{"id":61309,"date":"2025-12-09T10:00:51","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T16:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=61309"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:02","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:02","slug":"can-literary-fiction-save-classical-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/can-literary-fiction-save-classical-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Literary Fiction Save Classical Music?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Classical music remains \u201cthe most conservative\u201d performing art, as former New York Times <\/em>classical critic Anthony Tommasini wrote<\/a> in 2021. This is true both in the repertoire performed (Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven remain standard fare) and in the racial and gendered makeup of most ensembles. Only 2.4 percent of US orchestra musicians are Black, 4.8 percent are Latinx, and 79.1 percent are white\u2014according to a June 2023 report<\/a> by the League of American Orchestras\u2014and only one in nine music directors in the US are women. Pay discrimination and sexual harassment continue to plague female musicians; flautist Elizabeth Rowe\u2019s pay equity suit<\/a> against the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the recent sexual assault case<\/a> (and subsequent coverup) at the New York Philharmonic are just some of the most recent examples.<\/p>\n

But now, contemporary novelists are taking aim at some of the classical music industry\u2019s most harmful practices. Recent novels by Brendan Slocumb, Ryka Aoki, Imogen Crimp, Jessie Tu, Deborah Levy, and Ling Ling Huang expose\u2014and, in some cases, reimagine\u2014some of the\u00a0classical music\u00a0world\u2019s most troubling traditions, including the erasure of Black performers from music history, the abuse and harassment endemic to conservatory culture, and the physical injuries that often go unacknowledged by an industry committed to musical excellence above all else. Taken together, these new classical music novels invite readers to envision a world of high art centered not on elitism, exclusion, and exploitation, but on justice, community, and care.<\/p>\n

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Classical music is having a surprising moment in popular culture. Todd Field\u2019s T\u00e1r <\/em>(2022) made Mahler\u2019s Fifth Symphony the \u201csong of the season<\/a>.\u201d Bradley Cooper\u2019s Maestro <\/em>(2023) exposed Netflix audiences to Bernstein, Beethoven, and Mahler (and spurred Cooper to take years of conducting lessons). Add to these the recent Oscar-nominated documentaries The Only Girl in the Orchestra <\/em>(2023), American Symphony <\/em>(2023),<\/em> and The Last Repair Shop <\/em>(2023); the show-stealing orchestral covers of Pitbull and Taylor Swift in Netflix\u2019s Bridgerton <\/em>(2020\u2013 ); the \u201cOrchestra\u201d SNL skit<\/a> featuring Lizzo as a twerking flautist (2022); and an audience member\u2019s headline-making \u201corgasm\u201d<\/a> at a 2023 LA Philharmonic concert\u2014and it seems that classical music may be trending.<\/p>\n

This is no less true in the world of literary fiction. Since 2020, well over a dozen novels have taken classical music as their setting. These include archival mystery sagas like Brendan Slocumb\u2019s The Violin Conspiracy <\/em>(2022), Symphony of Secrets <\/em>(2023), and The Dark Maestro <\/em>(2025); queer fantasy tales like Ryka Aoki\u2019s Light from Uncommon Stars <\/em>(2021); coming-of-age narratives like Imogen Crimp\u2019s A Very Nice Girl <\/em>(2022) and Jessie Tu\u2019s A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing <\/em>(2020); and surrealist works of social critique like Ling Ling Huang\u2019s Natural Beauty <\/em>(2023) and Deborah Levy\u2019s August Blue <\/em>(2023).<\/p>\n

Of course, novels about classical music are nothing new. Writers from Thomas Mann to Kazuo Ishiguro have devised musical plots for centuries. Dozens of literary scholars (myself included<\/a>) have devoted their academic careers to tracing music\u2019s place in 19th-century literature. But what is notable about this recent surge in classical music fiction is that many of these texts center on a scathing critique of the industry itself. Slocumb, Aoki, Crimp, Tu, Huang, and Levy do not engage with classical music merely as a setting or plot point, but rather interrogate the racial, gendered, sexual, and labor politics of classical music culture. Some of the most exciting interventions in the classical music world, then, are happening in the realm of literary fiction.
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These new classical music novels re-envision many of the field\u2019s most violent traditions and exclusionary practices.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

