Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism 9781138285651, 9781315231716

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction
1 Woolf Rewriting Wagner: The Waves and Der Ring des Nibelungen
2 “That’s the Music of the Future”: Joyce, Modernism, and the “Old Irish Tonality”
3 The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake: Eternal Recurrence in Wagner, Woolf, and Joyce
4 Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: Towards Modernity
5 The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore: Fugue as Bridge to a New Feminist Awakening
6 A Strict Arrangement: Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, and the Kretzschmar Lectures
7 Sounding Bodies: Eroticized Music-Making in Proust’s À la Recherche
8 Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal
9 Words for Music Perhaps: W. B. Yeats, Music, and Meaninglessness
10 “The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It”: Ezra Pound’s the Pisan Cantos and the “Sequence of the Musical Phrase”
11 Imagism’s Musical Sympathies: Amy Lowell and Claude Debussy
12 Expansive Musical Modernism in William Carlos Williams, Steve Reich, and Tom Leonard
13 The Sudden Thing of Being No One: Robert Creeley’s Rhythm Changes
14 “With all that Tutti and Continuo”: Musicality and Temporality in Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon
15 “The Blues Always Been Here”: African American Music and Black Modernism in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
16 The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature

This volume explores the role of music as a source of inspiration and provocation for modernist writers. In its consideration of modernist literature within a broad political, postcolonial, and internationalist context, this book is an important intervention in the growing field of Words and Music studies. It expands the existing critical debate to include ­lesser-known writers alongside Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, a wide-ranging definition of modernism, and the influence of contemporary music on modernist writers. From the rhythm of Tagore’s poetry to the influence of jazz improvisation, the tonality of traditional Irish music to the operas of Wagner, these essays reframe our sense of how music inspired Literary Modernism. Exploring the points at which the art forms of music and literature collide, repel, and combine, contributors draw on their deep musical knowledge to produce close readings of prose, poetry, and drama, confronting the concept of what makes ­writing “musical.” In doing so, they uncover commonalities: modernist writers pursue simultaneity and polyphony, evolve the leitmotif for literary purposes, and adapt the formal innovations of twentieth-century music. The essays explore whether it is possible for literature to achieve that unity of form and subject that music enjoys, and whether literary texts can resist paraphrase, can be simply themselves. This book demonstrates how attention to the role of music in text in turn illuminates the manner in which we read literature. Katherine O’Callaghan is Visiting Lecturer in the Department of ­English at Mount Holyoke College, USA.

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

40 Surreal Beckett Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism Alan Friedman 41 Modernism and Latin America Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange Patricia Novillo-Corvalán 42 New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject Finite, Singular, Exposed Edited by Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, Paula Martín-Salván and María J. López 43 Reading London in Wartime Blitz, the People and Propaganda in 1940s Literature William Cederwell 44 The Nature of Modernism Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew Elizabeth Black 45 Nonlinear Temporality in Joyce and Walcott History Repeating Itself with a Difference Sean Seegar 46 Writing for the Masses Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Literary Tradition Christine A. Colón 47 Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature Musical Modernism Edited by Katherine O’Callaghan

Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature Musical Modernism Edited by Katherine O’Callaghan

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-28565-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-23171-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For my two little story-telling music-makers, Anoushka Róisín and Afrah Saoirse

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Contributors

ix xi xv

Introduction 1 K at h e r i n e O ’ C a l l ag h a n

1 Woolf Rewriting Wagner: The Waves and Der Ring des Nibelungen

17

E m m a Su t ton

2 “That’s the Music of the Future”: Joyce, Modernism, and the “Old Irish Tonality”

32

K at h e r i n e O ’ C a l l ag h a n

3 The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake: Eternal Recurrence in Wagner, Woolf, and Joyce

48

Ja m i e McGr egor

4 Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: Towards Modernity

62

Is a b e l l e B r a s m e

5 The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore: Fugue as Bridge to a New Feminist Awakening

79

R e n é e D i ck i n so n

6 A Strict Arrangement: Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, and the Kretzschmar Lectures M a r i a K ag e r

94

viii  Contents 7 Sounding Bodies: Eroticized Music-Making in Proust’s À la Recherche

110

A xel E n g lund

8 Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal

126

S uddhaseel S en

9 Words for Music Perhaps: W. B. Yeats, Music, and Meaninglessness

140

A drian Paterson

10 “The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It”: Ezra Pound’s the Pisan Cantos and the “Sequence of the Musical Phrase”

159

K atherine F irth

11 Imagism’s Musical Sympathies: Amy Lowell and Claude Debussy

173

D ebora Van D urme

12 Expansive Musical Modernism in William Carlos Williams, Steve Reich, and Tom Leonard

188

P eter C landfield

13 The Sudden Thing of Being No One: Robert Creeley’s Rhythm Changes

204

S teven T oussaint

14 “With all that Tutti and Continuo”: Musicality and Temporality in Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon

221

C aroline K ni g hton

15 “The Blues Always Been Here”: African American Music and Black Modernism in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

237

M ichael B orshuk

16 The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett

253

T homas M ansell

Bibliography Index

269 293

List of Figures

  3.1  Nature motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen49   3.2  Rhine motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen49   3.3  Erda motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen50   3.4 Twilight of the Gods motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen50   3.5 Redemption motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen59   4.1  Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata, Act I, Prelude66   4.2  Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata, Act III, Prelude67 10.1  From Canto LXXVI: a transcription of Ezra Pound’s rhythm and intonation in reading Canto (Caedmon, TC1155, 1960)164 10.2  Yeats’s poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus” transcribed for performance with a psaltery (Essays and Introductions, 26)165 10.3  From Canto LXXXIII: Pound’s spelling and punctuation168 11.1  Claude Debussy, Poissons d’or, bars 3–4182 11.2  Claude Debussy, Poissons d’or, bars 10–11182 13.1  Transcription of first sixteen bars of Charlie Parker’s solo in “Shaw ’Nuff”207 13.2  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 3–4 208 13.3  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bar 11 208 13.4  Scansion of lines 1–5 of “A Sight”209 13.5  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 3–6 211 13.6  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 11–14 211 13.7  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 7–8 211 13.8  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 15–16 211 13.9  Bridge section of “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 17–24212 13.10 Final measures of bridge section, bars 23–24, and concluding A section of “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 25–32213

Acknowledgements

The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1950, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1971 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Selected Letters 1907–1941 of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1950 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1973 by The Estate of Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. ABC of Reading, copyright ©1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, copyright © 1991 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “The Death of Franco of Cologne: His Prophecy of Beethoven” By W ­ illiam Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. R ­ eprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “January” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected ­Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “War, The Destroyer” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright ©1942 by William Carlos ­Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Two Deliberate Exercises” By William Carlos Williams, from The ­Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright ©1948 by ­William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

xii Acknowledgements “The Desert Music” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright ©1953 by William Carlos ­Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “The Orchestra” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright ©1948, 1962 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Tapiola” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected ­Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright ©1957 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Tapiola [revised version]” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright ©1958 by William ­Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Tapiola [‘final’ version]” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright ©1988 by ­William Eric Williams and Paul H. Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Paterson” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected ­Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Unrelated Incidents -4”. © Tom Leonard, by permission of the author. © The Authors League Fun and St Bride’s Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes. Reeves, Scott D. Creative Jazz Improvisation.3’d ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 2001. 158–59. Print. By permission of Scott D. Reeves. Robert Creeley, Selected Poems, 1945–2005, by Robert Creeley, edited by Benjamin Friedlander, © 2008 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press. An earlier version of Emma Sutton’s essay “Woolf Rewriting Wagner: The Waves and Der Ring Des Nieblungen” appeared, by kind permission of Routledge and Katherine O’Callaghan, in chapter 6 of Virginia Woolf and Classical Music. This project began many years ago when it was suggested to me as a collaborative project by Katie Brown; I thank her for being part of the early stages of the book. I would also like to thank my contributors: those who were there from the beginning have been extraordinarily ­patient in seeing this project through. I would like to acknowledge the work of Ann Donahue who took on the project before it moved to

Acknowledgements  xiii ­ outledge. The anonymous readers of the project provided expert and R pertinent advice and I thank them for their careful suggestions. I would like to thank the editors, Liz Levine and Michelle Salyga, and editorial assistants, Erin Little and Timothy Swenarton, who worked on this book at Routledge, as well as project manager, Assunta Petrone. I would like to acknowledge the support over several years of the Irish Research Council of Ireland. Declan Kiberd, Derek Attridge, and Oona Frawley have provided wise counsel over many years. I could not have finished this project without the loving support of my family and friends, my wonderful writing group at Mount Holyoke College, lively classroom discussions with my students, and the assistance of Kate Perillo and Nirmala Vasigaren of UMass Amherst. Finally, I would like to thank Malcolm Sen for providing encouragement, erudite suggestions, child entertainment, and hot meals in the final months of the project. Katherine O’Callaghan

