. Whether through direct commentary using themes, a foreshadowing of future events, or heard by the characters, McCreary's score is essential to the narrative structure of BSG. As said by the angelic character, Head Six, in the Kobol Opera House: "Life has a melody... a rhythm of notes that become your existence once played in harmony with God's plan."
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