Music and SF: A Theory

[A paper presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, March, 2002.]

Describing the relationship between music, a non-discursive mode of art, and sf, a so-called literature of ideas, is a challenge for any genre-theory. In any event, it is unavoidable, for even cursory research into sf’s connections with music reveals hundreds of musical works that allude explicitly to sf. It appears that very little work has been done in this area – beyond the extremely useful surveys in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (by Maxim Jakubovsky, Hugh Davies, Peter Nicholl, and Charles Shaar Murray), and in three successive issues of the British fanzine, Vector, in 1999.  In theoretical terms almost nothing has been done.

There are so many relevant musical texts that they have to be sorted into manageable categories. In the Vector series, the authors divided them among musical genres, Popular, Classical, and Film Music. Although this is quite legitimate, it gives primacy to the musical style, whereas I am most interested in whether there is some characteristic science-fictionality that every piece of sf-music has in common. Often a piece of music will display its association with sf through its title (e.g., Lamb’s “Alien” or Timo Maas’s “Ubik”) or its lyrics, or a performing ensemble’s or venue’s name (Jedi Knights, The Orb, Mouse on Mars, The Mars Lounge) – that is, in words that we can examine with traditional literary means. Or it makes its sf connections through visual associations, on posters, CD-flyers, logos, website graphics, etc., which we can approach through the analysis of visual design. But unless we believe that there can be something science-fictional in the non-discursive aspects of music claimed to be science-fictional, we are more or less stuck with the possibility that attaching science-fictional words and pictures to any sort of music at all makes the music sf.

Now, that strategy has its merits. On the face of it, there is no reason why John Williams’s score for Star Wars could not have been entitled Gulf Wars and used as a CNN anthem to back-up Darth Veder’s audio-logo.  Conversely, add sfictional lyrics to any tune and we may agree that we have a form of sf – most likely satirical, but certainly as legitimate as “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” and “The One-Eyed, One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater.” So it’s probably best to divide the field between music that depends on words to be sfictional, sf that depends on visual images, and music that claims, and aspires to be, purely musical sf. Even though this may sound unfashionably Aristotelian, there are advantages to establishing some aspects of sf that all media share, not to dissolve differences, but to have some points of reference for appreciating specific differences.

The first group, verbally-established sf, is the largest and most familiar. This would include all those texts whose associations depend on words: lyrics, librettos, and titles. The main test here is whether a piece will still evoke science-fictionality if we detach it from its verbal context. The second group would be those texts that depend on visual reinforcement – which would include most film-scores. The third group would consist of works that attempted to evoke science fictionality through sound and musical structure alone. I would love to be able to make these distinctions and find some form of pure sf-music, but the objection arrives before we can get started. Is there any such thing as “pure” music, except in the refined imaginations of the Central European gentry? We now think of music in very Aristotelian, if not Marxist, terms indeed, as an imitation of certain human activities. Even in Hungary, where Bartók established the protocols for collecting folk-music from the so-called “pure stream” (which meant old women in isolated villages) at the beginning of the 20th century, folk-music is now studied in terms of performance styles, dance variants, and the inter-relations among ethnic groups who exchange musical materials amongst themselves. The dominant paradigm now is to treat music as a material-social mimesis – of bodily rhythms, of social organization of bodies in movement, of the cultural construction of musical sound. We now are expected to hear the village dance in Haydn, operatic performance in Mozart sonatas, and a Tex-Mex barbecue in the free jazz of Ornette Coleman.

In other words, it’s quixotic to look for some pure science-fictional musicality, since we never get our music without some form of verbal or visual mediation that prefigures our responses. Still, I believe we can get closer to the element of science-fictionality even in the “impure” works by trying to identify how musicians try to evoke it in sound and musical structure specifically.

This project is part of a larger one, in which I’ve been attempting to describe sf in terms seven kinds of cognitive and aesthetic expectations – what I call the “seven beauties of sf.” In the roughest terms they are:

                1) fictive neosemes – signs that indicate newness; in literary fictions, these would be mainly fictitious neologisms and familiar words used in fictitious new contexts;

                2) fictive novums – imaginary historically unprecedented inventions or discoveries that change the course of human history;

                3) fictive futures – imaginary futures that place in relief the abstract historical or metahistorical pattern of the fable;

                4) fictive science – the invocation of an imaginary science that violates scientific knowledge in order to privilege play over logic;

                5) the science-fictional sublime – the sense of infinitude articulated by technology, most particularly in the depiction of technologies that surpass the capacities of their human creators to transform reality;

                6) the science-fictional grotesque – the sense of physical mutability and category-breakdown articulated and mediated by technology; and

                7) technosocial fable – essentially versions and inversions of three related narrative-structures: the Robinsonade, the epic of the technological handyman trying to subdue a femininely-charged archetype of inert nature; its inversion, the Gothic tale (the fable seen from the point of view of the feminine/feminized protagonist assailed by the technical man); and the utopia, the epic of realized rationality.

