SHREYA BOSE
Book -Music PAIRING
Most great musicians swear by the power of literature , which constitutes the most unsurprising fact in the world . Similarly , those who take their music seriously know that very little goes as well with a good book as a good song . ( The other thing is good wine ). In the spirit of mixing pleasure with more pleasure , a list of pairings between the written and the sung words await you below .
On The Road : Representative of the Beat Generation , this book is about breathless pursuit of liberation . It is filled with men and women who makes obscene gestures to the spirit on conformity , and jump into whatever broken-down jalopy will take them to the non-destination they look forward to .
The Beats were driven wild-eyed by all things jazz . Their words reflected jazz ' s insatiable need to devastate boundaries and construct worlds maddened by their own beauty . It makes little sense to question an association so rightly made . The book is made for the astonishing crevasses of sounds offered by Ornithology ( Charlie Parker and Benny Harris ) or the dissonant abandon of anything Thelonious Monk has ever made .
The Thousand and One Nights : One of the most familiar texts on this list is a tribute to the art of storytelling itself . A brave heroine slays the demons within the heart of a tyrannical king by coaxing his mind instead of challenging him to a duel . Scheherazade weaves tales of wonder by night , thrills the king and helps him see the flaws of his way .
The stories are shaped like dreams - reality mixed with the bizarre , the terrible and the magnificent . Magic is a fact of life , serving to make the reader question morality and intention . This mix of the incredible and the mundane is exquisitely etched in Wong-Kar Wai ’ s In The Moon for Love . The few minutes of the film ’ s most recognisable soundpiece , Yumeji ’ s Theme is a surprising but compatible accompaniment to the stories that constitute Scheherazade ’ s nighttime quest . Shigeru Umebayashi emits the sound of a distant , unsubstantial world , much like the realm of stories that seem almost real when couched in the half-light of Scheherazade ’ s whispers .
The Collected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe : Poe ’ s intention does not intend to scare readers . It delves into the deepest auspices of human fear , which makes them effectively terrifying . Florid , perfectly curated words unravel unseemly tentacles of terror with ghastly ease . Within 6 pages , Poe can give you new nightmares and hysterically question your existing ones .
Naturally , such text needs a soundtrack which is tempered to its unique brand of terror-based psychoanalysis . Western classical music tends to do the trick . Mozart ’ s Lacrimosa dies illa or Camille Saint-Saëns ’
Danse Macabre , Op . 40 ( telling of Death playing a violin at Halloween for skeletons to dance to ) work well for obvious reasons .
Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep ? : Philip K . Dick ’ s most name-dropped novel unleashes hard questions about the human ability to feel and express compassion , love and connection . Dick uses animals to lay bare the deficiencies in humanity . Outside the rapturous plot , the book is an exquisite metaphor for everything that our technologically-charged minds should be worried about . The distinction between flesh and machine is muddled , and unsolvable anxieties emerge .
When Arvo Pärt , Philip Glass , and Vladimir Martynov composed Silencio , they must read these anxieties to prepare . However , instead of a frantic compendium of eager sound , they created music that wanes minimally as quickly as it attacks with excess . It matches the book ’ s meditative progression , and match the high points of revelation with sheaths of hyperexpressionist crescendo . While the classical bend might seem disjointed from a book about a post-apocalyptic world , the exact opposite occurs .
The Score Magazine
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