ABSTRACT
Richard Powers’s balanced treatment of musical content and generous supply of experiential cues in Orfeo (2014) is to make Western art music, including its twentieth-century avant-garde strand, accessible and appealing for the reader. The novel embarks on intermedial transpositions of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, John Cage’s Musicircus, and several works by the central character, fictional composer Peter Els, trespassing between music and nonmusic. Musicircus, for instance, is a scoreless unrepeatable happening. Els’s compositions have no historical antecedents, so they can only be mentally overheard from beyond the storyworld. Unlike Els’s instrumental works, his song settings of Kafka and Borges, and his monumental operatic endeavor, the piece of biomusic that he encrypts in bacterial DNA possesses neither a potential for actual sound nor an accountable musical form. The verbal report of how that inaudible hybrid was created is the only pathway to performing and perceiving it. Since that report itself is incorporated into Powers’s narrative, the novel not only depicts but also exemplifies its own music, non-diegetically: The text erratically becomes what it renders. On a par with such metamusical extravaganzas, narrativizations of a Shostakovich symphony and a Messiaen quartet comprise the diverse repertory of Orfeo.
