An Irishwoman's Diary

What is it with soundtracks? Once upon a time, they were acknowledged only in the near-invisible credits which came up on the screen as you were leaving the cinema.

Scarcely anyone paused to read them, let alone consider rushing straight into a nearby record shop in search of their very own copy. These days, you don't even have to go to a record shop because soundtracks are everywhere. The supermarkets are full of them. Lyric FM's weekend schedule is bursting at the seams with them - check out Movies and Musicals(on Saturday mornings from 8.30 to 10.30, and Sundays from 3pm to 4 pm, if you don't believe me - and for some mystifying reason, they've become a regular feature on live music schedules.

They've even invaded the book world. Last week, inspired by a blast of sunlight on the dim memory of a New Year's resolution, I rummaged through a pile of this and that and emerged with a copy of a thriller I'd been meaning to read for almost a year. And danged if a CD didn't slip out of the inside cover. " Into the Dark," it declared. "A soundtrack to the novels of John Connolly, Volume II." Volume two? So (a) I missed volume one, and (b) when did writers start producing soundtracks to their novels anyway?

Don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining. John Connolly clearly knows his musical onions, and has put together a catchy compilation from - among others - The Delgados, Nickel Creek, Willard Grant Conspiracy and Sufjan Stevens. Good news, I thought. Now I can throw away The Unquiet, skip several hundred pages of harrowing murder and mayhem, and just lie back and enjoy a bit of bluegrass, electronica and indie rock.

Alas, the songs on the CD were themselves so redolent of murder and mayhem that they sent me scurrying straight back to the book. " The world is full of broken things; broken hearts and broken promises, broken people. . ." That's the thing about soundtracks. Even the most independently-spirited of them - such as the soundtrack to the Coen brothers' cult comedy O Brother Where Art Thou, which established itself as the soundtrack to the year 2002, and won a Grammy award for album of the year in the process - are locked into an eternal orbit with their parent movies or video games or, in this case, books.

You'd think this gravitational pull would be strongest in the case of instrumental soundtracks, which have been composed with the landscape of a particular movie in mind. The Star Warsfanfare, for example, which - in my mind, anyhow - conjures up an instant image of Han Solo and Obi Wan struggling across the desolate landscape of the ice planet Hoth. But according to the composer of the Star Warssoundtracks, John Williams, the pull works both ways. He didn't, he says, intend his score for The Empire Strikes Backto take us to another world, so much as to steep us in worlds of a more familiar kind.

As he puts it himself: "It was not music that might describe terra incognita, but the opposite of that: music that would put us in touch with very familiar and remembered emotions. Which for me, as a musician, translated into the use of a 19th-century operatic idiom. . .Wagner and this sort of thing." This sort of thing, apparently, includes references to Strauss and the large-scale 19th-century symphony, as well as to ballet scores by Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. Thus the music puts us in touch with remembered theatrical experiences as well as with our experiences of other movies - westerns, thrillers, rom-coms - and our cultural experiences in general.

Williams is not a man to argue with because when it comes to soundtrack experience, he's the man. The New York-born composer has produced fistfuls of them during the course of a 50-year career in the movie business, from Goodbye Mr Chipsin 1969 through Home Alonein 1990 to Harry Potterand beyond. Nor is the Star Warsfanfare his only iconic musical moment. He also came up with the theme from Jaws- that simple two-note motif which has come to symbolise terror, real or feigned, and has detached itself from the movie to become a legend in its own toothy lunchtime.

Add in the soundtracks to Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, Far and Away, Seven Years in Tibet, Angela's Ashes, The Missouri Breaks, Fiddler on the Roof, The Poseidon Adventureand Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and you've covered just about the entire gamut of human experience.

I'm beginning to see why people will pay good money to sit in a concert hall and relive these experiences courtesy of a live orchestra. You can do just that at the Mahony Hall in The Helix next Thursday (February 7th) at 8 pm, when the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, conducted by Gareth Hudson, lets rip with a Williams extravaganza. And may the force, as Obi-Wan would say, be with you. You're going to need it.