On The Net
The Music of the Future
by James Patrick Kelly
soundtracks
Although science fiction writers deal in the strange and imaginary, we draw from commonplace raw materials. New science and tech often provide a spark, as do certain philosophical conjectures that have been debated since Socrates schooled Plato. We develop characters based on people we know or have read about, although often they are so composite that they are unrecognizable to any but us.
Culture is another major source of our inspiration. By culture I mean not only the historical high culture of Beethoven https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-fFHeTX70Q and impressionism https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/impressionism.html and the Library of America’s boxed sets https://www.loa.org/. Rather we steal from popular culture—which snobs disdain as low—like Frank Sinatra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb1W4MNznDc and Marvel Comics https://www.marvel.com/ and Schitt’s Creek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqR5KNqAevs. Of course, when it comes to culture, the boundary between high and low is nebulous. Charles Dickens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJgyNrMmrpo was the most popular writer of his time, and songs by a pop group called the Beatles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSehX0m2YKs are regularly performed by symphony orchestras. One of the hallmarks of a thriving culture, whatever its ambitions, is interconnectivity and influence. The visual arts are regularly in conversation with the dramatic arts and, as we saw in the last installment, writers enjoy the challenge of writing about music.
But music has also informed science fiction in profound ways. Here’s an artform that can create its own unique sense of wonder, both of the sublime and the terrible, and has been doing so long before there was writing. Music achieves its brilliant effects in ways that are at once ineffable and compelling. This is one reason why the musical soundtrack is so important to film, and especially science fiction film, because it can add resonance to a scene without recourse to words or images. Although modern SF films have come to rely on lavish special effects technologies https://screenrant.com/biggest-special-effects-breakthroughs/ in general and CGI in particular, earworms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NE_OoO-N54 from a score can stick in our memories almost as often as dazzling SFX.
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classical classics
Directors use music to enhance a scene or comment on it, sometime by using works that everyone knows, sometimes by commissioning composers to create new work. A few have reached into the classical repertoire to complement their science fiction imagery, most famously Stanley Kubrick https://kubrick.life/, who directed 2001: A Space Odyssey https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/23/2001-a-space-odyssey-what-it-means-and-how-it-was-made.
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By all accounts, he was not easy to work with. Grandmaster Arthur C. Clarke https://clarkefoundation.org/arthur-c-clarke-biography complained about their relationship in his memoir about 2001 https://ia802702.us.archive.org/0/items/SpaceOdyssey_819/The_Lost_Worlds_of_2001_-_Arthur_C_Clarke.pdf, “I maintained that l was the writer and he should rely on my judgment; what would he say if I wanted to edit the film? In the end we decided on a compromise—Stanley’s.” Kubrick’s relationship with composer Frank Cordell https://www.vox.com/2018/4/26/17283314/2001-a-space-odyssey-music-stanley-kubrick-50th-anniversary, the first of four he approached to score the film, was even more fraught. The secretive director refused to share what he intended to shoot with Cordell. Kubrick was still deciding on the style of music he wanted and was vague about the plot. Desperately trying to please his director, Cordell eventually had what has been described as a nervous breakdown and Kubrick moved on. With principal photography already begun, he dispatched an assistant to London’s largest record store to buy a selection of over a hundred classical LPs. Back at the studio the assistant would pull records from their covers and hand them to Kubrick, who would drop the phonograph needle onto track after track, hunting for musical placeholders until he could decide on the real score. Over the course of the shoot, Kubrick went to three other composers before eventually deciding to stick with his “temporary” choices.
The result was one of the most iconic film soundtracks of all time, as celebrated on the site 2001: A Space Odyssey Turns 50 and Its Soundtrack Endures http://brianwise.net/2001-a-space-odyssey-50-soundtrack/. In a film filled with silences, Kubrick’s intense selections are riveting. From the triumphalist bombast of Richard Strauss’s https://www.richardstrauss.at/biography.html Thus Spake Zarathustra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfe8tCcHnKY to the ironic space station waltz of The Blue Danube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZoSYsNADtY by Johann Strauss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Strauss_II to the amorphous, moaning chorus of the several Thomas Legeti compositions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTw2T708TW0, the soundtrack moves from strength to strength.
In his fascinating video essay Why Do Sci-Fi Scores Use Classical Music So Much? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_Ye_quzAJk, Albert Genower talks about strategies for using music in SF film. He points out that while the Classical (with a capital “C”) repertoire is associated with grandeur and excellence, it is also perceived by many movie-goers as elitist and inaccessible. On the other hand, he discusses why it can be more relatable than digital music. More on that in a moment. Some SF film composers have been so heavily influenced by classical masters that we might think of their work as small “c” classical. Think Bernard Herrmann http://www.bernardherrmann.org/, who composed music for The Day The Earth Stood Still https://archive.org/details/The.Day.The.Earth.Stood.Still1951 and Fahrenheit 451 https://vimeo.com/433467090 and many of Alfred Hitchcock’s best http://www.bernardherrmann.org/articles/misc-torncurtain. (Trivia note: Herrmann was another of the composers Kubrick queried about working on 2001, but the famous composer declined the commission because he thought mixing contemporary compositions with classical music was vulgar.) And, of course, there’s classically influenced John Williams https://johnwilliams.org/, who scored ET https://amblin.com/movie/e-t/, Jurassic Park https://amblin.com/movie/jurassic-park, and the Star Wars ennealogy https://www.starwars.com/films. For more classic classical SF soundtracks, click to Six of the Best Sci-Fi Movie Soundtracks https://www.classical-music.com/features/tv-and-film-music/six-best-sci-fi-movie-soundtracks or Listen to the 20 Best Sci-Fi Movie Orchestral Scores of All Time https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/scifi/20-scifi-movie-orchestral-scores-time.html.
