Reflections on Music in Fiction: Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence (1999), Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (2016) and Roger Scruton’s Perictione in Colophon (2000)

Abstract

Abstract Music and literature are sister arts whose affinities and intertwinement over time have been explored from musicological and literary studies perspectives. Music holds great fascination with both scholars and lay persons because it manages to move us deeply even if we do not know much about it in a technical or theoretical sense. Aesthetic theories of music have time and again assigned this art form a special, sometimes even a divine, status. This article explores some ways in which contemporary novels reflect on music as an art form and cultural practice, its personal as well as political significance. It investigates how such reflection about music is embedded in the narrative texts, either as narratorial comments which momentarily suspend the action or as thoughts and opinions expressed by characters. In each case, readers are invited to follow the often deeply philosophical lines of reasoning presented in the text and to form their own ideas. Musical ekphrasis is used to convey at least a fleeting impression of the ephemeral ‘texture’ of the respective music and its lasting effects on the novels’ characters.