Music and literature

Music and literature, in many ways, seem antithetical. Whereas music is a non-representational form, literature is. Literature connotes concrete meanings. Music, as Stravinsky controversially once said, cannot really express anything other than itself. It is pure form. If a pop/rock combo claim that their latest album is a social critique, that has much more to do with the lyric sheet than with the musical arrangements.

I think that music trumps everything in the end. When literature approaches its greatness it is usually when it is like music. My favourite novels are those which are ambiguous, open-ended and self-negating (in the sense that there are elements which do not fit and which contradict each other). The feelings it elicits are close to music: what does it mean? In the case of modern/post-modern literature, you can analyse the text and offer an interpretation. The text itself has no single meaning. Music can be analysed in terms of its use of harmony, metre, motifs etc., but semantically you cannot impute a meaning onto it.

When you listen to music, you do experience those kind of mystical moments.   In many ways, science is also driven by a desire to unravel the mysterious. Quantum mechanics is especially exciting in that its field of study keeps growing and growing. Even its experts scarcely know half as much as about it as we lay-men. Yet, whatever desires lead to its practice, science classifies and codifies. The ultimate aim is to solve the mysteries which make us scratch our heads. What can music ultimately say? Not as much as literature and certainly not as much as science. When I listen to J. S. Bach pieces I feel an overwhelming urge to grab hold of something and I am unsure what it is exactly. Literature should try to elicit those reactions.

Words in many ways are inadequate. Samuel Beckett wrote 'Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.' Words often try to ascribe meaning to a world without meaning. There is no God; everything is one big mistake. If this is the case, who should care about that big teeming novel I'm keen to write? Who should care about the writing by the masters - Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, etc. - when their insights are ultimately the attempt to make sense out of this meaningless wasteland called Earth?

Sadly, literature has not borrowed from music all that much. There are not that many novels about the lives of composers. The masterpiece on the subject is Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, based on the life of Arnold Schoenberg. This is the consummate novel about music in that it captures the ineffable, psychological and spiritual torments associated with it. Anthony Burgess wrote a novel - I haven't read it - about the structure of Beethoven's Eroica symphony in which he mimics the sounds of the music through language and onomatopoeia.

Before I got into writing, my desire was to become a composer. Sadly, time dragged on and on until it became too late. Composing is a lot of hard work. Also, I do not really have the kind of mathematical aptitude required. I turned to writing. Just as J. G. Ballard includes frustrated pilots because flying was his adolescent desire, my stories are crowded with frustrated composers. If I have never been able to write music, at least I have been able to pay tribute to it in some way. I have written stories about Alfred Schnitkke (my only published piece; available to purchase on the navbar to the right), Carlo Gesualdo (titled 'Desperate Lives'; available on the navbar to the right) and Olivier Messiaen.