The Sound of Music
But the spoken word alone is not enough – other sound effects have their parts to play too. Some writers already make use of these, but usually behind the scenes. For example, here is Susanna ClarkeΦ, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr NorrellΦ, talking about her writing regimen:
I like darkened rooms too – and lamplight – and the sound of rain. On sunny afternoons I’ve been known to draw the curtains, switch on the light and play a CD of rain falling. It creates a sort of quiet, private world which helps writing sometimes.
Quite so. And it might also help readers to become immersed in her remarkable world (a magical story that takes place in 19th-century England, almost entirely in the wintertime and often in the rain). It is not hard to imagine how other sounds – a quickening heartbeat, a radio news broadcast, a wailing siren passing from ear to ear – might convey the genius loci in ways that do not detract from the written words but only add to them.
To be clear, I am not saying that all writing or reading should be accompanied by sound. Many authors prefer to write in silence (John HarveyΦ, best known for his 'Charlie Resnick' series of crime novels, is just one whom I've heard say this) and a lot of readers no doubt feel the same. What's more, many works are simply ill-suited to any kind of audio treatment. But many aren't – and now we can do something about that.
So far we have covered speech and sound effects, but the greatest potential of all for audio surely rests with music. While words and images tickle our conscious forebrains, music can stir more primitive and subliminal sensations in the emotional centres of the amygdala. Not for nothing did SchopenhauerΦ come to see it as a manifestation of human will itself.
That is why music, in contrast to unadorned text, can make us elated or tearful for no reason that we can ever explain. It is also why combining visual narrative with background sound – the noetic with the poetic – makes for an altogether more intense, sometimes even overwhelming, experience. Wagner understood this when he infused his operas, particularly The Ring, with complex leitmotifs (or 'guides to feeling') to accompany particular characters, objects or moods.
More recent purveyors of escapism, from filmmakers to restauranteurs, have come to exploit this effect widely. The results can be ostentatious, like John Williams's themes for JawsΦ and Star WarsΦ, or more subtle, like ambient musicΦ (which its leading proponent, Brian Eno, now prefers to call "sonic landscape", an alluringly multisensory phrase). Either way their potency is undeniable.
When considering examples in which music could provide a useful backdrop to a written story, an obvious place to start is with narratives that are explicitly concerned with musical themes. For example, Rose Tremain's outstanding novel, Music & SilenceΦ, describes the life and loves of an English lutenist called Peter Claire in the court of King Christian IV of Denmark and his adulterous wife, Kirsten. In the following scene, the King is addressing his musician, and discussing those chart-topping hits of the early 1600s, John Dowland's Lachrimae. You can listen while you read by using the controller below.
Audio: Peo Kindgren
'Well, you had better play for me. I suppose you know that we had your Mr Dowland here at court. The conundrum there was that such beautiful music could come from so agitated a soul. The man was all ambition and hatred, yet his ayres were as delicate as rain. We would sit there and blub, and Master Dowland would kill us with his furious look. I told my mother to take him to one side and say: "Dowland, this will not do and cannot be tolerated," but he told her music can only be born out of fire and fury. What do you think about that?'
Peter Claire is silent for a moment. For a reason he can't name, this question consoles him and he feels his agitation diminish by a fraction. 'I think that it is born out of fire and fury, Sir,' he says, 'but also out of the antitheses to these – out of cold reason and calm.'
'This sounds logical. But of course we do not really know where music comes from or why, or when the first note of it was heard. And we shall never know. It is the human soul, speaking without words. But it seems to cure pain – this is an honest fact. I yearn, by the way, for everything to be transparent, honest and true. So why do you not play me one of Dowland's Lachrimae? Economy of means was his gift and this I dote upon. His music leaves no room for exhibitionism on the part of the performer.'
Peter Claire unslings his lute from his back and holds it close against his body. His ear (in which he wears a tiny jewel once given to him by an Irish countess) strains to hear, as he plucks and tunes. King Christian sighs, waiting for the sweet melody to begin. He is a heavy man. Any alteration of his body's position seems to cause him a fleeting moment of discomfort.
Now Peter Claire arranges his body into the stance he must always adopt when he performs: leaning forward from the hips, head out, chin down, right arm forming a caressing half-circle, so that the instrument is held at the exact centre of his being. Only in this way can he feel that the music emanates from him. He begins to play. He hears the purity of the sound and suspects that this, alone, is what will count with the King of Denmark.
Music may be "the human soul, speaking without words.", but it certainly adds to the words for me.
Another book in which music plays a central role – almost as if it were a character – is Vikram Seth's An Equal MusicΦ. In some ways this is a perverse book that brings to mind the famous (and liberally attributedΦ) quote, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture". But in fact, the words support the music, and vice versa. And as if to prove this, you can even buy an accompanying CDΦ of classical music. The author says in the sleeve notes:
Is the purpose to provide necessary illustration for the action in the novel? Or background music for the act of reading? Or a substitute for the text itself, which can only attempt to describe what cannot truly be described? For me the aim is none of the above, but rather, to give pleasure.
Personally I would change that last sentence: "For me the aim is any or all of the above, whichever gives the reader most pleasure." And to enable this the book and the CD should be sold together in a single phictional bundle.
Here is an extract from the book accompanied by a section of the music described. In this scene, the protagonist, a violinist called Michael returns home and puts on a record of Beethoven's String Quintet, Op. 104 in C minor, which he has just had a lot of trouble finding in the shops. (The passage will make more sense if you also know that he plays in the Maggiore Quartet and is in love with a fellow musician called Julia.)
Audio: The Lindsays
I put the string quintet on. The sound fills the room: so familiar, so well-loved, so disturbingly and enchantingly different. From the moment, a mere ten bars from the beginning, where it is not the piano that answers the violin but the violin itself that provides its own answer, to the last note of the last movement where the cello, instead of playing the third, supports with its lowest, most resonant, most open note the beautifully spare C major chord, I am in a world where I seem to know everything and nothing.
My hand travels the strings of the C minor trio while my ears sing to the quintet. Here Beethoven robs me of what is mine, giving it to the other violin; there he bequeaths me the upper reaches of what Julia used to play. It is a magical translation. I listen to it again from beginning to end. In the second movement it is the first violin – who else? – who sings what was the piano's theme, and the variations take on a strange, mysterious distance, as being, in a sense, variations one degree removed, orchestral variants of variations, but with changes too that go beyond what could be explained by orchestration alone. I must play this with the Maggiore, I must.
Whilst this is an interesting and (up to a point) a satisfying experience, one potential problem stands out: the words and music are not sychronised. In fact, although they are about the same subject they hardly fit at all. In a few short lines the words take us from the beginning of the performance to the end, a span that an unabridged version of the music would take almost half an hour to enjoy. Someone (provided they had more talent then me) could certainly edit the music to fit the words better. But this misses a more important point: if they had been written with musically accompanied phiction in mind, the words would have been different too.
To see and hear an example of this approach, consider what is, to me, perhaps the most obvious example of a piece of prose written specifically to accompany a piece of music. It comes from a scene in the 1984 film, AmadeusΦ. The character of Antonio Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham) is talking about a composition by his nemesis, Mozart: the Serenade No. 10 for Winds...