List of Contributors

Michael Borshuk is Associate Professor of African American Literature at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Swinging the V ­ ernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006) and numerous articles and book chapters on African American literature, American modernism, and music. Isabelle Brasme  is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the U ­ niversity of Nîmes, France, and a member of the EMMA research team at the ­University of Montpellier. She has published various essays and chapters on Ford Madox Ford, as well as a monograph entitled: P ­ arade’s End de Ford Madox Ford: Vers une Esthétique de la Crise (­Montpellier, PULM, 2016). She has co-edited with Jean-­ Michel ­Ganteau and Christine Reynier a collaborative volume on The H ­ umble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts (PULM, 2017), and has edited a collaborative volume of translations and essays on artists and war, entitled Les Artistes et la Guerre (Paris, Houdiard, 2017). Peter Clandfield currently teaches at MacEwan University in E ­ dmonton, Alberta. He has published articles and book chapters on topics including Modernism, contemporary Scottish literature and culture, and literary and screen representations of urban development. Renée Dickinson  earned her Ph.D. at the University of Colorado, ­Boulder. She taught for seven years at Radford University in Virginia as both Assistant and Associate Professor. She is currently an instructor at Bellevue College. She has published and spoken on Virginia Woolf, Olive Moore, Ford Maddox Ford, Harry Potter, and teaching composition. Axel Englund  is Associate Professor of Literature and Wallenberg ­Academy Fellow at Stockholm University. He is the author of Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan (2012). Specializing in word-and-music studies and comparative literature, with an emphasis on German literature in the twentieth century, Englund has written on W.G. Sebald, Nelly Sachs, and Rainer Maria Rilke, but also on Per Olov Enquist and J.M. Coetzee. His articles have

xvi  List of Contributors appeared in German Quarterly, German Life and Letters, Mosaic and Perspectives of New Music, as well as in numerous anthologies. Englund has held visiting scholarships at Columbia ­University, Freie Universität Berlin and Stanford University, where he was an Anna Lindh Fellow in 2011. He is also the Swedish translator of W.G. ­Sebald’s poetry. Katherine Firth  is a Lecturer in the Graduate Research School at La Trobe University, Australia. Her recent work has focused on the relationship of poetry and music, particularly in Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion (BWV 245): A Theological Commentary: With a new Study Translation by Katherine Firth and a Preface by N. T. Wright, by A. Loewe (Brill, 2014); and on academic writing trouble, in a forthcoming book. Maria Kager  holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers ­University and is lecturer in modern English literature at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Her work has appeared in, among others, Studies in the Novel, The James Joyce Quarterly, The Journal of Modern Literature, L2 Journal and in various edited volumes. She is currently completing a book about bilingualism and cognition in modernist fiction. Caroline Knighton  is an independent scholar whose research is concerned with gender and twentieth-century literary and visual cultures. She has previously published work on a variety of modernist figures including Mina Loy and Amy Lowell, and has most recently been preparing research on the gendered thematics of New York Dada. During the completion of her Ph.D at Birkbeck College, University of London, she hosted the Djuna Barnes Research Seminar and was co-organiser of the 2012 International Djuna Barnes Conference. She is currently working on a monograph concerned with the functions and forms of autobiography in the work of Djuna Barnes and the Dadaist poet, model and visual artist the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Thomas Mansell  studied English at Clare College, University of ­Cambridge, and Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. He completed his Ph.D. “Samuel Beckett and Music: Incarnating the Idea” at Birkbeck, University of London, and has contributed articles to Samuel Beckett Today, Performance Research, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and Beckett and Musicality (Routledge, 2014). He works as a piano teacher and accompanist, principally for the North London Conservatoire. Jamie McGregor was born in London and studied in South Africa, receiving his MA from the University of Cape Town in 2000 and his Ph.D. from Rhodes University in 2009. He currently teaches English

List of Contributors  xvii at Rhodes, where he has been based since 2003, offering courses in Modernist literature, mediaeval and renaissance epic, Romantic poetry, and modern fantasy. His doctoral thesis “Myth, Music and ­Modernism” reflects a central interest in the relationship of the ­German Romantic composer Richard Wagner to a wide range of English literature, from Woolf, Joyce, and T.S. Eliot to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. His debut article “‘The Sea, Music and Death’: The Shadow of Wagner in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway” (English Studies in Africa 49.2 (2006): 83–108) received the Thomas Pringle Award for 2008. He is presently working on a full-length study of Wagner’s operas, The Road to Monsalvat, as well as a popular guide to Dante, Going through Hell. In a somewhat lighter vein, he commemorated ­Wagner’s bicentenary in 2013 by impersonating the composer himself in a dramatised reading of The Flying Dutchman, following this up in 2014 with Lohengrin and in 2015 with Tristan and Isolde (featured at the National Arts Festival held annually in Grahamstown). Katherine O’Callaghan  is a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of ­English at Mount Holyoke College where she teaches twentieth-­ century British and Irish Literature. She was the 2014–15 ­A rmstrong Visiting Professor at the University of St Michael’s College at ­University of Toronto and a Visiting Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She was a recipient of a 2-year Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the School of English in Trinity College, Dublin. She received her Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled “The Space Between: Music and Language in the Writings of James Joyce” from University ­College Dublin. Dr. O’Callaghan has taught at UCD, NUI G ­ alway, NUI Maynooth, and spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at ­Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. She regularly presents papers at international Joyce conferences, taught the Finnegans Wake seminar at the Dublin James Joyce summer school, and has contributed to RTE and BBC radio programmes on Joyce and music. She is particularly interested in the role of music in prose, and her current research project is entitled Music and the Irish Novel, an exploration of music as a provocative and radical aspect of Irish novels written in English (1890-present). Her collection, Memory Ireland Volume IV: James Joyce and Cultural Memory (2014, co-edited with Oona Frawley), was published by ­Syracuse University Press. Adrian Paterson  is Lecturer in English at the National University of ­I reland, Galway. A graduate of Worcester College, Oxford, and ­Trinity College, Dublin, he is the author of Words for Music: W. B. Yeats and Musical Sense (forthcoming) and completed an Irish Research Council fellowship at the Moore Institute at NUI Galway entitled Perfect Pitch: Music in Irish Poetry from Moore to Muldoon.

xviii  List of Contributors For Yeats 2015 he curated NUI Galway’s Yeats & the West, an exhibition since reimagined for The Model, Sligo, and Thoor Ballylee. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and writes with particular interest in the artistic interactions of modernism and the fin-de-siècle. Suddhaseel Sen is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Bombay (on lien from Presidency University, Kolkata). He obtained his Ph.D. in English on ­European and Indian adaptations of Shakespeare from the University of Toronto and is currently working on a doctorate in musicology on cross-cultural exchanges between Indian and European musicians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Sen has been a Research Fellow for the Balzan Research Project, Towards a Global History of Music, under the directorship of Professor Reinhard Strohm. His recent publications include essays on Ambroise Thomas’ French operatic adaptation of Hamlet (in Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism, ed. Joseph Ortiz); Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool, a Bollywood adaptation of Macbeth (in the journal ­Borrowers and Lenders); musical settings of Tagore’s poetry by Western composers (in the University of Toronto Quarterly); Richard Wagner and ­German Orientalism (in The Wagner Journal); and on cross-cultural exchanges between Tagore and British musicians Maud ­MacCarthy and John Foulds (Routledge, forthcoming). His arrangements of Tagore’s songs have been performed by Western ensembles in India, ­Canada, and the USA. ­ ndrews Emma Sutton is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St A and works mainly on literary-musical relations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Publications include Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford UP, 2002), Opera and the Novel (co-edited, 2012), Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form (Edinburgh UP, 2013) and numerous entries on writers and visual art for The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (2013). She is co-editor of Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. Emma is Founding Director of the Virginia Woolf & Music project exploring music in Woolf’s life and afterlives; it has commissioned and premiered new music responding to Woolf’s writing, showcased work by women composers, and organised public lectures and workshops. She broadcasts regularly on music and literature, most recently for the BBC Proms, Moscow TV, and Radio National, Australia. Current work includes a book on ­Euro-Pacific musical encounters in the nineteenth-century, focused on the writer (and amateur composer) Robert Louis Stevenson. Steven Toussaint is the author of the poetry collection The Bellfounder (2015) and the chapbook Fiddlehead (2014). A graduate of both the

List of Contributors  xix Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Institute of Modern Letters, he holds the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship for 2017. He lives and writes in Auckland, New Zealand. Debora Van Durme  completed her doctoral dissertation “Words Circling Sounds: Music in Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy and Edith Sitwell” (Research Foundation Flanders / Ghent University) in 2012. Since then, she has been working at Ghent University as an English Literature teacher and as the coordinator of the university-wide honours programme “Quetelet Lectures.”

