Music, Soul of the Universe by Allen Stroud

In reality, ‘A’ was never likely. I was intelligent and attentive at school, but children who got the top marks in Music were all learning instruments outside of school and had been for years. I studied classical music every night, practiced the pieces my piano tutor had set me and when it came to the exam results, found that I had managed to do enough to get a ‘ C ’. Of all my GCSE grades, this was the lowest, but it was the one I was most proud of.

Additionally, my compositional skills were something I had more success with. I wrote instrumentals for one of the final school plays and continued to write small pieces at home. However, my Yamaha PSR 400 didn’t have anywhere for me to save my work, so written arrangements had to be finished and recorded to tape or the keyboard left on (sometimes overnight).

After school, my interest in writing music remained. I moved up from the Yamaha to a Technics KN 1200, a keyboard I still own and write much of my music on. This came with a 16-track internal recorder and a disk drive, which allowed me to revisit works and refine them. I wrote a whole slew of pieces on this keyboard. when I took A-level Performing Arts, I was the only member of the class to choose the music specialist option and wrote a set of pieces based on John Adams’ Shaker Loops (1978).

I then joined forces with Rathe Holligum and wrote a set of pieces for the Theatre version of Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man - a play I adapted and co-directed in 1996.

The days I spent with Rathe were probably some of the most eye opening for me in terms of judging my compositional abilities. It was very clear that he was much better at writing and creating music that I was. He used notation software and two Roland JV 1080 sound modules. At the time, his setup for composing seemed entirely alien and advanced to me.

I wrote a few more pieces for the final videos I produced on my university degree, in 1999, and one of my fellow students used a piece. It was at this point I began to work with samples, arranging them appropriately with my own recorded sections and using a computer to create the arrangement.

After this, I became a much less frequent composer. I have always been a very self-critical person, particularly when it comes to my creative works. Up until this point, to me, my music was an outlet. I could listen to it in comparison to other works and clearly see that mine was inferior. I didn’t mind that, as the pastime of composing I find very relaxing and energising at the same time.

Then in 2006/2007, I was writing a live role-playing game and decided to introduce it with a short film. The soundtrack for this film was something I composed and then extended to produce a 46 min fantasy orchestral work. EOS: World of Dawn was a massive step forward in the quality of my work and similar to my writing, I feel that at this stage, I had found a level on which I was writing music that I could accept as being good.

After completing this album, the music equipment went away once more (partly due to moving house). I continued to collect samples for my library but produced no pieces of music. My catalogue of pieces became part of a royalty-free collection to be used by my students. One graduate used my work in his dissertation documentary film and won an award for it, which pleased me no end.

So, when in 2013, I undertook to write an album for Elite: Lave Revolution, as part of the Kickstarter for the licence, I was nervous. Not because I was worried about writing an album, more because I’d stepped away from composing. I rebuilt my music centre in the loft of my house and linked it up to my desktop computer. I dusted off my samples library, upgraded my arranging software and set to work.

What followed were really productive months of energised creativity. When I ran out of ideas, I had Chris Jarvis asking me for input into his audio drama, Escape Velocity. These had to be written fast to accommodate his release deadlines, so I’d write a very short piece for him and then work on it for a couple of days afterwards, expanding the themes. Or, I’d reach a part in the writing of Elite: Lave Revolution and get an idea, dash off to the loft and come back down at 2am with a few minutes of extra work. The result of this is a 55-minute album, which you can find on Amazon Music. This formed the soundtrack for the audio drama version of Elite: Lave Revolution. You can listen to an extract here: http://laveradio.com/podcasts/Lavecon_Lave_Revolution_Looping_Trailer.mp3

Since then, I’ve kept writing music whenever I getthe chance. People approach me or I approach them. Occasionally, I’m writing pieces for my own fiction and occasionally it’s for other people’s fiction.

Music for Audio Books

There’s a variety of ways an audio of a story can be arranged. A traditional audio book is a narration with introductory and ending music. An audio-illustrated narration has some music at key moments, sound effects, maybe a few different voices and such. Then there’s a full audio drama, the kind you might be used to listening to on Radio 4. This has a fullcast, with each role spoken by a different actor and an effort made to make the different locations sound authentic.

As a composer, each type of arrangement presents different challenges.

I try to think thematically. There might be specific concepts and elements, like space opera scenes, or dystopian city scapes, or epic fantasy quests. All of these have cinematic music that is associated with them. Vangelis’ Bladerunner soundtrack, complete with pitch bended synths and dissonance invokes images of futuristic urban decay. James Horner’s work on Star Trek, instantly transports me into a clash of huge spacefaring warships. Howard Shore immediately brings the listener back to Middle-Earth, etc.

Usually, people have asked me to compose them some music because they have heard something else I’ve done and liked it. That suggests what I’ve written has worked forthem in some way, helping to illustrate the audio drama in their imaginations. That’s what I’m trying to do really. In away, music can be the equivalent of visual story telling for audio drama, in that it can illustrate a particular moment. In Escape Velocity Season 1 Episode 2 at 9 minutes 7 seconds, there is a particular moment where this happens –

http://laveradio.com/podcasts/escape_velocity/escape_velocity_remix_episode02_128k.mp3

The moment in the scene is where a character first looks into the depths of space, and the music has to represent that, helping the listener imagine what they can see. This isn’t solely down to me, the editor has assembled the scene and chosen where to put the music, but when my music offers something that helps you put the scene in your head, I’m doing the job right.

