Alan Parsons’ daring attempt to soundtrack a book: “A revelation”
In a world where there seems to be nothing new under the sun, it’s startling when you come across glaring omissions in culture. Music and literature have been old stablemates since time immemorial, but there have been incredibly few attempts to marry the two in any true capacity. This felt like a challenge Alan Parsons was born to take on.
He is a man of daring projects, so much so that his solo moniker was The Alan Parsons Project. Prior to that, he had been a producer and sound engineer who helped to welcome rudimentary synths into The Beatles’ sound and was pivotal in orchestrating The Dark Side of the Moon. Yet, a few years on from these monuments in rock ‘n’ roll history, he was ready to head down his own novel path.
In 1976, he began work on his debut solo album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Naturally, given the experience he had in his locker from his storied build-up behind the mixing desk, this was never going to be an ordinary album. However, as you tick over to the second side of the record, you are greeted with an advancement that has, oddly, rarely been attempted since.
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a near-16 minute instrumental suite. But it is one with a supreme purpose in mind: he intended it to function as a soundtrack for the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name. The macabre book shook the world in 1839 with its stark gothic descent into madness, isolation, torturous familiar ties, and, of course, ghouls.
However, Parsons wasn’t merely trying to relay that in song—that had been done plenty of times before—he was creating an eerie accompaniment well over a century after the fact. “If you read the story while listening to the music then it’s quite a revelation,” he told Fred Dellar upon release. With a prelude, arrival, intermezzo, pavane, and the fall, all in orchestrated sequence, he matched the instrumentation and mood with the whims of Poe’s prose.
In other words, he created a soundtrack so that one would galvanise the other in a perfect tesselation of story and sound. The section considered ‘The Fall’, for instance, “Is supposed to represent that stringed instrument thing. It’s all Hungarian and Greek stringed instruments.” It’s a high and mighty crescendo that matches the dramatic metaphysics in Poe’s revered tale. It was an effort to create a fully immersive yet rudimentary cultural experience. And it is a triumph. It works.
So, aside from the odd banjo parp between chapters in the audiobook for Steve Martin’s stunning memoir or the sparse use of ambient synth by Nick Cave for The Death of Bunny Munro, why have there been so few attempts to marry music and literature since? After all, Parsons proved that it doesn’t have to be a distracting racket that makes it hard to read.
However, he did prove the tricky predicament that you have to read The Fall of the House of Usher in a shade over 16 minutes to get the full effect. Also, the fact that the album failed to sell particularly well perhaps proved that the need for a library to go along with the release is maybe not the best marketing. And so, this refreshing idea failed to give rise to a new form of music.
But as the monologue that appears on the 1987 remix of the record decrees: “Without music or an intriguing idea, colour becomes pallor, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are for but for a moment motionless.”
