Classical Music for Sci-Fi: Perfect Soundtrack Pairings

Science fiction seems to have more interesting outlets these days than ever before. Want your local neighbourhood but with beings from a parallel world? Perhaps you want The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross or The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. A completely separate world, but with our-world-characteristics? Then it’s the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. Stories of adventurous girls who attend their final years of school in a balloon floating over Dartmoor, learning the dangerous arts? That would be Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series.

Now, what music would you listen to for this? A composer such as György Ligeti might spring to mind first, so for Gail Carriger’s first book, Etiquette and Espionage, we suggest the waltz movement of Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1. As the tempo indication spells out: Tempo di valse, moderato, con eleganza, un poco capriccioso – Allegretto, un poco gioviale (Waltz tempo, moderate, elegant, a little capricious into an Allegro that’s a little jovial) and so we have Sophronia, learning the skills of society, but in a balloon-based school that’s prey to air pirates and sudden downings.

Gail Carriger: Finishing School series

György Ligeti: String Quartet No. 1, “Metamorphoses nocturnes” – Tempo di valse, moderato, con eleganza, un poco capriccioso – Allegretto, un poco gioviale – (Parker Quartet, Ensemble)

For Discworld, we have to create the chaotic world of Ankh-Morpork. Who better than Leonard Bernstein, that ultimate arbiter of music about New York? Something’s Coming, arranged for brass band, from his musical West Side Story, captures the activities, the noise, the personalities of the city. You can just see CMOT Dibbler in the middle of all this, selling his sausages.

Melvyn Grant: CMOT Dibbler in Where’s My Cow

Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story: Suite (arr. for brass band) – II. Something’s Coming (Center City Brass Quintet, Ensemble)

For Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, I think we want a bit of Bartók and his Night Music. As Thomas Nightingale and Peter Grant make their way around the fae side of London, who knows what might come out of the dark?

Ben Aaronovitch: Rivers of London series

Béla Bartók: Szabadban (Out of Doors), BB 89: IV. The Night’s Music (Elisabeth Klein, piano)

Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series combines, as he says, H.P. Lovecraft’s horror, Len Deighton’s spy novels, and a lot of workplace humour. Everyone will find something in poor Bob Howard’s daily travails with IT problems and applied computational magic, combining databases and fighting the dark arts. Composer David Hackbridge Johnson puts this into his piano music.