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.
“It also predicts that he would dislike the sounds of a language if he didn’t know the language.”
Perhaps this contributed to his disdain at the idea of learning German while living in Germany — i.e., he was an adult, and so learning German would have meant a rudimentary mapping of meanings to meaningless sounds, a process that he didn’t have to endure for the three languages he knew, since he’d learned them naturally as a child. He also hated “Finnegans Wake”; but, cutting against your theory, he did praise the “Wake” for certain passages containing “heavenly music” (if I recall his wording correctly).
Nice point. Strange that he ever used the phrase “heavenly music” because evidently he didn’t find music heavenly at all.
I realize now that my comment rather deepens the mystery. From all the evidence, it seems as if Nabokov didn’t mind or liked or loved mostly all sounds (his descriptions of some natural sounds are almost erotic: for instance, the opening paragraph of “Lolita”) — except certain artificial or intrusive or instrumental ones. But why? Most natural sounds, and the sounds of prose and poetry in particular, are inherently softer (only rarely is something in nature abrupt and loud like the wet *crack* of a stone against stone), so the intensity and loudness difference might be a major factor here. Recall also how maddening Nabokov found the elephantine footsteps of the owners of the apartment above his, and his loathing of a student who tried to bring headphones playing music into his classroom. Nabokov’s dislike of these noises and of music is perhaps due then to a particular form of hyperacusis. If so, all instrumental sounds — especially orchestra sounds — would have felt similarly intrusive to him (“an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds”: “succession” emphasizes the unstoppable intensity of music as it unfolds, experienced by him as a kind of pummeling of the self). And anything that intruded on the sovereignty of the self was especially anathema to Nabokov. “Vladimir Lenin . . . was reported seriously ill by the latter half of 1921, having symptoms possibly consistent with hyperacusis, such as regular headache and insomnia” (from the Wikipedia entry on hyperacusis); Nabokov also had insomnia all his life and remarks in his autobiography on his amazement at the ability of some people to quickly fall asleep in public — possibly hinting at the cause of his insomnia: over-sensitivity to certain types of sounds, or hyperacusis.
It is quite a mystery. How can you like poetry but not song?