Marc Estrin
Classical Music in Literature
Scott Esposito
Classical music, I have been told, is near death. Similarly, I've read in many places (probably written by the same people) of the novel's imminent demise. Strange then how some of the freshest work I've read recently has resulted from the union of these two dying art forms.
Proving that classical music can be as profound and bizarre as anything a novelist can toss into the mix, author Marc Estrin puts the fictitious Insect Sonata by noted maverick composer Charles Ives in his novel Insect Dreams. Here's part of its performance on April 1, 1931:
Without a word of introduction, [the pianist] walked upstage of the Steinway Concert Grand and returned with a large brick and two pieces of two-by-four, one 47 3/4 inches, the other 45 1/2 inches, the longer pained in white, the shorter in black enamel. He put the wood on the piano bench and carefully leaned the cement block on the sustaining pedal. Climbing out from under the keyboard, he retrieved the wood and placed the longer piece, narrow edge down, along the white keys, and the shorter one, wider side down, along the black. He was ready to begin the first movement: "Creation."
Standing over the keyboard, the piano bench behind him, he took a huge breath and crashed his whole body weight, elbows first, down onto the wood. Some in the audience gasped, most jumped. The piano let out a sound such as had never been heard in any concert hall. At no time, ever, had all eighty-eight notes of a Steinway Concert Grand been simultaneously sounded and sustained publicly.
Quadruple fortissimo to start, the opening ultra-chord took a full two and a half minutes to decay into nothingness.
Estrin goes on to gloss this singular opening: it's a musical homage to the (then) recently theorized Big Bang. In addition to being good reading, this performance neatly captures the spirit of the times--the public and artistic infatuation with science, particularly theoretical physics, which was then revealing previously unthinkable realms and inspiring novelists and film directors to unleash visions of ludicrous inventions, like time machines, atomic energy plants, and atomic bombs.
(Considerations of other novels in full article.)