{"product_id":"music-in-the-words-musical-form-and-counterpoint-in-the-twentieth-century-novel-1","title":"Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel","description":"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.","brand":"Taylor \u0026 Francis Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54246435160408,"sku":"9781138259805","price":72.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781138259805_2d158c99-d699-4e8b-a282-853aeead6cfb.jpg?v=1781005538","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/music-in-the-words-musical-form-and-counterpoint-in-the-twentieth-century-novel-1","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}