ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with music and writing, in particular with the age-old question of how to represent the musical experience in words.1 The desire to do so stems from the value placed on that experience, and so on music itself. Music is at once the most direct and esoteric of the arts. Our daily lives are criss-crossed with musical experiences and modes of listening, from the ambient sounds of radio and muzak, and the personalized environments of the portable music player, to the sonic immersion of the latest digital technology. We listen without thinking, and yet asked to explain the sounds themselves – to describe what we hear – many of us flounder. We pass thereby from the felt immediacy of the musical experience to the seeming inadequacy of our ability to put that experience into words. This gap, if there is such a thing, has given rise to an entire discourse on music, not to say of aesthetics itself, one by-product of which has been a querying of the sense of attempting verbally to write music. Such writing abounds, however, not least in the fiction and theory which forms the focus of the present study. Consider the following examples:
Each of these extracts concerns the nineteenth-century composer Robert Schumann. Music certainly is described, if only indirectly. It is a singular music, at once strange and strikingly intimate; a private music, or at least a music of private communication. The aesthetics of the time of composition are still clearly present in these late records of reception, in the idea of music as fraught self-expression, an almost irrational by-passing of conscious filters; a suspension, even a transcending, of everyday discourse. The desirable secrecy of the music is also potentially a mark of excess, of something not quite right: the wrong Schu.
