Music at Night

Music at Night
1st UK edition (publ. Chatto & Windus)

Music at Night is a 1931 collection of essays by Aldous Huxley.

The essays in this books cover different subjects, such as morality in arts ('To the Puritan All Thing are Impure', a defence of his friend D. H. Lawrence), music ("After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music",[1] he writes in 'The Rest is Silence'), similarities in the behaviour of men and cats ('Sermons in Cats'). Part of these essays may be regarded as a description of changes in society at the first half of the 20th century: 'Forehead Villanious Low' deals with the fruits of universal education, while 'Art and the Great Truth' defines modernist literature as "A terror for the obvious in his [the writer's] artistic medium - (...) which leads him to make laborious efforts to destroy the gradually perfected instrument of language".

References

  1. ^ James Hull, Gerhard Wagner 2005. Aldous Huxley, representative man. Lit Verlag. p199
v · d · eWorks by Aldous Huxley
Novel

Crome Yellow (1921) • Antic Hay (1923) • Those Barren Leaves (1925) • Point Counter Point (1928) • Brave New World (1932) • Eyeless in Gaza (1936) • After Many a Summer (1939) • Time Must Have a Stop (1944) • Ape and Essence (1948) • The Genius and the Goddess (1955) • Island (1962)
Short story

"Happily Ever After" • "Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers" • "Cynthia" • "The Bookshop" • "The Death of Lully" • "Sir Hercules" • "The Gioconda Smile" • "The Tillotson Banquet" • "Green Tunnels" • "Nuns at Luncheon" • "Little Mexican" • "Hubert and Minnie" • "Fard" • "The Portrait" • "Young Archimedes" • "Half Holiday" • "The Monocle" • "Fairy Godmother" • "Chawdron" • "The Rest Cure" • "The Claxtons" • "After the Fireworks" • "Jacob's Hands: A Fable" (published 1997) co-written with Christopher Isherwood
Short story collection

Limbo (1920) • Mortal Coils (1922) • Little Mexican (US title: Young Archimedes) (1924) • Two or Three Graces (1926) • Brief Candles (1930) • Collected Short Stories (1957)
Poetry

The Burning Wheel (1916) • Jonah (1917) • The Defeat of Youth (1918) • Leda (1920) • Arabia Infelix (1929) • The Cicadias and Other Poems (1931) • Collected Poetry (1971)
Travel writing

Along the Road (1925) • Jesting Pilate (1926) • Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)
Essay collection

On the Margin (1923) • Essays New and Old (1926) • Proper Studies (1927) • Do What You Will (1929) • Vulgarity in Literature (1930) • Music at Night (1931) • Texts and Pretexts (1932) • The Olive Tree (1936) • Ends and Means (1937) • Words and their Meanings (1940) • Science, Liberty and Peace (1946) • Themes and Variations (1950) • The Doors of Perception (1954) • Adonis and the Alphabet (US title: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) (1956) • Heaven and Hell (1956) • Collected Essays (1958) • Brave New World Revisited (1958) • Literature and Science (1963) • The Human Situation: 1959 Lectures at Santa Barbara (1977) • Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1999)
Screenplay

Pride and Prejudice (1940) • Madame Curie (uncredited, 1943) • Jane Eyre (1944) • A Woman's Vengeance (1947) • Prelude to Fame (1950) • Alice in Wonderland (uncredited, 1951)
Non-fiction
Play
The Discovery (based on Frances Sheridan) (1924)  • The World of Light (1931)  • The Gioconda Smile (play version, also known as Mortal Coils) (1948)  • The Genius and the Goddess (play version, with Betty Wendel) (1957)  • The Ambassador of Captripedia (1965)  • Now More Than Ever (1997)
Children's book
The Crows of Pearblossom (1944, published 1967)  • The Travails and Tribulations of Geoffrey Peacock (1967)
Other book
The Art of Seeing (1942)  •• Selected Letters (2007)


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