I also love to write about music, and because I’ve always written fiction, I’ve found the writing I do about music is in made-up stories and novels.
Thus came Coral Press, not only to get musical novels into print but also to provide a forum for the whole idea of musical fiction -- and now we’re starting this blog to give our readers a place to move discussion, note new musical fictions, and further the whole notion that you can tell a story as good and powerful as real life in a novel.
What specifically made me set this blog up was reading Music from Big Pink, a musical novel by John Niven that’s part of the excellent Continuum Press 33 1/3 series of book on single LPs. As you probably know, the books in the 33 1/3 are examinations of one album, creatively written, for sure, but for the most part a long essay about how the record was made and the effects on everyone it has had.But with Music from Big Pink, Niven wrote a fiction—a first person narration by a young drug dealer hanging around Woodstock as the Band was putting together its first, great LP. There can—and should—be debate as to how good a novel Music from Big Pink is (The New York Times Book Review quite liked it), but that it succeeds in colorfully and powerfully evoking the world around The Band circa 1967, the tensions in the group, and the both willful and haphazard creation of a masterwork can’t be denied. The Music from Big Pink story is well told through an invented character and his story.
More and more there are musical fictions out there, and more and more they’re getting attention and appropriate regard. We’ll talk more here about musical fictions as they appear; we’ll also feel comfortable discussing movies and TV that are also musical fictions (a flick such as Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous is a perfect example of how telling a good musical story in a made-up way can lead to powerful art; the somewhat lamented recent TV show Love Monkey shows another way storytelling can get into the music biz, if not the music itself).
One of our stated goals with starting Coral Press is to turn musical fiction into an accepted genre. As our joke goes, we’re after the reader who says, “Boy, I’ve read those mysteries and romance novels, and by now they’re all the same. What I really need is a good new Musical Novel!”
These readers are out there. All you need is a love of music and a love of reading about it and a love of hearing a good story with strong characters and powerful lots and ... well, all that makes any novel great.
And that’s what we here at Coral Press, especially here in our new blog, hope to push: Books that tell musical stories in a musical way, that let you capture all the joy and sadness—and more—of the music itself as you read.