Introduction Katherine O’Callaghan

In 1902, Andrei Biely composed Dramatic Symphony, a work in four movements with a structural dependence on repeated leitmotifs or, in his own terms, “musical phrases.”1 This work, written as a novel, attempted to present music through the medium of language. The Russian writer’s quest was to become a seminal impetus for many writers in the twentieth century: the modernist pursuit of a “musical” literature. In the nineteenth century, the English writer and critic Walter Pater suggested that all arts constantly aspire to the condition of music. 2 Andrei Biely outlined his own Paterian construct for a new century in his manifesto, “The Forms of Art”: “Will not all forms of art seek more and more to occupy the position of overtones in relation to the basic tone, i.e. to music?” (182). Biely’s argument may place literature in a position of deference to music, but it is distinguished by its eschewal of the argument concerning whether literature may or may not “become” music, a pitting of the forms against each other that is all too common in discussions on the role of music in literature. Samuel Beckett, in relation to his radio play Words and Music, would pass a formidable judgment on this combative scenario: “Music always wins.”3 What Pater had identified as the condition to which all arts aspire was the unification of subject and form, an aesthetic harmony apparently only possible in music. The challenge taken up by many writers in the twentieth century was not necessarily to turn their writing into music, but to draw on music so as to interrogate the relationship and, in some cases, narrow the gap between subject and form in literature. “Words multiplied by music: modernism was fascinated with the ­possibility,” writes Sebastian Knowles.4 In their desire to express the sensibilities of their time, modernist writers elicited ordering principles of structure, form, and pattern more customarily associated with music, not as imported practices, but as innate (if latent) aspects of their own art form. The essays that follow demonstrate that music inspired modernist writers to draw more deeply from within their own art form, that the absorption of music into their work involved a close scrutiny of the musical potentialities inherent within language, an examination of the interstitial space between words and music, and an engagement with

2  Katherine O’Callaghan non-literary formal experimentation. Many of the writers discussed in this collection drew on music as a motif or a grace note gesturing the reader towards the world of sound, performance, interpretation, and improvisation. Rhythm, pattern, repetition, and variation become portals through which a sense of meaning is transmitted and received. The imprint of musical forms such as sonata, theme and variation, or fugue can certainly be found in modernist literary works, but it was primarily the internal structuring principles of music that provoked and compelled a series of radical literary innovations. The emphasis on interiority is not arbitrary; modernist art is concerned with the interior world of things, no matter how banal. Indeed, it has focused, both in its metropolitan and in its marginal forms, on the psychic underbelly of everyday life, forever scrutinizing not that which seemed beyond the veil of the real, but that which the quotidian clarifyingly revealed. ­Literary modernism’s project began as a correction to the allegedly ­ ineteenth-century realist modes, which failed to shallow vision of n question the narrative vehicle of literature in a manner to which the modernists aspired. Music can stand as a marker of what is unspoken in literature, a space to acknowledge moments of inexpressibility. In the Victorian novel, for example, music “may be a key to a character’s thoughts or hidden ­emotions—especially in situations where words are forbidden (courtship scenes, for instance).”5 While what has traditionally been considered the modernist period sees the lifting of some, if not all, Victorian restrictions, there was also an increasing understanding that it is not societal pressure alone that prevents us from accessing and articulating all of our motivations and desires. Eric Prieto writes that the literary modernist’s interest in music is “motivated by a growing mistrust of the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and by a desire to seek out techniques appropriate to one of the central quests of literary modernism: the ever more accurate representation of psychological states and processes.”6 In order to achieve this, Prieto argues, music is called upon because it “offers a set of formal, expressive and referential principles that can be used in the attempt to better represent the inner space of consciousness” (x). James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and William Faulkner, among others, and earlier and influentially, Édouard Dujardin, presented the inner world of their characters through the narrative device of stream of consciousness. This modernist technique strives to present an unmediated interiority. Indeed, that pursuit remained a central focus for Joyce, who commented in relation to his early work on Finnegans Wake: “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensibly by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”7 For many modernist writers, music inspired ways of conveying inner and submerged voices and the realm of the unconscious.

Introduction  3

Cacophony, Polyphony, Atonality Modernist writers worked in a noisier world than any of their ­predecessors, and this sociohistorical soundscape reverberates in their work. Gramophones, telephones, densely populated cities, machines, and automobiles were all sources of the escalation of auditory imprints in modernist texts. Contrasting the differing emphasis on sound in the openings of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Woolf’s Mrs  ­Dalloway, ­A ngela Frattarola writes: “It is not until the modernist period that the novel becomes saturated with sound—both in content and form.”8 Indeed, the modernist period returns to literature the urgency of its roots in oral storytelling and singing traditions. Daniel ­A lbright has traced the merging of the art forms and their shared heritage, and has pointed out that the philosophies of the twentieth century gestured towards a permeability between language and music: The linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the philosophies of ­Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida, tend to strip language of denotation, to make language a game of arbitrary signifiers; and as words lose connection to the world of hard objects, they become more and more like musical notes.9 The most prevalent and compelling manifestation of such trans-formal inspiration in musical modernist texts is the leitmotif. Motifs have, of course, played an enduring role in literature since Homer’s use of recurrent phrases, and the practice undoubtedly has roots in oral literary cultures that predated written texts.10 However, in modernist literature we find an unsurpassed focus on the motif, or, more precisely, the leitmotif, as a structuring device that produces meaning through repetition. Here we must attempt to distinguish between the more prosaic recognition of a repeated motif and a more fluid, more incorporative process whereby we allow repetition to have a less delineated and more cumulative effect. The fabric of the text is formed by the weaving of notes and tropes, under the guiding principles of repetition, variation, and context. The musical structure of August Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, for example, arises from an interior pulse of repeated tropes rather than an imposition of form on subject. The leitmotif effect is magnified over the duration of the reading process, creating a palimpsest of implication, significance, and connotation within the wider textuality of a novel, play, or poem. The influence of this technique can be traced to composer Richard Wagner’s use of short recurring musical phrases that signaled character, theme, place, idea, or object in his operas. In literature, the leitmotif functions in a manner that is, to a large degree, dependent on the reader, who must recognize not only its recurrence, but also the interactions between those appearances or utterances throughout the work. Understanding thus

4  Katherine O’Callaghan becomes dependent not on narrative or the progression of a story, but rather on variations on a theme at the level of details, tropes, or mannerisms accumulated in the reader’s mind. The leitmotif figures prominently in the writings of Édouard Dujardin, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Olive Moore, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf and functions as a means of both interrupting the mono-directional progress of narrative and integrating form and subject matter. The literature of the early modernist era in particular displays a marked attentiveness towards the development of techniques for the “organising of sounds on paper,”11 with a close eye on the analogous relationship between musical composition and its written score. Peter Clandfield, in his contribution to this collection, suggests that the lineation of William Carlos Williams’s poems might even be considered the equivalent of the musical score. And if the words on paper are in fact the score, the work remains to be interpreted, placing the responsibility for performance on the reader. David Pierce notes that this imposition on readers or audience members to experience the work in itself was general across the modernist art forms: “From Picasso to Joyce the line that links them all was a conscious refusal to allow their work to be paraphrased.”12 This leads to an intensified role for the reader, who must interpret in a musical, rather than a literary, manner. By this I mean that the reader is called upon to perform the text, to interpret the work in the temporally active manner of a musician performing a score, and must evade the desire to capture what the text might be “about.” In his essay here on the late modernist poet Robert Creeley, Steven Toussaint suggests that the reader may even be called upon to be alert to a state of improvisation. Creeley, he writes, “creates a picture of improvisation, or perhaps, more accurately, attempts to translate the peculiar mode of consciousness associated with improvisation to the reader as an affective condition of the reading experience.” In the framework of Gotthold Lessing’s division of the arts into ­n acheinander, the arts that operate in time (for example, music and literature), and nebeneinander, those which operate in space (for example, the visual arts, sculpture, and architecture), music possesses an aspect of the spatial arts that language, on the whole, does not: simultaneity.13 In his formative essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Joseph Frank suggests that “modern literature, exemplified by such writers as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, is moving in the direction of spatial form.”14 The desire for works to be perceived instantaneously may be epitomized by the temporal compression requisite to the circadian novel. Indeed, three of the authors discussed in this collection wrote novels set over the course of one day: Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and Moore’s Fugue. Derek Attridge has pointed out that “Modernist works like The Cantos or The Wasteland or The Waves stake a claim against time and chance: they are stamped with the

Introduction  5 will to specify, to capture, to purify, to preserve.”15 Judith Butler, drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, links the spatialization of art with the experience of loss, in particular the loss of “redemptive narrative.” Butler writes: “Spatialization will emerge as a response to the loss of eschatology. History itself, on such a view, becomes a kind of catastrophe, a fall from which there is no redemption, the dissolution of sequential temporality itself.”16 Inspired by, and responding to, the preeminence of nonempirical modes of intellectual enquiry, modernist writers aspired towards the polyphony or “simultaneity” of the musical art form, whereby multiple “horizontal” strands can be performed simultaneously. This pursuit of a polyphonic or, in some cases, fugal effect in text differentiates the modernist writer’s quest from the more traditional pursuit of a lyrical or “musical” text. It may be that the most declamatory and lyrical literature holds the least claim to aspiring to that which music achieves. On the other hand, texts that come closest to an evocation of the simultaneity of music, of multiple voices in temporal unison, are rarely the most poetic, and they rarely touch on the elegiac tonality associated with so-called musical language. The desire to write in a polyphonic manner was, of course, complicated by a growing societal distrust of the very possibility of harmony, of multiple voices sounding in unison. As Isabelle Brasme writes in this collection, “the absence of unison highlights the variety and irreconcilability of individual perspectives and thus points to a major concern in modernist aesthetics.” It was not aesthetic coherence, but aberration, that seemed to best identity with, and communicate to, the human condition. In Planetary Modernism: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (2015), Susan Stanford Friedman suggests that the meanings of modernity and modernism are “perpetually unsettled, unsettling,” and that therein lies the potential of the field.17 In this groundbreaking work exploring the implications of a geographically and temporally expansive concept of modernism, Friedman acknowledges the different, often oppositional impulses and disciplinary approaches to modernity and modernism. She states that her work aims to “[i]nterrogate the dissonance,” noting that “we find at its center the contradictory core of modernity itself, a bang/clash never to be stilled” (10). There is an ethical stance in refusing to reach resolution, and Friedman argues that her work, in providing a “provisional definition of modernity,” “does so with no illusions of stilling the debate or quelling the anxiety caused by a newly expansive and still expanding field” (11). Words and music studies, another still expanding field, would also benefit from this form of Keatsian Negative Capability, where one is capable of being in uncertainty. In this collection, at the crux between those two critical fields, there is a recognition that the space between music and language is also unsettled and unsettling, as is that between form and content, and thus the question of

