Fantasy, and Fantasy Music

[filkertom]

singingpatient asked me how I would define fantasy, and for that matter fantasy music.

It's an interesting question. The first part, fantasy, is to my mind reasonably straightforward: Fantasy is what is not. Now, this is not to say that it couldn't be, shouldn't be, won't be; it's just that, right now, it isn't. My closing my eyes and thinking about stretching out poolside at Disney World's Animal Kingdom Lodge is a memory, a daydream, a replay, whatever; it happened. My thinking about stretching out poolside at the Grand Floridian Resort is a fantasy; it hasn't happened. (My thinking about doing so with Angelina Jolie gets into the "pipe dream" category.)

You might say that's too tight a definition; certainly you could say something about how plausible something is. But even that has two facets, because "plausible" can be read as either how possible something is, or how likely something is. It actually is possible that I might someday stay at the Grand Floridian Resort; it's not very likely because [a] it's expensive as hell and [b] it's not much to my taste. Visiting's nice. But it is "plausible", because it could actually be done. On the other hand, while it is physically possible, i.e., we're both alive, on the same planet, etc., etc., my chances with Angelina are pretty much zippety-doo-dah. (I'm noticing a distinctly Disney trend about this post. Might as well run with it.)

Another aspect is the debate about the difference between science fiction and fantasy fiction, where the workings of the one must be known and used if not detailed and the workings of the other include some unknown or unknowable force called something like "magic". Star Wars was, bluntly, a fantasy epic, until midichlorians were introduced as a rationale for a person's manipulation of the Force, at which point it became a science fiction story. (A stinker of one, but still.)

For our purposes, then, I think fantasy involves magic. Therefore, to explore the musical part of the question, Mozart's The Magic Flute, Wagner's Ring Cycle, Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe, Gordon Bok's "Peter Kagan and the Wind", Stan Rogers' "Giant", and Archie Fischer's "The Witch of the Westmoreland" would all fit the category handily. Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker does as well, as it tells a fantasy story in dance. Beethoven's Sixth Symphony does not, even though the context with which most people are familiar with it is the Greek mythological setting of Disney's Fantasia. Continuing in that vein, "Part Of Your World" and "Kiss the Girl" from The Little Mermaid are both fantasy, although for different reasons -- the one is the lament of a mermaid who wishes to be human, the other all the reasons why a boy might want to kiss a girl -- and "Les Poissons", an ode to violent cooking, is not.

Similarly, the musical Little Shop of Horrors, wild and crazy though it is, is not fantasy but science fiction. The attempt at an explanation that might be arrived at scientifically -- an intelligent, mobile, hemophiliac race of plants -- may be way off the charts, but I bet someone has tried to write it up for Traveller. (I remember fondly a book of monsters for Runequest, which featured an "anthropophage". It was a thinly-disguised attempt at a rational write-up of H.R. Giger's Alien.)

What do you think? What counts as "fantasy" for you? "Fantasy music"?

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Off topic:

Your fans think you (and The FuMP (http://www.thefump.com/) crew) are muttering "Only ONE? (http://www.rpmchallenge.com/)"

[catalana.livejournal.com]

This is a really nice analysis of the topic. Two thumbs up from the philosopher in the corner. *grin*

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Tenk yoh, tenk yoh. See you at Cap?

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Seems to me, "fantasy" as music or literature ought to have its definition limited to those things which could not be presented as realistic fiction; otherwise, all fiction from Austen to Zola would count as fantasy. Seems to me, "If I ran the Circus" is fantasy, while "If I Were a Rich Man" is not.

I do count as "fantasy" any historical fiction that presupposes key facts from the past that are different from actual history (eg, Socrates refused the hemlock and escaped from Athens; the Confederate States of America survived as an independent nation). In distinguishing "science fiction", how important is the plausibility of the explanation given? Does it make a difference to you whether the Confederacy won the US Civil War because Pickett's charge succeeded, or because racist time travelers from the future delivered howitzers to General Lee?

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Well, remember two interesting facets of "realism": First, there are dreamlike fantasies, If I Ran The Circus and the works of Lord Dunsany just off the top of my head, and there are "realistic", "believable" fantasies. The key word is verisimilitude, the appearance of truth.

Hand in hand with that is emotional resonance, character identification: feeling what they feel. Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass get much of their power from Alice, representing us, trying to make sense of this goofball world she's fallen into. Harry Potter, oppressed and abused and unloved throughout his childhood, suddenly finds out that he is a wealthy wizard and subject of a prophecy. Miles Vorkosigan (yes, I know, SF, not fantasy) is everybody who ever got dissed by athletes for studying too much or being too weak or skinny or slow or different.

Dorothy Gale and Frodo just want to go home.

Regarding the latter, I'm a fan of some alternate histories. Good god, I'm a Harry/Hermione shipper -- do you have any freaking idea how much fanfic is out there just on that? Just "first kiss" fics? (Don't go looking for Snape/Harry or Harry/Draco unless you're not doing anything for a month.) The writing, the plot, is everything... and you have to take it on a story-by-story basis. Sherlock Holmes Through Time And Space is pretty cool. I love the Nantucket books by S. M. Stirling. I would point out that the examples you give are two different stories, and it matters how each one is handled. Heck, one of the best alternate histories I've ever seen is the framing fantasy around Spinrad's The Iron Dream, where Hitler dabbled in radical politics for a little while but then emigrated to the US and became a noted science fiction illustrator, editor, and writer.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

The About Time books provide as useful a set of definitions as I've seen.

"Sf/fantasy" is stories about things that are, as far as we know right now (or at the point in time when the story is set), impossible in the real world. (This would include history having gone a different way from the way we know it went.)

Within that overall category, sf is broadly about humanity's relationship with its tools, and fantasy about humanity's relationship with its symbols.

[andpuff.livejournal.com]

I like that broad definition a lot!

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

You will probably find all kinds of alternate definitions of fantasy music, but I'd like to state a general guide: if the music has a lot of bells, chimes, flutes or harps in it, it just might be fantasy music.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Once when I was working in a lab, a Chinese graduate student asked me what the difference was between science fiction and fantasy.

I had to think about it a bit, and then answered that fantasy was defined by the presence of working magic.

So, for example, I think "Dream Park" is science fiction; even though the setting is (at least partly) fantasy-like, the magic is all technologically generated. But most (maybe all) of Charles De Lint's books are fantasy, even though in many cases the setting is the modern day world, because there are uncanny beings that can work real magic.

I think of science fiction, on the other hand, as a story where the plot is driven by the consequences of some scientific or technical advance. Stephen Gould's book "Wildside" would be an example of science fiction set in the modern day, but one could conceive of science fiction set in the past (steampunk pops to mind, but a story where the plot is driven by the social consequences of the discovery of flint-knapping among a group of Neanderthals would count too) or even in a fantasy world, as well as the more traditional future setting. There is indeed some overlap here, as science fiction can also be defined as a (usually future) high-tech setting for a story, in which the plot is driven by something else--a mystery or a war story, for instance.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter.