Like the quest for the perfect mousetrap, new ideas bring new challenges which often threaten to overtake them at the onset. What's worse, I feel like I've been playing the Eastern Bloc in this latest literary arms race.
There's a conundrum I've been wrestling with that hasn't yielded much in the way of ground gained: the puzzle of adding music to a written (and therefore soundless) medium.
Naturally, I'm not talking about clipping a midi file to the spine of a paperback (although with e-readers, the concept is quickly becoming less outlandish). I'm referring to adding the presence of music to a literary work on the part of the setting and characters as part of the story itself.
It sounds easy: "so-and-so softly strums his guitar to the delight of his lightly inebriated patrons."
But anyone who works in music knows that a song is much more than the act of playing an instrument or even the lyrics of a song. Anyone who listens to music knows that music makes you feel something that the spoken word often falls well shy of.
There are several layers to enjoying a piece of music: the simplicity, the complexity, the challenge, the audible skill involved, the beauty of its crafting, the sense of its structure and flow (much like with a story itself), the emotion portrayed, the way the pacing starts to drive your own pulse ahead of it like a crazed cattle driver...it all blends together into an ever more evasive gestalt that is really, really hard to portray in silent, unspoken words.
In in its simplest form, writing about music is no different than writing about a gorgeous vista or beautiful sight. With no colors or graphics (at least, in most novels), you have to tell your reader not just the details of what they're seeing ("a sun setting over the far horizon") but the feel of the thing ("loosing its last angry flash before being dragged across the edges of the sky.").
The same is true for music, except that you're not depicting a note or even a phrase, you're not depicting an instrument or the shape of the strained musician wrestling to keep pace with her own fevered playing. You're also detailing the flow of the piece, the different movements and flow, the way it teases the expectations of its audience and the overall crescendo that brings you to the edge of your seat, desperate for the final note.
...Clearly, I'm something of an audiophile, which I can only assume is complicating matters infinitely more. Someone who adores the interplay of shadow and light in oil painting or the delightful reshaping of the cubist movement might have as much trouble describing things in the visual, but my crux appears to be music, and I suspect I'm not alone.
The first instinct, it seems, when trying to write about playing music is to try and include it all: the what, the why, the how-it-feels; to glut the narrative with more technical detail than your readers will understand, more intention than they will appreciate and more emotion than they should have room for.
Naturally, this is completely wrong.
But what's the golden ratio? How much can the average reader be expected to comprehend and how much emotion will goad them into sympathetic appreciation without overloading them with tearful fanboyishness that merely leaves them laughing, and not in the good way.
Generally I find that the technical details should be kept to the visual elements we all know, and perhaps the occasional tidbit to add a little mystery for the average reader and a sense of verisimilitude for a more experienced audience: adjusting the knobs to tune a string instrument, fingering the keys on a flute or sax, the interwoven double-strokes of a drumroll.
In addition, try to limit the specifics to the start of a given phrase; the lead-in time before the music has really started to form itself, or when it turns suddenly and takes on new life. Highlighting the working of the musician's fingers or lungs helps emphasize the shift, as well as reminding the reader that music is a thing being made and the challenge, strain and raw emotion that goes into every vein of it.
The emotion itself, both of the musician and of the listener, is where I feel the majority of the text should come from. There's a third source, the instrument itself, which to any non-musician sounds immediately like overly poetic sentimentality, but the truth is that any reader can identify with a personified instrument.
Take a separate example: in westerns, gunslingers often have tales about their sidearms, naming them, talking about their predilections, their wants and their will. Truckers who always use the same rig start to talk to it, identify with it and make it its own person.
The same is true for instrument. When you start with the player's internal struggle and then move to that of the instrument, it blends them together into a team, something immediately more compelling to your reader.
By bringing out the instrument's "human" qualities during the song rather than right from the start (where the focus on technical detail very much defines it as a thing), you give the impression that the player is bringing the instrument to life.
Blend that in turn with the audience and their reaction, whether individual or, more often, as a faceless collective, and you can extend the same tacit metaphor: the player and her instrument are bringing the audience to life, as well.
When it comes to the music itself, however, there's little hope in getting your average reader to understand more than the basic terms of "refrain" and "crescendo." The subtle queues that clue a knowledgeable reader into what the musician is doing are a very specific jargon that doesn't present itself often.
Most people would think 'adagio' is a type of cheese.
Instead, use the same language you use when expressing a beautiful image. The music, like the image, is meant to evoke something: anger, torment, longing, joy, triumph. Use those words to build your image. Conjure up in the mind of both musician and audience the very moments that, for them, define the intended emotion.
A sad song to an old farmer may bring to mind of his son, lost in the war, as if the music is calling out for him to return. A bouncy, lilting phrase reminds him instead of the harvest dance, with the musician's fingers across the strings forming their own little foxtrot as they go. Keep the imagery rooted in reality and make it personal, make it matter, if only to the musician herself.
Or at least, that's what I intend to do. I can't say that words written will ever be as powerful emotionally as words sung or notes played, but I like to believe that they can be. If nothing else, I like to believe that we can live through the characters themselves and thus savor the way the music we cannot ourselves hear makes them feel.
So here goes nothing. And a one, and a two...
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