Sacks notes that William and Henry James almost never refer to music. I'd never thought of that before: you don't necessarily notice an absence like that till it's pointed out. You can't imagine Proust without the haunting phrase of Vinteuil. If I wrote a novel and it happened to have no music in it, you might draw a mistaken conclusion about me. I might say that the absence of music is not significant: novel writing is about something else, a different compartment as it were. If I wrote 50 novels without music being played in them, that would even stranger.