Reviewed by Matt Usher
The Blue House
by Sky Gilbert
Cormorant Books
August 2025, 250 pages, Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1770867529
The origin of twelve-tone music, or twelve-tone technique, is generally a laurel bestowed upon Arnold Schoenberg. You’ve probably never heard a song composed beneath its principles; few have. It’s an esoteric experiment in diffusing the tonic (the note you hear most often in a piece, the one it always returns to) into the full spectrum of notes, in the western chromatic scale at least. Equal attention is given, in theory, to every note. This, following various systems to ensure that notes are visited in equal measure. Twelve-tone is a vestigial outgrowth of musical obscurantism, something like esperanto, a grand idea that never quite planed out.
Incidentally, Schoenberg was triskaidecaphobic. He suspected that he’d die in a year that was a multiple of 13. He died on Friday the 13th, at 76 years old (7+6=13). Eccentrism among composers is hardly unknown. Completely independently of that, there was a lesser known, earlier exponent of a form of the twelve-tone technique: Joesf Matthias Hauer. In his divine geometry, each note must sound before any are repeated. Hauer wanted to plumb the ethereal spirit of music through strict rules, impersonal, to circumscribe the bounds of creativity. He still considered it a spiritual technique. As well, both of the above men fled the Third Reich; Hauer had the honor of being displayed in the Nazi display of ‘degenerate’ art. He was also fascinated by the I Ching and likely died after giving away many possessions with the exception of his copy. Something about twelve-tone music attracted singular personalities.
Sky Gilbert inserts Rupert Goldmann, a stunted childhood prodigy on the cello, into the fabric of musical history. He navigates through familiar names, comments on Bach and Beethoven, and has a number of louche encounters with Leonard Bernstein, for whom he cherishes a disdain. Said disdain twists into a vicarious disgust when Bernstein copies Goldmann’s melody into his vulgarly pedestrian popular music. Later, he’s credited with a form of convergent evolution: developing polymodal chromaticism before the real-world originator, Béla Bartók. This is another effort to interpret music along chromatic means, centering the twelve-note chromatic scale. Here I have a very pedantic difference with the author: the Dorian and Lydian modes do not “share the same tonic”; the polymodal chromatic scale is made by using them with the same tonic. Put very briefly, a modal scale arises when you begin a traditional scale on a different note, but retain the same general shape. Though the scales are composed of the same notes, the tonic changes, so the variance in sound is made by different emphases rather than a different set of notes.
That aside, we are introduced to another real world figure, Serge Koussevitsky, who debuted a Bartók piece that used Rupert’s theory, which might be seen as a betrayal, at least according to our deuternarrator. He is an almost-student of Rupert’s named Simon Reycraft, a sample of a musical almost-was who, in part, ended up discouraged in his path of the cello by a blunt refusal from Goldmann. It may be interesting to note here that there is a pattern in characters: Koussevitsky and Goldmann are both Jewish, the former from Russia and dodging the pogroms, the latter whose parents fled Germany. The other combination, Goldmann and Reycraft, are both gay. This is important, because the book centers the undercurrents that come from such identities, complete with a lengthy sub-portrait of the gay underground. As the protagonist is told, “there are only three kinds of musicians: Jewish musical geniuses, homosexual musical geniuses, and bad musicians.”
To return to the beginning, or da capo al coda as it might be marked on sheet music, then. We establish early on the relation the novel has to time: first, the voice of Goldmann toward the end of his life, believing he is dead after a second suicide attempt. From there we enter into an earlier starting chronology which we later learn is born from a request from Reycraft for Goldmann to document his life in recordings. Occasionally, we have interludes of Reycraft’s thoughts and commentary, often providing context and color, at other times suggesting that the deceptive prerogative of the storyteller is being exercised.
If you’ve read Russian literature and are familiar with introspective but often contemptible characters like the Underground Man, you may recognize a pattern with Rupert’s internal life. He is credited with genius, or something like it, and is given to philosophical flight, but so comes with it hauteur and a distinct disdain for his ‘lessers’. Such group consists of quite nearly everyone, as they don’t live up to his artistic ideal. Here we might shift aside to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an exploration of the development of a deeply spiritual creative who is, as is often the case, anomic with regard to quotidian life. “It’s certainly not easy being somewhat of a genius”, dictates Rupert, but, “I will bore you with that now.”
Goldmann credits himself with “a wealth of emotions” at his command; his gift, in the narrative, is generally registered as such. His musicality and compositions alike are self-declared to be emotional masterworks. While the more Hauer-ish details of construction are elided, that is later shown to be de rigeur for him; he ends up very at odds with Reycraft’s interest in the fundamental mechanics of composition.
