Music in the prose…
Some prose is so beautiful that it almost seems like music. Garcia Marquez’s Nobel winning novel did that for me—maybe it helped I read Cien Años de Soledad in Spanish, a musical language to be sure—this book will soon become a video series instead of a single movie, which is more appropriate for the century it covers!.
In this article I’m writing about references to music in literature, though, or writers being inspired by music. Musicians take stories and turn them into musical theater and operas. Writers don’t often return the favor. In my free download, Mayhem, Murder, and Music, the individual stories are inspired by music, but that’s not the same as turning a musical piece into a story (see my web page “Free Stuff & Contests” for this and other free PDFs). Maybe some clever producers of audiobooks use a musical background (and sound effects like in those old radio shows?), but the plots aren’t stolen from musical pieces.
Why not? Writers, especially beginning ones, are often given plot ideas in writing groups. (In my third article this week, I’ll even provide some.) Why not the following then? Take Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony—it’s the “Pastoral”—and steal its story, a day in the countryside. The thunderstorm movement could even be a harbinger of horror. Hmm. Maybe old Ludwig stole the idea from such a short story, sans horror? Musicologists can chime in, if any read this blog. I’ll refrain from going to Google this time. Or take Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and turn it into a story about witches and their victims. In the audiobook version, these pieces can be playing in the background.
It’s a stretch, I know. Mussorgsky did a double take by going from art pieces associated with various stories to a musical piece, Pictures at an Exhibition (Ravel orchestrated the composer’s original piano work to make the piece a popular orchestral extravaganza and filler in concerts), but no writer I know of has done the opposite. Maybe the best we can do is to write stories inspired by musical pieces in a loose sense?
Will the future of publishing change this? I can imagine multimedia ebooks or audiobooks where the stories are inspired by music and/or speech and even contain odors (like the ones you might imagine for that Beethoven symphony right after the storm when the world smells fresh and spring-like). The possibilities are endless for mixing prose with audio, visual, tactile, and other senses. But will the music essentially be the story?
Probably not, but it can always suggest one. What would Star Wars’s evil Empire be without that stirring music in the background announcing Darth Vader on that battleship? And there’s the rub. As the medias mix, will the printed word play second fiddle to the movie? After all, that famous opening scroll in the original movie is the only prose the viewer sees—it’s more like a prologue to a book, but the movie is the story.
And it’s entirely possible that readership will disappear no matter how the stories are generated because the written word is no longer a medium for artistic expression. That would be sad.
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Comments are always welcome!
Last man alive? What about last woman alive? Penny Castro, LA County Sheriff’s Deputy and forensic diver, finds she isn’t alone, though—there are a few others who survive the contagion and want to kill her. And the remnants of a US government could be the greatest danger for her and the family she’s adopted. The post-apocalyptic thriller The Last Humans will soon be published by Black Opal Books and available at the publisher’s website, online retailers, and bookstores (if they don’t have it, ask for it!). Coming March 30! Pre-orders now accepted on Amazon and Smashwords.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
