Classical music remains “the most conservative” performing art, as former *New York Times *classical critic Anthony Tommasini wrote in 2021. This is true both in the repertoire performed (Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven remain standard fare) and in the racial and gendered makeup of most ensembles. Only 2.4 percent of US orchestra musicians are Black, 4.8 percent are Latinx, and 79.1 percent are white—according to a June 2023 report by the League of American Orchestras—and only one in nine music directors in the US are women. Pay discrimination and sexual harassment continue to plague female musicians; flautist Elizabeth Rowe’s pay equity suit against the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the recent sexual assault case (and subsequent coverup) at the New York Philharmonic are just some of the most recent examples.

But now, contemporary novelists are taking aim at some of the classical music industry’s most harmful practices. Recent novels by Brendan Slocumb, Ryka Aoki, Imogen Crimp, Jessie Tu, Deborah Levy, and Ling Ling Huang expose—and, in some cases, reimagine—some of the classical music world’s most troubling traditions, including the erasure of Black performers from music history, the abuse and harassment endemic to conservatory culture, and the physical injuries that often go unacknowledged by an industry committed to musical excellence above all else. Taken together, these new classical music novels invite readers to envision a world of high art centered not on elitism, exclusion, and exploitation, but on justice, community, and care.

Classical music is having a surprising moment in popular culture. Todd Field’s *Tár *(2022) made Mahler’s Fifth Symphony the “song of the season.” Bradley Cooper’s *Maestro *(2023) exposed Netflix audiences to Bernstein, Beethoven, and Mahler (and spurred Cooper to take years of conducting lessons). Add to these the recent Oscar-nominated documentaries The Only Girl in the Orchestra (2023), American Symphony (2023), and *The Last Repair Shop *(2023); the show-stealing orchestral covers of Pitbull and Taylor Swift in Netflix’s *Bridgerton *(2020– ); the “Orchestra” SNL skit featuring Lizzo as a twerking flautist (2022); and an audience member’s headline-making “orgasm” at a 2023 LA Philharmonic concert—and it seems that classical music may be trending.

This is no less true in the world of literary fiction. Since 2020, well over a dozen novels have taken classical music as their setting. These include archival mystery sagas like Brendan Slocumb’s *The Violin Conspiracy *(2022), *Symphony of Secrets *(2023), and *The Dark Maestro *(2025); queer fantasy tales like Ryka Aoki’s *Light from Uncommon Stars *(2021); coming-of-age narratives like Imogen Crimp’s *A Very Nice Girl *(2022) and Jessie Tu’s *A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing *(2020); and surrealist works of social critique like Ling Ling Huang’s *Natural Beauty *(2023) and Deborah Levy’s *August Blue *(2023).

Of course, novels about classical music are nothing new. Writers from Thomas Mann to Kazuo Ishiguro have devised musical plots for centuries. Dozens of literary scholars (myself included) have devoted their academic careers to tracing music’s place in 19th-century literature. But what is notable about this recent surge in classical music fiction is that many of these texts center on a scathing critique of the industry itself. Slocumb, Aoki, Crimp, Tu, Huang, and Levy do not engage with classical music merely as a setting or plot point, but rather interrogate the racial, gendered, sexual, and labor politics of classical music culture. Some of the most exciting interventions in the classical music world, then, are happening in the realm of literary fiction.

These new classical music novels re-envision many of the field’s most violent traditions and exclusionary practices.

Slocumb’s novels dramatize the racism experienced by Black performers and musicologists. In The Violin Conspiracy, a violinist named Ray is repeatedly told that “Black people just [can’t] play this kind of music.” In Symphony of Secrets, a musicologist named Bern must navigate the insidious racial politics of a paternalistic and exploitative nonprofit arts foundation. Slocumb’s novels not only expose Western classical music’s white supremacist traditions but also rewrite them. Slocumb frames the history of classical music as one in which Black artists played a crucial role—which they no doubt did, as recent scholarship about performers and composers like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence Price, and Joseph Bologne has made clear. Ray’s grandmother gifts him a violin, which turns out to be a Stradivarius that his great-great-grandfather’s enslaver forced him to play. Bern discovers that most of the music of the beloved fictional composer Frederic Delaney was in fact written by—and stolen from—a Black woman named Josephine Reed. Slocumb’s novels craft alternative narratives about musical heritage, inviting readers to ponder what other kinds of musical pasts may be lurking beyond public consciousness and to recognize that classical music is not as white as it seems.

Other novels focus on the labor conditions of classical musicians—a topic that often goes unacknowledged in an industry that prizes the musical masterpieces of genius composers (what Alex Ross calls the “cult of the Work”) above all else, including the embodied experiences of musical workers. As scholars such as William Cheng and Anna Bull have noted, this bodily erasure is especially problematic in an industry whose workers are plagued by repetitive strain injuries (RSIs); according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Music and Medicine, four out of five classical musicians will experience an RSI at some point in their career.1 Several recent novels critique the ways in which the classical music world extracts and exploits performers’ bodily labor, presenting—often in agonizing detail—the physical pain that music making requires. The narrator of Crimp’s *A Very Nice Girl *describes how opera students “carried portable steamers around with them and wouldn’t go into air-conditioned buildings and drank so much water they needed to pee every thirty minutes.” The protagonist of Tu’s *A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing *frequently plays for hours on end, “without a single toilet break,” only to leave her hands raw and aching: “The calluses, normally hard, have burst, leaving damp layers of skin peeling off, half attached. It feels like I’ve plunged my fingertips into a bowl of razor blades.”

