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Music has always been inspired by things other than itself, and similarly music has been the inspiration for other forms of expression. This is the basis for this project.
Read this excerpt from E M Forster’s A Passage to India:
‘ Goodbye, Professor Godbole,’ she continued, suddenly agitated. ‘It’s a shame we never heard you sing.’E M Forster, A Passage to India, Part 1 Chapter 7
‘I may sing now,’ he replied, and did.
This thin voice rose, and gave out one sound after another. At times there seemed rhythm, at times there was the illusion of a Western melody. But the ear, baffled repeatedly, soon lost any clue, and wandered in a maze of noises, none harsh or unpleasant, none intelligible. It was the song of an unknown bird. Only the servants understood it. They began to whisper to one another. The man who was gathering water-chestnut came naked out of the tank, his lips parted with delight, disclosing his scarlet tongue. The sounds continued and ceased after a few moments as casually as they had begun - apparently halfway through a bar, and upon the subdominant.
‘Thanks so much; what was that?’ asked Fielding.
‘I will explain in detail. It was a religious song. I placed myself in the position of a milkmaiden. I say to Shri Krishna: 'Come! Come to me only.' The God refuses to come. This is repeated several times. The song is composed in a raga appropriate to the present hour, which is the evening.’
‘But He comes in some other song, I hope?’ said Mrs Moore gently.
‘Oh no, He refuses to come,’ repeated Godbole, perhaps not understanding her question. ‘I say to Him, Come, come, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come.’
Here, E M Forster draws attention to the differences in perception between two cultures through music. The Europeans struggle to make sense of the song by trying to interpret it according to their own preconceptions, but the music refuses to allow this to happen. Even more, the Western desire for fulfilment indicated by Mrs Moore’s hope that Shri Krishna will come eventually is itself confounded by Godbole. It is a subtle, intricate and carefully balanced cameo.
This is just one short example of how music has been an inspiration to another form of expression. Here are some other literary sources which use music as an inspiration or aid to a greater or lesser extent. You will be able to think of more:
| Kurt Vonnegut | The Euphio Question |
| Kurt Vonnegut | The Foster Portfolio |
| (Both of these stories are from the collection Welcome to the Monkey House) | |
| Vaclav Havel | Largo Desolato |
| The Bible | The Canticum Sacrum |
| Gregory Bear | The Infinity Concerto |
| T S Eliot | The Wasteland; Four Quartets |
| Anthony Burgess | A Clockwork Orange |
| George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four |
| John Cage | (music based on processes within)The Book of Changes |
In addition there are many references to music in the plastic arts - violins, guitars and musical notation in Picasso and Dufy, references to Symphonies and the like by Kandinsky and many others:
| Mussorgsky | Pictures at an Exhibition |
| Whistler | Nocturnes |
| Mondrian | New York Boogie Woogie |
| Harrison Birtwistle’s The Triumph of Time is based on an etching by Durer. | |
You will divide into your allotted groups. Each group will think of one, two or three inspirations which can be anything that is not musical. You are to come up with a musical entertainment by the workshops in week 8. There are currently a few simple rules:
Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies’ diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:George Orwell, 1948, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part Two, Chapter 4It was only an ‘opeless fancy, It passed like an Ipril dye, But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred! They ‘ave stolen my ‘eart awye!The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen....
...Winston gazed abstractly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:They sye that time ‘eals all things, They sye you can always forget; But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years They twist my ‘eart-strings yet!She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.
We also have sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not, of quarter sounds, and lesser slides of sounds; divers instruments like wise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp. We make divers tremblings and warbling of sounds, which in their original are entire; we represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps, which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echos reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller, and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes in strange lines and distances.Francis, Lord Bacon (Thomas More), New Atlantis
Fred Bockman is thirty and looks eighteen. Life has left no marks on him, because he hasn’t paid much attention to it. What he pays most of his attention to, and what Lew Harrison want ed to interview him about, is this eight-ton umbrella of his that he listens to the stars with. It’s a big antenna rigged up an a telescope mount. The way I understand it, instead of looking at the stars through a telescope, he aims this thing out in space and picks up radio signals coming from different heavenly bodies.Kurt Vonnegut, The Euphio Question, 1951
Of course, there aren’t people running radio stations out there. It’s just that many of the heavenly bodies pour out a lot of energy and some of it can be picked up in the radio-frequency band. One good thing Fred’s rig does is to spot stars hidden from telescopes by big clouds of cosmic dust. Radio signals from them get through the cloud to Fred’s antenna.
That isn’t all the outfit can do, and, in his interview with Fred, Lew Harrison saved the most exciting part until the end of the program. ‘That’s very interesting, Dr Bockman,’ Lew said. ‘Tell me, has your radio telescope turned up anything else about the universe that hasn’t been revealed by ordinary light telescopes?’
This was the snapper. ‘Yes, it has,’ Fred said. ‘We’ve found about fifty spots in space, not hidden by cosmic dust, that give off powerful radio signals. Yet no heavenly bodies at all seem to be there.’
‘Well!’ Lew said in mock surprise. ‘I should say that is something! Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in radio history, we bring you the noise from Dr Bockman’s mysterious voids.’ They had strung a line out to Fred’s antenna on the campus. Lew waved to the engineer to switch in the signals coming form it. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the voice of nothingness!’ The noise wasn’t much to hear - a wavering hiss, more like a leaking tire than anything else. It was supposed to be on the air for five seconds. When the engineer switched it off, Fred and I were inexplicably grinning like idiots. I felt relaxed and tingling. Lew Harrison looked as though he’s stumbled into the dressing room at the Copacabana. He glanced at the studio clock, appalled. The monotonous hiss had been on the air for five minutes! If the engineer’s cuff hadn’t accidentally caught on the switch, it might be on yet.
Fred laughed nervously, and Lew hunted for his place in the script. ‘The hiss from nowhere,’ Lew said. ‘Dr Bockman, has anyone proposed a name for these interesting voids?’ ‘No,’ Fred said. ‘At the present time they have neither a name nor an explanation.’...
After the broadcast, Fred, Lew and I were cordial to one another to the point of being maudlin.
‘I can’t remember when a broadcast has been such a pleasure,’ Lew said. Sincerity is not his forte, yet he meant it.
‘It’s been one of the most memorable experiences of my life,’ Fred said, looking puzzled. ‘Extraordinarily pleasant.’
We were all embarrassed by the emotion we felt, and parted company in bafflement and haste. I hurried home for a drink, only to walk into the middle of another unsettling experience...
‘Fred Bockman was on the radio today,’ [my wife] said in a far-away voice.
‘I know, I was with him in the studio.’
‘He was out of this world,’ she sighed, ‘Simply out of this world. That noise from space - when he turned that on, everything just seemed to drop away from me. I’ve been lying here just trying to get over it.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I said, biting my lip. ‘Well, guess I’d better round up Eddie.’ Eddie is my ten-year-old son, and captain of an apparently invincible baseball team.
‘Save your strength, Pop,’ said a small voice form the shadows.
‘You home? What’s the matter? Game called off on account of atomic attack?’
‘Nope. We just finished eight innings.’
‘Beating ‘em so bad they didn’t want to go on, eh?’
‘Oh, they were doing pretty good. Score was tied, and they had two men on and two outs.’ He talked as though he were recounting a dream. ‘And then,’ he said, his eyes widening, ‘everybody kind of lost interest, just wandered off. I came home and found the old lady curled up here, so I lay down on the floor.’
‘Why?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Pop,’ Eddie said thoughtfully, ‘I’m damned if I know.’
Good luck!