Music as Metaphor

Songs that tell stories and stories that invoke song

Over the past week I had the good fortune to attend two gigs celebrating singers and songs, Stewart D’Arietta’s arrangements of Leonard Cohen’s music My Leonard Cohen, and a new project by the singer-songwriter Lisa Lambe, Nightvisiting.

D’Arietta introduced Cohen’s songs with short biographical sketches while Lambe’s show, based on research in the National Archives, recreated the tradition of storytelling and singing that was the nightly entertainment in Ireland before the introduction of electricity. They were two very different but equally good shows, which brought home the beauty  of telling a story in song. I’m thinking particularly of Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, composed in the form of a letter, and the lament, Donall Og, sung by Lambe:

  You took what’s before me you took what’s behind me

  You took east and west when you couldn’t find me

  The sun moon and stars you have taken

  And God himself if I’m not mistaken.

  To be sure, Cohen was also a poet and there are many ballads in verse form alone without musical accompaniment. Yet in the singing of these stories the music supplies and sustains an emotional tone, beyond that created by the words and rhyme scheme.

Once, when I was young and dreaming of becoming a writer I disclosed my ambition to a friend who didn’t read much. Her response was to suggest that I write songs because she believed a song was rich in meaning and the music made it memorable. I demurred because I had no musical abilities – I was thrown out of singing class in school for kid-acting instead of attending to Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics (‘Dance a Cachucha Fandango Bolero . . .’) – and because mostly I preferred reading to listening.

Gondoliers, subject of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta

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That said, I was raised on the songs of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin drifting from my father’s record player to my childhood bedroom. Not your usual lullabies for sure. My friend had a point, however, about the combination of music and story. Her thought was echoed by the composer Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin whom I heard once say that music changes the way we feel, therefore it changes the way we think.

 My friend’s advice notwithstanding, I proceeded to write fiction and have often had recourse to songs as reference points in stories and novels. I think hard before choosing them because I need their lyrics to somehow amplify the feelings or situation of the characters. It is enough to cite the title or a few lines of a song for the reader’s imagination to hear the music too, like the soundtrack to a movie.

In her novel, The Forgotten Waltz, Anne Enright gives each chapter the title of a schmaltzy love song. That’s enough to let the reader know this romance is too dreamy to last. The sensitive side of fictional detectives is often portrayed through their love of music, for example, Michael Connolly’s hero, Harry Bosch, is devoted to John Coltrane, while Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse loves Western classical opera. By contrast, P.D. James made her Dalgleish a part-time poet to round out his character.       

All this cross-referencing brings me to the point that, while most songs are shorter than most short stories, absent flash fiction, their impact can be similarly affecting. I think that’s because the music adds an emotional depth which the writer must otherwise convey in words, a difficult stunt to bring off. Many are the renowned musical moments in literature which themselves have become a byword for states or mind or soul. Take the ‘little phrase of Vinteuil’ in Marcel Proust’s long ‘contemplation of the essence of things’, Remembrance of Things Past:

 It had at once suggested to him a world of inexpressible delights, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt nothing else could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire. . . . Indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation.   

Alas, ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ has the opposite effect on Gabriel Conroy in James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’. The song prompts a bitter self-realisation for Gabriel setting him at an emotional distance from his wife, Greta. Song and music are key elements of Joyce’s work and he himself had a fine tenor voice. His friend, Samuel Beckett, was an accomplished pianist who, occasionally, allowed for a moment of musical nostalgia, undercut with mordant wit, as in his recollection of the ‘consumptive postman whistling “The Roses are Blooming in Picardy” ’ in Watt.

 Schubert’s poignant setting of a poem by Ruckert, ‘Du bist die Ruh’, (‘You are Rest’) is seminal to the clandestine affair in Kate O’Brien’s The Ante Room. More recently, the Beatles’ song ‘Norwegian Wood’ summons painful memories for the narrator in Haruki Murakami’s novel of the same title. Here the songs are a shorthand for the emotional colouring of the story.

  Beckett once said of Joyce that when he wanted to describe a dance he made the words dance, an innovation that has inspired later writers. Tim Winton’s Dirt Music tells the story of an unlikely romance between a depressed woman and a former musician, Lu Fox, who has renounced playing after a family tragedy. Although he runs away he cannot escape the impulse to play music. Even alone on a remote island off the coast of Western Australia he finds himself rigging up a drone to twang. Winton conjures its strange music with his words:

Bubbles on his skin, twisting strings of bubbles in his vision; they dance across the gulf before him while his ears chirp through the pressures of descent and his collarbone aches. There’s an inward glide in the drone. Like the great open spaces of apnoea, the freedom he knows within the bubble of the diver’s held breath. After a point there’s no swimming in it, just a calm glide through thermoclynes, something closer to flight.

There are so many words associated with movement here, twisting, dance, chirp, glide, diver, swimming, flying, glide again, and bubbles all around, carrying Fox through pain to freedom and release, that the paragraph anticipates the resolution at the end of the novel. Passion, whether love, rage or grief seems to seek expression in sound, particularly in music. Attentive writers register its force through the sounds of the words they choose but also by using their words to invoke the universal power of music, whether familiar or new.

  What are your favourite examples of how music is played in books? Or of songs that tell stories? I’m all ears!