I too found Angela's Ashes, while grim in places, to be musical. And I thought that Accordion Crimes and Corelli's Mandolin were as spellbinding as a good song. --Not to mention beautifully written.

I thought that Brendan Behan's prison memoir, Borstal Boy, was very musical. Many of the songs mentioned in the Naughty Kids' Songs threads appear in the book. The use of many dialects of the British Isles makes for music as well.

Anthony Burgess (may he rest in peace) wrote Napoleon Symphony, a longish novel in which he tried (as much as possible in a long prose work) to apply the structure Beethoven's Eroica symphony to the Napoleon story--down to repeated phrases as motifs. Sounds dry, but it works as a novel. Very funny too.

I also thought that Burgess' A Clockwork Orange was very musical--again because of the sounds and rhythms of his invented teen slang, Nadsat.

doug