The Music in Her Head
“Her records are a free assault on everything that recording itself represents,” notes a fictional music critic in David Hajdu’s novel . He’s referring to the title character, a virtuoso pianist whose avant-garde improvisation rocks the lofts of 1970s SoHo. And he means it as a compliment, recalling “outbursts so vital, so mind-rattling, soul-fuckingly extreme that they burst out and fly straight through you and out of your room.” The novel purports to be an oral history, driving home Adrianne Geffel’s cultural impact by referencing records that had to be heard to be believed, an unauthorized semiautobiograpical film, even an eponymous verb, to (meaning “to release pure emotion in a work of creative expression”) and her mysterious disappearance, unsolved to the
