# Author-Composer



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

On another thread I was comparing the perfectly ordered prose of Jane Austen to the best baroque music. 
But on reflection, she should most properly be paired with Mozart. I described her authorial *voice* as being amused, alert & analytical. Although she is sometimes caricatured as being shallow, mercenary, snobbish or heartless, I see her as deeply humane, with concerns about moral conduct paramount. 'The Magic Flute' with its themes of sacrifice, truthfulness & personal integrity would certainly match her there.

It's just my point of view, and I'm very happy if somebody disgrees. For a start, I know more of Jane Austen than I do of Mozart. 

Which author - poet, novelist or playwright - would you match with which composer, on the grounds of style, subject matter, tone, output, your emotional reactions or whatever else you like?

Yes, it's all subjective, but it could be very illuminating.

Thanks in advance for any replies. :tiphat:


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

I'd like to pair Bach with Shakespeare - on the grounds of his awe-inspiring prolificness, his humanity, his mastery, his depth, his grandeur and a certain mystical element too. 
So there!


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Tennyson I'd pair with Tchaikovsky. They both have that nineteenth-century emotionalism & charm & can write big or small as the occasion demands. They have both been criticised for being too obvious or facile. But they are both masters, and I love the art of both.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Whom would TC members match with Franz Kafka?


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

I thought of Bach - Shakespeare simply on the grounds of sheer genius. I eventually dismissed it on the grounds that Shakespeare is closer to Beethoven in terms of sheer rumbuctiousness. Bach needs to be matched with somebody who captures his elegance and rationality - the closest is probably Alexander Pope.


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## CypressWillow (Apr 2, 2013)

I haven't read enough of Keats to be familiar with his entire body of work. 
So may I timidly suggest that his "Ode to a Nightingale" is, for me, best read whilst listening to Chopin. 
The same tender melancholy. Yearning for beauty. A vision of a finer world than this which we inhabit.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Kafka is so sneakily outré I might match him with someone very modern but not noisy. Hmmmm . . . Ligeti? 

Baroness Orczy can be matched with Haydn, not for her rather stuffy writing style (in my opinion), but for her characters. Under the shallow disguises lies depth.

I'm thinking George Sand might be matched with Chopin. ;-)


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Perhaps Mikhail Bulgakov and Shostakovich? Bulgakov's novels range from sharp satire (The Heart of a Dog), broad fantasy, albeit satiric (The Master and Margarita) and poignant lyricism (The White Guard).

Beethoven and Victor Hugo. Iconoclasts and revolutionaries storming the heights of expression.


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

I don't know why, but I find much easier to match composers with painters instead of writers. Should be the opposite perhaps, since both composers and writers work in the realm of Time, while painters are visually/spatially oriented.

Anyway, Joyce and Schoenberg is a good pair, imo.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Borodin and Chekhov.

Both present a sense of lamentation for a Russia lost ... both seemed to anticipate the coming Revolution which would change everything.

Read _The Cherry Orchard _while listening to the Second String Quartet. Borodin is the perfect incidental music for Chekhov.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

Ingélou said:


> Whom would TC members match with Franz Kafka?


I was just scrolling down the page, when I thought of Franz Kafka and, immediately, I thought of Dmitri Shostakovich. Don't ask me to explain 

While I have read a LOT of grand literature, mostly German and French, of the last century, plus most of the Nobel prizewinners in literature, this exercise is just too much effort for me


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Interesting, brotagonist. Maybe the link is the strain of living under unpredictable and tyrannous regimes?


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## shangoyal (Sep 22, 2013)

Jack Kerouac - Charlie Parker

For all the jazz fans. :tiphat:

Also, Emily Dickinson - Robert Schumann

Works for you guys?


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Handel and Dryden - robust, subtle, elegant, penetrating, well-crafted.


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## Cheyenne (Aug 6, 2012)

Hazlitt wrote that Chaucer is "the poet of manners, or of real life; Spenser, as the poet of romance; Shakespeare as the poet of nature (in the largest use of the term); and Milton, as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently describes things as they are; Spenser, as we wish them to be; Shakespeare, as they would be; and Milton as they ought to be." Keeping in mind, too, Milton's characteristic _elevation_, I would couple him with Bach, despite massive temperamental differences. Spenser would be Schumann; Chaucer -- you know, I don't like doing this at all. I have a feeling this works better with the slightly lesser geniuses -- i.e., the comfortably 'second-rate' artists. I find Dryden - Händel extraordinarily apt, for example; but I cannot find an adequate match for Goethe or Mozart.

Certain elements of certain authors and composers are certainly mirrored in each other, though! Carlyle - Beethoven, Martinu - Charles Lamb, Thomas Moore - C.P.E. Bach, Matthew Arnold - Max Reger, Ruskin - Respighi, Chopin - Swinburne..!


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## revdrdave (Jan 8, 2014)

William Faulkner and Charles Ives...both having that multiple voices, stream-of-consciousness thing goin'...And both providing serious insights into the presence of history, of things past, in our efforts to make sense of the now...that who we are is very much rooted in who we were.


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## Alfacharger (Dec 6, 2013)

Anthony Burgess with Anthony Burgess!


