SOURCE: "Musical Correlatives," in Music and the Novel: A Study in Twentieth-Century Fiction, Rowman and Littlefield, 1980, pp. 1-36.

In the following essay, Aronson explores musical analogies in various works of literature and art that can be traced to Pythagoras's concept of universal harmony, and examines how a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets and novelists have attempted to capture the experience of music in their writings.

1

In Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, published in 1928, there occurs a description of a concert at the house of Lord and Lady Tantamount before an audience of invited guests. The orchestra is playing Bach's suite in B-minor, for flute and strings. It is a festive occasion. Conductor, soloists and orchestra perform with gusto and precision. Some of the listeners present respond to the musical ritual by closing their eyes and by a willing surrender to visual associations of a vaguely disturbing though...