Tellability and/as Audibility: How "Every Sound Is Possible" in Matthew Herbert's The Music

Reading Matthew Herbert’s The Music: A Novel through Sound (2018), this essay explores the category of tellability in audionarratological terms. While tellability is often seen as pertaining to the story level only, Herbert’s intermedial extravagance—a verbal score of an imaginary music album—helps us rethink the category and resolve its innate contradiction: how can untellable stories be told quite successfully? With a story-centered definition of tellability in mind, The Music is a tellability disaster. Not only does it fail to tie its myriad reported sounds together in a consistent
plot, but it also rejects even the loose narrativity narratologists agree to associate with classical music forms. From Herbert’s acoucentric aesthetics, we argue that the capacity of words for notating inaudible sounds and ordering them into a musical whole builds an alternative narrative progression modeled on electroacoustic music instead
of verbal storytelling. Insofar as Herbert’s randomized sounds contribute to a musical work, tellability relies on the audibility of those sounds and the order imposed on them by the score, not a pre-given story. In Herbert’s persistent present-tense narration and sporadic use of we- and you-narration, tellability is maintained through the deictic proximity between readers and the storyworld—not an immanent feature of the story but a potential of storytelling across media. By crowdfunding The Music and incorporating its supporters into the text, Herbert secures a tellability certificate from his actual audience, across an ontological border all narratives devise.