Music in the Words

There is a strong tradition of literary analyses of the musical artwork. Simply put all musicology - any writing about music - is an attempt at making analogies between what happens within the world of sound and language itself. This study considers this analogy from the opposite perspective: authors attempting to structure words using musical forms and techniques. It's a viewpoint much more rarely explored and none of the extant studies of novelists' musical techniques have been done by musicians. Can a novel follow the form of a symphony and still succeed as a novel? Can musical counterpoint be mimicked by words on a page? Alan Shockley begins looking for answers by examining music's appeal for novelists and then explores two brief works a prose fugue by Douglas Hofstadter and a short story by Anthony Burgess modeled after a Mozart symphony. Analyses of three large emblematic attempts at musical writing follow. The much debated 'Sirens' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses which the author famously likened to a fugue Burgess' largely ignored Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements patterned on Beethoven's Eroica and Joyce's Finnegans Wake which Shockley examines as an attempt at composing a fully musicalized language. After these three larger analyses Shockley discusses two quite recent brief novels William Gaddis' novella Agapé Agape and David Markson's This is not a novel proposing that each of these confounding texts coheres elegantly when viewed as a musically-structured work. From the perspective of a composer Shockley offers the reader fresh tools for approaching these dense and often daunting texts.