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Slocumb\u2019s novels dramatize the racism experienced by Black performers and musicologists. In The Violin Conspiracy<\/em>, a violinist named Ray is repeatedly told that \u201cBlack people just [can\u2019t] play this kind of music.\u201d In Symphony of Secrets<\/em>, a musicologist named Bern must navigate the insidious racial politics of a paternalistic and exploitative nonprofit arts foundation. Slocumb\u2019s novels not only expose Western classical music\u2019s white supremacist traditions but also rewrite them. Slocumb frames the history of classical music as one in which Black artists played a crucial role\u2014which they no doubt did, as recent scholarship about performers and composers like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor<\/a>, Florence Price<\/a>, and Joseph Bologne<\/a> has made clear. Ray\u2019s grandmother gifts him a violin, which turns out to be a Stradivarius that his great-great-grandfather\u2019s enslaver forced him to play. Bern discovers that most of the music of the beloved fictional composer Frederic Delaney was in fact written by\u2014and stolen from\u2014a Black woman named Josephine Reed. Slocumb\u2019s novels craft alternative narratives about musical heritage, inviting readers to ponder what other kinds of musical pasts may be lurking beyond public consciousness and to recognize that classical music is not as white as it seems.<\/p>\n

Other novels focus on the labor conditions of classical musicians\u2014a topic that often goes unacknowledged in an industry that prizes the musical masterpieces of genius composers (what Alex Ross calls the \u201ccult of the Work<\/a>\u201d) above all else, including the embodied experiences of musical workers. As scholars such as William Cheng and Anna Bull have noted, this bodily erasure is especially problematic in an industry whose workers are plagued by repetitive strain injuries (RSIs); according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Music and Medicine, four out of five classical musicians will experience an RSI at some point in their career.1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Several recent novels critique the ways in which the classical music world extracts and exploits performers\u2019 bodily labor, presenting\u2014often in agonizing detail\u2014the physical pain that music making requires. The narrator of Crimp\u2019s A Very Nice Girl <\/em>describes how opera students \u201ccarried portable steamers around with them and wouldn\u2019t go into air-conditioned buildings and drank so much water they needed to pee every thirty minutes.\u201d The protagonist of Tu\u2019s A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing <\/em>frequently plays for hours on end, \u201cwithout a single toilet break,\u201d only to leave her hands raw and aching: \u201cThe calluses, normally hard, have burst, leaving damp layers of skin peeling off, half attached. It feels like I\u2019ve plunged my fingertips into a bowl of razor blades.\u201d<\/p>\n

As these novels reveal, injuries are so agonizing to performers not only because they cause physical pain, but also because a musician\u2019s worth (both personal and financial) depends on their body. Tu\u2019s protagonist is told that her fingers are \u201cthe most valuable part of [her] family.\u201d The narrator of Levy\u2019s August Blue <\/em>has her hands insured \u201cfor millions of dollars\u201d in America: \u201cI had to take care of my hands. The basics were massaging them, drumming my fingers for circulation, soaking them first in warm water, then in cold, keeping my nails short, no varnish, no rings, moisturizing, stretching, no splinters or cuts, trying to sleep without lying on my arm.\u201d Passages such as these serve as biting critiques of an industry that often obscures the physical labor of music making in service of \u201cthe music itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

These musical bodies are also vulnerable to violent forms of exploitation and abuse. Tu\u2019s protagonist details the pain she suffers at the hands of her first violin teacher (also her grandfather):<\/p>\n

