Musical forms
It seems to me a lot of sf (especially urban fantasy) focuses on rock music: characters who are in rock bands, scenes in which authors attempt to describe the magical experience of playing rock music (those scenes almost always leave me cold), stories that draw their titles, characters, or situations from popular songs. (Though a lot of rock-oriented stories, it seems to me, are a little too self-conscious about it, throwing in too many sly references to a particular popular song or musician; that can be done well, but I think it's easy to overdo it.) And there are a fair number of folktale-like stories that draw on old folksongs (such as Justine Larbalestier's "The Cruel Brother").
A smaller number of stories focus on jazz. Alan DeNiro, for example, has sold us a couple: "Last Call in Temperance" (a science fiction story about jazz musicians, among other things) and "Tetrarchs," a story that feels (at least to my uneducated ear; I don't know whether this was actually what Alan was trying for) like a prose version of jazz music.
And this week's SH story, Eliot Fintushel's "Women Are Ugly," has a section that describes a date in terms of the movements of a piece of classical music.
But I don't think I've ever seen stories that try to feel like most other musical forms. What would a story be like that took its rhythms and tone and feel and sensibilities from rap, say, or klezmer, or techno? Or punk? (I suppose Love and Rockets counts.) Or even blues? (I suspect I've seen blues stories, but I'm not thinking of any offhand, except in the sense of stories about how awful life is.)
I suppose I've read stories that feel like New Age music to me, but not generally in a good way; I more or less like New Age stuff, but it tends to feel like background music to me, and/or puts me to sleep.
Which brings up a problem with this approach to stories: if the editor and/or the readers don't have some appreciation for the musical genre in question, they may not like or even get the story.
But I still think it's an interesting approach.