In summary, this book is, in the majority of its body, a close portrait of the artistic genius whose flight falters somewhere along the way, who falls into morose seclusion and obscurantism and the titular blue house: an undersea-themed, blue-painted lent house that Goldmann uses to isolate himself from the world and even from his own creativity. Reycraft’s sections begin affectionate and gradually grow inclined toward unweaving the rainbow so that its spectrum might be put within the sight of AI that he believes will soon be able to compose music. As mentioned above, this is underpinned by the insular world of musicians and composers, as well as the cottaging-adjacent industry of gay cruising. This is given what elsewhere has been called a satirical treatment, though it can come off distinctly negatively. As the author is a member of the queer community, I will register this, then suspend judgment. The details are clearly brewed with truth in steep, and there is the affection of closeness to what many in those lanes will find very familiar. Though there are some odd notes; Bernstein entering Goldmann is accomplished, “with such ease that I hardly knew it was happening”. While what is called bottom prep is referenced in a later, abortive, episode with fisting, here Rupert is saved the anterior aspects of anal sex. Elsewhere, Goldmann fetishizes the trans experience in an imaginary episode that inspires a composition, centering around the preservation of a member of a grand scale. Incidentally, that fantasy came from close observation of Reycraft over a bar glass; Reycraft declines to credit that idea.
There are a few anomalies in narration that blur the line of characterization and editorial decisionmaking: Goldmann favors an em dash-spliced formation. “a heavy dose of apologizing, and self-dramatizing — self-dramatizing and apologizing”:
I decided there was no need to call attention to the danger of large breasts, yet — and anyway, I didn’t want to break the spell between us… Maria welcomed — nay begged… I would have a sit-down with her mother — as breasts for any woman are a delicate issue — which I was not looking forward to…
This, all in one paragraph. As much as dictation might be discursive, one often wants for a comma. Another chipped note is Goldmann’s diction. Often he uses clichés (“fly in the ointment”, “why rock the boat?”) which rather detract from the idea of a vain genius given to unique expression. Along with this is the quoted above, dealing with his thoughts on the large breasts of an underaged girl. A real concern for an adolescent musician, yes, but one questions the inclusion in the authorial creative process.
It is only late that we enter into what feels another of the novel’s fascinations: Reycraft’s thoughts on AI. He is credited with a likewise form of genius, taking to an ivy league curriculum with no training in a matter of months. Soon he is included, as an undergrad, in research on the forefront of computer science. Though this lacks sufficient space for exploration, we can see it as an echo to the earlier strain begun by Goldmann’s relationship to creation, elucidated by his view of it in terms of emotions available to him. In an age of prospective technological deregulation, we have already begun to experience what will be a long struggle between the artist and the pseudo-creative AI. Literary journal submissions are clogged with ghost-in-the-machine-written stories; ChatGPT wins degrees for the educationally disinclined; writers and visual artists alike are mined without consent for the development of learning model AI. Reycraft is one of these technocrats, not only wanting to vivisect Goldmann’s creative process through an interviewing verging on bulldogging, but desirous also of integrating that into the machine mind that we are often told will replace most workers. The poison in the pill, of course, is that there’s already an effort to replace artists. Rupert is not only an obscure composer at odds with the modern world, the man who is likely his greatest admirer intends to obviate even a genius with the comforting mime of a learning model.
Consider giving The Blue House a read if you’re interested in a detailed portrait of a manic depressive artist, following the lows and lows, with stunted highs, of a life lived on odd terms with art and bad terms with society and the people who inhabit it. If you have an interest in the mid to late century gay cruising subculture, you’ll also find fodder for thought here. So, too, if you want to repose upon thoughts of the struggles of creation, the war of clear methods versus necessarily blind inspiration. You will be rewarded in your curiosity with a thoughtful exploration of the travails of a brilliantly tortured mind, an effortless interweaving of fiction and history, and the affection of closeness with the subject matter and the real people by whom it is cherished. Gilbert’s voice has the surety of experience and study, as well as that of an author who can look back upon their successful oeuvre.
About the reviewer: Matt Usher is an agender, highly neurodivergent writer and musician who likes poetry, tabletop roleplaying, trading card games (mtg and ygo), and professional wrestling. They are based out of Brooklyn with their two partners in a happy polecule. Most of their works are short stories but it happened that their first credit was in literary criticism. If you want to reach out and/or contact them regarding their reviews or stories (please do), you can find them at https://bsky.app/profile/mattusher.bsky.social