This is not much of a theory, in traditional terms; it’s more like a dumpster or a crazy-quilt. I do not claim that there are some deeper reductive principles to which these beauties can be reduced. In fact, I resist that. Let’s say that I have found that these qualities tend to go together in works considered sf – whatever the medium: literary fiction, film, computer games, and visual art. The question is: does it hold for music in any way other than through associations with sf in other media?

I believe we can make some appropriate substitutions:

1) Musical neosemes are sounds that indicate radical newness – alien, robotic, cyborg sounds that indicate strangeness either metaphorically (as in so-called “alien sounds” emanating from imaginary biologies or societies) or literally (such as “techno,” robotic, or computer sounds), which call attention to the new material conditions of producing sounds. Examples of these are synthesized sounds generated without harmonics, or with so many harmonics that it is clear they could not be produced without technological mediation (varieties of guitar feedback and distortion, for example). There are neosemic equivalents of pitches, as well as intensities, textures, extraordinary loudness, harmonics, and the like, all of which call attention to the technological production of music. These sounds also conjure up the fictional neosemy of an “alien” audience for whom the new sounds are customary – listeners of the future, extraterrestrials, robots, cyborgs, etc. The locus classicus of this constellation of effects is the soundtrack for Forbidden Planet. The film’s so-called “electronic effects” – a sign that the producers did not want to commit themselves to calling it music – have such an innovative role in the film that they have rarely been imitated. The film has no conventional music;  the diegetic action is accompanied by purely electronic patterns, embodying several kinds of neosemy. It is futuristic, alien, machine-generated, uncanny, and – inasmuch as it is a constant accompaniment – it expects the audience to become accustomed to it, and hence to become alien itself. This estrangement is then doubled in the action, when the electronic music becomes the preserved diegetic music of the Krell – who can stand as the archetype of science-fictional culture: aliens with a highly advanced machine civilization who are also metaphors for the future evolution of human beings. This is dramatically unlike most such diegetically embedded examples of future or alien music, in that it has already been established as the sonic atmosphere of the film, requiring the audience to view it as natural, rather than as peculiar.

Such neosonic elements are probably the most typically science-fictional aspects of sf music. Electronically synthesized sounds have been so distinctively different in the musical ecology from other kinds of sounds that they have naturally been associated with technological transformation. They reproduced, and originally functioned to denote, the workings of electronic machines. Many, if not most, of the early pieces that used such effects presented themselves as “space music,” and this tradition has continued unabated into contemporary dance-club and trip-hop culture. They are still sufficiently linked to such electronic functions that they are hard to assimilate into other kinds of music without importing futuristic connotations.  Even so, we shouldn’t expect this situation to last indefinitely. We can be made to think of other things with the right verbal or visual cues. One of the best examples of early space music, with all the conventional sonic evocations of travel through space, was entitled by its composer, Klaus Schulze, “Floating” – displacing the electronic effects from their original connotations to a more flexible and ambiguous set of associations. Similarly, hiphop and scratch culture have had such a pervasive influence on contemporary music that sounds once associated with futuristic technology now more often evoke the sonic language of our own time. No longer futuristic, they signify the contemporary.

2) Novums – to explore novums in purely musical terms, we need to think in terms of the history of music as the field in which novums occur. Sf rarely focuses on such micro-cultural changes as changes in musical style, especially in music itself, because the paradox often discussed in terms of film’s visual neosemes – i.e., that anything represented as futuristic is already present for the viewing audience and hence no longer really a sign of the future – is exaggerated in music. After all, there is no space between the suggestion of future music and the perception of music in the present moment. The diegetic and the nondiegetic are identical. The theramin, however, was a real exception, as was the synthesizer when it played tones with few overtones, and the rich supply of sampled electronic noises. This sense of historical surprise becomes dull with time. Usually, the musical novum involves either a narrated novum (i.e., in the lyrics or the title), accompanied by an appropriate epic accompaniment (e.g., Jefferson Airplane’s “Wooden Ships”) or soundtrack (Jimi Hendrix’s “1983,” Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”). The musical challenge is to create a sense of change in which the music tells the story of the change or in which the fusion of lyrics and music is equal (as in Lamb’s “Alien”).

3) Fictive futurism – the imaginary “logic” of the link between the present and the future in music. In strictly musical terms, this would involve the sense of the extension from the music of the present to the music of the future. In its petit bourgeois form, this is something like the musical finale of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where we are expected to believe that the extraterrestrials use not only Kodály’s system – not in itself a fatal choice, since Kodály’s system and the pentatonic base can be used to construct such chilled-universe pieces as the Khatchaturian adagio in 2001,  Bartók’s Music for Percussion and Celeste in The Shining, and Goldsmith’s Alien soundtrack – but that their full and fluid communication spins like an electronic Disney ensemble piece, a cosmic Dumbo. In a sense, the allegorical recuperation of Close Encounters occurs precisely when we hear the musical joke, and realize that the Mothership is an immense Disney music box, arching back to the musical toys it brought to life at the beginning of the movie, and beyond it, to the melodious machinery of Gepetto’s workshop. I guess I’m saying that in the duet between the Air Force and the Mothership, the film assimilates its sf element into regressive fantasies of childhood – a development reinforced by the spectacle of the Mothership flying off regally like a colossal fertilized egg.

