SOURCE: "Notes Toward a Theory of Verbal Music," in Comparative Literature, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Spring, 1970, pp. 147-56.

In the following essay, Scher uses a passage from Aldous Huxley's Pount Counter Point to illustrate his conception of verbal music, and he also describes the characteristic features of verbal music in prose.

Aesthetic speculation about the interrelationship between literature and music has been regarded as a fascinating and elusive, if somewhat suspect, border area of literary criticism. In their influential Theory of Literature René Wellek and Austin Warren voiced particularly strong scepticism concerning the possibility of successfully combining the "sister arts." Yet the numerous examples of "great artists in the field of literature [who] also feel a need for going beyond the limits of their art and striving after a symbiosis with the other art" cannot be ignored; and today more and more scholars agree that musico-literary relations promise a...