Writing music
After Julio Cortázar's "El perseguidor", with a brief detour through Thomas Bernhard's Der Untergeher
“El perseguidor” is a short story by Julio Cortázar that follows the misadventures of one Johnny Carter, a jazz saxophonist. Carter — based on Charlie Parker1 — is addicted to alcohol and weed; he’s also tormented by the nature of time and reality. He tries to resolve his existential conundrum through music. He fails
I often cringe when reading it. Not because I might not like it — I actually love it, as I do most of JC’s work2 — but because it’s one of the most naïve representations of substance abuse ever written. I think Julio was a bit of a mummy’s boy when it came to some things; it’d take him at least ten or fifteen more years — and falling in love with the much cooler Carol Dunlop — to write about this topic with some flair. But I digress; the reason I bring up “El perseguidor” is because it’s one of the best examples of writing music I can think of.
First, let me get out of the way what I think is the worst possible way to write music: telling the reader what music sounds like. How lazy is that? And what’s the actual point of it? You might as well send them to listen to the actual music and dodge the work. The second worst way to write about music is quoting lyrics. Yes, inter-textuality and inter-poetics are great, but I can’t tell you what a pain in the arse it is to clear the rights for song lyrics; it’s a shame, but give up on that idea and thank me later (your future editors should thank me too). The third worst way to write music is dropping song or album titles, or the names of artists, which is exactly what Cortázar does in Rayuela (Hopscotch),3 and one of the reasons I avoid re-reading it. This is little more than performing cultural capital, and it does little for the work itself.4 Don’t do any of the above; instead, to write music properly, let the music possess your prose. This is how “El perseguidor” works. Critics have long noted that this story is deeply influenced by bebop.5 What interests me here isn’t this general claim, but how this happens at the level of individual sentences.