Introducing: Music for Desks
It’s difficult enough to write about the mysterious interaction between writing and music, and it might be harder still to write an introduction to a column about that interaction—if writing about music is like dancing with architecture, then what I’m doing now is essentially dancing about a dance with architecture.
See what I mean?
Something needs to go here though, and as I fidgeted at my desk, trying to come up with an introduction, my mind wandered to my favorite writer on music, Ralph Ellison. Ellison was trained as a trumpeter at the Tuskegee Institute in the 1930s, and he used his considerable musical talents to infuse the sentences, scenes, and structures of both his fiction and non-fiction. His masterpiece, Invisible Man, might well be the most musical novel ever written by an American, and the prologue to that book alone is a bottomless exploration of jazz and the blues. It’s that prologue that came to mind, and one moment from it in particular: As the unnamed narrator takes us on a tour of the subterranean hole near Harlem where he’s chosen to shelter, he explains that he sometimes will play five recordings of Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” simultaneously. While his hole vibrates with the song, he enjoys his favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin: “I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.” Red drizzled over white; liquid poured onto a solid and shimmering into vapor; molded brass letting loose a bendable beam of sound: The connections here are in the contrasts, opposites combining to make a third, new element.
By describing how the practice of writing interacts with the act of listening to music, the essays in “Music for Desks” aspire to a similar magic. These pieces will be exploratory in nature—in all senses about process, rather than result. Their success, then, shouldn’t be measured by what you learn from them, but by what your mind produces by seeing these two seemingly opposite art forms contrasted. Here’s hoping they make life in your own little hole a little more tolerable.
— Corey Sobel
Corey Sobel is the series editor of "Music for Desks." His debut novel, The Redshirt, will be published this October.
