Music That (Not Which) Is Bound To Please

Normally, the mere rustling of papers can draw an angry glance amid the long oak tables in the hushed hall of the New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room. But no one will say “Shhhhhhh” when duck calls, eggbeaters, and a blaring megaphone fill the room next month for the world premiere of a musical work based on a little book, Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.” Composer Nico Muhly had one word to describe the acoustics of that majestic room with murals of billowing clouds: “delicious.”“The text is so iconic,” Mr. Muhly said. A Juilliard graduate, he has composed a half-hour of classical music based on humorous examples of pithy rules found in the famous guide to grammar, style, and punctuation. “Will Strunk loved the clear, the brief, the bold,” E.B. White wrote in the book’s introduction. Bold, too, is composing a song about the use of dashes:His first thought on getting out of bed – if he had any thought at all – was to get back in again.Her first thought on getting out of bed – if she had any thought at all – was to get back in again.If dashes are not your interest, there’s another song devoted to hyphens.Another warns against adding unnecessary suffixes (the book likens them to “putting a hat on a horse”). In this song, a tenor and soprano will sing from the balcony to banjo accompaniment: “Overly, over, muchly, much, thusly, thus, overly.” As Mr. Muhly described the evening, “I set a lot of lists to music.” More lists than Liszt.The evening will celebrate the first ever illustrated edition of “The Elements of Style” (Penguin Press), illustrated by artist Maira Kalman. While musicians will perform from the balcony, Ms. Kalman will be on the main floor with a band of amateur percussionists producing “controlled random sounds.” They will be at a “table of goodies,” Mr. Muhly said, consisting of an eggbeater, an umbrella, duck calls, a clattering teacup and saucer, meat grinder, and appropriately, an old Royal typewriter. (“One that makes a lot of noise,” Ms. Kalman said.) There are metal cans she dubbed a “can-un-drum.”Ms. Kalman, well-known for her illustrations in the New Yorker magazine, had never read “The Elements of Style” before chancing upon the book a few years ago at a yard sale on Cape Cod. She was struck by its quirky particularity and “quiet madness.” She marveled that a book could begin with a discussion of apostrophes.With wide-ranging interests (she once helped found a society devoted to rubber bands), she set out to illustrate the book, but found herself singing its sentences. This spurred collaboration with Mr. Muhly. They had met in Italy when Mr. Muhly’s mother was at the American Academy in Rome and Ms. Kalman’s late husband, the noted designer Tibor Kalman, was there creating Benetton’s Colors magazine.Like Mr. Muhly and Ms. Kalman’s teamwork, “The Elements of Style” was itself a collaboration. William Strunk printed the book privately for his English classes at Cornell University in the second decade of this century when E.B. White was a student. White wrote an appreciation of his former teacher in the New Yorker in 1957. Two years later, Macmillan published the volume as revised by White.It has gone on to sell millions, and the Modern Library ranked it among the top 100 nonfiction books of the last century, coming in 21st after Gertrude Stein’s “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” and immediately before Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma” and Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica.” Not bad for a book consisting of “seven rules of usage, 11 principles of composition, a few matters of form and a list of words and expressions commonly misused,” as White described Strunk’s original work to which he appended a chapter on style.Mr. Muhly’s song “An Approach to Style” begins “Place yourself in the background.” This describes the book as well as White, a reticent individual whom James Thurber wrote would take the fire escape and head to Schrafft’s when unknown visitors came to see him at the office. Herbert Mitgang reported in the New York Times how White did not want his living in North Brooklin, ME, mentioned in the press to forestall buses of teachers and students coming in search of the author of “Charlotte’s Web”: “Maybe you can say ‘somewhere on the Atlantic Coast.’ “This same quiet presence comes through in the book, the thrust of which is that style is achieved not through affectation but by paring away the inessential.Describing how Strunk and White’s book made this music project a pleasure to create, Mr. Muhly said, “First of all, the language is clear: They followed their own advice in writing the book.”Intriguingly, Ms. Kalman said she heard there was once a ballet based on “The Elements of Style” in the 1980s.William Safire ought to review this production, or perhaps he will sit it out and wait until Mr. Muhly and Ms. Kalman tackle Fowler’s “Modern English Usage” as an opera. The ghost of White’s father, a piano manufacturer, will surely enjoy the performance on October 19.But don’t call the show “nice.” One song describes that adjective as an indistinct “shaggy, all-purpose word.” Strunk and White advise using that word “sparingly in formal composition.”

Music That (Not Which) Is Bound To Please

Music That (Not Which) Is Bound To Please

More from the New York Sun

The Debt Ceiling Looms

Dollywood Goes Silent To Mourn Its ‘Chief Dreamer’

Zelensky Tries Old-Fashioned Flattery on Musk as He Seeks Expanded Starlink Capabilities for New-Fangled Drone Strikes

CIA Director’s Trip to Russia Shrouded in Mystery

Syrian Kurds, America’s Top Allies in the War on ISIS, Forced To Dissolve Fighting Units, Join National Army

Siri Gets Smarter but Remains No Match for ChatGPT

A Modern Shakespearean Spin on Sisterhood

Knives Out for House Democratic Leadership After Pro-Israel Jewish Congressman Installed Atop Powerful Middle East Subcommittee

More from the New York Sun

The Debt Ceiling Looms

Dollywood Goes Silent To Mourn Its ‘Chief Dreamer’

Zelensky Tries Old-Fashioned Flattery on Musk as He Seeks Expanded Starlink Capabilities for New-Fangled Drone Strikes

CIA Director’s Trip to Russia Shrouded in Mystery

Syrian Kurds, America’s Top Allies in the War on ISIS, Forced To Dissolve Fighting Units, Join National Army

Siri Gets Smarter but Remains No Match for ChatGPT

A Modern Shakespearean Spin on Sisterhood

Knives Out for House Democratic Leadership After Pro-Israel Jewish Congressman Installed Atop Powerful Middle East Subcommittee