A book about music which strikes a chord

In 1923, Leos Janacek wrote his first string quartet and gave it the subtitle Kreutzer Sonata. The immediate inspiration was not Beethoven’s work of that name, but Tolstoy’s novella about the piece’s transformative and terrible power. Thus: music about words about music.

But the words in question are entirely fictional, and Tolstoy’s work is only “about” Beethoven in the sense that it is about a series of events that begins with a performance of his music. The idea of music inspired by music writing – musical criticism – would seem more improbable. And yet that is, in a sense, what will happen when the Southbank Centre devotes its 2012-13 season to The Rest is Noise, The New Yorker critic Alex Ross’s love letter to the 20th century in classical music. As Frank Zappa might have said: architecture about dancing about architecture.

This year-long series of concerts is a tribute to the book’s enormous critical and commercial success, which is all the more impressive given that writing movingly and evocatively about music is so very hard to do. I discovered this first hand this past summer when I made my first substantial attempt as a writer, if I may be generous with myself and use that word: an e-book entitled Beethoven’s Shadow.

On top of the basic, if sometimes seemingly insurmountable, difficulty of crafting a good sentence, writing about music has a serious built-in problem, which is that the only thing worth doing is also nearly impossible: to convey something of what the emotional experience of listening is like. This is so extraordinarily difficult because to write effectively you need to be direct, clear and specific, whereas the glory of music lies in its abstraction – its nearly infinite malleability according to the listener’s psychological state – and if you don’t embrace that, you are sure to miss its essence. If you err on one side, you end up with a blow-by-blow account that can read like the minutes of a meeting or, worse, a report card; on the other end of the spectrum you get platitudes about beauty and spirituality without approaching either.

How does one thread this needle? Clearly the entirety of a musical work’s emotional content cannot be expressed with words – if it could, why would one even need to play it? – but is it possible to write prose about music that is whittled down to lucidity and yet still captures the music’s sensuality and ambiguity? Certainly it can be done with dance and painting, which come a close second and third to music in terms of their abstract, not to say highfalutin, natures. Writing in The New Yorker, for example, Mr Ross’s colleagues Joan Acocella and Peter Schjeldahl have written about Velázquez and Balanchine, Degas and Bausch in a way that sets my pulse racing and makes me not just see but feel their work in my mind’s eye, even though these are not artists I am knowledgeable about and, if I’m being honest, my lack of knowledge makes me feel slightly threatened by them in what I imagine is much the same way that many people say they feel threatened by classical music. To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that Mr Ross or any other music writer fails where Ms Acocella and Mr Schjeldahl succeed; my own tactile, obsessive and highly prejudiced relationship to music simply means that the subject of a piece of classical music criticism is likely to be buzzing in my ears even before I start reading, and therefore the writing and what it evokes tends to be all mixed up with my own responses to the music. In short, I’m not well positioned to judge its effectiveness.