In 1764, Horace Walpole published the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, set in a labyrinthine castle surrounded by woods. The novel features the supernatural, with a dark secret from the past at its core. Today, 260 years later, gothic is still with us in the form of “contemporary gothic” plays, fiction, films, music and computer games.

Central to the popularity of gothic is the way it affects its audiences. It is supposed to unsettle, to make the flesh creep and provoke feelings of claustrophobia. Soundtracks for gothic films are integral to creating such effects, building suspense and unease while amplifying the visceral impact of sudden jump-scares.

Alejandro Amenábar’s soundtrack for The Others (2001), for example, weirds its listeners out. The hollow but reverberant timbre of brushed piano strings evokes the spaces of the house, conjuring up the old-fashioned alienness of the place. Action, set and music sympathetically resonate.

The soundtrack for The Substance (2024) shrieks with the strings and sudden disso­nances of ‘The Nightmare and Dawn’ (taken from Ber­nard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo). Then, it deepens the sense of disquiet with the sinister incantations and mediaeval-sounding harmonies of Swedish composer Anna von Hausswolff‘s ‘Ugly’ and ‘Vengeful’.

How 19th-century melodrama turned the sweet music of gothic into something darker

Both soundtracks impressively succeed in doing what we expect gothic music to do: provoke unease, create suspense and drive home the horror elements.

But has the music of the gothic always been called upon to unsettle and scare? Has it always sounded so, well, gothic? These are questions I explore in my new book The Music of the Gothic 1789–1820.

Over the last few years, I’ve been rummaging through archives in London, Oxford and Dublin, searching for settings of songs from novels and music associated with gothic plays such as The Mysteries of the Castle (1795). I uncovered many treasures, some of which probably haven’t been performed for a couple of centuries.

Thanks to a grant from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, I was able to bring some of this music to audiences once more, with the help of a group of wonderful musicians, headed by Seb Gillot, who performed the tracks.

The gothic novels and plays of the 1790s were populated by sweet-singing heroines and heroes. Among the music I encountered was a song by the composer and singer Harriet Abrams (c. 1758-1821), in which a woman imprisoned in a madhouse sweetly pleads with her cold-hearted jailer.

I also found music for gothic plays by the Northumbrian William Shield (1748-1829) and the Irish tenor Michael Kelly (1762-1826), who wrote songs about jolly mariners, comic poachers and young peasant girls on their way back from market.

None of this material sounded remotely like what we would now describe as gothic. Even the music accompanying the entrance of a blood-covered ghost in The Castle Spectre (1798) was warm and stately — and singularly unterrifying.

I realised that none of the music from the 1790s — a period when gothic was phenomenally popular — was intended to scare. On the contrary, it was called upon to provide relief from the scare. In late 18th-century gothic plays such as The Italian Monk (1797), music was associated with romance, comedy and sublime religious experience, but not horror or terror.

At what point then did the kind of gothic music we know today come into being? The evidence can be found in books such as Remick Folio of Moving Picture Music (1914), which contains music for silent film accompanists. With names like Mysterioso, or Foreboding and Wind Storm, or Hurry, they were evidently designed for scenes of suspense and mystery.

Such music is indebted to the music of Victorian melodrama, but what I wanted to know was when melodrama acquired its distinctive gothic sounds.

Digging into the past of gothic

Very often in research, you discover that things happen gradually. There is trial and experiment, a series of influences, a slow accumulation of examples, and then a tipping point. But when it comes to gothic music, that is not the case.

There is a definite date when a specific kind of music erupted on to the entertainment scene. The date was 1802, and the occasion a new dramatic production — a “melo-drame” or musical drama called A Tale of Mystery, with music by Thomas Busby.

Busby’s music was conceptualised very differently to the music of the 1790s. For a start, it was intended to add to, not to provide relief from, the gothic elements of the play.

Most crucially, it was not part of the imagined world of the drama. The fictional characters did not sing it — they did not even “hear” it: Busby’s music was directed at the audience. Instrumental music calculated to disturb, it was chaotic and unnerving, with lots of fast, disjointed short phrases, disturbing chords and cliffhanger endings.

Instantly recognised as new and revolutionary, it caused a sensation. After audiences had a taste of the new gothic in A Tale of Mystery, music on the page and on the stage soon became something darker and more troubling.

The older kind of music didn’t disappear overnight, of course, but melodrama took hold and the music of gothic was transformed. Not just on stage but also on the page. Gothic music was no longer uplifting but sinister.

As seen in The Woman in Black (2012), there’s nothing like a music box in a deserted house to terrify audiences. And who doesn’t thrill to the sound of the diabolically thundering organ in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera?

The writer is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster in the UK

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, February 16th, 2025