music in fiction

[calimac]

It took actually reading a New Yorker that came while I was gone (the Aug. 24 issue) to find out about Alex Ross's "Imaginary Concerts", a quick historical survey of the music of fictional composers, i.e. ones invented for novels. If you're a subscriber you can read it online (but if you're a subscriber why would you want to? You already have it in print), but even a nonsubscriber may read the abstract at that link. Ross also has a blog post with some supplemental reading, and a podcast discussing some of the article's points in brief.

The last book discussed in the article is the only one I'd read, Kim Stanley Robinson's SF novel of a future performer/composer, The Memory of Whiteness. I remember the disputes when it was new among readers as to whether KSR's protagonist was credible as a musician, and the eventual establishment that people with classical backgrounds thought he was; it was those with pop backgrounds who found him not so, not realizing that the classical life is different.

But I'd like to read some more. (Not Proust - it'd take a lot more than the lure of music, or even of madeleines, to get me to read Proust.) And I did get down to the library today and pick up a few others. I've now read Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, which is very short and fast, but I have a lot of problems with its depiction of the music, which I'll go into if anybody here tells me they've also read it. Randall Jarrell's satirical Pictures from an Institution sounds hilarious from the quote Ross gives:

His "Joyous Celebration of the Memory of the Master Johann Sebastian Bach" had a tone-row composed of the notes B, A, C, and H (in the German notation), of these inverted, and of these transposed; and there were four movements, the first played on instruments beginning with the letter b, the second on instruments beginning with the letter a, and so on. After the magnificent group that ushered in the piece (bugle, bass-viol, bassoon, basset-horn, bombardon, bass-drum, bagpipe, baritone, and a violinist with only his bow) it was sad to see an Alp horn and an accordion come in to play the second movement.

But on reading the opening chapters it seems much more diffuse and less attractive than a David Lodge campus novel. The blurb of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled nearly made me put the book down (a pianist who doesn't know what city he's in? I know Ishiguro specializes in unreliable narrators, but come on), but on browsing it doesn't look that bad. On the other hand, I dropped William Gaddis's JR after one look at the opening page. I will not read a whole novel, still less a long one, consisting almost entirely of dialogue without even quotation marks around it or identifications of who's speaking. I just won't, sorry.

The one I'm saving for later is Robertson Davies' The Lyre of Orpheus, which looks like fun. Davies is an author I've long wanted to read but never have, largely because his novels are so interconnected that I've never been certain where it was safe to start, and I've not seen a reliable introductory guide.

Here's the complete list, extracted from the article and the blog post, with summaries of Ross's reactions from the article, if any:

• William Wackenroder, The Remarkable Life of the Composer Joseph Berglinger (1796)
• E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kreisleriana (1814-15) and Kater Murr (1819-21) (these works actually inspired real music by Robert Schumann)
• Honoré de Balzac, Gambara (1837) (a premonition of avant-gardeists like Harry Partch)
• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Charles Auchester (1872) ("muggy literary hot air")
• Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe (1904-12) ("a novel of mind-blowing laboriousness" describing a composer who's a Frenchified Richard Strauss)
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27) (especially interesting in that, though the fictional composer's music is important, the composer is not much of a character in the story; Proust's descriptions remind Ross of music by Fauré, and there are definite Wagner references)
• Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947) (I had not known that 1, Mann got Theodor Adorno, the noted musical theoretician, actually to work out the fictional compositions for him for the sake of verisimilitude, or 2, Alfred Schnittke's Faust, a wild Weillian piece I've heard excerpts of, was inspired by this book)
• Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (1954) (a parody of Doctor Faustus whose composer is a cross between Schoenberg and John Cage)
• William Gaddis, JR (1975) (a failed would-be Leonard Bernstein)
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Memory of Whiteness (1985) (Mahlerian music of the future)
• Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus (1988)
• Frank Conroy, Body & Soul (1993)
• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (1995)
• Ian McEwan, Amsterdam (1998) (a failed would-be RVW)
• Christopher Miller, Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano (2002) (satire about a cross between Cage and Glenn Gould)
• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)
• Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold, Considered as Murderer (forthcoming, 2010)

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

We seem to be missing the character Richard Halley from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The novel includes descriptions of two of his works, an opera, "Phaethon," and his Fifth Concerto, plus brief hints at a couple of other works. There is also a composer named Mort Liddy, who is attacked twice, once for writing modernist high art pieces and once for writing imitative Hollywood scores—I'm not sure how often the same composer does both! I don't know if you would be able to read Atlas Shrugged, but it does fit your criteria.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Add Rand to Proust and Rolland (and Mann, too, actually) as well as Gaddis as authors whose creation of fictional composers is not going to tempt me to read them. This is a sweetener, not an imperative.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

I recently re-read Pictures from an Institution. a book that I love for its wisecracks and slow-burning bitchiness; if you're me, like Hamlet it's full of quotations.