6  Katherine O’Callaghan whether a critical methodology can ever, or should ever, attempt to settle and domesticate this zone remains. Peter Childs, in attempting to define the modernist era, writes: “[t]here were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair.”18 Neither modernist music nor literature breaks entirely with its past. Albright cites the characters in Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women, who “drift off pitch” and suggests that “what is needed of course is a tuning-fork,” adding “[b]ut, alas, there is no fundamental note, no viable key, in the serial world of the Modernist fiction.”19 The portrayal or representation of atonality in modernist literature is sometimes overt—a movement from polyphony to cacophony—and sometimes more covert: the keyless protagonists in Joyce’s Ulysses, the “key-gone” family of Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon, as described in Caroline Knighton’s essay. It would be false to assume, however, that modernist literature is entirely untethered. It is perhaps best to remember what Ellen Carol Jones noted: “modernism does not relinquish the master narrative that the crisis of representation threatens to dissolve.”20 It appears that narrating such a crisis of representation had the effect of centralizing the use of musical aesthetics, principally because it pushed textuality to its representational limits. Authors such as Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and Amy Lowell stabilized their representation of chaos through depictions of architectural groundedness in often phallic structures such as obelisks, lighthouses, or the gnomon of a sundial, as if these imposed some order onto the chaotic whirlpool of the early twentieth century. In the auditory scheme of things, the machinist cacophony of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique might be proleptically present in Leopold Bloom’s understanding of modern music, but the soundscape of Bloom’s day is nonetheless ordered by the ringing of bells throughout Dublin and the metronomic tapping of a cane, while the chiming of Big Ben permeates the day of Mrs. ­Dalloway and the other residents of London: “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”21 The modernists maintain some symbols of order: the lighthouse that holds vigil over the unruly waves, the Martello tower over the “winedark” sea, threads that map labyrinths, a tuning fork that sounds tonal order in the swirling currents of atonality. Indeed, Steven Touissaint suggests in his contribution on Robert Creeley here that it is the residual presence of stability that spurs the power of modernism’s instabilities: “the ghost of regular speech, the knowledge of even a flexible convention, undergirds the poem’s divergences from it.” He suggests that for both Creeley and his musical influence ­Charlie Parker: “Change becomes ‘significant,’ in other words, in tension with background stability.” Meaning in such literature is found in the tension between stability and instability, the settled and the unsettled,

Introduction  7 approaching something close to the abstract play of modalities and tensions in absolute music. Five years after Biely wrote that music is the tone to which other art forms were overtones, Arnold Schoenberg composed his String Quartet No. 2, opus 10. The final two movements of the piece for voice and string quartet mark the shift away from tonality and towards the twelvetone technique that Schoenberg later developed. Twentieth-century writers were aural witnesses to a radical shift in musical composition; those in Europe and America also became familiar with musical tonalities from other cultures, such as eastern scales, jazz rhythms, and traditional modalities (although, as I argue in my own contribution, some of this newness had a strange familiarity for Irish modernists). The writers who appear in this collection were influenced by an eclectic range of musical eras and styles. Some, such as Rabindranath Tagore, had the ability to draw on many traditions: Hindustani, Bengali folk, Carnatic, Irish folk, and European classical music. Robert Creeley and August Wilson drew from the improvisations and fragmentation of African American music (bebop and blues, respectively). They were, of course, preceded by the extraordinary innovations of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, which draws on jazz not only thematically, but also engages on a stylistic and formal level with the temporality of jazz improvisation. James Joyce once claimed to admire Palestrina and Schoenberg and nothing in between. We know that his musical tastes were actually far more extensive, but it is clear from the essays here that many modernist writers were certainly drawn to both the formal structure of J.S. Bach and the twelvetone technique of Schoenberg. Djuna Barnes is described by Caroline Knighton here as “telescoping between high modernist and Baroque reference points.” Many of the writers gravitated towards Wagner’s drama, found kindred spirits in the impressionism of Debussy, and relished the challenge of later Beethoven. Wagner is mentioned in several essays in this book, and Bach, Beethoven, and George Antheil feature frequently. However, there is little or no appearance of music from the Classical era; Mozart and Haydn here lose the dominance they otherwise maintain in the world of music. The centrality of the influence of contemporary composers on modernist writers has been insufficiently examined to date: the essays in this collection will demonstrate that the fundamentally altered soundscape of the musical world deeply impacted the structural and linguistic innovations of the literary one. The desire of composers such as Antheil, Schoenberg, Harry Partch, Igor Stravinsky, Alexander Scriabin, and Debussy to create new modes of expression and new forms of composition fascinated contemporary writers. And the conversation continued on the other side of the trans-artistic divide: John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, and Steve Reich, to mention just a few composers of the later twentieth century, were all deeply influenced by many of the modernist writers discussed in this collection.

8  Katherine O’Callaghan

Background and Existing Criticism This book builds on a lean but distinguished critical lineage. Daniel ­A lbright’s Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (2000) is an essential work in the field of musical aesthetics and literature, and his 2004 Music and Modernism: An Anthology of Sources provides both archival information and source material. A short but invaluable introduction to interdisciplinary aspects of modernism can be found in Albright’s foreword to Sebastian Knowles’ edited collection Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce (1999). Albright’s final works, Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts (2014) and Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music and Painting, 1872–1927 (2015), gather together his life’s work as the preeminent writer and lecturer on the intersection of art forms in the modernist period. ­Earlier works addressing the topic of music and literature include Calvin S. Brown’s Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (1948), ­Lawrence Kramer’s Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (1984) and Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900 (1990), Jean Pierre Barricelli’s Melopoiesis: Approaches to the Study of Music and Literature (1991), and Steven Paul Scher’s edited collection Music and Text: Critical Enquiries (1992). More recent engagement from emerging critics on the role of music in modernist literature can be found in the Cambridge Scholars collection Music in Literary Modernism: Critical Essays and Comparative Studies (2006), edited by Robert S. McParland. Focus on the role of music in fiction, in particular, can be found in Alex Aronson’s Music and the Novel: A Study of Twentieth-Century Fiction (1980), Daniel Melnick’s Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music (1994), Werner Wolf’s The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study of the History and Theory of Intermediality (1999), Alan Shockley’s Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel (2009), and Emily Petermann’s The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance and Reception in Contemporary Fiction (2014). Brad Bucknell’s Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce and Stein (2001) provides a detailed theoretical discussion for a small group of authors. Eric ­Prieto’s Listening In: Music, Mind and the Modernist Narrative (2002) focuses on Robert Pinget, Michel Leiris, and Samuel Beckett and gives a robust critique of the critical field to date. Prieto does an excellent job of articulating some of the shortfalls within the existing field of words and music studies. The tendency on the part of critics to get caught up in arguments concerning whether a musical pattern or technique is being engaged with in a manner that moves beyond mere metaphor has prevented the discussion from moving to the far more fruitful field of how this musical engagement actually affects the writing and the reading processes. This is an important acknowledgment for many students

Introduction  9 who encounter a dearth of critical terminology and rigor, leading each to think that they are setting off on this exceptionally exciting path for the first time, but apparently aimless and without guidance. The emphasis on the role of the reader and the centrality of music itself in this collection signal fruitful paths of enquiry. Given the varying historical, cultural, and political vectors that are evoked in any definition of modernism, the issues of periodization and historicization are inevitably raised. Can we say when the era of modernism begins and ends? Is any text written within a particular time frame necessarily “modernist?” And, then, do the writers of this era respond to music in a manner that can be distinguished from the response of writers from other periods? The possible origins of modernism have been pinpointed in the visual and musical arts. The invention of the camera, rendering representational visual art near obsolete, encouraged the development of new forms of representation leading to the first Impressionist art exhibition in 1874. In the case of music, the premières of Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune (1894) and Igor S­ travinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) have each been credited as sparking the birth of modernism. There are several studies that fruitfully focus on individual years representing high points of the era: Jean-Michel Rabaté chose 1913 as a moment of intense creativity in his book, 1913: The ­Cradle of Modernism (2007). As well as The Rite of Spring, the year saw the arrival of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas, Niels Bohr’s “Bohr model” of the atom, and the first volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Other studies, for example Michael North’s Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (2002), have highlighted 1922—the year that heralded the peak of the Harlem Renaissance and the arrival of Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Wasteland, Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Katherine ­Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories, and Pound’s ­C antos, among many other works discernible for their intentional, formal, and linguistic innovation. 1922 was also the year in which Edith Sitwell published Façade, which queried the boundaries between music and poetry. However, this collection takes a broader approach to modernism, underlining periodicity’s manifestly porous qualities. It is alert to the developing sense of expansive modernisms such as those proposed in Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms or Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s collection Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism and Modernity.22 Peter Clandfield, in his essay here, makes the case for extending the traditional period boundaries of modernism so as to include discussion of the effect of William Carlos Williams’s later works on musical composers, which “amplify ways in which musical modernisms resonate well beyond the high modern period.” Michael Borshuk situates August Wilson’s 1982 play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom within the purview of this collection, writing that the play liberates “any understanding of black modernism… from absolute definitions and from presumed temporal boundaries.”

