Ekphrasis: Writing About Music

How do we write about music? This is a form of what the ancient Greeks called ekphrasis: the description of one art in another. Not all of us are musicians, but nearly everyone likes one kind of music or another. It brings something wonderful to our lives, punctuates our memories, stirs our emotions. And when I think back upon some of the most life-changing books I’ve read (Homer’s Odyssey and the Sirens’ song, anyone?), the magic of music played a part in making them memorable. There are many ways in which the art of beautiful sounds can enrich our writing.

Melody in Words

We might call this a technical connection between music and words. For those who are poets, the connection is evident. Poetry, after all, has been described as “dry music,” with a definite tempo (meter) and phrasing. All it lacks is melody. There are poems that can literally be chanted (one thinks of Vachel Lindsay), and the lyrics of songs are, after all, poems. But even we prose writers aspire to lyrical passages, don’t we? Writing so beautiful and evocative that it calls out a whole range of emotions and associations, transcends the rational vessel of its words, acts directly upon our deepest consciousness… like music itself.

Musicians as Characters: A Way of Perceiving

One way to insert music into a novel is to employ characters who are musicians. People who are trained in music perceive the whole world through that lens. Unlike most of us, who tend to think visually, they think aurally. Remember the composer in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas? What a great, quirky voice “seeing through his ears” lent that character! We tend to think of musicians as having a certain kind of sensitivity, too, which enriches them as personages. Who would have imagined the great warrior Achilles was a musician, playing the harp in his lonely tent! Doesn’t that add a dimension to his character that we might not have suspected otherwise? Ditto Sherlock Holmes and his violin.

Music as a Character

I’ll bet nearly everyone reading this can associate certain pieces of music with certain moments of their life.  Music burrows into us, clings to our emotions, becomes a sound-track for our experiences that evokes whole scenes every time we hear the chords. Those songs or instrumental pieces have become “characters” in our life story. We can put them to work in our fiction as well. An evocative piece of music can stand in for an entire event, can be a great way to amp up the suspense, or nuance a character’s conscious thoughts. Movies are a great way to see this in action: notice how characters often have a “theme.”

But how do you describe something so non-visual, non-verbal? Resort to similes and metaphors. Music can pour, shimmer, soar, puddle. It can wrap around us, pierce our viscera, mount to the skies.

Music as Symbol

If you’ve ever read any of Patricia McKillip’s fantasy oeuvre, you will have noticed how frequently music plays a role in them. The Riddle-Master Trilogy is the most obvious, but it runs throughout her work. What does it mean? Why is the Christ figure a musician? What does the quest for a perfect song stand for? Music lends itself so easily to symbolism of harmony (well, yes: that’s a term borrowed from music), cosmic balance, self-fulfillment, etc., that it would be a shame not to exploit it somewhere. It implies so much more than words can say.

Who Gets to Write About Music?

Fortunately, it doesn’t take a musician to write about music. Maybe if you are depicting the world through a musician’s eyes, you need to know what that world is like. Certainly if describing the technical production of music, you need to have the right vocabulary. Think of it as any kind of “getting-it-right” research you might have to do. But we all experience music in one way or another, expert or not. It impacts us all. And the best part about it is that that impact transcends words. You might not be able to say something scientific about a minor key, but what really matters is how its emotional weight knocks you flat. Music strikes us directly at the most primitive level. Wow, look at those violent words: impacts, knocks, strikes! It really does, you know, banging on our eardrums physically. But the beauteous part is what happens in the brain, in the gut, in response to those blows. Music to our ears!