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Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Hardcover, New Ed)
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Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Hardcover, New Ed)
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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.
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