Lessons in Harmony

Lessons in Harmony is a framed historical novel about music, friendship, marriage, artistic influence, and regret. It pretends to present a lost memoir written in 1943 by Pierre Aleksandr Mylonas, a fictionalised music critic and friend of Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Around that memoir is a modern editorial frame supplied by Justine La Chasse, who discovers the manuscript in 2026.

The book begins with Justine explaining how the manuscript came into her family’s possession. Her grandmother once worked as housekeeper for Alexandre Taverne, a man who had become unexpectedly rich through the complicated inheritance of the rights to Maurice Ravel’s music. Ravel died childless and left his musical estate to his brother Édouard; Édouard later left it to his masseuse Jeanne Taverne; and Jeanne left it to her widower Alexandre. In the 1960s, Justine’s father Xavier, then a small child, was sometimes taken to Alexandre’s house while his mother worked. One day, needing paper to draw on, he was given a tartan box containing a typed manuscript. He drew on the blank backs of its pages, and the box was saved only because his mother treasured his childhood drawings.

After her grandmother’s death, Justine and her father clear out the house in Hendaye and rediscover the box. Justine notices that the backs of the drawings contain a continuous English manuscript. She also finds a sealed letter addressed to Édouard Ravel, written in 1943 by P. A. Mylonas. The letter explains that Mylonas has written a memoir about the friendship between Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams, the English composer, and has sent it to Édouard as the guardian of Ravel’s affairs. Édouard never opened it. Justine realises that this is probably the only surviving copy of a lost memoir.