Books About Music and Musicians

By Lucy Levine · Updated November 3, 2026

The hardest thing a novelist can try is to make you hear a sound with nothing but print. The books about music on this shelf manage it, mostly by writing about what music does to a listener rather than what it sounds like. Here are eleven, from a Dorset church band to a New York record executive, with the passage in each older book that does the hearing for you.

The classics come first and are quoted from their public-domain texts. The recent books are in copyright, so they are described rather than quoted, and their dates come from Kirkus Reviews and their publishers.

Classic books about music

1. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)

The subtitle is The Mellstock Quire, and the novel follows a village church band of fiddlers and singers in its last years, as barrel-organs and harmoniums come in. Hardy says in his preface that the musicians were paid almost nothing for a year of Sundays, only

just enough, as an old executant told me, to pay for their fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which they mostly ruled themselves).

Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, preface

The same preface describes their home-bound music books, with church music written from the front and jigs, reels and ballads from the back till sacred and secular met together in the middle. That book is the novel in miniature.

2. Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata (1890)

A man on a train explains why he killed his wife, and his case against her involves a violinist and a Beethoven sonata. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica dates it to 1890 and says it created a profound impression. Posdnicheff’s rant about music is the most hostile, and most perceptive, in fiction:

Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have.

Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, chapter XXIII (trans. Benjamin R. Tucker)

He means it as an accusation. Read it again and it is the best description in this list of why people listen at all.

3. E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)

Chapter V is a concert at the Queen’s Hall, and it opens with a sentence that is half joke, half manifesto:

It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

E. M. Forster, Howards End, chapter V

Forster then shows each listener hearing a different piece: Mrs Munt tapping along, Helen seeing heroes and shipwrecks. The chapter is a short lesson in how one sound becomes several private experiences, and a plot device too, since an umbrella goes astray in it.

4. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (first volume, 1913)

The opening volume of In Search of Lost Time, which Standard Ebooks dates to 1913-1927, contains the best-known imaginary piece of music in literature: the andante of a sonata for piano and violin by the fictional composer Vinteuil. In “Swann in Love” it becomes the private property of Swann and Odette, the phrase

which was, so to speak, the national anthem of their love.

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, “Swann in Love” (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

“Our song” is a cliché; Proust makes it a study of how a melody gets attached to a person and then outlives the feeling.

5. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915)

Thea Kronborg leaves the small town of Moonstone to become an opera singer. Standard Ebooks notes the story is said to have been inspired by the soprano Olive Fremstad, and that the title comes from an 1884 painting by Jules Breton. The key scene is a symphony concert in Chicago, where Thea is at first too excited by the orchestra itself to listen, until the Dvořák begins:

This was music she could understand, music from the New World indeed! Strange how, as the first movement went on, it brought back to her that high tableland above Laramie

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, part II, chapter V

Cather understands that first hearing a great piece is mostly hearing your own life in it, and that this is not a mistake.

6. George du Maurier, Trilby (1894)

Three artists in Paris, a model called Trilby O’Ferrall, and Svengali, the pianist who gains a mysterious power over her. Standard Ebooks records its 1894 serialisation in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and notes the antisemitism of the portrait of Svengali, whose name became a word for a manipulator. Read it as a document of how frightening musical talent once seemed.

Modern books about music and musicians

7. Vikram Seth, An Equal Music (1999)

Michael Holme plays violin in the Maggiore Quartet in London and has never got over Julia McNicholl, the pianist he left ten years earlier. Kirkus, which gives its release date as May 1999, singles out the quartet’s other members as sharply drawn. Read it for the texture of professional chamber music, where a career depends on three other people.

8. Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (2003)

David Strom, a German Jewish physicist, and Delia, a Black singer, meet in 1939, the year of Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial; their son Jonah inherits her voice. Kirkus praised how much Powers knows about musical technique, theory and history. It is the most ambitious novel here about who gets to own a tradition.

9. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (2007)

The New Yorker critic’s history of the twentieth century through its classical music, from Mahler to the present. Kirkus singles out its chapter on Sibelius, a composer historians have tended to sideline. If you only read one nonfiction book about music, make it this one, then listen to everything it mentions.

10. Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes (2009)

Five first-person stories about musicians and the evening, which Kirkus aptly called the fictional equivalent of a concept album. One features a session saxophonist talked into plastic surgery as a career move. Ishiguro’s theme is the one every working musician knows: early promise traded for a living.

11. Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)

Record-company executive Bennie Salazar, his old bandmates and his assistant Sasha, followed from the late 1970s into the 2020s. Kirkus lists it as a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle winner. Egan uses the music business to show the move from analog to digital, including a chapter told as a slide presentation.

The shelf at a glance

Book	Author	Year	The music
Under the Greenwood Tree	Thomas Hardy	1872	Village church band
The Kreutzer Sonata	Leo Tolstoy	1890	Beethoven’s violin sonata
Trilby	George du Maurier	1894	Svengali’s piano
Howards End	E. M. Forster	1910	Beethoven’s Fifth
Swann’s Way	Marcel Proust	1913	Vinteuil’s sonata (fictional)
The Song of the Lark	Willa Cather	1915	Opera; Dvořák’s New World Symphony
An Equal Music	Vikram Seth	1999	String quartet
The Time of Our Singing	Richard Powers	2003	Classical voice
The Rest Is Noise	Alex Ross	2007	Twentieth-century classical
Nocturnes	Kazuo Ishiguro	2009	Jazz, session work, guitar
A Visit from the Goon Squad	Jennifer Egan	2010	Rock bands and the record business

For the traffic going the other way, see our pieces on albums inspired by books, songs that borrow from literature and Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”. And for a last fact worth carrying to a concert: Thea hears the Dvořák in Cather’s novel as the second number on the programme, and she is not ready to listen until it begins.