Music & Literature no. 3 brings to light the life’s work of three artists who have to date been denied—by geography, by language, and by politics—their rightful positions on the world stage. The Australian writer Gerald Murnane, a rumored Nobel Prize candidate, has been deemed “a genius on the level of Beckett” by Teju Cole, who opens this issue with a spirited exchange of long letters with the Aussie great. For the first time, Murnane’s entire catalog is introduced by top writers and critics, and we glimpse his three remarkable archives, which the author insists will remain unpublished until after his death. “The Interior of Gaaldine,” the infamous text that explains his fourteen-year absence from the world of fiction, rounds out more than 120 pages of new material on and by one of our finest yet little-known Anglophone writers. The issue’s second half is devoted to the Slovak composer Vladimír Godár and his unlikely collaborator, the Moravian violinist-singer Iva Bittová, who honed their crafts under the pall of the Communist regime and who only in recent years have begun cultivating worldwide audiences. Now, for the first time, Godár’s artistic writings as well as his manuscripts are available in English, alongside a portfolio of photographs and an oral history of Bittová’s career, as told by some of her closest collaborators and artistic partners.

224 pages; Paperback / E-book edition forthcoming
ISSN: 2165-4026 ISBN: 978-0988879928

Contents

I. Gerald Murnane

Teju Cole's Letter to Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane’s Long Letter to Teju Cole

The Three Archives of Gerald Murnane

An Interview with Gerald Murnane / Will Heyward

Mere Dreaming: On Tamarisk Row and A Lifetime on Clouds / Tristan Foster

Far Enough: The Peculiar World of The Plains / Wayne Macauley

Gerald Murnane’s Exquisite Failures / Matthew Jakubowski

The Provincial Imagination / Ivor Indyk

Undiscoverable Countries / Emmett Stinson

Reading Gerald Murnane's Landscapes with Proust / K. Thomas Kahn

Some Persistence of Memory / Scott Esposito

An Encounter with Gerald Murnane / Hari Kunzru

The Interior of Gaaldine / Gerald Murnane

From A Thousand Windows / Gerald Murnane

II. Vladimír Godár

An Interview with Vladimír Godár / Taylor Davis-Van Atta, trans. Clarice Cloutier

Chin on Palm on Elbow: Listening to Vladimír Godár / Lawrence Sutin

Art as Palimpsest: Cultural Exegesis in the Work of Vladimír Godár / Ivan Moody

A Personal Tribute to Vlado / Peter Breiner

Recording Mater / Tomáš Šelc

On the Work of Giya Kancheli / Vladimír Godár, trans. Clarice Cloutier

Encountering the Poet / Vladimír Godár, trans. Clarice Cloutier

Eight Photographs from the Composer's Archives

III. Iva Bittová

A Conversation with Iva Bittová / Mark Molnar

Knowing, Feeling... : An Oral History of lva Bittová / Ian Patterson

Mesmerizing Bittová / Béla Javorszky, trans. Sue Foy

Iva Bittová and the Question of Eclecticism / David Auerbach