Over at The Independent, Jessica Duchen lists her favorite works of literature that prominently feature music. Mirroring Heine, she starts out, "Music begins where words end," which is more or less true—after all most writing about music sucks the juice right out of it.
It's a pretty good list, though, if a little serious. Two books I would have added would have upped the fun factor considerably. First, there's the sadly OOP The Death of David Debrizzi by Paul Micou, which is a joyous yawp of a rant directed at a pompous, prominent impresario dictated from the deathbed of his disgraced rival. Sort of—it's actually far more complicated and interconnected than that, which is just another way it resembles music.
Then there's The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers, which not only manages to write intelligently about music and time, it works as a virtuosic rumination on ace and place in 20th Century America. I really need to read Singing again with a notepad to hand—I suspect that, in its twists and turns, repetitions and variations, it might actually be composed in sonata allegro form.
