The Music of H. Lovecraft (Part 1)

As we have seen, and as is pretty well known, HPL's writing is full of "the unnamable" - descriptors that attempt to describe the indescribable. Most of the time this is because the thing being described is so weird or demonic that his narrators struggle (supposedly) to find the right words for it. But there is a much more apparently down to Earth linguistic struggle that goes on in his fiction - music.

In 'The Hound' the narrator tells us of he and his (literal) partner in crime's artistic diversions. The scene is an odd one. Surrounded in their secret museum by unusual, mystical and profane objects pilfered from graves and the like, they also indulge in playing their own musical compositions.

But this is not music as most of his original readership would understand it:

"There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness."

It's clear that the narrator and St. John have created these instruments themselves, adapting them from more conventional ones so as to better produce the unconventional sounds they found so pleasing. At the time of HPL's writing, there was no such music available to listen to or buy commercially. Such things were viewed as modern/performance art. The Italian 'Futurists' included amongst their events 'The Art of Noises', using strange devices that made sounds intentionally replicating the sounds of industrial machinery and an increasingly mechanised daily environment, filled with sirens, engines, clanging metal etc. 

This was decidedly avante garde. Even by the 1950s when 'musique concrete' became noted as a distinct genre it was still regarded as an avante garde artistic practice - 'experimental music' as a genre was still a decade or so away.

HPL was nothing if not consistent in his avowed dislike of anything avante garde. However, music in general seems to have been something he found difficult to appreciate:

"...I am absolutely without the first rudiments of [musical] taste. It is simply a blind spot with me, & I candidly recognise the fact. My aesthetic emotions seem to be wholly unreachable except through visual channels. Whenever I seem to appreciate a strain of music, it is purely through association--never intrinsically. To me, "Tipperary" or "rule, Britannia" has infinitely more emotional appeal than any creation of Liszt, Beethoven, or Wagner. But at least I do not fall into the Philistine's usual pitfall of expressing contempt for an art which I do not understand."
 - letter to August Derleth, 21/11/30

This 'associational' sense of music appreciation seems to explain the way in which he writes about music in his fiction - it is as important as much for its effects on the listener/narrator (and the reader) as it is as an acoustic 'event'. Perhaps even more so. This is notable also in one of his poems, 'Harbour Whistles', which again would seem to echo/prefigure (depending on how aware HPL was to the Futurists' musical art) experimental industrial musics:

"The harbour whistles chant all through the night;

Throats [...] ranged in motley choirs

[..]

Fused into one mysterious cosmic drone."

If anyone had told him that 'Drone' would one day become a section in some record shops he would probably be appalled! The association there is that HPL thinks of 'non-musical music' as something incantatory - something that is so devilish it can only be used to summon up weird beings from another dimensional realm (a "cosmic drone" or St. John's "cacodaemoniacal ghastliness").

This is turned on its head in HPL's most famous use of music in his fiction - 'The Music of Erich Zann', which we will look at in Part Two.