Journal of Fandom Studies, The - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2016

In the past decade, numerous film and television adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective stories have inspired fans across the world to form vibrant communities devoted to creating Sherlockian fiction, art and music. These fans join a lineage of fandom as old as Doyle’s stories themselves, a lineage within which the interpretation of music within Doyle’s original stories, as well as performing Sherlock-related songs, constituted important acts of fandom. Through examining archival records of Sherlockian correspondence, publications and recordings as well as the textual, visual and audio-visual creations of online fan communities, I analyse the musical representation in Doyle’s original stories, and then document how Sherlockians from the nineteenth century to the present have integrated music into their fan activities. Expanding on the work of Small, I suggest that Sherlock Holmes fans engage not only in live music-making activities but also in what I term textual musicking – the fictional interpretation of canonical diegetic music in the written word. Finally, I identify how historical shifts in musical fandom embody and reflect a more fundamental recent shift in perception of the Sherlockian textual canon, but also what it means to be a Sherlock fan.

Filk is broadly defined as the traditional folk-based music and related community created by and for a sub-community of science fiction and fantasy fans. Born in the 1950s, filk today includes international participants of various experience levels and musical styles. Social context and music are equally important in this tradition; prominent values include self-expression, play and building a face-to-face co-creative, collaborative group experience. This article, founded on Textual Poachers (1992), assumes that filk remains a folk music in many ways, and that filkers still prefer face-to-face musical and personal interaction in spite of a lively, diverse online filk community. I gathered ethnographic data through participant-observation and a questionnaire to examine the following questions. How does the filk community value face-to-face and online interaction, how do filkers negotiate moving between these two domains and how do the domains interact? With four generations of filkers now active, are there generational differences? I postulate that the face-to-face group creativity and co-creation in filk is based on a fluid and permeable performer/audience boundary, allowing individual and group expression to happen simultaneously. This in-person, real-time, deeply immersive co-created experience reinforces a strong sense of community, making face-to-face interaction highly valued.

Star Trek’s fan group stands out as one of the oldest and most prominent within ‘nerd culture’, in both popular media and fan studies scholarship. The franchise has a long history of fan participation via fanzines, fan fiction, cosplay and conventions. Fan participation and consumption of Trek-related music has an equally extensive history. This article examines new ways in which music and Star Trek fandom intersect by focusing on the concert movies Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage and Star Trek Movie Live. In these events, live musicians, typically an orchestra, performed a score in synchronization with projected visuals from a pre-existing movie or television show. The comparison of the events’ different approaches to format and marketing inform different means of fan musical engagement with Star Trek. Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage attracted older ‘hard core’ fans by harnessing nostalgia in service of the production. Alternatively, Star Trek Movie Live opened up the doors of fandom to include not only Trekkers, but also other fandom subcultures and the general public. Ultimately, both events represent opportunities for the expansion of the classical music repertoire and the broadening of audiences.

Wizard rock, often stylized in written form as ‘wrock’, creatively engages with and augments the content world of Harry Potter through musically and lyrically diverse performances. Fan studies centred on Harry Potter have often discussed the application of fictional heroism to real-world issues, and wizard rock musicians are frequently cited as fandom activists. However, there is little analysis of the music, lyrics and performances of wizard rock as it relates to the moral messages of the series. Focusing on the work of the first wizard rock band, Harry and the Potters, I unite ethnographic fieldwork with historical research and the study of myth to place wizard rock within a narrative of musical activism, fan creativity and morality in music. Similar to their heroes in the books, these musicians imbue their music and their self images with the series’ morals, historical tropes and archetypes. They make this morality tangible by donating proceeds of compilation albums or music subscription series sales to nonprofit organizations, and by weaving these messages into their music. I argue that the wizard rock community’s application of fictional heroism through music, lyrics and performance encourages fellow Harry Potter fans to embrace heroic qualities in the real world.

The term ‘recut’ designates a trailer that a fan has created by editing footage from a film or trailer to new sound (voice-over, sound effects and underscore). The resulting re-imagined audio-visual text typically presents a genre-shifted narrative that intertextually relates to the source material. The ‘re-tuning’ by fan-editors involves imposing a new soundtrack (usually music and/or narration) over reordered and edited images, like the adapted family-friendly ‘Shining’ (2005) from the horror film The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) or the horror trailer refashioning of ‘Mrs. Doubtfire – Recut’ (2009). The literature about ‘vidding’ and recutting provides a foundation for considering how fans provoke new meanings when they add or re-order voice-overs, sound effects and music in recut trailers. The fan-editor must creatively engage with genre-based cinematic trailer practices and traditions of musical signification in re-imagining the source text. Thus sound effects and electronically distorted music predominate in re-tuned horror trailers, like ‘Mrs. Doubtfire – Recut’ or ‘Scary Mary Poppins’ (2006), while light-hearted melodies and instrumentation prevail when adapting source material to create a recut comedy trailer (‘The Wicker Man’ 2006). Thus the recut and re-tuned trailer represents a transformative nexus of sight and sound within fandom.