L.Last year Taylor Swift’s album Evermore featured two prominent literary allusions: the Rebecca-inspired Tolerate It and Happiness, a break-up song referring to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
After news that Dolly Parton’s debut novel will be released along with her new album, it seems that the fiction-inspired music is having its time.
The scores for the screen adaptations of books have enjoyed steady sales for years, with Wendy Carlos’ and Rachel Elkind’s soundtrack for The Shining (1980) due for a new vinyl release later this month. And authors write music that has existed for decades into their work: Sean Hughes’ novel The Detainees, which died in 1997, featured a vengeful antique dealer who got upset after being pushed into a wedding gift mosh pit.
The label can be summed up in one sentence: soundtracks for books on tape
The Scottish micro-label Bibliotapes has turned literature-inspired music into a whole business. The label’s goal – to ask musicians to compose new scores for classical novels – is an idea so simple it could almost be a lucky coincidence. Stuart McLean, who runs it, suggests that it is.
“There wasn’t a big plan. The label can best be summed up in one sentence: soundtracks for books on tape, ”writes McLean.
“After I mentioned the idea of book soundtracks on Twitter, I was sent one for CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew by Ioan Morris, who composed many of the Doctor Who soundtracks for Big Finish’s audio adaptations.”
The label has now released eight other soundtracks to novels, including Audio Obscura’s pulsating score for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Rupert Lally’s brooding woodwind compositions for John Wyndham’s Day of Triffids, and the Electronica prepared by Twenty-Three Hanging Trees (and since then with Kurt Vonnleegut’s Cat’s Crad selected by Meadows Records).
Bibliotapes only releases its soundtracks in cassette form (McLean “never made sense of holding onto anything long after the physical copies were sold” and “cassettes are faster to make and distribute” than vinyl), but the artists themselves kept their music digital available through Bandcamp.
Book-addicted music fans have definitely grabbed the soundtracks – all physical releases of Bibliotapes have long been sold out. The attraction of the cassettes also lies in the fact that they are marketed as a kind of collector’s item: each soundtrack has original covers in the style of the Pelikan paperback books of the 1960s.
And some of the writers have listened to the soundtracks of their books. Susan Cooper, author of the children’s folk horror novel The Dark Is Rising, has apparently sent positive feedback to composer Rob Colling, known as Handspan, after he released his album based on her novel.
There’s clearly an appetite for albums like this, and McLean isn’t the only one finding ways to combine music with literature. Booktrack, an audio production service, believes that “sound beyond the spoken word gives us an opportunity to deepen our experiences with the stories and worlds we build in our imaginations” and offers bespoke compositions and scores for Kenneth Branagh’s reading of Frankenstein, in his online shop.
Meanwhile, Frances Castle, illustrator and curator of the record label Clay Pipe, has created an ongoing graphic novel series called Stagdale, for which she composes the score.
As with Bibliotapes, the emphasis is on physical releases – their story of displaced Londoners negotiating 1970s village life isn’t available digitally – but it’s hard to come up with a more fitting soundtrack than the scintillating instrumentals on the included three-track download to introduce.
Perhaps one day Audible or Spotify will find a way to offer a listening experience that combines music with novels (Audible has already dipped its toe in the water with its sound-designed “immersive” original dramas). For now, however, it is up to small labels like Bibliotapes to close this gap in the market. After a break of more than a year (“The tapes are running out at the supplier’s because of the literal covers”) Bibliotapes is back: This week it released a soundtrack for the Strugatsky brothers’ roadside picnic. It remains to be seen whether the concept of the label will continue to prevail (could publishers and literary agents soon sell the music adaptation rights to novels as they currently do the filming rights?).