The Music of H. Lovecraft (part 2)

In Part 1 we saw some examples of HPL using musical and 'anti-musical' description to evoke weird moods. In one of his most famous short stories music isn't merely a throwaway detail but is very much first and foremost. This is of course 'The Music of Erich Zann'.

*

The title character is introduced to us as "an old German viol-player [...] who played evenings in a cheap theater orchestra". Living upstairs from the narrator, it is the music he plays in his room that first piques the narrator's curiosity.

But what kind of music does he actually play? HPL, for the most part, doesn't tell us (there is a specific exemption to this right at the end). Remembering his own lack of interest in music (see Part 1) it's interesting that he adopts the get out clause of having his narrator admit to us that he knows nothing about music:

"Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before;"

This is a clever variation of HPL's 'unnamable' tendency - his own words manage to get the reader to describe (imagine) something he can't or won't describe himself. And yet the narrator is quick to assert that this is music of some sort - identifying it as music, with "harmonies", a "kind of fugue" and with "recurrent passages". In other words we are definitely not dealing with the 'cacadaemoniacal' sounds of St.John and friend in 'The Hound'. Erich Zann is not just making sounds or indulging in avante-garde 'noise' - he is playing music.

*

The fact that the reader is left to iamgine this music represents something of a gamble for HPL, writing in 1921 remember, for it relies to some extent on the musical knowledge/familiarity of the reader; if one has no concept of musical theory then how can the narrator's observation "[I] concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius" really mean anything? On this side of the 21st century there are any number of experimental musical sub-genres and even someone versed in these might be hesitant to pass comment on a practitioner's "genius" (or otherwise).

As the story develops, so too does Zann's music: it assumes "a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player". Is someone or something playing alongside him...? It becomes clear that Zann's playing is in some way a spell - an acoustic/aural event designed to ward off... something:

"He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out - what, I could not iamgine."

Alas for Zann the 'spell' doesn't work - he dies, his viol playing on without him, and the space outisde his window shows only an empty star-devoid blackness.

*

There are a number of mysteries in this story but one of the strangest relates to music, for during Zann's last frenzied attempt at a 'spell' the narrator is able to give us a specific musical description for once, recognising the music as "a wild Hungarian dance [tune] popular in the theaters".

At first my own assumption was that, in his desperation, Zann had simply run out of his own compositions and, unable to improvise something, played the first tune that came to mind. My feeling now however is that the "Hungarian" part is a clue. Ancient cults predominating in HPL's stories, it may be that old folk songs and dances in some way originate from the sort of frenzied cult-like behaviour that we see summons (or at least placates) Cthulhu and the like?

Stretching the point, perhaps this is why HPL uses music as something incantatory - an aural spell which stirs things in the human soul which can be wonderful ("[Zann] enchanted me for over an hour") or demonic ("a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity").

It reads like HPL's own subtle commentary on music as an art form, its elusive nature - and how it can rouse various emotions. This being fiction he can go yet further - and his 'music' can rouse not only emotions but actual creatures.