As I played, he would push me into position. If my body didn\u2019t move the way he wanted, he had ways to change that. To fix my sometimes-wavering bow arm, he tied a thin wire to my wrist and attached the other end to a doorknob. Then he opened and closed the door slowly, so I\u2019d get used to the motion of the moving bow arm, steady and still and always at precisely the right angle. Sometimes, he\u2019d move the door so fast that by the time we finished my wrist was encircled with a bright red ring. When that happened, my mother would ask me to cover my wrists, so she didn\u2019t have to see what my grandpapa was doing to me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tu\u2019s novel speaks to the all-too-common culture of bullying, harassment, and abuse endemic in musical training settings; as recent work by Bull and Jillian Rogers shows, conservatories often create cultures of systemic abuse that weaponize students\u2019 pursuits of \u201cmusical excellence.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Huang\u2019s Natural Beauty<\/em> offers an especially haunting representation of a character who experiences lasting psychic and physical damage from her time in the classical music world. Upon entering conservatory at a young age, the narrator endures bullying, harassment, and sexual abuse from fellow students, teachers, and rich patrons and later falls prey to a dangerous wellness cult called Holistik. The conservatory-to-cult pipeline is clear; both spaces foster an \u201cobsess[ion] with growth and self-improvement\u201d and prize beauty and bodily purity at any cost.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \u201cLupin\u201d and the Limits of \u201cHaute Culture\u201d<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Shannon Draucker <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

Fiction provides a space for writers not only to critique the classical music world\u2019s repressive culture, but also to reimagine it. The heroine of August Blue<\/em> ultimately sheds all manner of male influence over her music\u2014her teacher, male conductors, even Rachmaninoff himself\u2014to become a composer in her own right. Tu\u2019s protagonist, rejected from the New York Philharmonic, joins a new ensemble called the New York Chamber Group, which is committed to \u201cdiverse repertoire,\u201d collaborations with \u201cdance groups and artists from Brooklyn,\u201d and \u201cmonthly funks, which are performances based on improvised ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most powerful reimagination of classical music culture can be found in Aoki\u2019s Light from Uncommon Stars, <\/em>in which the protagonist, a transgender violinist named Katrina, locates in classical music not only a powerful escape from transphobic violence\u2014\u201cWith the violin, I can sing, speak, be beautiful \u2026 I\u2019m not worrying about what bathroom is safe\u201d\u2014but also a powerful source of community and connection with her listeners, many of whom themselves occupy marginalized racial, gender, and sexual identities. In both her public performances and her YouTube videos, where she makes her performances of everything from Bart\u00f3k to video game music accessible to millions of viewers worldwide, Katrina aims to show her fans that they will \u201cnever again be alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

These new classical music novels thus re-envision many of the field\u2019s most violent traditions and exclusionary practices. But these texts also have something to offer to non-musicians and to readers who are not at all invested in the world of Bach and Beethoven. Writing about the \u201cmost conservative\u201d performing art, these novelists present especially nuanced critiques of racial exclusion, gendered violence, sexual abuse, and labor exploitation. They also rework common narratives about art altogether. Tales of \u201cdead white men in wigs\u201d<\/a> give way to more diverse, more compelling (and more realistic) histories. Narratives of abuse and exploitation are laid bare\u2014and then transformed into stories of healing and solidarity. Myths about individual geniuses (prodigies, maestros, virtuosos) shift to explorations of collaboration and community. While some of these visions might seem idealistic\u2014it is hard to imagine the classical music world in its current form so readily embracing Katrina\u2019s multimedia, genre-bending YouTube performances, for instance\u2014these novels nonetheless prompt readers to conceive of new possibilities for better artistic futures.<\/p>\n

  1. William Cheng, Loving Music Till It Hurts <\/em>(Oxford University Press, 2019); Anna Bull, Class, Control, and Classical Music <\/em>(Oxford University Press, 2019); Jeanette Der Bedrosian, \u201cRock On\u2014Just Not Too Hard<\/a>,\u201d Johns Hopkins Magazine<\/em>, Summer 2019. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. Jillian Rogers, \u201cAbuse, Trauma, and the Politics of \u2018Excellence\u2019 in US Musical Training Programs\u201d (paper presented at the American Musicological Society national meeting, Chicago, IL, November 16, 2024). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  3. See Shannon Draucker, \u201cThe Conservatory-to-Cult Pipeline<\/a>,\u201d Alternative Classical, <\/em>September 25, 2025. \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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