Musicians of Fiction
It's not easy to write convincing fiction when one of the characters is a great artist. The explanations of the art and its greatness usually fall flat. Two embarrassing examples from Ayn Rand's novels come to my mind instantly. In the opening pages of Atlas Shrugged, the theme of a mysterious symphony keeps popping up, one that is brilliant and perfect precisely because it was never written (oooh, that's spooky!). The other example comes from the The Fountainhead: Howard Roark's architectural masterpieces are left mainly to the imagination in the novel (I presume—I never read it) but must be shown in the movie version because of the nature of the medium. This showing is not to Roark's advantage because the artists hired to create the architectural drawings and matte paintings inevitably relied on clichés, because if they were geniuses like Roark they wouldn't be working in Hollywood. (One friend's reaction upon seeing those "masterpieces" was to blurt out, "he invented the 1950's!").
Two works of fiction from the world of SF feature characters who are musicians, and to my delight get them mostly right. First is Ian R. MacLeod's Song of Time. A supporting character, prominent in the first few chapters (the ones I've read so far) is a brilliant young pianist who dies a slow death, but not before transmitting his passion for music to his sister, the main character. I'm amazed to report that some of the lad's advice on the topic of practicing is actually useful. Amazing.
The other musician, a composer actually, is the first-person main character of the short story Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffery Ford, available from my good friends over at the Starship Sofa Podcast. I thought it regrettable that the story told of a magnum opus consisting of two-voice counterpoint (only two? To carry an extended work? I doubt it) but otherwise the depiction of the life and work of a composer felt right to me. As a bonus, the character is also a synaesthete, one of a group that, long-time readers know (hi Mom!), I have made the butt of good-natured jokes here at the Fredösphere (if jokes about concentration camps can ever be good-natured. . . and I say, when they're about synaesthetes, they are!).
Labels: AynRand, Composition, Creativity, MusicTheory, Starship Sofa, Synaesthetes
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