Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel
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A01=Alan Shockley
Adaline Glasheen
Author_Alan Shockley
Beethoven's Eroica
Beethoven’s Eroica
Blind Piano Tuner
Bloom's Thoughts
Bloom’s Thoughts
Category=AVA
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Chapter's Opening Section
Chapter’s Opening Section
Chopin
Common Musical Notation
Croppy Boy
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
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Eternal Golden Braid
Finnegans Wake
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker
intermediality in fiction
Joyce Burgess Gaddis analysis
Joyce's Earlier Work
Joyce's Opening
Joyce’s Earlier Work
Joyce’s Opening
Kreutzer Sonata
La La
La La La
literary musicology
Mighty Halls
modernist literature studies
musical form in twentieth-century novels
narrative structure analysis
Ormond Hotel
Phantom Hands
Poetry
prose fugue technique
Romantic Veil
Sonata Allegro Movement
Verse Line
wake
Werner Wolf
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754661993
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 May 2009
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 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.
Alan Shockley is Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory in the Cole Conservatory of Music, at California State University, Long Beach. He has published articles and reviews on contemporary music as well as on James Joyce, Anthony Burgess, and other authors. He delights in writing for chamber ensembles, electronics, and the human voice.
