Finding Harmony, Literally, in Fiction About Music

By Nicole Lamy

Jan. 25, 2019

Dear Match Book,

As St. Augustine said about time’s ineffability, we all know what music is until we are asked to explain it. Yet that challenge hasn’t stopped writers — musicologists, poets, novelists — from trying to articulate music’s place in the human experience. And while there are many good novels about pop and jazz, I am most interested in fiction that grapples with the complex power of classical music.

Although there are many novels whose titles make reference to the genre, few actually address the nature of the musical experience. Many of the last century’s writers wrote beautifully about its ethereal and mysterious qualities: I’m thinking of the famous, though imaginary Vinteuil sonata in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” and Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus.” More recently, Richard Powers’s novels (“The Gold Bug Variations,” “The Time of Our Singing” and “Orfeo”) and “The Metropolis Case,” by Matthew Gallaway, have investigated the profoundness of music as both an art and a deeply personal experience. Could you suggest other titles that address classical music in a meaningful way?

TIM McCRACKEN

MILFORD, N.J.

Dear Tim,

The gloriously wide-ranging resource list of musical fiction that you’ve already compiled and included with your email stretches from 1941 (Virginia Woolf’s “Between the Acts”) to 2017 (the English translation of Mathias Énard’s “Compass”), and across genres, encompassing even science fiction (“The Memory of Whiteness,” by Kim Stanley Robinson) and mystery (“Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer,” by Wesley Stace). There’s even a diversity of musicians among your favorites: a soprano in Robertson Davies’s “A Mixture of Frailties”; a pianist in “Appassionata,” by Eva Hoffman; a composer in “Amsterdam,” by Ian McEwan. Allow me to add some additional tracks to your literary playlist.

Echo Chambers

“She hummed back the exact pitch of the buzzer (D-flat) and he let her in”: A quick tonal exchange between a violinist and a violist near the beginning of Aja Gabel’s bittersweet, romantic 2018 debut, “The Ensemble,” hints at the way music shapes the lives (and bodies) of members of a string quartet over the course of nearly two decades, and gives the narrative its harmony.

ADVERTISEMENT

Discord, however, and notes of longing accompany a gathering of aspiring high school musicians at a prestigious annual festival inside an imposing but dilapidated hotel in “Bellweather Rhapsody,” Kate Racculia’s sweet, dark and quirky double mystery (with plenty of authentic music nerdery).

The oddball charms of Racculia’s novel have nothing on the unusual form and subject of “The Big Music,” Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the Highland bagpipe. The New Zealand-born author (who is now a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland, and is best-known in the United States for “Rain,” her slim, heartbreaking novel of sibling love) divides “The Big Music” into movements, and the novel’s patterning of language (which reminds me, in parts, of Woolf’s “The Waves”) has all the lilt and rhythm of a score.

The World on a String

Music is so intrinsic to the narrative of Louis de Bernières’s sweeping, baroque World War II novel, “Corelli’s Mandolin” — with its evocations of composers including Hummel, Vivaldi and Beethoven, and tremolos and glissandos plucked on a string instrument named Antonia — that the book inspired a soundtrack played on a guitar and mandolin: “Music From the Novels of Louis de Bernières.”

More mandolin music — played by a supporting character, Juan Tellamantez — echoes throughout passages of “The Song of the Lark,” Willa Cather’s novel about the life of Thea Kronberg, an opera singer from Moonstone, Colo. The instrument’s gentle twang, “a golden pool” of sunlight on the floor as Thea sings a hymn, even the sound of the sea within a conch shell: Each sensory experience seems to color the protagonist’s consciousness as she matures as a performing artist.

Beyond Measures

Exacting narratives composed by two acclaimed novelists capture layers of virtuosity and unexpected comedy in their intricate arrangements. In William H. Gass’s “Middle C,” a job at a record store (the High Note) in rural Ohio gives a young, mediocre piano student named Joey Skizzen an education that grows “by octaves,” and launches this “snob in motion” on a path to becoming a professor of music. And in the fiction of the Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro — notably his story “Cellists,” from the collection “Nocturnes,” and his massive, dizzying novel “The Unconsoled” — variations on the natures of performers and their (often adoring) audiences build to an immersive literary symphony.