Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Paperback)

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 Agape 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.

General

Imprint:	Routledge
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	November 2016
First published:	2009
Authors:	Alan Shockley
Dimensions:	234 x 156 x 11mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	206
ISBN-13:	978-1-138-25980-5
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > The arts: general issues > General Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900 Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
LSN:	1-138-25980-2
Barcode:	9781138259805

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