The music of Erich Zann

[Genus Unknown]

I think the insights and interpretations of bar1scorpio, Crocodilian, and jiBeckett are all pretty compatible.  I really like Crocodilian's classing of this as a "dream story," and it makes the "shaggy dog" ending a little more palatable. So, our narrator crosses over to this "dream street," where Erich Zann is desperately trying to cancel out the sound of this intelligent "Music Out of Space," and our narrator never figures out how the story ends because he's come out of the "dream" and can't access that world again.

I'll even add my own twist on the ending: the street wasn't destroyed, or erased, or anything like that. Maybe the Sentient Hyper-Music From Beyond wanted our narrator gone, because he didn't belong there.  Maybe it was trying to close the door between its world and the real world, and Erich Zann was battling it to keep that door open.  When the music wins(?) the final battle, it drives our narrator out, and closes the door so that no more pesky outsiders can intrude on its business.

...Not that I think HPL had any of this in mind.  I don't think he knew any better than we do what was going on in the Rue D'Auseil (or however you spell it). I think he really just wanted to build up a bizarre event, dangle an illusory explanation in front of the reader, and then make us watch him throw it away. The fact that we get no hint at all of what's really going on makes me think he didn't have anything particularly in mind.  This has the delightful side-effect of making all possible interpretations valid. 

[Kaelestes]

This has the delightful side-effect of making all possible interpretations valid. 

You put it far more eloquently than I did! Good on you!:)

[old book]

Fairy music intices, tantalizes, its listeners, drawing them on into the darkness, where it becomes silent and abandons them. The more so for composers and musicians. Those whom it doesn not destroy, remain haunted for life by the exquisite airs. Some have even recorded a few notes of their haunting melodies for their mortal kin, but the reproduction is never adequate to the original.

http://www.mysticvoodoo.com/fairy-power.htm

http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/eop_02/eop_02_03171.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-schumann

[wereguppy]

Crocodilian's comment about it being a dream got me thinking. To call the whole thing a dream is too much in my opinion, but that may be the result of one too many Star Trek episodes where continuity was patched by saying "It was a spacial anomaly and didn't happen" two minutes before the credits roll. The other pieces Lovecraft has in the Dreamlands have a bit of a different feel to them, but then even the Dreamlands are not a separate universe when Lovecraft writes. Azathoth and Nyarlathotep cross over but that isn't all that spectacular since both are supposed to be alien and unknowable. On that other hand when Richard Pickman showed up in the Dreamlands I was taken aback and fascinated because until that point I assumed that the Dreamlands were removed from all other settings. Then again in At the Mountains of Madness:

"Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene’s unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land - highest of earth’s peaks and focus of earth’s evil; harborers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing on earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in the polar night - beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof primal legends hint evasively." - 10th paragraph before the end.

This says "archetype of Kadath" but is that perhaps Lovecraft giving to his narrator an incorrect expression and in reality he is looking at what Randolph Carter ascended with his ghoul army? Of course here is where my imagination dredges up the cats vs. toad-things battle and I visualize a Rembrandt painting of Lovecraftian Ragnarock where Cthulhu spawn do battle with the alliance of men and cats in uniform and all seriousness and ambiance is ruined. Maybe Reepicheep can have a cameo while Thomas Olney, Neptune and Nodens ride around in the sky pulled by dolphins in their big crenulate shell and tow Lieutenant-Commander Graf Karl Heinrich von Altberg-Ehrenstein's U-Boat out of the ocean.

HOWEVER, I like the idea that the Dreamlands and the real world bleed together in some places. Not ley line sites of power but sites where the barrier between realities is weakened to the point of non-existence. Like the plot behind a quarter of all horror movies. Using Lovecraft's idea that people don't want to see supernatural in their midst, I imagine that the reason the Rue d'Auseil became the Rue d'Auseil was because people, like those in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, refused to acknowledge any other worldliness to the extent that they paved and constructed into and through the gate to the Dreamlands.
The removal of the Rue d'Auseil then is no longer a removal but a sealing off. If that part of Paris never existed within Paris to begin with, then naturally there would be no space within the city suddenly vacant. And how would you draw a place on the map that would have to occupy the same space as another part of town.

Of course the BEST part of the story what was said in the podcast: the atmosphere, not how it is possible for the events to have happened.

[old book]

"archetype" was an interesting choice of words. Does he mean "ideal" a la Plato? Merely image? Jung would (later?) write that the archetypes CAN'T be perceived directly.

Somewhere I came across a connection with a real Ausseil and some fairy music, but perhaps it was a dream in the valley of Clairvaux.