*As most of you know, I’m flying out to Bedford TX today to teach a workshop this weekend. We’ll forget the fact I hate flying (No, we won’t. Ya’ll keep my plane in the air till it’s SUPPOSED to land, you hear? Or you don’t get any more books!) I woke up late, and am trying to remember all the last minute things, so thank you Alma Boykin for stepping into the breach with a very interesting piece. (Yes, I have other guest posts waiting and am likely to use them all over this weekend. But Alma’s was the first one up.)*
Can a Dragon Play a Flute? Random Musings on Music in and Around Fiction
A guest post by Alma Boykin
Can you build a world without music in it? Would you want to? If space aliens have something analogous to our music, would we recognize it? What sort of music do you play in a space elevator?
As far as we know, humans have been making semi-musical sounds at least since the Mesolithic (i.e. the ice ages). We probably mimicked bird whistles and other environmental noises, and then started creating our own variations on whistles, cheeps, and thumps. Flutes and percussion instruments, or what seem to be flutes and percussion instruments, are found in graves all over Europe, Anatolia, and other places. Why do we do it? Because it’s fun? As a way to communicate with animal spirits? For religious reasons? To irritate the people in the next cave by banging loudly on a hollow log while they’re trying to sleep? Heck if I know. But over the course of time humans developed all sorts of ways to make noises, then put those sounds together into patterns that we call music. And then they put that music into their stories, or vice versa, since sung or chanted ballads predate novels by thousands of years.
Music appears in many, many sci-fi and fantasy stories. It ranges from religious music to bawdy ballads to formal instrumental compositions to something played for friends at a party. Music heals and kills. Can anyone who saw the original 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea movie from the House of Mouse hear the opening bars of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D-minor” without seeing Nemo playing his pipe organ? Who here remembers bits of the Harpers’ ballads from McCaffrey’s Dragonriders and Harper Hall trilogies? You can put your hands down. Anyone willing to admit to listening to or even composing filk? Didn’t think so and I never have either, even though that’s what got me reading C. J. Cherryh. Slightly to the side, how many members of the general public had ever heard of Vangelis before the TV series Cosmos first aired?
Music can make the world for the reader. Sometimes literally, in the case of Aslan singing creation in The Magician’s Nephew. What people sing, play, like or consider unacceptable can give large amounts of flavor to a fictional world. Much of the Pern story falls flat without music, to the extent that you could argue that music IS the culture on Pern. The teaching ballads preserve the most important bits of history, the warnings about the Threads, and reinforce the social order. In fact, there’s an amazing amount of music in all of McCaffrey’s books, even the Ship Who series. She and Mercedes Lackey just might have the record for musical notes per page of text (although O.S.C. has a few moments, as does David Weber).
Music also helps make alien cultures more alien. Which can be a technical challenge for writers. Take, for example, a reptilian species with a complex society that has instrumental music suitable for religious and secular events. What sort of instruments will they use? Percussion is an easy and safe choice, since most limbs can beat on things or hold sticks or strikers of some form. What about wind instruments? Sure, except . . . your reptiles don’t have lips. Can they exhale through nostrils? How would you design a wind instrument for that (not counting P.D.Q. Bach’s nose-flute.)? Or would they use something powered by bellows, giving you versions of bagpipes and organs? How about plucked string instruments (harp, harpsichord)? Talons and catgut might not get along well, unless the musician chooses to wear a protective guard over her talons, or to clip them, which brings an interesting conundrum if those talons are needed for self defense. Are some musicians members of a special protected, but dependent, class? And what would their music sound like? If the aliens hear a broader frequency range than humans do, that could be an interesting plot point – a spy passing messages through music that human ears can’t register.
Often there’s a social aspect to music. Do the upper classes or castes listen to different music than the lower? Perhaps the political elite listen to simple instrumental selections, savoring the purity of the tone and melodic line, while the lower classes favor complex harmonies and catches, like bawdy bar songs with dropped rhymes (see “The Farmer” by the Wicked Tinkers for an example of the art). If religious music must be acapella, then is party music purely instrumental? Maybe that society’s really radical social rebels sing dirty songs acapella as an insult to the religious establishment.
For a while it seemed like every third short story included music as a way to communicate peace and harmony with aliens. Um, what if the first music they encounter is Queen, Iced Earth, and Black Sabbath, with a little Ramstein just to for variety? Earth might get turned into a smoking ember as a proactive step to keep such a violent species out of the stars! Or we could discover that the Little Green Men are headbangers who revere The Clash the way some of us look at Bach, Buxtehude, and Vaughn Williams. Or perhaps their favorite themes sound a lot like New Country (in which case, there is still no evidence for intelligent life in the galaxy, IMHO.)
