Five novels about musicians

Novels don't tend to cover the world of work much. Somehow the 9 to 5 grind lacks literary possibilities. In children's fiction it is normally the school holidays, and parents are conveniently abroad or dead, allowing children to get on with fun and adventure.

In adult fiction characters are perhaps off work sick, have inherited a lot of money, or do something vaguely creative in a freelance way. Even in police procedurals, where you might expect a dose of realism, the cops rarely sit at a desk answering emails or filling forms for any length of time. Similarly, apart from Sherlock Holmes pottering about with a bit of chemistry, you don't often come across characters in novels with much in the way of hobbies.

Not many novels have musicians as the protagonists, which is odd, as they don't lead the 9 to 5 office life. Perhaps novelists aren't generally musical, or don't know many musicians. Perhaps it's the difficulty of writing meaningfully about music that no one can hear, although I can think of novels about artists that include detailed descriptions of non-existent paintings...

Here are five novels that do involve musicans, two (or possibly three), include folk music, two focus on pianists, two have composers, and there is a fair smattering of fiddlers and violinists. This isn't an exhaustive list. There are no pipers (but there could be if I included a book I meant to reread and meant to write about here: Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music).

The Fountain Overflows - Rebecca West. We get to hear a lot about the super talented Richard Quin, who can't quite be bothered, amd the terribly untalented Cordeila with her "greasy tone". Of the talented twins we are only told that they practice a lot and will be concert pianists one day, but somehow we never really know what it is to love music, to enjoy playing it.

The Song Collector - Natasha Solomons
The protaginist here, Harry Fox-Talbot, is a collector of folk song, musician, and composer. Solomons talks of him losing music when his wife dies, of getting tunes stuck in his head, of the joy and frustrations of music. It makes me feel as though she is either a musician herself or knows musicans well.

Under the Greenwood Tree - Thomas Hardy
The tale of the choir (or quire) of Mellstock village and how their voices, violoncello, treble and tenor fiddles and are ousted from  the church by flighty Fancy Day and her harmonium. There is much about the importance of music for dance and community gatherings and about folk song.

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell. Despite the series to which this novel belongs being known as A Dance to the Music of Time there are lots of pictorial references in it and not much of music. However, a key character is the composer Hugh Moreland, who drifts in and out of several of the books in this series. He doesn't seem to do much composing and the focus is on his drinking and difficult relationships with women. Moreland was based on Constant Lambert.

A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle. We like our fictional detectives to have some sort of quirk, aside from the usually abysmal home life. Some paint, some grow orchids and some listen to music but there is only one I can think of who plays music - the great Sherlock Holmes. Although, apparently, he doesn't play very well (although what he does play may be folk music).