The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure … by Emily Petermann (2014)

How to compose fiction that deals either with jazz or classical music, not just thematically but on a structural basis? And is it possible at all to write texts as Mozart or Ellington once transcribed scores? Emily Petermann tries to find answers to the questions of what exactly a musical novel is and how it should be organized. That is, she looks for form, techniques and macro structural elements. Having in mind the intermediality  of the genre, a combination of text, music and other media, she sets out to show different organizational approaches to the musical novel.

In The Musical Novel, we encounter two distinctive types of novels and two entirely different approaches. While in the first half of the book she researches the genre of the jazz novel (where jazz is treated as a musical genre, indifferent of which style of jazz), in the second part, she concentrates on classical music in fiction. The jazz novels are rather new; the first one is from 1975, Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar. It is also the first part of the only jazz (and blues) novel tetralogy that continues with The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven-League Boots (1995) and The Magic Keys (2005) which are part of Petermann’s analysis, too. Furthermore, she examines Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976), Xam Wilson Cartier’s Be-Bop, Re-Bop (1987) and Muse-Echo Blues (1991), Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Christian Gailly’s Be-bop (1995), Stanley Crouch’s Don’t The Moon Look Lonesome (2000) and Jack Fuller’s The Best of Jackson Payne (2000).

Petermann, an Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Konstanz, Germany, in the second part of her study does not just approach another musical genre but an altogether different strategy. For here five novels (by authors Rachel Cusk, Nancy Huston, Thomas Bernhard, Richard Powers and Gabriel Josipovici) all use Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations as a topic and build a story around it, that is in terms of structure, use of aria(s) and themes. This results in five different perceptions of one classical piece, that, contrary to the organization of a jazz piece, has clearly defined pauses, parts, and lead voices that will not let room for improvisation. (After all, the composition in question is known to be a piano piece, while the jazz novels feature all kinds of different instruments and players.) And the character of the composition exists only in musical scores, since Bach hardly had the means to record it. This, on the other hand, adds a notion of instability to the performance and the performers and, ironically, also gives room for the fictional interpretation/improvisation of the piece.

While Petermann’s study of the Goldberg Variations is extraordinarily good (and new), the focus on the use of jazz in so-called jazz novels in part one cannot compete with it.

Although her chapter “The Performance Situation in Jazz Novels” is excellent and covers many fictional sessions, concerts, all kinds of oral devices and rehearsals; this actually is the best passage in the book. But then I missed some essential texts, particularly in the case of Albert Murray’s novels, his “blues idiom” and some basic writings by Ralph Ellison, as well as some mention of recent books on jazz fiction criticism, too. Furthermore, since there is a huge body of African American literature – and criticism – this resource may have been taken into consideration somewhat more intensively. Almost all the jazz novels quoted here were written by African American authors.

However, this may be a consequence of the sheer number of novels examined here (16 altogether), that may have made a deeper analysis impossible.
One of her discoveries is that there is not too much difference in the textual and organizational approaches to novels describing (and using the structural features) jazz or novels with a “classical” theme. As Petermann states in her conclusion, the “important question remains of what the music means for these novels. … The position taken by this study emphasizes the intrinsic reference of music within its own closed system, through the establishment of patterns, repetitions, breaches with conventions, etc., which make connections to other parts of the piece or to forms and patterns shared by other pieces of music. […] As interpretations of and responses to music, musical novels are first and foremost acts of esthesis, in which the text develops what may be very individualized associations with a piece of music or genre.”
For the scholar of musical fiction, this book is of great interest.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2015

Emily Petermann. The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction (European Studies in North American Literature and Culture). Camden House, 2014, 250 p.