Do aliens ever get earworms? No, not the Star Trek kind, but the “oh gads, make it stop, it’s stuck in my head, arrrgh” kind. I ended up writing a story around the MC getting an American folk hymn stuck in her head, and it keeps playing as she’s dealing with a medical mess. Does a character have a tune he always whistles or hums? Does it drive the rest of his work shift up the proverbial tree? And who managed to break into the interstellar fighter-carrier’s PA system and start singing an updated version of “Stand to Your Glasses Steady” without being caught?
And then there’s writing to music. Either here or over at the Mad Geneii’s place, the topic came up (or was it at the Passive Guy’s blog? Anyway.) about using music when you write. If memory serves, it came down to half the group eschewed music as a distraction, and the other half either used it for white noise or depended on it.
I will confess to preferring silence, except when I am fighting a mood or the TV. Gurney Halleck said, “Mood is for cattle and for love play,” not for fighting, but there are times when howling bagpipes or black metal are necessary to get me into the right frame of mind for a battle or combat scene. And sometimes a quiet, reflective movement calms me down when I’m bouncing too much to write a slow passage. It’s hard to beat the soundtrack to the remake of Battlestar for “creepy, something-around-the-dark-corner, did-you-hear-that” moments. For white noise, I have to have instrumental, or vocal music in a language I don’t speak, although some of the great masses are so familiar that they vanish into the background (Mozart’s “Coronation Mass” and “Requiem,” Hyden’s “Lord Nelson Mass,” the Faure and Rutter Requiems, Brahm’s German Requiem, Lauridson’s “O Nata Lux,” I think you can see a pattern here.) The trailer music compellations can be useful as well, again for bits of mood.
How musical is your reading and writing? And what does it mean if a culture has no music? Or if it had music and then rejects it as anathema, as a certain human sub-culture does today?
UPDATE: completely different post up at Mad Genius Club
According To Hoyt 
Strangely enough there is going to be a symposium at the U of I , Urbana-Champaign starting tonight entitled “Writing Another Future.” It is cross discipline and includes lots of music as well as science fiction. The keynote address is going to be given by Kim Stanley Robinson and he is also going to participate in a panel called:
Panel on Science Fiction Literature and Music
Associate Professor Stephen Taylor, moderator
Minister Faust, Guest Writer
Kim Stanley Robinson, Guest Writer
Dexter Palmer, Guest Writer
Fernando Benadon, Composer
Perry Goldstein, Composer
Here is the URL for the schedule.
http://publish.illinois.edu/writinganotherfuture/schedule/
Thanks for the interesting ideas….
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Very interesting.
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What about wind instruments? Sure, except . . . your reptiles don’t have lips.
If they can talk, they’ve got a tongue; why not use the tongue like lips serve? Especially if it’s sort of flat, press that against the roof of the mouth and you can make a rather good seal with the tongue.
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Humph! Dragons don’t *need* to play flutes. That’s the job of the princess. [Wink]
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Actually, that’s not a bad idea. If you have a species who is able to appreciate music, but can’t produce it for themselves, capturing a human musician could lead to an interesting story. I might just steal that.
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Have fun.
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No, actually, their job is to learn useful skills. Although, making music is one that many _do_ learn. We dragons don’t run the Princess Protection Program (PPP for short), for free you know. Although, I will admit that there is a “fair amount” of cleaning needed for hoards. (Big toothy grin)
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That’s a possibility, but how do you work an instrument around the teeth, if they have incisors or other teeth at the front of the upper jaw? That’s where I ran into difficulties. You could use something like an oboe’s reed, or bagpipes like the Irish pipes. (Note: I’m a keyboard player, harpist, and vocalist, not a brass or woodwind musician, so there’s a great deal of specific technical info on those instrument groups that I lack.)
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I don’t know about dragon digestive tracts, but if there’s a sphincter they ought be able to be able to produce sound and I know of no reason to presume they couldn’t produce enough, sufficiently controlled, for our purposes.
Or perhaps I’m just talking out me ass?
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And you were doing so well for 40 words …
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My initial mental image was actually of that “roll your tongue into a circle” kid’s game…..
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They would have trouble with things like Flutes and Brass (which requires vibrating part of your mouth inside the mouthpiece), but woodwinds could be made to work with the “trap the mouthpiece against the roof of the mouth with the tongue) method. Another option for a non-lipped entity would be to have a soft piece that can cover the entire mouth; then, they can make their own sounds, to be amplified and modified by the instrument. Alternatively, they can use this over-the-mouth cover as a method of blowing up a bladder, so that they can play an instrument like a bagpipe.