10  Katherine O’Callaghan In this, Borshuk suggests that “Wilson anticipates Houston Baker’s conceptualization of ‘renaissancism’ as an alternate name for modernism, marking a tradition that began in the Harlem Renaissance but continued in more fluid terms ever after.” Critical analysis of literary modernism has broadened in recent decades to include issues of gender, race, memory, and postcoloniality. Although postcolonial studies kept an understandably critical distance from modernist authors, often demonstrating the complicity of the modernist project with the colonial one, it was also instrumental in ushering in a more pluralistic vision of modernism, not least through the seminal critical readings supplied by Edward Said. The voices of modernism are not homogeneous, and modernist authors, colonial, semi-colonial, or “peripheral,” were frequently concerned with evoking a sense of polyphony, be it through the use of multiple narrators or the textual evocation of the layered psyche of the modern psychoanalytic subject. David ­Bradshaw has pointed out that there are so many instances of modernist writers appropriating aspects of and even whole areas of specialist knowledge which in turn transformed the shape and tenor of their work – Yeats and eugenics, H. D. and psychoanalysis, Graves and myth, are obvious examples. 23 The role of music in literature sits at one of these many intersections. And so to explore the influence of music on literary modernism is to contend with a host of linguistic, representational, formal, generic, and stylistic qualifications. There are many formidable challenges involved in such truly interdisciplinary criticism: literary and musical terms are not always interchangeable; descriptions of music necessitate an imposition of linguistic, literary, and rhetorical parameters; and such criticism also calls for literary scholars who are alert to the correspondences and discrepancies between two different/divergent art forms. Critical terminology also changes over time. As Emilie Crapoulet notes: the concept of “musicality” for Virginia Woolf is undoubtedly ­different from that of the 21st-century critic…this concept travels, not only on the lateral plane, from discipline to discipline, art form to art form and even culture to culture, but also, and most importantly, on the vertical axis, in time, within disciplines and art forms. 24

The Essays Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical ­Modernism is a collection of essays that outlines the pervasive and strategic influence of music and musical aesthetics on the writings of Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Robert Creeley, Ford Madox Ford, James

Introduction  11 Joyce, Amy Lowell, Thomas Mann, Olive Moore, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Rabindranath Tagore, William Carlos Williams, August ­Wilson, ­Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats. While some of these authors have previously received critical attention in relation to their use of ­music— Pound, Woolf, and Joyce, in particular—some have received none at all. This collection extends the lines of inquiry into the phenomenon of prolonged and intense musical engagement by modernist writers by providing a multi-genre focus on prose, poetry, and drama. The contributors to the collection are literary critics with exceptionally strong musical backgrounds and expertise; they are more concerned with the influence of music as an embedded energy within literary language than as a form of external embellishment. The depth of musical knowledge that the contributors bring to their literary criticism produces insightful new readings of these modernist texts that point towards a paradigmatic shift in the way we read music in literature. It is hoped that this book will provide a critical apparatus to scholars familiar with other musical traditions and alternative modernist exercises, who might in turn further enrich the interdisciplinary field of music and literary analysis. What this collection of essays demonstrates is that the configuration of a sonic register was central to the modernist sensibility that aspired to reach the very limits of linguistic and textual representation. As this book shows, such configurations can often be purely aesthetic or prominently political. In the first essay, Emma Sutton brilliantly argues that Virginia Woolf was “hostile” to Richard Wagner’s mythopoeia as exemplified by the Ring cycle. Sutton demonstrates that while The Waves is structured by the leitmotif on a formal level, Woolf’s purpose in alluding to the composer’s technique is parodic, political, and profoundly “anti-­Wagnerian.” James Joyce’s juxtaposition of modernist musical innovations and an older Irish tonality is then explored in my own essay. In an intervention that hopes to further challenge the notion of a singular modernism experienced as a unified teleological progression, I explore key moments concerning music in “The Dead” and Ulysses and argue that Joyce’s engagement with music extends far beyond musical allusions and structural form. The night call that finally draws together Stephen ­Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses is delivered in an uncanny modality, ­carrying overtones of both dissonant modernity and old tonalities. Joyce and Woolf also figure in Jamie McGregor’s exploration of the striking coincidence of Wagner’s—particularly The Ring’s—deep influence on two major works of high modernism: Woolf’s The Waves (1931) and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). For McGregor, the most influential aspects of the composer’s tetralogy are its cyclical theme and form. Alternatively, Isabelle Brasme suggests that in the case of Ford Madox Ford, the colossal scale and mythological heft of the Ring are the enticing aspects of Wagner’s work. She argues in her essay that the writer’s

12  Katherine O’Callaghan Parade tetralogy aspires to similar “vastness.” Brasme also demonstrates that the use of Wagnerian leitmotifs in the Parade “constitute a metatextual commentary on the act of writing,” one that does not merely break away from traditional realist fiction, but rather gestures beyond modernist innovations. She notes a “strikingly innovative atonality” in Ford’s “disconcerting mix of tones.” Fugal structures here are indicative of the failure of communication; atonality is situated as a response to World War One, as “polyphony shifts towards cacophony.” For Olive Moore’s novel Fugue, the musical and psychological definitions of the phrase “to flee” are central. Renée Dickinson argues that Moore breaks with the traditional musical fugal form, “ultimately exposing the psychological dissociation of the modern subject’s split subjectivities.” Contextualizing this lesser-known author in the light of her journalistic work, Dickinson considers the possibilities for the articulation of the feminine subject in inconclusive endings and the disruption of narrative. The creation of a weblike structure through the use of leitmotifs is returned to again in Maria Kager’s comparison of the structure of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus to a musical composition. Kager reminds us that Mann, of perhaps all of the writers discussed in this collection, was the most overtly concerned with evoking the essence of music itself. Mann had written to Theodor Adorno that “[Doktor ­Faustus is], a music-novel, almost the novel of music, [and] tries to become the thing it is about.” Kager shows that, for Mann’s fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn, the future of music harks to the past, and the development of the twelve-tone structure is a means of discarding the subjective and random imposition of harmonic chords, allowing a return to an earlier polyphony. Music’s perceived elevated status as a site of aesthetic purity is undercut by attention to the presence of a physical performing body in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, writes Axel Englund, who considers this work in the context of fin-de-siècle notions of transgressive sexuality. He demonstrates that Proust’s “Narrator projects onto music notions of purity and absoluteness, but the eroticism of the performing body insists on intervening.” Descriptions of musical performance in prose can, Englund persuasively argues, thus “become[s] a vehicle for the transgression of boundaries both social and aesthetic.” The symbiosis between music and poetry is exemplified by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. In his essay in this collection, Suddhaseel Sen cogently elaborates on the importance of music in the shaping of Tagore’s modernist sensibility and positions the polymath poet as an artist who demonstrates a “rooted cosmopolitanism.” Sen also expertly explores the ways in which Tagore inspired both Pound and Yeats, even though they remained unfamiliar with much of his vast literary and political output. Adrian Paterson’s thought-provoking essay on W. B. Yeats argues for a reassessment of Words for Music Perhaps and emphasizes the word “Music” rather than “Perhaps.” Paterson draws attention to the accuracy

Introduction  13 of Yeats’s musical imagery and to Yeats’s own statement that the collection involved a sequence of poems designed to be set to music. The indelible impression of collaboration with avant-garde composer George Antheil can be found in the poems, which Paterson shows to be “the better for the presence of music.” Katherine Firth astutely observes that Ezra Pound’s deepest engagement with music is to be found in his Pisan Cantos, and she evaluates the poet’s practice of “composing [poetry] to the sequence of the musical phrase.” Pound’s use of free verse is analyzed in relation to Yeats’s “Speaking to the Psaltery”—mentioned in the earlier essay by Paterson—and the “chaunting” of Arnold Dolmetsch and Florence Farr. Firth demonstrates that, for both Yeats and Pound, it is the ear, even in silence, that is the guiding force for poetry. Listening and reading aloud are essential to aesthetic production and reception, as made clear by the poets’ sound recordings of their own works. Pound is shown to be searching for an inherent music in words, one that is deeply embedded within the words themselves, and not dependent on the apparent musicality offered by “symmetrical rhythm and cadence.” Reclaiming Amy Lowell’s position as more than a mere advocate for Imagism, Debora van Durme analyzes her poetry in the light of the influence of composer Claude Debussy. This inspiration is contrasted with the impact of the “pattern music” of both J.S. Bach and George ­A ntheil on Pound. Pound considered Debussy to be writing “music for the eye,” while Lowell was drawn to the depiction of image in both music and word, writing in a preface to one of her collections that she was “stressing the purely pictorial effect.” Van Durme argues here that Lowell’s own brand of “Imagism” lies between Pound’s poetic Imagism and Debussy’s musical Impressionism. William Carlos Williams also aligned himself on the side of visual art, agreeing that “painting is closer [to him] than music,” but Peter ­Clandfield, in his essay, makes a strong case for the significance of music to the poet’s work. The cultural and political presence of music—jazz, classical, contemporary—comes to the fore here; Williams can be read “as a kind of cultural antenna, picking up and retransmitting significant musical sounds from his surroundings.” Clandfield’s essay is sensitive to the role of the reader in uncovering musical presence: ­“Williams’s techniques of scoring establish that readers, especially of ­innovative poems such as his, have active roles in the production of meaning.” Two “musically active readers,” poet Tom Leonard and c­ omposer Steve Reich, are drawn into the discussion. Steven Toussaint explores the influence of musician Charlie Parker on the late modernist poet Robert Creeley, and he suggests that it is not that the poet is literally improvising his poems, in the manner in which Parker improvises his music, but rather that he “tries to encode the participatory discrepancies and neutralization of temporal associations common to bebop improvisation into the formal structure of his

