Tricia Sullivan
All material copyright Tricia Sullivan 2010
Why Music is Science Fiction
By Tricia Sullivan
The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote something that has stuck in my head for years. He suggested that because musical ‘intelligence’ confers no survival advantage, musical thinking is probably one of those happy accidents that come standard with a big cortex. Music serves no real purpose. It just is.
Now to me, that’s spooky. Because cognitively speaking, there’s a lot that language can’t do, but music can. I don’t like to think where we’d be without it.
For starters, there’s something singular about the way music stands guard over time. Painting works in two dimensions, sculpture in three; but music works in the fourth dimension. Sure, film moves through time, but as a narrative medium film seldom plays fast and loose with reality the way music does. As one of my fictional characters says, ‘Music doesn’t reference reality. Music creates reality.’
Building worlds and messing around with time. Sound familiar? SF makes a career out of doing what music does for free.
Music is also coded. The score (or CD) is not the sound. The sound can only happen in time. That makes music the most elusive of expressive media: before it’s been, it’s already gone.
It’s almost alive.
Musical experience is non-referential to four of our senses, and being nonverbal it’s also difficult to access through words, which we hold responsible for capturing sensory experience and subsequently constructing ideas. Have you ever felt that a piece of music did something to you-got at something-changed something-and yet you couldn’t talk about it in a satisfying way? I sure have. Talking about music tends to be unbearably mechanistic (a one-six-two progression in C minor) and therefore reveals little of what’s important. Or else it’s like talking about wine-you know, piquant with a burst of peach and a lazy Sunday afternoon finish. I mean: very nice, but…huh? Are we listening to the same plonk?
Of course, some people do manage to write meaningfully about music. Me, when I’m writing I’m pretty much doing music. I came to music late in adolescence and on top of that, my ears are a little ‘different’ from most people’s ears. And I mean, aside from sticking out at funny angles. They’re weird. So, with my weird ears, not only was I not going to Carnegie Hall, I wasn’t even going to make it in a post-punk band. I loved music, but I wasn’t going to get paid for doing it.
They pay me to write, though. So I do music by writing.
I sort of hear my books as I’m writing them. You can’t translate dance into poetry, or architecture into film, without profoundly altering the subject. I mean, really, you can’t translate at all: each medium handles its subject too differently. Similarly, there are aspects of human experience that music reaches, touches, and understands that are unreachable in forms other than music.
That’s why, when I write out of the musical part of myself, I have to write SF. Unlike many SF writers, who write out of a scientific idea (‘What if…?’), I write my way in. I use ‘scientific’ metaphors to try and put a shape to some internal thing which is presenting itself to me as intuited truth. My work moves from the unknown into the known.
When I write SF, I’m usually trying to make sense of a reality that, in my view, violates its own terms. A musical expression might accomplish this easily, but because I write prose I have to stretch hard to get there. But let’s face it: most writers are fantasists. The moment you commit metaphor, you are writing fantasy. All of the impulses that lead me to write fiction are the same impulses that, extended and hyperextended, produce science fiction. All fiction is a re-vision of reality; SF is just more radical in its perspective.
The key to both music and SF lies in opening unexplored places. Musical territory is hard to map, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, straddling the borderline between the concrete and abstract and enabling us to stretch beyond what we already know.
Accident? Well, that makes music even more SFnal. You gotta love it.
By Tricia Sullivan
The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote something that has stuck in my head for years. He suggested that because musical ‘intelligence’ confers no survival advantage, musical thinking is probably one of those happy accidents that come standard with a big cortex. Music serves no real purpose. It just is.
Now to me, that’s spooky. Because cognitively speaking, there’s a lot that language can’t do, but music can. I don’t like to think where we’d be without it.
For starters, there’s something singular about the way music stands guard over time. Painting works in two dimensions, sculpture in three; but music works in the fourth dimension. Sure, film moves through time, but as a narrative medium film seldom plays fast and loose with reality the way music does. As one of my fictional characters says, ‘Music doesn’t reference reality. Music creates reality.’
Building worlds and messing around with time. Sound familiar? SF makes a career out of doing what music does for free.
Music is also coded. The score (or CD) is not the sound. The sound can only happen in time. That makes music the most elusive of expressive media: before it’s been, it’s already gone.
It’s almost alive.
Musical experience is non-referential to four of our senses, and being nonverbal it’s also difficult to access through words, which we hold responsible for capturing sensory experience and subsequently constructing ideas. Have you ever felt that a piece of music did something to you-got at something-changed something-and yet you couldn’t talk about it in a satisfying way? I sure have. Talking about music tends to be unbearably mechanistic (a one-six-two progression in C minor) and therefore reveals little of what’s important. Or else it’s like talking about wine-you know, piquant with a burst of peach and a lazy Sunday afternoon finish. I mean: very nice, but…huh? Are we listening to the same plonk?
Of course, some people do manage to write meaningfully about music. Me, when I’m writing I’m pretty much doing music. I came to music late in adolescence and on top of that, my ears are a little ‘different’ from most people’s ears. And I mean, aside from sticking out at funny angles. They’re weird. So, with my weird ears, not only was I not going to Carnegie Hall, I wasn’t even going to make it in a post-punk band. I loved music, but I wasn’t going to get paid for doing it.
They pay me to write, though. So I do music by writing.
I sort of hear my books as I’m writing them. You can’t translate dance into poetry, or architecture into film, without profoundly altering the subject. I mean, really, you can’t translate at all: each medium handles its subject too differently. Similarly, there are aspects of human experience that music reaches, touches, and understands that are unreachable in forms other than music.
That’s why, when I write out of the musical part of myself, I have to write SF. Unlike many SF writers, who write out of a scientific idea (‘What if…?’), I write my way in. I use ‘scientific’ metaphors to try and put a shape to some internal thing which is presenting itself to me as intuited truth. My work moves from the unknown into the known.
When I write SF, I’m usually trying to make sense of a reality that, in my view, violates its own terms. A musical expression might accomplish this easily, but because I write prose I have to stretch hard to get there. But let’s face it: most writers are fantasists. The moment you commit metaphor, you are writing fantasy. All of the impulses that lead me to write fiction are the same impulses that, extended and hyperextended, produce science fiction. All fiction is a re-vision of reality; SF is just more radical in its perspective.
The key to both music and SF lies in opening unexplored places. Musical territory is hard to map, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, straddling the borderline between the concrete and abstract and enabling us to stretch beyond what we already know.
Accident? Well, that makes music even more SFnal. You gotta love it.