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My understanding of flute mechanics is that it is not your lips that are vibrating, but rather blowing air across a carefully formed edge at a carefully selected velocity and angle gives you vortex cycles of specific frequencies.
I recall there is an oriental end blown flute that simply uses a wedge cut out of one end of a reed for the mouthpiece.
I expect you could also do rimphones.
Further, stringed instruments do not have to be plucked with the point of the nail; they can be strummed with the back of your fingernail for a notably different sound. You can thump the string, or slide the nail along it for another sound. Then there are the bows, and wheels.
Just because it makes music, it does not mean it even remotely resembles anything ergonomic.
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Heh. Needed to separate Flutes from Brass better. I did not intend to imply that Flutes produced their sound in the same way as Brass. Reptiles would likely not be able to play flutes because of not having lips, because they would have to way to control the airflow that precisely.
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Anything with a double reed requires some lip strength (embouchure), and that’ll include oboes, bassoons, etc. But bagpipes might work, as I believe the reed(s) is entirely enclosed and in another part of the instrument.
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For any woodwind instrument whose mouthpiece goes inside the player’s mouth, you need flexible lips to create a seal preventing air leaking out around the edges. If the air leaks out around the edges, instead of a nice strong sound you get just a “huuuuuf” sound or squeaks. (Well, reed instruments squeak and squeal when you are learning, when the reeds wear out, and sometimes just because so that isn’t necessarily unusual.)
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However, OUR reed instruments have hard mouthpieces, because we have flexible lips that can mold themselves to the shape of the mouthpiece. If you’re crafting for less flexible mouth parts, then the mouthpiece would contain the flexible material, if they have an agile enough tongue to do what Foxfier suggested.
Now, on the other hand, reptiles that we know on Earth don’t have a wide tongue (at least, any that I know don’t), so that might not be viable anyway.
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Given that dragons are fantasy creatures, why must we assume that they don’t have flexible lips? I’m not aware of any real-world reptiles that can breathe fire, but we don’t object to dragons on that account.
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If a dragon can speak English, French, Old Norse or, indeed, any human (or Elvish) language, as many reportedly have, then perforce they have flexible lips. Thus it follows they can play (properly scaled) musical instruments relying upon forcing air through an amplifying chamber.
Perhaps the more interesting issue might be the effect upon musical teschnique of having a forked tongue.
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They don’t have to have flexible lips to speak English. Parrots don’t.
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The Norwegians have an instrument called a nose-flute, and it has some very interesting sounds. I would think that any species that doesn’t have lips would probably learn to play some kind of wind instrument. Brass, on the other hand, would be a problem! Drums would be simple, and could be played by any creature with controllable appendages (think about an intelligent octopus in a symphony orchestra!). Stringed instruments can be tapped as well as plucked (dulcimer). I read somewhere that someone had written and recorded music in a 64-tone range, using computer-generated sound. Any culture that is totally devoid of music must be both tone-deaf and so alien we could NEVER understand them.
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Music is also dependent upon one’s perception of time. In my work I have a number of characters who are non-corporal and have a drastically different understanding of time. They are able to perceive that sounds are occurring at regular intervals, but don’t grasp that the sequence of sounds makes a pattern.
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I’ve always wondered if music came before spoken language. Idle speculation, I know. Personally, I find music a pretty basic necessity next to air, food, water, and shelter. I also work to it, both as encouragement or to drown out other distractions. I could see aliens lacking anything recognizable as music if they were deaf. Perhaps they communicate telepathically or via elaborate visual signals. It would be interesting to speculate on what their art forms (if any) would be. Great essay BTW.
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Thank you. :)
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Really enjoyed the post– my problem with music is that it takes a portion of my attention and I find it hard to use it when I am writing unless it is instrumental. As for a civilization– I noticed that in our own history folk music styles were different between the aristocrats and the commoners.
I guess what I am saying is that I only wrote one piece that used music in a story– and it was a family type gathering story (very appropriate, I think). Also, I think my next Christmas story, if I choose to write it, would be around a piano with a group singing carols.
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Oddly, I find that Trance.FM classics really serve as good background. Not so much stuff with vocals in it, but some of the straight rhythmic stuff starts, and… I’m gone. I surface a page later, 4 to 8 paragraphs, then read over and go “Wait a sec! Where did that assassination attempt come from!” o.0 – then grin and keep going.
I ain’t gonna refuse a muse.
