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Sounds From Nowhere: Musical Protagonists by Alejo Carpentier and Zora Neale Hurston

Abstract Critics have missed the music of Seraph on the Suwanee. In response, this paper listens to the music of Zora Neale Hurston’s final novel through the ears of Alejo Carpentier. Although Carpentier published Concierto barroco (1974) twenty-six years after Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), the later novel offers a new reading of American music that changes how readers view the earlier work, in part because Concierto barroco creates an understanding of music in a Caribbean context that suffuses both novels. Although unknown to each other, musical and anthropological interests connect these coeval literary figures. Most compellingly, the trope of music in Hurston’s fictive work puts her musical rhetoric in conversation with Carpentier. In Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagi- nation, Robert discusses the rare ability to create music in one’s mind, a characteristic evident in the protagonists of both of the novels under discussion. Together, this paper ultimately argues, Hurston and Carpentier make beautiful music.