When words combine with music to sing out from the page

James Joyce, Seamus Heaney and Thomas McCarthy are among the poets assembled in a wonderful book of writings inspired by music, says Alan O’Riordan

“WRITING about music,” the much-quoted quip goes, “is like dancing about architecture.” It’s a reasonable statement in the sense that nothing can ever really make up for listening to the stuff itself. But it’s reductive in an important way –— it denies the power of words inspired by music to make us hear differently, to make us pause to consider a particular effect, or to explore the resonances that music and memory, intertwined, can have.

In these senses, writing about music is a fruitful pursuit, one that often allows poets to share a subjective response to a sensation that is easily accessible to the reader.