A while ago, my attention was drawn to a term that I came across in a newspaper. I remembered seeing this term first in a discussion of Jennifer Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Shortly thereafter, I saw it again in a review of Erik Menkveld's Het grote zwijgen (2011), a novel featuring two Dutch composers, Matthijs Vermeulen and Alphons Diepenbrock. Since then, I have encountered it more often, and it has now come into common usage amongst literature reviewers. The term is ‘music novel’.

Music novel: it sounds so obvious – a novel that is partly or entirely about music. Everyone has read one: classics, such as Doktor Faustus (1947) by Thomas Mann or De koperen tuin (1950) by the Dutch author Simon Vestdijk, or more recent examples, such as Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (1995), Vikram Seth's An Equal Music (1999), Het psalmenoproer (2006) by Maarten 't Hart, or Swing Time (2016) by Zadie Smith. Websites and printed bibliographies present lists of the titles of hundreds of such music novels, as if the usefulness of such information were self-evident. Upon closer inspection, however, the term is remarkable, given the lack of similar descriptive words for novels in which other art disciplines are prominently featured. Why is it that we never talk about theatre novels, literature novels, dance novels or visual art novels?

Music unquestionably has a special relationship with literature. The two disciplines have always been closely linked, and the connections between them have been discussed for centuries. In recent decades, these have also been the subject of in-depth, systematic examination within the academic field known as ‘musico-literary studies’, also known as Word and Music Studies, which is part of the broader area of research on ‘intermediality’.

In musico-literary studies, researchers pay attention to a broad range of connections between the disciplines and across a wide variety of literary and musical genres, including song, opera, poetry and prose. Musical influences on the novel vary wildly. Music can play a role in many different ways, and the purpose of a musico-literary analysis is to highlight these diverse elements, in order to say more about the content, structure and expressiveness of the literary work as a whole.