Music has always had a profound effect on writers and thinkers. Music was a powerful tool for Johannes Kepler, the father of modern astronomy, who found inspiration in the concept of the music of the spheres for his third law of planetary motion. Music for Shakespeare was “the food of love,” and music has certainly been an influential creative force in the process of writing science fiction. Sometimes music is invoked mainly as background noise. Other times, lyrics and musical compositions directly affect the plots and characterization.

Numerous examples of both types of stories have appeared in Asimov’s. The December 2008 issue alone carried three stories that, while vastly different from each other, owed much to Euterpe, the muse of music. The most obvious example was the cover story, David Ira Cleary’s paean to the alternative rock music of the eighties and early nineties. Although the sound of the music is pumping in the background, the culture that was associated with the music is also used to explore the dissolute lives of David’s grunge cover musicians.

Euterpe is no less in evidence in Kath-ryn Lance and Jack McDevitt’s “Welcome to Valhalla,” although this time she appears in disguise as a Valkyrie. The composer has morphed from Kurt Cobain to Richard Wagner, but the music is still inextricable from the story. Music does not seem quite as central to “In Concert,” the lovely duet of an old woman and a lost astronaut composed by Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem. Yet, it is music that gives the story its title, and it is music that brings us nearly to tears when we reach the story’s elegiac ending.

Earlier in the year, it was the multiple universes and strains of jazz that featured so brilliantly in Gord Sellar’s “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” (July 2008). It’s the music of Miles Davis and Lester Young that the aliens love, but they are defeated by the dissonant harmonies of Thelonious Monk.

Music exists as a comfortable part of the background in most of the works of Tom Purdom. Tom, a former Philadelphia music critic, imagines a future in which anyone can be, and usually is, a music virtuoso. Due to the ubiquity of information molecules that can be installed in the human body without expensive surgery, it no longer takes years of practice and great of talent to play like a Jacqueline du Pré or a Vladimir Horowitz. Characters pick up the cello or the piano as casually as they might play a game of rummy. It’s refreshing to see classical music take on such an ordinary and omnipresent role in society, but Tom also seems to hint that the ease with which the characters play their instruments indicates that the ability to create true art has been lost.

Connie Willis is another long-time Asimov’s author whose work is clearly influenced by her interest in music. The song “White Christmas” features in her story “Just Like the Ones We Used to Know” (December ’03). According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the multiple versions of this best selling song of all time have sold over a hundred-million copies. The song permeates the story and our consciousness. Our familiarity with this song helps to move the plot along and ensures that the story resonates. This feat has to be accomplished without resorting to any of the song’s actual lyrics, though, because the words are under copyright protection.

Many songs that find a permanent home in our memory can be accessed by a simple reference to the song’s title. This is fortunate, because titles cannot be copyrighted so authors are always free to refer to songs by their names. It’s not much of a stretch to hear the Talking Heads while reading Lucius Shepard’s Life During Wartime or the Beach Boys while immersed in Howard Waldrop’s “Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna Dance?” (August 1988).

On the other hand, Connie made masterful use of lyrics in her Hugo-Award Winning Story “All Seated on the Ground,” which appeared in our December 2007 issue. Here, the story’s denouement can be found in the words of dozens of Christmas carols, hymns, and popular songs. Since most of these songs have long been in the public domain, the author was able to quote their lyrics. The words may have provided the clues in the story, but our knowledge of the music provided the sound track.

It’s important, though, that a story stand on its own without an assumption of the audience’s musical knowledge. I brought no deep appreciation of either jazz or grunge to my readings of Gord’s and David’s stories, and yet the stories were so well written that they conveyed their extra meanings to me. Just as it’s always a pleasure to pick up allusions to Milton, Lord Byron, or Pythagorus, it’s fun to find those mentions of modern culture. I’m certain I miss numerous song references, so authors must employ additional methods to ensure that they get their points across. Early in Allen M. Steele’s career, he was criticized because his “beamjacks” listened to groups from the distant past like The Grateful Dead and Twisted Sister while working dangerous space construction jobs. Still, the independent and rebellious spirit of Allen’s characters shone through even without the presumption of a seventies rock renaissance.

The stories in the current issue don’t appear to be infused with musical motifs. Their plots are not affected by mathematical harmony. Together, though, they can be thought of as the themes and development that form Asimov’s February 2009 symphony.