Will Self is going to be giving a lecture entitled “What’s my leitmotif-ation? Examining the formal properties of the symphony and the novel” on Saturday 8 October at 5pm at Kings Place in London.
“Many writers are intrigued by the connections between musical and literary forms,” writes Self, “but it’s the more egregious attempts at synthesising the two – think of Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon Symphony – that tend to grab attention, usually because they so spectacularly fail both as literature and as ‘linguistic music’. I will be arguing that in fact key innovations in literature have resulted from the absorption and recasting of musical form, and that just as the programme music of the late 19th century was an enormous catalyst to the atonal revolutions of the 20th, so these revolutions were in turn hugely implicated in literary modernism.”
Tickets range from £9.50 to £14.50. For details, visit the Kings Place website.