BTW, if anyone else is trancely inclined, I find that something like Armin Van Burin’s ‘A State of Trance’ videos on youtube work well also. I’ll admit, I’d kind of like to go to one of those concerts, but I don’t think my age demographic would fit in so well, and I’d likely have to wear earplugs…
(I tend to listen to it fairly low – loud enough to hear the melody and base line, but I’m not about to try rattling the walls. The family would complain, not to mention the bats in my belfry.)
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Good music is worthwhile in and of itself. It also has utilitarian value.
Noise-canceling earphones filter out ambient distractions. Properly chosen music filters out internal distractions.
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THIS.
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Well, dragons can ride horses and marry human princesses, as long you pick the right folklore, so no reason why they can’t play the flute.
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And, then again, maybe human music is unique in all the Universe. What would the reaction(s) of other aliens species(es) be to it?
(I know, it’s been done, but that doesn’t mean you can’t come up with a new variation on the theme.)
M
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About the same way my dad reacted to rock and roll in the ’60s.
“Turn that garbage down!”
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My mother had a similar reaction to Janis Joplin but loved the Moody Blues. Go figure.
M
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Mother didn’t even like music. She’d listen to it in the car, sometimes – but Father used to complain because she wouldn’t let him listen to anything in the house. She had to have her TV on, but you’d better not play the radio!
For those interested…
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Well, THAT was unexpected…!
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Sarah, may the ground rise gently to meet you, and then only when you wish it so.
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ugh
I just got bifocals. Walking out to the car from the glasses place, and then walking into the next place, it really looked like the ground rose up to meet me. Feet, of course, reported otherwise, and it was enough to induce motion sickness. (Walking around in the next place it cured itself.)
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Between my bifocals and my astigmatism, I learned the hard way: 1) not to look down through the bottom of my glasses and 2) not to look sideways to judge distance without turning my head.
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I remember first getting bi-focals. Took about a week before I could see steps going down clearly.
On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 12:37 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > marycatelli commented: “ugh I just got bifocals. Walking out to the car > from the glasses place, and then walking into the next place, it really > looked like the ground rose up to meet me. Feet, of course, reported > otherwise, and it was enough to induce motion sickness. (Wal” >
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Music is integral to my writing, perhaps because I played a lot of music growing up – piano, guitar, oboe and percussion in school, voice, etc. Usually the first thing that happens is that I find a song that hits a particular emotional note – usually that’s going to be something in another language (almost certainly Japanese because I write a lot to anime soundtracks) or instrumental.
The first book I wrote (and promptly trunked) came out of a Muse song. (Hysteria, from the Absolution album), and every time I hear it I can see the image of the climactic battle at the end in my head. The Crown of Exiles stuff relies pretty heavily on the soundtrack(s) to Macross Frontier. Hells Bells, I sang on the podcast version of Battlehymn.
IIRC, KJA has admitted publicly that he’s written multiple songs based off Rush’s “Red Sector A”. To the point where his wife just gives him a look when it happens again. And he AND THE BAND just wrote a novel based off their most recent album – Clockwork Angels.
So music
dependentwriters have some good company, I guess?LikeLike
While I’ve noted music and poetry in many of my favorite works of SF&F – Pournelle got me re-hooked on Kipling and “Fallen Angels” got me to hunting for a lot of Filk including the Awesome “Fire in the Sky” – few have had music and lyrics woven as deeply into their stories as John Ringo. One is hard pressed not to find myriad musical references, and, after his first few books, chapter headers and entire stanzas of everything from the Cruxshadows and Nightwish to Heather Alexander’s “March of Cambreadth”
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Yes, and I find he generally has good taste in music. I very seldom find a song in one of his books (or his playlists that are sometimes printed at the back of his books) that I don’t like.
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For writing I find if I’m really familiar with a song, it can prevent other distractions. If the song is not as familiar to me, IT is the distraction.
My first published story was called Darkness, Darkness and written to the loud, repeated renditions of the Youngbloods’ song of the same name. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-CYWbfFoXY. Some day I intend to write a space opera version of Springsteen’s Darkness at the Edge of Town. I also wrote a story centering on an alien race’s different reaction to their own (banned for their own good) music.
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I need a reasonable quiet environment to write, music distracts me. But some of my characters have “theme songs.” When I’m having trouble with one of their scenes, I play the song a few times to, I dunno, summon them from my subconscious? Get me into the right personality mode to write them? Something like that.
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So how would an aquatic, reptilian species make music?
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Vibrating membranes on the sides of the head or throat would probably work. Maybe even surfacing to take air into their stomach to blow and modulate pitch and tone?