14  Katherine O’Callaghan ­ oems and the strategies and techniques he employs within them.” What p Toussaint adds in particular to the collection is an exploration of how a writer might attempt to “translate the peculiar mode of consciousness associated with improvisation to the reader as an affective condition of the reading experience.” Michael Borshuk’s essay on August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom also explores the manner in which modernist music, in this case black vernacular music, might be a source of power in the face of chaos, as well as a source of inspiration for the play itself. Borshuk traces the fragmented representation of music in the play, which, he argues, resonates with the defiant performative black modernism of the Black Arts Movement. Borshuk demonstrates here how much is lost by the assumption that the impulse of modernism began and ended with one early twentieth century group of writers or was definitively terminated with the development of postmodernism. The musical device of antiphony was used by Djuna Barnes to structure her tonal play The Antiphon. Caroline Knighton uncovers the rich tapestry of references, motifs, and the “inherently musical patterns of return, refrain, and variation” that form a work concerned with the poetics and politics of memory. Knighton positions the author not in opposition to structures of what might be considered mainstream modernism, but by reading her work through alternative musical models. Knighton argues that Barnes was not “making it new” but “making it differently.” The influence of music on Samuel Beckett has already received a degree of attention; in the final essay of the collection, Thomas Mansell considers the effect of such readings on our perception of Beckett, and the preconceptions of music inherent in such criticism. Cautioning against a “musicalization” of Beckett that is in effect a “marginalization,” Mansell seeks for the integration of musico-literary approaches into the body of Beckettian criticism.

Conclusion After writing the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses, Joyce claimed that he had “explored the resources and artifices” and “seen through all the tricks” of music. 25 As we progress through the essays in this collection, we come to understand how a sustained focus on a literary work’s musical aspects serves to highlight the “constructedness” of textuality itself. Reading a text while alert to its musical influence and aesthetics increases our awareness of the literariness of the work: its tricks become clearer, many of its artifices are uncovered, and an author’s pursuit of a unification of content and form is foregrounded. This musically sensitive approach opens further reading possibilities; it focuses the mind on the sounds and rhythms of the text, the heartbeat of words as utterances in time. Several of the literary authors discussed in this collection have been considered

Introduction  15 “difficult” in their own time, and some continue to be considered so ­ antos: today. Barnes’s The Antiphon, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Pound’s C these works have never been accused of simplicity. This collection demonstrates that a musical lens can provide an alternative gateway to the text. A work that demands critical unravelling to the point of complete revelation may be the difficult one, rather than the text that calls for an open reader who can embrace it “as that thing itself,” as Beckett described Finnegans Wake—that is, without recourse to paraphrase, in the manner in which we experience music.

Notes 1 Andrei Biely, The Dramatic Symphony, trans. Roger and Angela Keys, in A Novel with an Essay: The Forms of Art, trans. John Elsworth (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 182. 2 Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1980), 106. 3 Quoted in Katherine Worth, “Words for Music Perhaps,” in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Mary Bryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 16. 4 Sebastian Knowles, “Introduction,” in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian Knowles (New York: Garland Publications, 1999), xxix. 5 Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, “Introduction,” in The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, eds. Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff (Burlington: ­Ashgate, 2004), xiv. 6 Eric Prieto, Listening in: Music, Mind and the Modernist Narrative ­(Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 2002), x. Hereafter cited in text. 7 James Joyce, Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Nov. 24, 1926, Letters of James Joyce, Vol. III, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), 146. 8 Angela Frattarola, “Developing an Ear for the Modernist Novel: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce,” Journal of Modern Literature 33.1 (2009), 4. 9 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2000), 6. 10 Clive Hart notes that the term leitmotif was “coined by Hans von W ­ olzogen for specific application to the music of Wagner.” He writes that “[t]he ­Homeric epithets and formulae, the refrains and burdens in folk poetry and prayer are direct ancestors of the leitmotiv, and [Thomas] Mann himself was fond of saying that the technique can be traced at least as far back as Homer. The quasi-ritualistic repetition of key-phrases in narrative goes back even further, beyond the origins of writing.” Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 164. 11 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 6. 12 David Pierce, Reading Joyce (Harlow: Pearson, 2008), 302. 13 Gotthold Lessing, Laokoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). 14 Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three Parts,” The Sewanee Review 53.2 (1945), 225. 15 Attridge, Joyce Effects, 119. 16 Judith Butler, “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” in Loss, eds. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian. (Berkeley: U of California Press, 2003), 469. 17 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia P, 2015), 3. Hereafter cited in text.

16  Katherine O’Callaghan 18 Peter Childs, Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 17. 19 Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 144. 20 Ellen Carol Jones, “Writing the Modern: The Politics of Modernism,” ­Modern Fiction Studies 38.3 (1992), 550. 21 Virgina Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. (New York: Mariner Books, 1990), 4. 22 Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 23 David Bradshaw, “Introduction,” in A Concise Companion to Modernism, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 2. 24 Emilie Crapoulet, “Voicing the Music in Literature: Music as a Travelling Concept,” European Journal of English Studies 13.1 (2009): 79–91. 25 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 459.

1 Woolf Rewriting Wagner The Waves and Der Ring des Nibelungen Emma Sutton

We came up here 10 days ago to attend the Ring—and I hereby state that I will never go again, and you must help us both to keep to that. My eyes are bruised, my ears dulled, my brain a mere pudding of pulp—O the noise and the heat, and the bawling sentimentality, which used once to carry me away, and now leaves me sitting perfectly still. Everyone seems to have come to this opinion, though some pretend to believe still. —Virginia Woolf, May 19131

The Waves (1931) has long been perceived as Virginia Woolf’s most “musical”—and most Wagnerian—novel. Since the 1960s, studies of Wagner’s literary influence have acknowledged the novel’s thematic and structural affinities to Wagner’s Ring cycle (1876) and explored (­albeit briefly) Woolf’s use of the leitmotif. 2 William Blissett termed the novel “pervasively leitmotivistic in its structure and symbolism,” John DiGaetani characterized Wagner’s influence as “pervasive, despite the fact that his name never appears,” and Raymond Furness described the text’s “symbols and motifs” as “derived incontrovertibly from ­Wagner.”3 More recently, Woolf scholars have explored the novel’s debts to ­Wagner’s Parsifal (1882)4 and its “intermediality” with Beethoven’s late string quartets.5 The growing recognition of music’s enduring role in Woolf’s formal experimentation—and of Woolf’s astute perception of music and literature alike as politicized, “socially constructed cultural ­artefacts”6 —informs this reexamination of The Waves’s relationship to the Ring. Woolf’s engagement with Wagner’s tetralogy was lifelong and ambivalent: despite an apparent break from Wagner before the First World War, and several skeptical allusions to his operas in the novels, Wagner’s work remained a vital stimulus to, model for, and antitype to Woolf’s prose.7 She attended at least five complete Ring cycles (in 1898, 1900, 1907, 1911, and 1913)8 and heard most of Wagner’s other operas multiple times.9 She may not have attended a complete Ring whilst working on The Waves,10 but she and Leonard were listening to recordings of Wagner’s music at home by the mid-1920s,11 and in the period preceding and during the drafting of the novel, Woolf was

18  Emma Sutton attending opera regularly (she saw Die Walküre in 192512 and Götterdämmerung in June 192613 and opera “most nights” during a visit to Berlin in January 192914), heard Siegfried on the radio,15 and was discussing “19th Century music and rhetoric” with composers and music critics including Edward Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth.16 Given that The Waves reworks aspects of Wagner’s two most complex mythological works (which retell, respectively, Teutonic myths of the fall of the gods and the Grail legend), this exploration of the novel’s intertextuality with the Ring concentrates particularly on Woolf’s response to Wagner’s mythopoeia. The Waves’s depiction of individuals’ and societies’ persistent attraction to mythology, symbols, “patterns,” and “stories” alerts us to one of Woolf’s most powerful reservations about Wagner. The novel includes a number of explicit criticisms of grandiose myth making, even by the arch “phrase-maker” Bernard himself; beginning his final monologue, Bernard observes: “there are so many … stories … and none of them are true.”17 Bernard unequivocally states, “I am no mystic” (216), and despite the recurrent images in the novel, we should recall Woolf’s objections to the “gross symbolism” she perceived at Bayreuth.18 The Waves is suffused with symbols found in the Ring and in Parsifal, but they are often used in incongruous, parodic contexts (Wagner’s golden ring that confers omnipotence becomes, for instance, a cupboard handle [220, 224]). The Ring’s symbols are domesticated, historically located, particularized; they are also used deliberately unsystematically, as Woolf’s characters are associated with various Wagnerian protagonists at different moments. Woolf’s inconsistent, intermittent use of images from the Ring is one strategy through which she undercuts Wagner’s project. Woolf therefore adopts Wagner’s technique of the leitmotif for profoundly anti-Wagnerian purposes: her “symbols” are not intended cumulatively to construct an increasingly rich and complex mythology offering an authoritative narrative of society’s and individuals’ origins, behavior, and decline, but rather to qualify each other, to undercut myth, inviting us to resist the emotive power of myth and symbolism. In the first draft of the novel (initially conceived, like the Ring, in four parts),19 Bernard describes his narrative in near-Wagnerian terms: “I am telling myself the story of the world from the beginning.”20 The completed novel, in contrast, celebrates pluralist narratives: I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories? (143)

Woolf Rewriting Wagner  19 There is, Woolf suggests, no one story; her Wagnerian “symbols” contradict each other, are interleaved with numerous other allusions, and require us to recognize their partial, limited signification. 21 Woolf uses a Wagnerian technique to undercut the political work of myth, to question the interests served by particular mythologies and the generalizing tendency inherent in myth itself. Rather than exploring the formal methodology and intermedial implications of Woolf’s use of the leitmotif, 22 this essay attends to the politics of this apparently formalist—perhaps seemingly apolitical—experiment in leitmotivistic prose. It proposes that this “pervasively” Wagnerian text has, in fact, much in common with Woolf’s overtly politicized representations of Wagnerian performance in novels such as Jacob’s Room (in which a performance of Tristan critiques the imperialism and war-mongering of Georgian society) and The Years (in which an extended account of Siegfried augments the novel’s attacks on Fascism and anti-Semitism). 23 Attending to The Waves’s Wagnerian debts suggests the ways in which Wagner’s work shaped the novel’s sexual and economic politics. This essay begins with a close reading of the first “interlude,”24 detailing the depth of Woolf’s knowledge of the Ring, before arguing that Woolf adopts the leitmotif for ambivalent, often hostile, purposes throughout the novel.

