Henry Holyoak Lightcap plays Mahler’s fifth symphony at maximum volume. As it blasts through his living room and kitchen he starts drinking. He drinks because of his depression and he doesn’t stop until he shoots his fridge and passes out on the kitchen floor. All the while the orchestra plays on.
This is the opening scene of Edward Abbey’s magnum opus, his homecoming story of Odyssian proportions, The Fool’s Progress. The solemn trumpet solo that begins Mahler’s fifth is as good an opening to the novel as any words conjured by Abbey himself. The music is majestic and, as the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross puts it, moves through a “heroic struggle, a delirious funeral march, a wild, sprawling Scherzo, and a dreamily lyrical Adagietto to a radiant, chorale-driven finale.” The perfect accompaniment for a scene that is full of indulgence, hubris and hopelessness.
Yet if you’ve never heard Mahler’s fifth symphony this would have been lost on you. It would have been a passing comment – a scene setting devise that hinders the imagination. Does this then mean that references to music in fiction are bad?
Personally I’ve always liked it when an author mentions music in a novel. A passing remark about what song is playing on the kitchen radio is all it takes for me to start analyzing the whole scene through this musical lens. Yet there are others who see it as nothing more than distracting name-dropping that has no benefit whatsoever.
This little argument therefore boils down to one question: should writers make specific reference to songs or artists in their novels or rather just deal in vague descriptions?
Well as with most things it depends on how it’s done. That means making a distinction between novels about music and novels that use music to some altogether different end. A good example of a novel about music is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. It’s a good book, but because its plot revolves so much around music it’s hard to separate the music that’s central to the plot from the music that highlights the novels themes. The music becomes too important. Musical references are much better suited to the background.
As the writer Paul Micou says: “Music in novels – like much of sex in novels – usually repels me, because the author tries graphically to describe something that is debased by technical description, and that in any case everyone has already experienced in their own lives. I feel the same way about long scenes of preparing and eating food. Unless the music, or the sex, or the food are not an insight into the character, then I become detached from the story.” Musical references work best then when a slyly dropped name or half a line of description subtly enhances a mood or a theme.
If there’s one writer who knows how this is done it is Haruki Murakami. His novels are positively littered with references to music. This isn’t really all that unusual since Murakami is a bit of a music nut. In the seventies prior to his writing career he ran a jazz bar in Tokyo called Peter Cat.
He explained how his years behind the bar influenced him in an essay published in the New York Times last year. He said after college “the professional area I settled on was music.” His café “served coffee in the daytime and drinks at night. We also served a few simple dishes. We had records playing constantly, and young musicians performing live jazz on weekends. I kept this up for seven years. Why? For one simple reason: It enabled me to listen to jazz from morning to night.”
He was quite the fan. He still is, and it is evident in his novels that jazz isn’t his sole area of musical interest. Many of his characters, especially the anonymous male narrators found in many of his works, listen to a lot of music. However it’s probably his earlier 1988 novel Dance Dance Dance that holds the title for most musical name drops he’s pumped into a work of fiction.
Dance Dance Dance is about a male journalist who writes culture pieces for women’s magazines and who becomes entangled in a paranormal murder mystery. It’s a typical Murakami novel: an unnamed, thirty-odd, male protagonist, awash in a world that gets stranger and stranger by the day, forges unlikely friendships with a an mix of characters and never fully understands everything that happens to him. Yet at eighty two references to distinct musicians, it’s Murakami’s most blatant use of music in a novel.
But it works, and it works well. Different types of music come to signify different relationships almost like leitmotifs in an orchestral movie soundtrack. Jazz is the narrator’s theme. When he’s alone, artists like Coltrane, Ray Charles and more obscure acts such as Arthur Prysock and the Count Basie Orchestra pepper the scenes. Similarly cosy and safe hotel muzak, of the “Moon River” ilk, comes to represent his romantic relationship with Yumiyoshi, the pretty receptionist in The Dolphin Hotel. In the same vein classic rock, like the Alan Parson’s Project and The Doors, is always on the stereo when he meets up with Gotanda, a former schoolmate of his.
But it’s in the narrator’s relationship with Yuki, the reticent and possibly psychic twelve year old girl he spends half the novel minding, that Murakami uses music to the greatest effect. Yuki spends the majority of her time listening to eighties pop music: Boy George, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Phil Collins. The narrator doesn’t particularly like it, but he puts up with it and finds common ground with her by introducing her to some ‘oldies’ – Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly, Elvis. The music becomes a symbol of their ability to connect and – almost – understand each other.
This is only highlighted by the contrast of meeting Yuki’s estranged mother, who says, “I can’t listen to that stuff for more than thirty seconds before I get a splintering headache. Being with Yuki is fine but the music is intolerable.” Pop music connects Yuki and the narrator. Just in the same way that it keeps her and her mother apart. In Dance Dance Dance music acts as a symbol, a theme, a motif and is also at a times as a great for springboard for humour. Murakami proves that using musical references in fiction is not merely self-indulgent egoising, but a successful writing technique.
And if you don’t still believe that music in fiction can be good thing. Well just forget Murakami and consider that Edward Abbey got me into Mahler at the age of fifteen. Now that is an astounding feat of writing.
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Hence the list below.
This article uses a quote from Oxford Forum’s interview with Paul Micou. You can read the original interview here.