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## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

John Steinbeck and Aaron Copland
Big space stories

E M Forster and Elgar
Empire

Solzhenitsyn and Shostakovich
A gulag connection 

Hemingway and Gerswhin
Americans in Paris and Cuba


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I have long associated Mozart with the painters of the Rococo, all of whom brought a certain elegance, wit, humor, sensuality, _joie de vivre_, natural clarity, and humanness to their work... rather like Mozart:







Among the writers I think of in connection with Mozart and the Rococo are Molière, Voltaire, and even Rousseau. Most of all, however, I think of Robert Herrick:

*Delight in Disorder*

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribands to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

*Upon Julia's Clothes*

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!

I also think of the early poems of Paul Verlaine... especially those from his book, _Fêtes galantes_.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Bach? Initially I thought of Shakespeare due to his preeminence and his Baroque mastery of language... but I must agree that Shakespeare is too "rambunctious" and plays far too fast and loose with structure or form. Turning again to the visual arts, I find that I have always thought of Bach in connection with those works of art that employ abstract structure, form, and pattern in a manner that almost conveys an attempt to suggest the structure of the universe... the face of God... the "music of the Spheres":







The closest in literature that I can think of is Dante. Dante's _Comedia_ employs the most incredible formal structure... and like Bach this structure is not employed merely to show off, but rather as a means of suggesting the underlying structure in the whole of creation and in God.


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## shangoyal (Sep 22, 2013)

Wow, StlukesguildOhio, these are beautiful!


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## Antiquarian (Apr 29, 2014)

I often listen to music as I read. I remember thinking how fitting Bartók's Sonatas for Piano and Violin were whilst reading China Miéville's 'The City & The City'. Both are dark, brooding works that just ooze Eastern Europe.


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## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

Stravinsky & Nabokov
Ligeti & Beckett
Bach & Luther


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

Brahms and Flaubert.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

senza sordino said:


> John Steinbeck and Aaron Copland
> Big space stories


I like this. Excellent choice. Copland did the score for _Of Mice and Men_.

I would go with Walt Whitman and Aaron Copeland.

Note: Ingélou, great idea for a thread.


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

I'm struggling to come up with a composer who could pair with William Blake...


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Cosmos said:


> I'm struggling to come up with a composer who could pair with William Blake...


William Bolcom, though not a contemporary, has set the entire "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" as a three-hour work for soloists, choruses, and orchestra. He worked on it for 25 years.


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## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

Cosmos said:


> I'm struggling to come up with a composer who could pair with William Blake...


John Tavener or William Byrd.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

William Blake & William Byrd, hey, Morimur? Nice idea - they both have a direct, bright quality, and a seeming simplicity that contains multitudes.


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

Cosmos said:


> I'm struggling to come up with a composer who could pair with William Blake...


I am not at all familiar with his writings , but I'd match the painter with Scriabin.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

Samuel Barber and Lord Byron.

Wagner and Tolkien.


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

GioCar said:


> I am not at all familiar with his writings , but I'd match the painter with Scriabin.


That's what I was thinking. Visions of the Daughters of Albion would pair nicely with the Poem of Ecstasy


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Erik Satie and e e cummings


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Kafka and Prokofiev. They never go quite where you expect.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Reading a review of a new Bach cantata album (_Recreation for the Soul_ -- Channel Classics 35214) in the latest _STEREOPHILE_ magazine this morning, I was reminded of the "games" Bach played in his cantatas. To quote just a portion from Robert Levine's article (p.191, Vol.37, No.10): "For example, the first letters of each 'aria' of Cantata 150 spell out Doktor Conrad Mecbach, mayor of Muhlhausen, where Bach worked ..." This prompts me to consider Bach as a musical analogue for Dante whose _Commedia _is an encyclopedia of Medieval "games" as well as a great "spiritual" tribute, and who also wrote secular verse such as _La Vita Nuova_ (_The New Life_) a tribute to a woman, Beatrice Portinari. Too, what other composer besides Bach has so profoundly explored the depths (secular music such as the _Brandenburgs_ and the solo violin and cello suites) and the heights (the masses and Church cantatas) of music as has Bach, whose sounds could well serve as the incidental music for a trip through Dante's three realms ... although the _Inferno _is certainly undeserving of Bach's music in any but an artistic sense.

So, I couple the composer Bach with the poet Dante -- two undisputed and prolific giants in their fields -- both masters of the sacred and the profane. In other words, the human.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

John Donne and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber - in Battalia, Biber shows the sense of struggle and use of dissonance that we find in some of Donne's religious poetry and his Rosary Sonatas can be compared with Donne's La Corona (& poems like Good Friday, Riding Westwards) in their intriguing meditation on the Christian story. 

In his love poetry, Donne can be compared with Lully - both show joy in the sensual, sometimes insouciant, often passionate.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

Frank Zappa and Thomas Pynchon

Well, gee, who would have thought I'd attempt to compare my favourite composer and my favourite novelist? Big surprise, that.

While Zappa was a prolific composer of short form works (usually, however, joined together seamlessly in gigantic two-hour-plus setlists) with a few big ones here and there, Pynchon has more epics to his name than anything, titles like _Gravity's Rainbow_, _Mason & Dixon_, _V._, and _Against the Day_ ranging from high-end triple to low-end quadruple digit page counts. Though they differ in form, the works of both combine the serious and the trivial into singular comic ideas, often via a dense network of pop culture references, in jokes, bizarre asides, and crude lyrics, laid over a background of irony, tragedy, paranoia, and the grotesque.


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

Boris Pasternak <-> Nikolay Myaskovsky (men of the world who lived through turbulent times).
Friedrich Nietzsche <-> Alexander Scriabin (questions of religion and existentialism).


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