Das Rheingold and the First Interlude The Waves is made up of the soliloquies of six individuals framed by depersonalized interludes describing the natural world, and the first scene of Das Rheingold is a vital inter-text for the interlude with which Woolf’s work begins. Early analyses of the novel recognized Woolf’s allusions to the “preliminary evening” with which the Ring opens, but Woolf’s intricate reworking of Wagner’s libretto, music, and stage directions has not been explored in detail. Both texts begin with relatively brief “preludes” portraying the waves: Wagner’s cycle opens with the rippling sound of the waves of the Rhine before the curtain rises, and Woolf’s brief italicized interlude (3–4) describes the waves and light before the monologues commence. Depictions of the elements and the natural world therefore precede the appearance of increasingly anthropomorphized figures: in the opera, the Rhinemaidens and Nibelung dwarf of the first scene are followed by the gods Wotan and Fricka in the second scene; in the novel, the allusions to the birds late in the interlude precede the appearance of the children in the monologues. Both texts begin at dawn on the water’s edge (the sea shore and the depths of the Rhine surrounded by dry chasms) and both begin in almost total darkness: Wagner’s innovative practice of dimming the lights in opera houses ensured that the audience sat in semidarkness as the music began to unfold (the curtain rises only from bar 126), whilst Woolf writes that

20  Emma Sutton the “sun had not yet risen” and the “sea was indistinguishable from the sky.” Woolf’s allusion to the “indistinguishable” elements recalls the music and theatrical effect of the opening bars of Das Rheingold, which begins with a low E flat marked pianissimo on the doublebasses: the volume and pitch of the note (towards the bottom of the register audible to humans) and the concealment of the musicians in the darkened theater make it difficult to identify precisely the moment when the music begins or the instruments play. Woolf echoes the deliberate indeterminacy of Wagner’s opening. If these characteristics appear generic to origin myths rather than specifically Wagnerian, 25 the extensive, precise similarities between Wagner’s stage directions and Woolf’s prose strongly suggest she knew an English translation of the libretto. 26 The upper part of the stage is occupied by “flowing water, which streams restlessly from right to left,”27 whilst Woolf’s waves move “perpetually.” The initial darkness is followed by increasingly demarcated bands of light and dark, which Wagner describes as “Greenish twilight, lighter above, darker below” (Wagner 3); “[g]radually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon,” Woolf writes, “Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear” and “flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky.” As sunlight falls on the Rhinegold, the contrast between light and dark becomes more distinct: Through the waters an ever-increasing glow makes its way from above, which gradually kindles, on a high point of the central rock, to a blinding, brightly-beaming golden gleam; a magical golden light pours from this over the waters [… until] The whole of the water glitters with bright golden light. (Wagner 38 and 47) Compare Woolf’s final sentence of the second paragraph: “Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.” The colors (green, gold, red) and the images of light and flame recur in both texts: the Rhinemaidens describe the light “flam[ing]” on the water (Wagner 44), whilst Woolf describes the “incandescence” of the “burning bonfire,” the “broad flame,” and “arc of fire.” White spray or foam appears in both accounts: “Towards the bottom [of the stage] the waters resolve themselves into a fine, humid mist” (Wagner 3), whilst Woolf’s waves “swept a thin veil of white water across the sand.” Woolf’s precise use of color in this scene and in the novel as a whole suggests not only her familiarity with the score or libretto but also her theatrical experience of Wagner’s works. His innovative, symbolic use of color and lighting is most conspicuous in the Ring and Parsifal, and Woolf was familiar with productions

Woolf Rewriting Wagner  21 (preeminently, those at Bayreuth) that reproduced Wagner’s stage directions meticulously. 28 Furthermore, Woolf’s interlude, like the scene i in Das Rheingold, represents the waves aurally as well as visually. The first “speech” (by the Rhinemaidens) is addressed to the waves and imitative of them: Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle, walle zur Wiege! Wagalaweia! wallala weiala weia! (Wagner 9) Woglinde’s non-semantic opening words (“Weia! Waga!”) continue the orchestral representation of the waves, the rippling string quavers and (from bar 81) semi-quavers in 6/8 time that began the cycle. Furthermore, the first representational words of the opera— “Woge, du Welle” (“Wander, ye waters”)—are onomatopoeic. The Rhinemaidens thus (­aurally) personify the river: they playfully chase each other through the water “like fish”; and Alberich in turn “pursu[es]” them (Wagner 11 and 36), not dissimilarly to the waves “following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually” in Woolf’s interlude. Woolf’s instruction, in notes for the first monologues, that the “rhythm of the waves must be kept ­going all the time”29 indicates that the interlude was intended to establish an aural representation of the waves; her repetitive syntax and ­diction ­create comparably rhythmic, cyclical prose. Three sentences begin with the word “gradually” (this word or synonyms repeatedly a­ ppears in ­Wagner’s stage directions) and words and images recur (colors, “sea,” “sky,” “wave,” the “fan,” fabric, the “bars,” “sediment,” “clear,” “­fibres”/“fibrous,” the arm, the lamp, and fire). Woolf’s extensive use of present participles (“dividing,” “following,” “pursuing,” “sighing,” “rippling and sparkling,” and “making”) augments the repetition, ­echoing the vocabulary of Wagner’s libretto and stage directions (“[d]azzling delight,” “[g]listening rays,” for example [Wagner 42]). Woolf’s almost entirely monosyllabic opening sentence is followed by sentences of increasing clausal complexity and repetitive polysyllabic v­ ocabulary (“­following each other, pursuing each other,” for ­example).30 Woolf’s syntax thus mimics the cyclical repetition of the waves and of Wagner’s triadic quavers and semi-quavers in which the waves are represented at the start of the cycle, but it also recalls the cumulative, expansive tone of ­Wagner’s music in scene i as a whole, which gradually crescendos towards Alberich’s entrance and eventually towards his theft of the gold. ­Garrett Stewart identifies a “slowed phonic pulse” as distinctive of Woolf’s “explicitly antipatriarchal style” that subverts received diction and syntax through “an intrusion of the phonic  into the  scriptive.”31  Crucially,

22  Emma Sutton it may have been Woolf’s knowledge of Wagner’s music that allowed her to develop this feminist technique that challenges much that the composer represents: the rippling string quavers and semi-quavers in which the waves are evoked throughout Das Rheingold are a plausible source for the novel’s idiosyncratic prose. Woolf’s early allusions to the birds also imitate the sounds and movements of the Rhinemaidens. Both begin by making non-signifying noises: the birds sing a “blank melody” (in later interludes their songs are expressive), 32 just as the first sound we hear of the Rhinemaidens is lyrical but non-referential. These natural creatures make similar spatial movements: Woglinde begins the opera guarding the gold “alone” and sings first; Wellgunde calls to her “from above” and is answered by Woglinde, who “dives down to the rock” (Wagner 9). “One bird chirped high up;” Woolf writes, “there was a pause; another chirped lower down.” The birds, the waves, and the Rhinemaidens (sisters of Woolf’s “nymph of the fountain” [87 and 199]), suggest the amoral beauties of nature and appear at the start and end of Wagner’s and Woolf’s texts, when the parallels between opera and novel are clearest. Both texts, then, begin by telling a variety of origin narratives—of a single day, of creation, of human (or gods’) presence in the natural world, of the senses (especially sight and hearing), and of the emergence of language and music from apparently inchoate sound—and both depict the dawn as an awakening. The Rhinemaidens describe the gold as a sleeping male in its “cradle”: Woglinde:  “Look, sisters! the wakener laughs in the deep.” Wellgunde:  “Thro’ the waters green the beauteous sleeper she Flosshilde:  “Now kissing his eyelids, woos them to open.” Wellgunde:  “Look he smiles in the shimmering light.”

greets.”

