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

Alan Shockley (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

206 Seiten

2016
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-138-25980-5 (ISBN)

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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.

Contents: Introduction; A fugue and a sonata; Sound and shape: Ulysses' sirens' songs; Anthony Burgess' Eroica; The Wake and its music; This is a chapter if I and David Markson say so: This is Not a Novel; William Gaddis' player piano; Going the whole hog; Bibliography; Index.

Erscheinungsdatum	08.01.2017
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	453 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Musiktheorie / Musiklehre
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-138-25980-2 / 1138259802
ISBN-13	978-1-138-25980-5 / 9781138259805
Zustand	Neuware