Saw – The Ride at Thorpe Park in Staines might seem an odd place for musical revelation. But it was there last month – suspended upside-down 100ft above a Surrey heath, my body contorted in dizzying pleasure-pain, brain unloosed from its moorings, mouth open in a silent scream, pulling a G-force of 4.7 – that a new universe of creative possibility opened up to me: the deep connection between rollercoastering and music. And I had one of Britain's most exciting composers, 32-year-old Scot Anna Meredith, to thank for it.
Rollercoastery is new to me, apart from a psychologically scarring ride in 1988, when I was 12. Anna had to hold my hand through the thrills of Thorpe Park's rides: the stomach-defying loops of Colossus, and the horror-movie theming of the queue for Saw. But, after a minute and a half strapped into the floating seats of Nemesis Inferno, my terror had turned to joy. I was hooked.
Anna told me about the Aerosmith rollercoaster she had ridden at Disneyland Paris (the brilliantly titled Rock'n'Roller Coaster Avec Aerosmith: who could resist?), for which the ageing rockers have written a song. Above the noise of the trains and screams, it's difficult to pick out the niceties of Aerosmith's music but, even so, it's given Anna an idea. She'd like to compose a proper piece of rollercoaster music, something more than a three-chord, four-in-a-bar rock song. She'd aim for an endlessly changing soundscape of industrial electronica, or an ethereal texture of swoops and slides: a sonic analogue of the trip your body goes on as it deals with the forces the rollercoaster architects throw at you.
Like rollercoaster designers, composers manipulate the laws of physics. The Rite of Spring is irresistible precisely because of the way Stravinsky constructed it – the twists and turns of the music through time, the movement of sound through the air. Like a piece of music, each rollercoaster has its own, temporal world: you have to submit to gravity and momentum. When music takes you out of yourself, it's a similar feeling. What's more, neither is a metaphor for anything else: the Rite of Spring is a bruising physical encounter. So is Saw – The Ride.
