Nabokov and Music

Nabokov and Music

It is well known that Nabokov didn’t like music: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.” But he doesn’t say why. The affliction didn’t run in his family and his son was an opera singer. Moreover, as has been remarked, his prose is quite musical, as if he loves the music of words (the opening paragraph of Lolita is a case in point). It would be interesting to know if he disliked some kinds of music more than other kinds. Did he dislike orchestral music more than vocal, the latter being more verbal? Would he dislike a good story told a cappella, say the story of Lolita? Did he dislike some pitches more than others? Would he have liked rap because less melodic (he liked poetry)? Did he dislike percussion as much as woodwind? Did he like to dance? Did he appreciate Buddy Rich? Most people dislike some music, so was he on a dislike spectrum? Did birdsong irritate him?

I have a theory and it might apply to more people than Nabokov. He didn’t like musical sounds unconnected to meaning. In prose, especially spoken prose, sounds are connected to meaning (he had quite a musical way of reading his own words aloud); but in music the sounds are loosely connected to meaning, if at all. He liked sound and meaning combined but not sounds alone. There had to be a meaning that the sounds served. This theory predicts that he wouldn’t have hated a sing-song way of reading prose (so long as it was good prose). Some poetry reading is like this. It also predicts that he would dislike the sounds of a language if he didn’t know the language. If he was so focused on meaning, did he dislike all meaningless sounds, like a waterfall or a cow mooing? There is no evidence of that. His affliction seems quite puzzling. He could have been indifferent to music as an art form without finding it “irritating”, as most of us are indifferent to many sounds. Did he like to watch a ballet performance? Was he exaggerating for effect? He is an aesthete who loves the music of language but dislikes the art of music.