The Music of the Planes

You want gratuitous fluff? Here it is.

One of the common ways it seems that people with a RPG hobby waste time is posting to newsgroups or creating web pages listing musical inspiration for sundry games or settings. Frequently, these lists are heavily tilted towards rock music (for reasons spelled out nicely in Derek Percey's list at the end of the In Nomine core rules book). This list is a little different. Here, I list one or two pieces of classical music which I think fit very well with certain of the Outer planes. I'm a big fan of classical music; it probably has something to do with having played the violin since I was five years old.

The Outlands

Beethoven, Sympony #6

...the whole thing. Leave any movements out and you don't have the proper balance.

Dvorak, Symphony #9 ("From the New World")

Especially the second movement.

Mt. Celestia

Saint-Saens, Sympony #3, 4th movement

It starts with an organ blast, and quickly works its way into a line that sounds like a hymn. The folks who made the movie Babe knew that this was suitably grandiose music about the triumph of the individual, and so it fits Mt. Celestia quite well. It's got the power and the bombast, together with the heavenly strains and choirs of angels.

Widor, Toccatta from Symphony #5 for Organ

Bytopia

Copeland, "Fanfare for the Common Man"

Sums it up pretty well.

Copeland, "Appelachian Spring"

The Shaker Hymn fits very well here. What is it with Copeland and this plane?

Elysium

J.S. Bach, "Air on the G-string" from Suite No. 3

I'm having a hard thinking of a more suitably peaceful piece of music.

Stravinsky, "Pastorale"

Originally written in 1907 for soprano and piano, in 1933 he transcribed it for violin and piano. A very peaceful piece of music that KDFC used to use when it would sign off for the night at midnight back when I was in high school (in the first half of the 1980's).

The Beastlands

Saint-Saens, "Carnival of the Animals"

For the name if no other reason!

Arborea

Tchaikovsky, Sympony #6, 3rd movement

It certainly fits for the Sensates, and it's not too far off for the Greek powers. It's jolly, upbeat, and is the one movement that seems to be about enjoying life in the middle of a symphony entitled "The Pathetique."

Mozart, Overture to "The Magic Flute"

Ysgard

Beethoven, Symphony #5

It would seem I'm pretty stuck on the Beethoven Symphonies. That's true in real life too.

Holzt, "Jupiter" from The Planets

The perfect counterpoint to the similar piece listed for Acheron.

Pandemonium

Berlioz, "Symphony Fantastique"

...especially where it starts to really get intense.

The Abyss

Prokofiev, "Dance of the Knights" from "Romeo and Juliet"

...or, at least, the first section of it. The title doesn't sound right, but this is a piece of music you might recognize even if you don't know much classical music. It is rather severe and ominous sounding.

Carceri

Mozart's Requiem

This one I can't quite explain, but it seems to strike me as vaguely appropriate.

The Grey Waste

John Cage, "Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds"

Perhaps the worlds most apathetic piece of music. OK, OK, serious musicologists are likely to come at me with kitchen implements, saying that I didn't get it, that the point of the piece is environmental sounds, that it's a serious piece of music, etc. Yeah, OK, I'll ceed all that. But the fact remains that from down here in the peanut gallery, a piece of music which is nothing more than "stand there and do nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds" really seems pretty apathetic. (My tastes are simply not mature enough to appreciate a lot of John Cage, I guess. I'll stick with Beethoven.)

Baator

Moussorgsky, "Night on Bald Mountain"

What else?

Acheron

Carl Orff, "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana

The words don't exactly fit (though they aren't terribly off either), but you can almost hear the crashing cubes underlying the inevitable march of war....

Holzt, "Mars" from The Planets

Nearly perfect.

Mechanus

Beethoven, Symphony #8, 2nd movement

The movement that Beethoven wrote in honor of the recent invention of the Metronome seems particularly appropriate for the plane of clockworks. It's got a constant rhythmic underpinning, and a good balance between light and serious tone.