What it must be like to be tone deaf

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.

Vladimir Nabokov's dislike of music is common knowledge (especially because of the well-known quotation above from Speak, Memory).

In his lecture on Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Nabokov finds sympathy in Kafka's feelings about music.

Without wishing to antagonize lovers of music, I do wish to point out that taken in a general sense music, as perceived by its consumers, belongs to a more primitive, more animal form in the scale of arts than literature or painting.

I am taking music as a whole, not in terms of individual creation, imagination, and composition, all of which of course rival the art of literature and painting, but in terms of the impact music has on the average listener.

A great composer, a great writer, a great painter are brothers. But I think that the impact music in a generalized and primitive form has on the listener is of a more lowly quality than the impact of an average book or an average picture. What I especially have in mind is the soothing, lulling, dulling influence of music on some people such as of the radio or records.

In Kafka's tale it is merely a girl pitifully scraping on a fiddle and this corresponds in the piece to the canned music or plugged-in music of today.

What Kafka felt about music in general is what I have just described: its stupefying, numbing, animallike quality.

This attitude must be kept in mind in interpreting an important sentence that has been misunderstood by some translators. Literally, it reads “Was Gregor an animal to be so affected by music?” That is, in his human form he had cared little for it but in this scene, in his beetlehood, he succumbs: “He felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved.”

Nabokov explained in a 1964 Playboy interview that he was "bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians."

Nabokov's short stories are full of visual descriptions. Overflowing, perhaps. I always wondered how such (what I would consider) musical sentences could come from a person who claimed he hated music. But his stories have given me more of a clue about his relationship with music.

In "Wingstroke" Nabokov mentions a "Boston," which is a waltz:

When the music started again, the youth invited Isabel to dance a Boston.

Being able to describe the rhythm of a dance shows that his ear is not unmusical (rhythm is part of music after all), but perhaps he wasn't able to discern the difference between pitches, which is what I understand actual tone deafness to be.

In "The Seaport" he shows that he certainly has an ear for texture:

Inside, beyond the tables, a violin wrung its sounds as if they were human hands, accompanied by the full-bodied resonance of a rippling harp. The more banal the music, the closer it is to the heart.

Maybe for a person with synesthesia, like Nabokov, who is hyper-endowed with the ability to translate his hightened visual sensitivities into language, describing music without the ability to appreciate its pitches is akin to a color blind person trying to describe the colors used in painting, or the ones that appear in nature (like in butterflies).

Here is a particularly revealing passage from the story "Music":

To Victor any music he did not know--and all he knew was a dozen conventional tunes--could be likened to the patter of a conversation in a strange tongue: in vain you strive to define at least the limits of the words, but everything slips and merges, so that the laggard ear begins to feel boredom.

And I can't resist using this passage from elsewhere in the story to end this post:

The music must be drawing to a close. When they come, those stormy, gasping chords, it usually signifies that the end is near. Another intriguing word, end . . . Rend, impend . . . Thunder rending the sky, dust clouds of impending doom.