Musical Influences on Writing

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Musical Influences on Writing

I’m not sure how many other authors are greatly influenced, or not, by music. For myself, music plays a very important role in helping me to visualize the environment I’m creating, as well as set the tone of a particular scene. This enormous influence is one of the reasons I mentioned in the afterword of From Mountains of Ice my preferred music list when I was writing the novel.
Unfortunately, one reader felt that because I listened to the soundtrack from Gladiator I cloned the movie.

My response was, that the sound track for Gladiator inspired me had more to do with the mood Lisa Gerrard sets with her remarkable voice, than with memory of the film itself. It should be noted it is Lisa Gerrard’s voice, once again, in the Dead Can Dance music that I found utterly compelling and of inspiration. The Pan’s Labyrinth soundtrack was also very much an influence, not because of the film, but because of the haunting and startling quality of much of the music, as was Russian Easter by the St. Petersburgh Chamber Choir. That I listened to the latter didn’t mean there was a religious or Orthodox Christian influence; it meant the music itself, the mood it evoked, moved me.

For example, there is a scene about a third of the way into the novel, in which Sylvio (the protagonist) enters the Temple of Nerezza (his country’s patron goddess and goddess of death). In this scene he watches his reflection flicker in the red marble of the columns and walls, feels the heat of hundreds of candles lit on Nerezza’s altar. When I wrote that scene I listened over and over again to Chant of the Paladin from The Serpent’s Egg CD, by Dead Can Dance.

Before that, when Sylvio makes his way up the avenue of temples, there is a carnival scene that plays out in street vendors, whores, bawdy puppet shows, oracles and supplicants. If you really want to get the feeling of this scene you need to listen to my inspiration, Ullyses by Dead Can Dance, The Serpent’s Egg.

And just a little later on, when Sylvio enters the ossuary where the dead Principessa Viviana lies, you should listen to Song of Sophia from the same album, and later still during Carmelo’s peregrination to the Temple of Nerezza for the festival and his rededication to the goddess, Indus, from Dead Can Dance’s Spiritchaser would put you in the same atmosphere I envisioned when writing the scene.

In the scene where Sylvio wakes up from his ordeal in the mountains, and finds what has been done to his body and realizes the full import of his situation, the soundtrack from Pan’s Labyrinth, A Book of Blood, very much carries the despair and futility of the moment and was my touchstone for the scene. Then, when Sylvio returns to Simare, a complete cucullatus, and gathers the dead in his wake to bring Carmelo to justice, the sweeping sadness and mystery of The Fairy and the Labyrinth from Pan’s Labyrinth brought me to tears throughout those passages, evoking the overwhelming weight of that section.

Just a few insights for you into the writing of From Mountains of Ice. I hope you will find this of inspiration.
10
Nov 2009
By Lorina StephensBooks, From Mountains of Ice4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Writing about the WW1 era in my previous two novels, and now the 1920s for my latest book, I use the lyrics of popular songs of that time for dramatic effect and in the development of relationships between characters. An American ragtime historian and award-winning performer created CDs of the tunes mentioned in the books – soundtracks for the novels. For the latest one, he actually composed a piece in the style of that time, for a fictional Broadway musical that one of my characters has written. Music certainly does help to evoke an era and mood!
    Gabriele Wills

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