‘Orfeo’ came out in paperback at last so I ordered it; the truth is that Richard Powers is not an author I can read as an .epub. (And, despite me calling him a favourite author, is often not someone I can read more than once, because so many of them pare so close to the bone for me — ‘The Goldbug Variations’ nearly wrecked me, at the time..)

‘For many people the primacy of texture and timbre in music would make any attempt to incorporate it into a narrative, into a verbal construction, a little bit pointless. These listeners go to music precisely for the thing that words and verbal semantics can�t get to. Other people who are attracted primarily by harmony and the progressions of harmony probably feel more affinity with the prosody of words and the meanings encapsulated in the syntax of sentences and the changing progressions of chunks of story. That sense of a lingering unfolding of expectation, followed by surprise or satisfaction in moving away from or toward those expectations, is shared across those elements of music and prose. My love of harmonic expectation and progression in music is not unlike my love of cadence and register in prose. I don�t always read for story or character. I often read for language and for the unfolding trajectories of sentences and paragraphs. And it never really felt profoundly odd to me�once I did commit in my third novel, The Gold Bug Variations, to writing about music�to explore the common features between prose and sound, pure musical sound.’

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“But I�m not personally convinced that the turn toward darkness is intrinsically wrong. The turn toward difficulty and thorniness isn�t necessarily something we want to demonize and ban. Something in me is sympathetic to Adorno when he says that serial music �takes upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world.� We need a music large enough to incorporate everything in our soul, even that tangled darkness. But I wanted to tell the story of a man who starts out at a neo-romantic moment, takes the turn that serious and academic composition takes, and then lives long enough to see everything that he�s committed to get washed away and replaced by another kind of neo-romanticism at the end of the day. And I wanted to tell that story in a way that would make a reader�s sympathies vacillate, so that at times the reader would feel that there�s something misguided and alienating about this project, that Els is guilty of that same wrong turn that so much of modern music is guilty of, trying to push the ear so far that it cuts off its audience and leaves them with something unhearable. But at other times, I want the story to twist and change so that the reader might feel in Els�s pursuit something stubbornly valuable and almost heroic. In a culture like ours today, where only the beautiful and the easily accessible and the affirmative get played again and again, we have a new need for music that might complicate and deepen the story.”

conversation with richard powers