Worldbuilding: putting a soundtrack to your words

Whenever I think of worldbuilding for writers, I keep coming back to the same thing. Worldbuilding is really about creating stuff that evokes an emotion in the reader.

It becomes literally world-building when we write fantasy – often, I suspect, helped along by doses of some suitable soundtrack. Music usually goes together with writing – either being played while the stuff’s being written, or listened to while the book is being read. It’s a way of enhancing the emotion,  almost impossible to imagine high fantasy without some soundtrack to it. And, of course, there are composers who’ve thoroughly exploited the point.

I’m thinking Richard Wagner – nineteenth century composer who envisaged fantasy worlds of colossal scale – vast worldscapes that he painted with sound, story, visual spectacle and the finances of mad King Ludwig. Musically it was very genre-specific – if he were alive today, he’d be a heavy metaller.

Wagner knew how to put arguments through music. He was a ‘metaller’ not just through his vast soundscapes – the bombast, the soaring vocals, the colossal orchestration, the overblown sets – but conceptually. He wrote high fantasy that spoke to the mythic beliefs of his mid-nineteenth century society. That particular aspect found an unfortunate audience of evil in post-First World War Germany, who managed to twist his ideas to their dark ends. (They did this to everything they touched, of course). There’s a great documentary by Stephen Fry going through those issues.

But setting that aside, high fantasy remains a staple of heavy metal today. and I think the guy who pioneered the idea was Wagner.

Attaching music to the high fantasy we read or write also makes it speak to us today. “Real” music in any fantasy setting would have to be made by instruments of the setting – voices, certainly; and if you read The Lord Of The Rings, you’ll find Tolkien inevitably describing some – including the single uplifted voice above the noise which then became a motif for at least one Led Zeppelin song. But I suspect a lot of readers more usually associate Middle Earth with Howard Shore’s movie soundtrack. Or maybe Bo Hansson’s slightly weird album from 1969. (Hansson’s often credited with inventing prog rock with that release.)

It was that relationship between music and concept, I suspect, that prompted Sophia Coppola to use early 1980s gothic-pop – Siouxie and the Banshees and The Cure mainly – as the soundtrack for Marie Antoinette. In the conceptual sense, she was arguing, French royals and nobility were to 1780s French society what the ‘goths’ were to the 1980s; disconnected, odd, weird. It was a pretty compelling idea, in fact. And what a wonderful way of putting an argument – through music.

What it boils down to is that music can help us get a different angle on the world we’re building; it can colour the way we imagine and see it; and it can colour the reading experience. It becomes an important part of the whole, I suspect. And the ‘ideal’ music for any story will differ from person to person.

Do you listen to music while writing – or associate particular music with particular books or stories?

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Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012