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One, two, three, four-
And the universe came into being.
-Terry Pratchett
Music That Sounds Like Nothing You've Ever Heard Before
FANTASY IS A CURIOUSLY MUSICAL GENRE. FANTASY LITERATURE, CINEMA, television, and video games feature musical metaphors, the songs of manifold creatures, and elaborate soundtracks in order to sketch the atmosphere of fantastic landscapes, to highlight crucial events and to characterize alien languages and habits. Musical metaphors have been used to characterize personae, locations and events from Tinkerbell's name to the title of George R.R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-). It signifies qualities for whose description words alone are not enough, qualities that bear semblance to the otherworldly magic sometimes ascribed to music. Music suggests the possibility of another reality: a world or universe more beautiful, more harmonic, more brilliant than ours. The simple fact of its sound makes music lift the veil of the supernatural, the divine, the alien, or the occult world it originates from, making audible a fragment of that other world by traversing the timespace from then and there to here and now. Because of the otherworldly origins attributed to music, it is often described in fantasy literature as sounding like "nothing ever heard before." The musical laughter of the Brides in Bram Stoker's Dracula, for instance, is explicitly inhuman:
[Dracula's brides] whispered together, and then they all three laughed-such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. (Stoker 42)
Dracula's brides reveal their fantastic nature in their "musical" whispering and laughing. When such creatures make music themselves, for instance by singing, their otherworldliness becomes even more evident. This is illustrated, for instance by the post-dinner musical performance of a family of Martian descendants in Paul Magrs's Never the Bride:
I sat bemused as they launched into the weirdest singing I have ever heard. Their voices were high-pitched and fluting: they rose entwined together in the most extraordinary harmonies. The words were unintelligible, but there was something compelling about the piece. It seemed avant-garde, futuristic, even-like nothing I'd ever heard before. (Magrs 64)
Fantastic music, in short, is...