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Maybe essentially the same way Whales do.
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blow bubbles in tune? bang on shells?
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Glass harmonica. But yeah, that works better above water.
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Perhaps the undersea equivalent of a Muppaphone?
I leave it as an exercise for the student to postulate how to wield the underwater mallet.
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I actually had the muppaphone in mind when I wrote my comment, but, I couldn’t remember who they were.
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1. Percussion was the first thing that came to my mind.
2. Per the post and MishaBurnett’s comment above, music involves patterned sound (though not all patterned sound is music, of course).
IMHO any intelligent species that a) enjoys some patterns for their own sake, i.e. finds beauty in them, and b) uses sound, very likely will create music.
3. Literature gets translated. Someday there might be a way to translate music from one genre, culture, and/or species to another, so an individual comfortable with one form can see what another form is “getting at”. Ditto for other arts. Progress to that end would be controversial, especially if computers are used.
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Don’t forget Tolkien in The Hobbit & LOR series
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Good point. I was trying to think of slightly more recent works and went from what is on the shelves closest to my desk.
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Sarah, too bad you can’t get to Texas on Lutheran Air. :)
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Your arrival—somewhere—is predestined, so leave your troubles behind!
Or would that be Calvinist Air? I forget.
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I had the idea, once, to design a pipe organ that played through tidal forces. (Can’t remember if I ever gave a thought to the moon around this world, but…) It was humans doing it, but it could have been anyone. And of course the tide covering the entrance of a cave system that had small openings for air to escape out of was just a neato-cool thing and not a necessity. After all, fans work too. In any case, a piano or organ or harp or xylophone or guitar or hammer (or non-hammer) dulcimer or accordion, are all pretty much percussion instruments.
Someone or other designed an instrument that was a series of rotating glass bowls in graduated sizes on a spindle that were played like wine glasses. I can not remember what it was called though.
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Glass harmonica. May have been invented by Benjamin Franklin
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High Tide Organ in Blackpool. They exist!
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I’ve found the fact that various types of music can be emotionally evocative in very different ways, even when striking on the same emotional plane, to be very useful in writing. Being able to ‘design’ an emotional state in preparation for writing a particular scene has helped me to connect to the writing on more than one occasion. Even though I’m doing it to myself with deliberation it leads me to reflect the emotion and the evocation in the writing with more sincerity.
As far as writing music, or musical ideas, into the work…I find this to be a daunting task. But an interesting challenge to explore in one of my in progress ideas wherein I have multiple species interacting. Now I’ll have to ponder musical referents and responses.
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Re “no music”: Given the utility of noise-making objects for communicating over distances (trumpets, etc.) the only way I can conceive of a race without music is to conceive a race without *hearing*.
As to “aliens hearing Queen”: One assumes they would take the time to learn English, so they can understand what the human is saying — at which point we have an entire alien fleet headbanging to “Bohemian Rhapsody”…. >;)
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And who managed to break into the interstellar fighter-carrier’s PA system and start singing an updated version of “Stand to Your Glasses Steady” without being caught?
Makes me want to start singing “I’ll take you home agaiiin Kathleen….”
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I’ve actually been involved with Filk for over 20 years; indeed, my only published work is a filk of a Leslie Fish tune (“New Sins for Old”) about another Leslie Fish tune (“Banned from Argo”) in Xenofilkia magazine.
Filk (and folk) has always seemed to me to be the continuation of the oral tradition.
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Hmm, it appears wordpress ate my posts. :/
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(Late to the topic anyway, but this might be relevant. I’ll try to post this one last time)
I once came up with some strange bat-like creatures for a silly roleplaying game. I was thinking a bit about what sort of art or culture creatures like that would come up with to decorate their cities/homes.
The idea was that they have this ridiculously good sense of hearing, so in addition to preferring a normally very quiet environment by human standards, music of some sort would definitely be one art they would pay attention to. Of course the bats we are all familiar with also use echolocation – they use sound to see – so work that in. These creatures would make sculptures – abstract in appearance to humans – the design would be of collections of chimes/resonators/antennae, whose purpose would be to resonate with certain tones and produce “sonic images”, structured phase delays in waves of various frequencies. So there is this hybrid art-form that humans wouldn’t immediately get (some of the tones involved are above human hearing range, and produce little more than a headache) involving music and sculpture, and “visuals” in terms of their echolocation sense. Anyway, my imagination leads me strange places. Other aspects of these creatures culture derived from similar brainstorming.
(I’ll have to figure out a way to shoehorn them into this mindless space-opera thing I’m writing, when the plot moves to a less hectic place.)
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