Chapter 10
In: 'Make It Old': Retro Forms and Styles in Literature and Music
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Abstract
The Music: A Novel Through Sound (2018) by the artist and composer Matthew Herbert contributes to an ongoing musico-literary tradition and within it presents a new and rare example: Herbert’s text uses the acoustic connection between noise, sound and music in order to challenge our preconceived notions of the latter. At the same time, The Music offers a renegotiation of modern and contemporary music aesthetics. Thus, this novel not only presents a challenge to the reader but also to the field of intermediality itself: how can Herbert’s work be categorised using the typology of intermediality? What affordances of form – musical and literary – are experimented with and explored in and through this novel?