Other sequences are about matching the pace of the scene. Driving beats or bass rhythms can underscore action sequences and moments of high tension. Without visual clues to work with, audio has to do a lot of work with the dialogue. So, using the music to maintain the pace of a scene despite a lot of narration from a character, is a goodway to do try and keep things moving without being overly obtrusive. Another illustration of this in Escape Velocity Season 2 Episode 5, No Quarter Given at 7 minutes 58 seconds – http://laveradio.com/podcasts/escape_velocity/escape_velocity_s2_episode05.mp3

Other narrators work differently with my music. The current audio drama series, The Dex Legacy, written by Emily Inkpen and produced by Chris Gregory of Alternative Stories and Fake Realities, makes use of a theme tune track with a selection of variations and incidental music that I have provided. Gradually, we are building up a collection of Dex Legacy music that they can use, and the process is quite organic. Either there will be a theme Emily or Chris would like me to explore, or I will come up with something and send it to them. I’m not as involved in the story process as I might have been before, but that’s actually a positive in my busy life right now and getting to listen to what they’ve done with my ideas is a nice treat on a Friday when each new episode is released.

Music as Part of My Writing Process

Music plays a significant part of the lives of most of us and also with genre readers. Many readers like to know what music writers were listening to when writing and increasingly writers discuss their musical influences. Many of my novels have scenes in them that were inspired by the music I was listening to at the time. I find there is nothing quite like listening to Thomas Bergersen, Hans Zimmer, Vangelis, or Enigma as a catalyst for my imagination in a particularly dramatic moment I am working on. Many writers have playlists specifically for writing to help them concentrate, visualise and describe the vista or the events as they transpire.

As a composer who is often working in two media at the same time, the creative works tend to express and inspire each other. When I write, I am mostly (as described) a‘pantser’, but I will often have a small scene list that I tick off so as to keep a guide on where I am going. Sometimes that scene list will inspire me to write music. I then go back to write the scene, put the music track on and am transported into the moment.

An example of this dual process is a track like ‘Gallant Cremation’ which portrays the final moments of a spaceship as it burns up in the atmosphere of a planet. The music was written first before I wrote the moment in the book. In the end, the way the story played out was that the only description of the crash was the musical piece. The novel narrates the moments before and the aftermath, as the protagonist, Pietro Devander, was unconscious during the crash itself. You can find the track on Amazon Music in the Lave Revolution album (search for 'Allen Stroud'). 

More recently, I’ve been working on writing my novel sequence, the Fractal Series, published by Flame Tree Press. This began in 2020 with the novel, Fearless. Since publication, I started composing music inspired by the stories. The sequel novel, Resilient, was launched at Eastercon 2022. Flame Tree have been very encouraging about the music I’m working on and there are plans to use it as part of the series.

In this situation, I’ve completed the written work and am revisiting it to write music that is re-invoking the moments of the novel. This has given me the opportunity to go back and imagine the scenes, locations and characters to capture what I described and visualised as I was drafting the chapters.

The revisit allows me to consider the emotive qualities of the writing. Coming back to the story after a period of time makes it fresh and allows me to reassess the key scenes froman imaginative point of view as a composer. It also allows me to create music that might get used if the story is to be adapted into one of the audio formats mentioned at the start. In a sense I’m putting together the components that express the emotive qualities of the story. The music reinforces the feelings I’m trying to convey in those moments of the narrative. The experience of coming back to the text after it is finished gives that process some clarity and having experienced the adaptation process before, I can see where an audio producer might want to make more than one use of a specific mood, using elements of a track again to draw the listener back into the same emotional space.

Growing as a Composer

As I’ve written more music, my loft studio has grown. Three synthesisers are now supplemented by a soft synths computer and the main arranger/editing machine. Twenty-five years ago, I was trying to make music that sounded orchestral and epic. At times, the sounds would let me down, the guitars didn’t sound like guitars, the strings didn’t sound like strings. These days, many of the best sound modules of the last twenty years are available second hand, or as a digital pack that can be loaded into a computer. New programs use a selection of recorded samples from some of the best musicians, bands and orchestras in the world. These can be played on a MIDI keyboard as individual notes, chords or sequences. Keyboard players like me are not limited by our skills as performers. Complicated piano parts can be recorded and layered together.

For me, the advances in technology have given me a larger palette to work from. There are a variety of ways I can approach making a track, linking it to other tracks onan album and creating variations. As a poor pianist, my skills haven’t improved, but with access to so many more instruments and wonderful sounds, I am able to realise more of my creative ideas in music. However, I still work the same way as I did twenty-five years ago, building my music tracks layer upon layer until they are finished. What I have noticed is that my motivation has also evolved. At the start I made music solely as a hobby and creative expression in and of itself.  Now, it has become something more focused and meaningful to me, particularly when it engages with other creative works, the stories other people have written, or the ones I have worked on myself.

Science Fictional instrumental music is creative content that can add so much to the stories of a writer. Finding a composer who can make work that helps you spark the imagination of your reader, helping them be transported to your fictional future, or alternative world, can enrichen the experience of a book in any form. It can also inspire the writer, in a reflexive process, helping with the creation of more science fiction stories.

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