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bloop-bleep
But in a film depicting the future, we might reasonably expect to hear the music of that time. This does not mean that using classical or popular music of the past in science fiction is necessarily anachronistic. After all, Mozart, Duke Ellington, and David Bowie have not yet been consigned to the ash heap of musical history. But popular tastes will move on, and we can try to guess where they will go. So what should the music of the future sound like? Albert Genower talks about using electronic and digital music to introduce a new sound palette to suggest technological advances and the otherness of future societies. But many listeners hear these kinds of music as cold, sterile, and alien. Why? Genower offers an esoteric discussion of musical semiotics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOZZUcJYUb8, the study of how we understand the music we hear and how it engages our emotions. I’m oversimplifying here, but: The physicality of music is key, and “our musical understanding comes from unconscious imitation of observed action, that we understand sounds in comparison to the sounds we ourselves make.” Theorists talk about gesture https://music.arts.uci.edu/dobrian/gesture/ evoking a metaphorical sense of physicality and movement. (Helpful hint: think air guitar https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD-_0sYq9mlkyeXs3R3bB8g) But digital music comprises sounds that are divorced from human gesture and can thus seem unnatural. “There’s no chain of physical activity to lead one to the source of the sound,” Genower reminds us. Thus while digital music can brilliantly evoke the eerie, unknown otherness of the future, large and small “c” classical styles offer more direct access to listeners’ experience and emotions.
One of the earliest electronic instruments was the theremin https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/audio-music/theremin.htm, patented in 1928 by the Russian inventor Leon Theremin https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/creepy-music-and-soviet-spycraft-the-amazing-life-of-leon-theremin. It consists of two metal antennas that create an electric field between them and function as position sensors. Using the natural capacitance of the human body, the player positions hands between the antennas without touching them, disrupting the electric field and creating unsettling sounds that have been variously described as singing, crying, and wailing. The critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that the sound was like a “cello lost in a dense fog, crying because it does not know how to get home.”One reason why you don’t own a theremin is that, while you can buy one for a couple of hundred bucks, they are notoriously difficult to master.
Two films from 1945 mark the theremin’s first use in Hollywood: Hitchcock’s Spellbound https://www.criterion.com/films/681-spellbound and Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend https://archive.org/details/the-lost-weekend-1945. Science fiction caught up a few years later with Destination Moon https://archive.org/details/DestinationMoon1950 in 1950 and The Day The Earth Stood Still in 1951. If the phrase “Gort, Klatuu barada nicto” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto sounds familiar, you have probably experienced the theremin’s eerie power to enhance that film’s sadly dated practical special effects.
Some may misremember a theremin in the 1956 big budget Forbidden Planet https://archive.org/details/ForbiddenPlanet1956_201707. There weren’t any, but pioneering sound engineers Louis and Bebe Barron https://moviemusicuk.us/2020/06/15/forbidden-planet-louis-barron-and-bebe-barron/ did create the first all-electronic score in movie history. A retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest set in space, this Star Trek precursor was the first movie to depict a faster than light spaceship, the first to take place on a planet outside our solar system and the first to feature a robot, Robby http://www.robothalloffame.org/inductees/04inductees/robby.html with a distinct personality. The Barrons’ score was perfectly suited to complement all of these innovations, although, in a dispute with the musicians’ union, their work had to be credited not as music, but as “electronic tonalities.” Some dismissed their work as sci-fi bloop-bleep.
After Forbidden Planet demonstrated the power of electronic and digital music, Hollywood took note. Wendy Carlos https://www.wendycarlos.com/ synthesized several classical music adaptations for Kubrick’s next film, A Clockwork Orange https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/19/a-clockwork-orange-at-50-stanley-kubrick, and in 1982 scored Tron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(soundtrack). That same year the Greek composer Vangelis https://www.nemostudios.co.uk/bladerunner/ improvised some of the pieces of Blade Runner https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/14/why-blade-runner-is-timeless on a variety of synthesizers while watching videotapes of scenes. The ambient feeling of his music avoids the wail of the theremin and the bloop-bleep of some digital music while still maintaining a distancing and otherworldly ambiance.
So what should the music of the future sound like? The neo-romantic emotionalism of orchestral ensembles or the eerie evocations of digital tech?
Dunno. It’s not up to me.
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exit
One thing I do know is that the one earworm I have never been able to banish is inextricably linked to my love of this genre. Often as not when something inexplicable happens to me, Marius Constant’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Constant Twilight Zone theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJjDXyXP2As begins to twinkle with its spooky ensemble of electric guitars, bongos, saxophone, and a dissonant French horn. Maybe it’s not the music of the future but the fact that it has stuck with me all these years has to mean something.
Do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do. There, now I’ve given it to you.
Copyright © 2024 James Patrick Kelly