Preview of An Equal Music Summary:

The novel's central theme is suggested by its title, which Seth has taken from a sermon by the early seventeenth-century English poet and churchman John Donne.

A passage from the sermon, in which Donne describes the entry of the redeemed Christian soul into heaven, serves as the epigraph to the novel: And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no cloud nor sun...