How To Add Beautiful Music To Your Fiction

You know the well-worn adage about how to get to Carnegie Hall. But as an author, you don’t have to practice for thousands of hours to enrich your fiction with mood-setting music.
Here are 4 examples of adding an auditory component to your work without binding a CD inside your book cover.
Including music in your fiction is a variation on the advice “Show, don’t tell.” Here, we’re doing “Play, don’t narrate.” And it works magic:
1. Play music in the background. Tobias is on his way home from college for Christmas. He’s sitting in a coffee shop, gulping black coffee, and postponing the phone call he has to make. For reasons the reader will soon discover, he’s dreading this family visit. In this brief example, the cheery background music provides a contrast between the character’s blue mood and the holiday season:
“Toby!” a voice boomed from the open door. A man stepped into the coffee shop. “Tobias Hillyer.” The thirty or so customers all stopped talking at once. “Holly Jolly Christmas” warbled on the soundtrack.
When you “play” a familiar song like this in a story or a novel, your readers engage their imaginations. Everyone’s heard this Christmas song, and most readers will hear this jingle playing endlessly in their mind’s ear. One short sentence makes your story more real and more involving.
2. Relive a character’s past life through music. In this short example, Seth, a grieving widower, has fallen in love with Claire, an occupational therapist in a wheelchair. She was a ballet dancer with an international career until an accident severed her spinal cord. In the following scene, she’s upstairs in Seth’s house, right after she has moved in with him. You don’t have to hear the music to understand that she’s reminiscing:
Arriving home one Saturday with bags of groceries, he found that the wheelchair lift had been installed, and Claire had gone upstairs on her own. He could hear her rolling about, arranging things, humming to herself. She had put on a CD of some ballet music he couldn’t identify.
3. Define a character through music. In the short story Prodigy, Dale and Pauline discover that their four-year-old son Julian, who isn’t doing very well in nursery school, is a piano prodigy. Anyone who has ever heard a child learning music will hear the tunes in this example:
Stepping out of the elevator on his return home, Dale heard the familiar songs from Volume 1 of the Suzuki Piano School as he walked down the long hall: “French Children’s Song,” “London Bridge,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.” He stepped in time to the simple, pleasing melodies, more appealing than he remembered from before his trip. The CD player must have been turned up pretty loud. “Au Clair de la Lune” was playing as he turned his key in the lock. He propped his briefcase against his wheeled suitcase and gaped.
It wasn’t the CD player. It was Julian.
The boy was sitting straight up, his feet in blue crew socks on a stool, his hands in impeccable position, no music in front of him. Julian finished his song, waited exactly as long as the pause on the CD, and began to play “Long, Long Ago.” He made no mistakes and played every note as if originating the melody himself, from an adult mind within the body of a child who could barely tie his shoes. He played better than the CD. Pauline was sitting on the living room sofa. Their eyes met, and they grinned giddily. Julian stopped only after he had finished all the songs in Volume 1.
“I play music, Daddy!” Julian pivoted on the quilted piano bench, cranked up as high as it would go, and jumped into Dale’s arms. Dale patted the boy’s curly, brown hair.
“It was beautiful, son.”
4. Paint a scene with music. A wedding scene or other emotional celebration calls for inspiring music in ample quantities. The trick is to interweave the playing of music with actions of your characters. In this example, Theodore, a music teacher, entertains at his sister-in-law’s wedding. His musical children, Gabriel and Beatrix, sing along:
For the recessional, Theodore played “Hornpipe” from the Water Music suite by Handel on the organ, while the couple and the wedding party filed to their seats at the back of the sanctuary. Beatrix scattered more flower petals after the bride, and then went to join her father and brother on the dais for one last song. Delicious smells were drifting in from the kitchen down the hall.
Flashing a party smile, Theodore announced, “In honor of the marriage of our sister, Carmela, and our brother, Tobias, we’d now like to perform our own special interpretation of ‘Higher and Higher’ by Jackie Wilson.”
Everyone cheered while he strummed the opening chords on his guitar. Then, in daring dissonances that clashed and sliced the air in interlocking, three-part harmonies of musical fireworks, they sang all the verses of “Higher and Higher” with exhilaration and toe-tapping fervor, accompanied by Theodore’s elegant guitar playing and the children’s dance steps.
The audience was on its feet, clapping, singing, stepping, and believing. After a prolonged standing ovation, Theodore called out, “Thank you, thank you. The DJ is ready and waiting for us in the banquet room. All right, everybody, now let’s party!”
Experiment with music in your fiction. Any kind of music works. Music adds its own voice to your story or novel, lending credence to your characters, their thoughts, and their deepest emotions.