It isn't really about the composer Gottfriend Rosenbaum though, so much as a book which uses him as the antagonist to the novelist Gertrude - who is a transparent portrait of Mary McCarthy. Rosenbaum is a saint of art, slyly witty, who never hurts anyone; Gertrude is a significant novelist who tears into everyone except her doormattish husband with an acid tongue and a fierce intelligence.

Mary McCarthy, who was novelist in residence at, I think, Kenyon at the same time that Jarrell was poet in residence, made the serious mistake of patronizing Jarrell for practicing what she felt to be an outmoded art form. So he wrote a novel, to make her very very sorry.

You don't get much sense of Rosenbaum's actual music except for the bit quoted above and the description of his early tone poem, Lucifer in Starlight. What I love about the book's portrayal of him is that he knows he is a minor artist and lives with that fact without bitterness.

[ellen-denham.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this--I've never read any of these books, and as a musician, the subject is of great interest to me. I really like Kim Stanley Robinson, but have not gotten around to reading some of the earlier books. "The Memory of Whiteness" is definitely going on my reading list.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"a transparent portrait of Mary McCarthy."

Well, that explains a lot (a lot that I wouldn't have figured out on my own).

This seems to have been the only novel Jarrell wrote. So that's why.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Don't miss his Orange County trilogy: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Because he's focusing on composers rather than musicians in general - which would greatly enlarge the field of books under consideration - Alex misses A Mixture of Frailties, an earlier Robertson Davies novel about the musical education of a singer. It is quite wonderful.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

A really, really tangential note about Rand is this: The Fountainhead's structure, as prose, starts out with the sentence "Howard Roark laughed" and ends with the phrase ". . . and the figure of Howard Roark." In other words, it has a linguistic analog of the musical structure where you start and end on the same note in the same key, while branching out in between. Atlas Shrugged does not do that. But its first sentence is "Who is John Galt?" and that's also the last sentence of Part Two (of three), in which Dagny Taggart desperately struggling to control a plane whose engine has died, as it falls toward a desolate part of the Rocky Mountains. So, in a sense, Rand closes the narrative off at that point, and reopens it in Part Three with Dagny Taggart in a hidden ethically ideal community, looking at the face of John Galt . . . and later comes back to the outside world, knowing that there's something else.

You can read this, I think, as Dagny dying at the end of Part Two, which is thus the close of her story, and Part Three being a new story, where she has ascended to heaven and then come back to earth, to be followed by John Galt, who's there to rescue her, a kind of Harrowing of Hell. The structural design is interesting.

And the titles of the parts go with it. The first two, "Non-Contradiction" and "Either-Or," both refer to logical principles that rest on the difference between No and Yes. But the third, "A Is A," is a principle that is purely affirmative, with negation shown to be literally nothing . . . evil in Rand's world is not a power but an impotence, given strength by the errors of the good. All of this is more Christian, and indeed more Scholastic, than Rand might have recognized. I've thought of her for some time as a kind of atheistic Thomist.

But in relation to music, the interesting point is the way in which the large-scale structure reflects and supports the theme.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

There is also Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden of course, where the composer is an Arctic-dwelling mutant with white fur.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

The Child Garden is a masterpiece, in my humble opinion, and possibly the best fictional treatment of a composer I've yet read.

There's also David Herter's novel Evening's Empire, and his "Prague Trilogy" of novellas, one of which includes Janacek as a central character. But I haven't read them yet, and the three novellas are tough to get -- published by an English small press, PS Publishing.

[divertimento.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that Alex Ross left out "Now Playing At Canterbury" by Vance Bourjaily. That novel centers around the preparation for the debut of an opera commissioned to launch an arts center in Iowa. However, this opera might not be fictional enough, since the novelist also wrote a libretto with the same title ("$4000") for an opera composed by Tom Turner in 1969, several years prior to the novel. In the novel, the librettist and composer characters had fictional names.

Online, I now find an article about the real-world "$4000" opera that was published in the pages of Sports Illustrated. Yes, Sports Illustrated. Read the article and see why:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1146652/1/index.htm