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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.
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.
Written in 1991 to commemorate the bicentennial of Mozart's death,
Burgess's novella-length piece is a compendium of themes, genres
and even art-forms revolving around the one central preoccupation
of the entire Burgess oeuvre: the reconcilability of life and art.
This is a kaleidoscope of a book, which stretches even the bounds
of even Anthony Burgess's fiction in an attempt to understand
Mozart through celestial dialogue, an opera libretto, and fragments
of a film script. As gracefully witty as it is daringly
experimental, Mozart and the Wolf Gang is one of Burgess's late,
great works, often overlooked due to its experimental form, which
nevertheless remains accessible, entertaining and yet refreshingly
original to this day. This new critical edition with analysis from
noted musicologist and a first-class literary critic Alan Shockley
enables this work's significance to be assessed by a new generation
of readers and scholars. -- .
Finding and knowing God is less about right theology and belief and
more about right geography. It is not so much about where we stand
on issues but about where we stand with others and whether we are
willing to embrace them as expressions of the Divine.
With Contemporary Piano: A Performer and Composer's Guide to
Techniques and Resources, Alan Shockley provides a comprehensive
resource for composers writing music that uses extended techniques
for the piano, and for pianists interested in playing repertoire
that makes use of techniques and/or implements unfamiliar to them.
Shockley explains dozens of ways to prepare a piano without
damaging the instrument, how to notate every standard technique and
many, many obscure ones, and the specific geographies of every
common concert hall piano. This will be the standard reference for
pianists touring and playing inside-the-piano repertoire, and for
composers at all levels of familiarity with the piano hoping to
understand the mechanical miracle that is the modern piano.
With Contemporary Piano: A Performer and Composer's Guide to
Techniques and Resources, Alan Shockley provides a comprehensive
resource for composers writing music that uses extended techniques
for the piano, and for pianists interested in playing repertoire
that makes use of techniques and/or implements unfamiliar to them.
Shockley explains dozens of ways to prepare a piano without
damaging the instrument, how to notate every standard technique and
many, many obscure ones, and the specific geographies of every
common concert hall piano. This will be the standard reference for
pianists touring and playing inside-the-piano repertoire, and for
composers at all levels of familiarity with the piano hoping to
understand the mechanical miracle that is the modern piano.
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