Examples of music writing
This is a working document. Here are some particularly good descriptions of music that I've come across in books. I want to keep adding, so please any good snippets: hellomouthguard@gmail.com
ELIZABETH HARDWICK from Sleepless Nights
In her presence on these bedraggled nights, nights when performers all over the world were smiling, dancing, or pretending to be a prince of antiquity, offering their acts to dead rooms, then it was impossible to escape the depths of her disbelief, to refuse the mean, horrible freedom of a savage suspicion of destiny. And yet the heart always drew back from the power of her will and its engagement with disaster. An inclination bred from punishing experiences compelled her to live gregariously and without affections.
Well, it’s a life. And some always hung about, as there is always someone in the evening leaning against the monument in the park.
A genuine nihilism; genuine, look twice. Infatuated glances saying, Beautiful black star, can you love me? The answer: No.
ANNIE PROULX from Heart Songs (1988)
The stamped tin ceiling was stained dark with smoke, a big table pushed against the wall to make more room. Above it hung a fly-specked calendar showing a moose fighting off wolves under a full moon. The Twilights sat silently on kitchen chairs arranged in a horseshoe row with old Eno at the center. Their instruments rested on their knees, their eyes gleamed with the last oily shafts of August sunlight. No one spoke. The old man pointed with his fiddle bow to an empty chair with chromium legs and a ripped plastic seat off to the side. Snipe sat in it and took his guitar out of its case.
ANNIE PROULX from Heart Songs (1988)
His accordion made a nasal, droning undernote like bagpipes, broken every few bars by circus music phrases, flaring, brassy elephant sounds. The effect was curious but not disagreeable. It gave the music a sardonic, rollicking air, like John Silver dancing a hornpipe, his wooden leg dotting blood on the captured deck.
KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD from The Eighty-Third (1916)
The thick, disturbed volume of sound outside called for explanation; if you could have heard it from Mars, you would have known it stood for danger. Yet it was a mere faint thrumming on the strings of peril - no explosions, no sharp reports, no shouting. The elements of noise were soft and stealthy - gentle thuddings on the worn earth, faint creakings, hoarse whispers; as it were, a death-rattle filling the whole atmosphere. I cannot describe it, but it made shrapnel seem healthy- something to which a man would bare his breast gladly. This sounded rather like the nether slime of danger. The very fear it caused was unhealthy a crooked trail of paralysis through the nerve-paths. My hand was steady, but my legs shook beneath me; my blood was warm, but things mopped and mowed in my brain. As yet, I had not stirred to look; but, as if my ears had not told me enough, my nostrils began to detect a faint, sickening smell. It was as if the dead had risen out of their trenches, with a little clatter of corrupted bones and weak motions of decomposing flesh. A terror that you could hear and smell, but as yet nameless and invisible.
RALPH ELLISON from The Invisible Man (1947)
Suddenly the bus jerked to a stop and I heard myself humming the same tune that the man ahead was whistling, and the words came back:
O well they picked poor Robin clean
O well they picked poor Robin clean
Well they tied poor Robin to a stump
Lawd, they picked all the feathers round from Robin's rump
Well they picked poor Robin clean.
Then I was on my feet, hurrying to the door, hearing the thin, tissue-paper-against-the-teeth-of-a-comb whistle following me outside at the next stop. I stood trembling at the curb, watching and half expecting to see the man leap from the door to follow me, whistling the old forgotten jingle about a bare-rumped robin. My mind seized upon the tune. I took the subway and it still droned through my mind after I had reached my room at Men's House and lay across the bed. What was the who-what-when-why-where of poor old Robin? What had he done and who had tied him and why had they plucked him and why had we sung of his fate? It was for a laugh, for a laugh, all the kids had laughed and laughed, and the droll tuba player of the old Elk's band had rendered it solo on his helical horn; with comical flourishes and doleful phrasing, "Boo boo boo booooo, Poor Robin clean" -- a mock funeral dirge . . . But who was Robin and for what had he been hurt and humiliated?
Suddenly I lay shaking with anger. It was no good.
RALPH ELLISON again from The Invisible Man (1947):
Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue’ – all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD from Crop Rotation
There was someone whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. He was ready at every opportunity with a little philosophical lecture which was utterly boring. Driven almost to despair, I discovered suddenly that he perspired unusually profusely when he spoke. I saw how the pearls of sweat gathered on his brow, then joined in a stream, slid down his nose, and ended hanging in a drop at the extreme tip of it. From that moment everything was changed; I could even take pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instructions, just to observe the sweat on his brow and on his nose.
updated 20 june