A Goodreads user asked Ann Leckie:

Hi Ann! I'd noted some time ago that you seemed to be a fan of choral music (I may be wrong in this, as I can't find the blog post in particular that clued me into this assumption). Does music play an especially large role in your worldbuilding or any thematic developments in the Ancillary series?

Ann Leckie I am indeed a fan of choral music! Music doesn't always play a large part in my worldbuilding--mostly it hasn't, in my short fiction, though of course it's a large part of the worldbuilding of the Ancillary trilogy. As a reader, I find the use of music in written fiction to be...not always done terribly well. Sometimes it is, but often not. This makes sense, actually, since a lot of what music does can't really be transferred to the page, and so things like using lyrics of songs the reader (hopefully) knows in order to provide a soundtrack or an atmosphere so often feel weak or contrived to me.

So I've mostly avoided it, myself, since I've never been sure I could pull it off to my satisfaction. There was no avoiding it with a character like Breq, though. And the songs in all three books do carry some thematic weight, if only through repetition--some of them reappear in places and any time an element does that, it's going to be doing some structural work. But mostly I'm not aware of those things until well after I'm finished, so it's hard for me to talk about them terribly well.

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