As these novels reveal, injuries are so agonizing to performers not only because they cause physical pain, but also because a musician’s worth (both personal and financial) depends on their body. Tu’s protagonist is told that her fingers are “the most valuable part of [her] family.” The narrator of Levy’s *August Blue *has her hands insured “for millions of dollars” in America: “I had to take care of my hands. The basics were massaging them, drumming my fingers for circulation, soaking them first in warm water, then in cold, keeping my nails short, no varnish, no rings, moisturizing, stretching, no splinters or cuts, trying to sleep without lying on my arm.” Passages such as these serve as biting critiques of an industry that often obscures the physical labor of music making in service of “the music itself.”

These musical bodies are also vulnerable to violent forms of exploitation and abuse. Tu’s protagonist details the pain she suffers at the hands of her first violin teacher (also her grandfather):

As I played, he would push me into position. If my body didn’t move the way he wanted, he had ways to change that. To fix my sometimes-wavering bow arm, he tied a thin wire to my wrist and attached the other end to a doorknob. Then he opened and closed the door slowly, so I’d get used to the motion of the moving bow arm, steady and still and always at precisely the right angle. Sometimes, he’d move the door so fast that by the time we finished my wrist was encircled with a bright red ring. When that happened, my mother would ask me to cover my wrists, so she didn’t have to see what my grandpapa was doing to me.

Tu’s novel speaks to the all-too-common culture of bullying, harassment, and abuse endemic in musical training settings; as recent work by Bull and Jillian Rogers shows, conservatories often create cultures of systemic abuse that weaponize students’ pursuits of “musical excellence.”2

Huang’s Natural Beauty offers an especially haunting representation of a character who experiences lasting psychic and physical damage from her time in the classical music world. Upon entering conservatory at a young age, the narrator endures bullying, harassment, and sexual abuse from fellow students, teachers, and rich patrons and later falls prey to a dangerous wellness cult called Holistik. The conservatory-to-cult pipeline is clear; both spaces foster an “obsess[ion] with growth and self-improvement” and prize beauty and bodily purity at any cost.3

Fiction provides a space for writers not only to critique the classical music world’s repressive culture, but also to reimagine it. The heroine of August Blue ultimately sheds all manner of male influence over her music—her teacher, male conductors, even Rachmaninoff himself—to become a composer in her own right. Tu’s protagonist, rejected from the New York Philharmonic, joins a new ensemble called the New York Chamber Group, which is committed to “diverse repertoire,” collaborations with “dance groups and artists from Brooklyn,” and “monthly funks, which are performances based on improvised ideas.”

Perhaps the most powerful reimagination of classical music culture can be found in Aoki’s *Light from Uncommon Stars, *in which the protagonist, a transgender violinist named Katrina, locates in classical music not only a powerful escape from transphobic violence—“With the violin, I can sing, speak, be beautiful … I’m not worrying about what bathroom is safe”—but also a powerful source of community and connection with her listeners, many of whom themselves occupy marginalized racial, gender, and sexual identities. In both her public performances and her YouTube videos, where she makes her performances of everything from Bartók to video game music accessible to millions of viewers worldwide, Katrina aims to show her fans that they will “never again be alone.”

These new classical music novels thus re-envision many of the field’s most violent traditions and exclusionary practices. But these texts also have something to offer to non-musicians and to readers who are not at all invested in the world of Bach and Beethoven. Writing about the “most conservative” performing art, these novelists present especially nuanced critiques of racial exclusion, gendered violence, sexual abuse, and labor exploitation. They also rework common narratives about art altogether. Tales of “dead white men in wigs” give way to more diverse, more compelling (and more realistic) histories. Narratives of abuse and exploitation are laid bare—and then transformed into stories of healing and solidarity. Myths about individual geniuses (prodigies, maestros, virtuosos) shift to explorations of collaboration and community. While some of these visions might seem idealistic—it is hard to imagine the classical music world in its current form so readily embracing Katrina’s multimedia, genre-bending YouTube performances, for instance—these novels nonetheless prompt readers to conceive of new possibilities for better artistic futures.

This article was commissioned by Ben Platt.

1. William Cheng, *Loving Music Till It Hurts *(Oxford University Press, 2019); Anna Bull, *Class, Control, and Classical Music *(Oxford University Press, 2019); Jeanette Der Bedrosian, “Rock On—Just Not Too Hard,” Johns Hopkins Magazine, Summer 2019. ↩
2. Jillian Rogers, “Abuse, Trauma, and the Politics of ‘Excellence’ in US Musical Training Programs” (paper presented at the American Musicological Society national meeting, Chicago, IL, November 16, 2024). ↩
3. See Shannon Draucker, “The Conservatory-to-Cult Pipeline,” *Alternative Classical, *September 25, 2025. ↩

Featured-image photograph by Arda E. Genç / Unsplash (CC0 1.0)