"Where are the bizarre chords in the middle?": A search for the sound of Imaginary Music

Musicology, as a discipline, has always, to some degree, relied on the notion of an epistemological gap between music and language. In the last few decades, some studies have attempted to rethink this gap and underline the importance of different types of discourse about music – such as informal ascriptions, critical descriptions, and literary references – for the understanding of how music can be perceived and interpreted in specific temporal and cultural settings (Kramer 2003). However, the specific relationship between words and music in the context of the novel remains quite unexplored by musicologists, with a few exceptions, such as works by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Lawrence Kramer and Cormac Newark.
In turn, Literature has fostered many different reflections about the importance of music in the novel genre, whether on a structural, an acoustic, or a semantic level. These studies are intrinsically connected to the development of the field of Word and Music Studies, which, in its short history, has motivated the emergence of new terminology that would fit specific musico-literary relationships, such as the ones proposed by Steven Paul Scher and Werner Wolf, and the invention or reinterpretation of concepts such as musicality, the 'musical novel' (Petermann 2014) and 'literary soundtracks' (Graham 2013).
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the study of "music in literature" and to analyse fictional "verbal music" (Scher 1970) from a musicological perspective; to approach the reader as co-creator and listener; and to understand how the verbal description of imaginary music in a novel can interact and alter the way we perceive, interpret and think about music.
In order to achieve these objectives, I will focus on the novel Kafka on the Shore (2002) by Haruki Murakami and analyse the case of imaginary music included in the text, as well as different attempts to transpose this inaudible verbal description to the musical medium. On Youtube, there are seven different musical interpretations of the song "Kafka on the shore". Although they are all based on the lyrics presented in Murakami's novel, each song choses a particular language, instrumentation, melodic gestures and time, which, in turn, motivate different reactions from the users that have read Murakami's work. These intermedial transpositions and the debates that they stimulate allow us to question the boundaries between music and language and to better understand the particular ways in which fictional verbal music can provoke and affect the reader's auditory imagination. As many comments to these musical adaptations make clear, imaginary music forces us to search for sound and allows us to participate in a process of "worldbuilding" that is simultaneously personal and collective. Also, the different materialisations of "Kafka on the Shore" act upon the readers and change the way they interpret Murakami's narrative, its characters and the overall reading experience.
In conclusion, by proposing that imaginary music is a form of verbal music worthy of distinction and reflection and by analysing a case of musico-literary intermediality that turns the reader into a composer or a listener with specific musical experiences and expectations, I hope to suggest that words and literature do not simply silence music and fixate a particular interpretation of its meanings (Odello 2013), but, on the contrary, prompt different "hearings" and help us communicate and understand the values we associate with musical as an idea and as a practice.