In more sophisticated, artistically ambitious terms, the continuity will be with a form of music that already pretends to be, or poses as, a music of the future – some avant-garde art that seeks to justify itself by imagining that it is developed further, that it is the beginning of what people in the future will listen to. This is the origin of the Krell music in Forbidden Planet, with its evocations both of electronic music and of atonality, as it is in Kubrick’s use of Ligeti’s choral music in 2001. We are far more accustomed to seeing this imaginary projection in musically banal terms – the “alien jazz” played in the Star Wars bar-scene, the weak techno in the corresponding scene in Outland, and in Matrix, where the banality either reaches maximum or real humor, when we are faced with the prospect that in the film’s futuristic world young goth-punks still dance to Rob Zombie.

4) Fictive science – music alone has a hard time conveying fictive science, since there is hardly any art more detached from logical contemplation than music. One natural point of departure is music that emphasizes its technological rationality in electronic synthesis. This is hard to isolate as science-fictional, though, since electronic music has since its inception emphasized its techo-rational character without recourse to sf imagery. Alternatively, new music can linked to new technological access to previously unheard melodies, as in the case of the music of the spheres (i.e., electronic recordings of planetary vibrations, cosmic winds, etc., as in Terry Riley’s “Sun Rings”),  the music of radioactive decay, of molecular negentropy. This category is arguably the most difficult to attach directly to sf precisely because it is already so close to futuristic science, and hence does not require or seek the imprimatur of sf.

5) The technological sublime is manifest in new sounds and designs indicating technologically new vistas of the sublime. These could be illustrative (as in soaring guitar breaks), or constitutive, such as electronic sounds of Pink Floyd, The Orb, Hendrix, etc. The most characteristic technological sublime in music is the driving pulse of techno-styles, the regular, entrancing sound of ecstatic “tripping” in space – and the sense, regularly evoked by techno-artists, of the infinite variability of electronic sounds, which are freed from conventional physical constraints by their technology.  Arguably, this is the most fully developed, and perhaps most congenial, of the seven beauties for music. An interesting ironic example in this category is the famous Puccini Aria in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, in which a human voice is smoothly enhanced, in order to reach tones unreachable by the most supple coloratura.

6) Technological grotesque – monstrous sounds, viscous sounds, that break the established, expected rhythms of a piece – not only the beats, but the harmonic and melodic patterns. This is the use of sounds to create a sense of unexpectedly visceral, physical music clearly generated in ways that emphasize their difference from widely upheld human conventions about musical tone and form. Technologically grotesque music also involves transformations  or mutations of one kind of music into another, or the sharp incongruity of one level (harmonic, melodic, lyric, etc.) with another – all through the emphatic mediation of unfamiliar instruments that clearly evoke “un-natural” associations.

7) Techno-fable – here things get really interesting. In music, this would entail the dramatic construction – in strictly musical terms – of the following motifs:

•  techno-construction out of chaos [equivalent of the handyman]
• a pedal of fruitful unconsciousness (perhaps a beat) [representing the fertile corpse]
• a complementary weak motif [the willing slave]
• a counter-element (motif, melody, rhythm, etc.) with clear affinities with the handyman [the shadow mage]
• a point of return and rest [the wife at home]

or its Gothic mirror-images:

• an enchanted/captive main line
• an ominous, entrapping pedal/beat
• an ambivalent, but undermining, weakening motif
• a liberating, agonistic motif
• a home – either safe arrival or ambiguous threat.

All of these elements developed with neosemic sounds.

I haven’t explored the possibilities of utopian musical construction, but I would expect that it would involve circular form, highly defined cells or modules, evocations of certain historical styles, and symbolically-charged instrumentation.

Now this last category is pretty fanciful. I seem to be describing not the dramatic structure of sf-music, but a form of synthesizer sonata. On the one hand, I do not think every science-fictional text has all the beauties; on the other, I believe these motifs can be found in many pieces that identify themselves as sf, and indeed in musical terms – usually either in ironic or in elegiac moods. I believe Hendrix’s “1983” works this way. As far as film scores are concerned, we should be surprised when they do not work this way, since the dramatic structures of sf films do.

Now, with these categories and applications I am either making a very small claim – that music purporting to be sf follows certain kinds of conventions – or a very big one – that science fiction determines generic protocols for every medium it uses, including music, in very similar ways, i.e., that sf is a powerfully normalizing way of thinking. But then that’s the question every genre raises.