(Wagner 39) Woolf also genders the sun (or figure holding the lamp) as female and personifies the waves “sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously,” just as the Rhinemaidens do. Both allude to human birth: Wagner’s scene of awakening simultaneously evokes seduction and the maternal and, in a draft of the interlude, Woolf compared the waves to women in labor.33 Both scenes emphasize the cyclical as well as the originative: Woolf’s waves move “perpetually,” and their movement, like that of the Rhine, implicitly predates audience or narrative observation. The cyclical, implicit in the shape of the ring itself, is vital to ­Wagner’s tetralogy as it is to Woolf’s novel: the subjects of temporality and repetition, ephemerality and permanence, are prominent in both works. Just as the opening of the operatic cycle anticipates, through its images of golden light, the lurid conflagration with which it concludes, Woolf’s first interlude evokes destruction, an ending, as well as a beginning. The

Woolf Rewriting Wagner  23 “incandescence,” the “arc of fire,” and the “red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire” recall the burning pyre with which Die Götterdämmerung ends, signaling the end of the reign of the gods and the start of the era of man. The first interlude, like the opening of Das Rheingold, is elegiac as well as celebratory.

“I see a ring”: From Interlude to Monologues The shift from this interlude to the first monologues also mimics the relationship between Das Rheingold’s first and second scenes. Both works move from the water’s edge to domesticity and less sublime natural scenes; in both, the second scene or section of narrative is again set at dawn depicting awakening consciousness. The monologues begin early in the morning (an unspecified time before “breakfast” [7]); the characters’ initial attention to sunlight and visual differentiation (the  repeated “I see” [5]) suggests that they are describing daybreak. The early references to the “tassel,” the “balcony,” and the “­w indow” hint that the children are in a nursery (5); they then explore the ­garden, observing the domestic activities of the female servants “Mrs. ­C onstable” and “Biddy” (6). Woolf’s monologues thus begin in domesticity, in the presence of maternal nurturing figures and a flower-filled garden. This might seem entirely unrelated to the operatic scene in which the Teutonic gods first appear, but there are suggestive parallels. Wagner’s second scene begins in the “dawning light” of the mountains as Fricka and Wotan sleep on a “flowery bank” (70). In contrast to the potentially sublime setting, the domesticity of their relationship is immediately emphasized: Fricka ­addresses Wotan first as “my lord” and then as “spouse” before ­praising the “graces of home life” intended to “bind” Wotan to her (Wagner 72–73, 78). Fricka is often interpreted as a Hausfrau exemplifying the limitations of conventional gender roles, suggesting that Woolf’s ­depiction of women at this point may—­p erhaps ­u nexpectedly—be echoing Wagner’s. Although Woolf’s representations of women later diverge from Wagner’s, in these second ­d aybreak scenes, both texts represent women in the domestic sphere, portraying the home as comfortingly secure yet restrictive. Furthermore, the first words thought or spoken by the characters—Bernard’s “I see a ring” (5)—immediately alert us to the continued relevance of the Ring. This was a late alteration to the text: even in the second draft, ­B ernard makes no early reference to a (golden) ring and instead describes a “pale, purple ball.”34 As we shall see, Woolf typically excised the more overt allusions to the Ring during her revisions, and it is notable that her alteration to the very start of the monologues foregrounds this conspicuously Wagnerian image: Wagner may have been muted in the final text, but his influence was tenacious.

24  Emma Sutton

Knickerbockers and Lassos: Demythologizing Wagner Bernard’s opening words are the first of numerous allusions to a ring; the words “ring,” “rings,” or “ringed” occur more than thirty times in the published text and there are, additionally, numerous other c­ yclical or circular images. In contrast to the frequency of this image in the monologues, there are only two references to rings in the interludes (55, 112), though references to gold are frequent. Thus, Woolf associates rings with the human rather than the natural world; it is, after all, Alberich who forges the ring from the Rhinegold, and it is only with the first appearance of an individualized human voice that the ring appears in the novel. The first interlude makes no reference to a ring, and “gold” appears as a color rather than as a metal or synonym for wealth; it recalls, therefore, the Rhinemaidens’ aesthetic rather than materialistic appreciation of the gold. The interlude’s hints of impending destruction, and its echoes of the Ring make Bernard’s opening words appear more sinister than they otherwise might. ­B ernard’s description of a ring “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light” (5) places him momentarily—­u nexpectedly—in the position of Alberich, whose theft of the gold and forging of the ring initiates the struggle between gods, Nibelungs, giants, and humans. And perhaps more importantly, Bernard’s immediate observation of the ring hints at his affinities with the composer himself: Bernard and Louis, the novel’s principal storytellers and poets, repeatedly associate rings with verbal fluency and literary creativity—with composition. “[I]f I find myself in company with other people, words at once make smoke rings” (49), Bernard reflects, the smoke rings suggesting a benevolent desire to communicate but also anticipating the lasso image of his conversation on the train: “A smoke ring issues from my lips (about crops) and circles him, bringing him into contact” (50). Louis’s use of ring images is also ambivalent, especially as he is associated with forged, metallic rings: he repeatedly imagines p ­ oetic composition as an attempt “to fix in words, to forge in a ring of steel” (28). Louis’s “forging” evokes Alberich’s forging of the ring 35 and Siegfried’s forging of the shattered sword Nothung—two objects that, in the Ring, allow their possessors to dominate others. In the first draft of the novel, Louis imagines a church service “welding him together into a formidable weapon,” “a single blade,”36 and he recognizes the desire for power implicit in wordsmithing: successful poetry has a “binding power,” and the forged ring suggests Louis’s desire to control, to “reduce you to order” through art (70). The ring and forging are two of the most protean, recurrent images in the Ring, and they are central to Woolf’s novel, but Bernard and Louis’s images persistently expose and thus undercut the totalizing aspirations of Wagner’s text.

Woolf Rewriting Wagner  25 In The Waves, as in the cycle, rings are also associated with sexuality and with patriarchal gender roles. The references to jewelry (numerous rings and necklaces that Jinny imagines as a “cold ring round our throats” [94], for example) evoke the conventional wedding band, an object that plays a vital part in the Ring. In Die Götterdämmerung, Siegfried gives the ring to Brünnhilde as a love token, and the action marks Brünnhilde’s joyous acceptance of human rather than divine status; it also marks the start of her increasingly conventional (sexual) morality in contrast to her earlier subversive independence. In the first act of Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde’s sister begs her to return the ring to the Rhinemaidens, but it is only at the very conclusion of the cycle that Brünnhilde releases it, ending human and divine control of the ring: after Brünnhilde’s death, the Rhine bursts its banks and the ­R hinemaidens reclaim the ring. Woolf echoes Wagner’s association of the wedding ring with constriction and loss as well as intimacy and joy37 when Susan describes Bernard’s engagement in an image of a ring thrown into a river: “Something irrevocable has happened. A circle has been cast on the waters; a chain is imposed. We shall never flow freely again” (107). Bernard’s “irrevocable” step echoes, perhaps, Brünnhilde’s acceptance of mortality, the necessary prelude to her human love. The novel’s numerous allusions to gold are also surely drawn from the Ring. Like the ring, gold is associated with beauty, the power of narrative, and imagination, and again recalls Wagner the mythmaker. Elvedon, for instance, the location for childhood imagination and storytelling, is golden: Bernard observes “the stable clock with its gilt hands shining” (11); later, Susan recalls “the gilt hands of the clock sparkling among the trees” (164). Rhoda, too, associates her flights of imagination about the other school girls with gold: “If they should say, or I should see from a label on their boxes, that they were in Scarborough last holidays, the whole town runs gold, the whole pavement is illuminated” (31, Cf. 157). Gold here evokes the pleasures of imagination and narrative. Yet gold also evokes money: entering the adult world of employment, Louis reflects: “I go vaguely, to make money vaguely. Therefore a poignant shadow, a keen accent, falls on these golden bristles […] this flowing corn” (48), and he anticipates financial success and ownership of a “goldheaded cane” (155). Gold is also repeatedly associated with sexuality and desire, as it is in the Ring. This is most evident in the representation of Jinny, with whom the color is conspicuously associated: “O come, I say to this one, rippling gold from head to heels” (78, Cf. 76, 105, 106, 134); “my gold signal is like a dragon-fly flying taut” (135). She sits on a “gilt chair” at the dance (76, 77, 105) and compares herself to flame: “I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold” (170, Cf. 30).38 Jinny’s “rippling” temperament associates her with fire and with water: Woolf’s vocabulary suggests both the Rhinemaidens (the flirtatious, inconstant objects

26  Emma Sutton of male desire) and the fire god Loge (the amoral, protean figure who liaises between Wotan, the giants, and the Nibelung dwarfs). Jinny is thus associated with two elemental forces in the Ring, and her “rippling” evokes the rapid chromatic semi-quavers of Loge’s leitmotif as well as the rippling watery sounds of the Rhinemaidens (“I stream like a plant in the river” [76]). In the first draft of the novel, the Wagnerian affinities are more overt: Jinny is (like the Rhinemaidens) “some sprite, something of water” and (like Loge) “something that had burnt a million years.”39 There are numerous other echoes of the Ring’s protagonists in the novel, augmenting the novel’s critique of sexual mores and materialism. The birds, whose songs are initially “blank” but which seem to convey meaning in the later interludes, recall the Woodbird of Siegfried, whose song gradually enlightens Wagner’s belligerent, ignorant hero Siegfried (an archetypal “boasting boy”). The repeated references to trees, canes, and walking sticks recall the World Ash Tree from which Wotan, king of the gods, makes his staff. The price of this power-giving staff is partial blindness: like the figure in Bernard’s “story of the man with one eye” (27), Wotan has lost one eye and travels the world incognito as The Wanderer, carrying his staff and dressed in a cloak.40 In adulthood, Bernard sports a “cloak” and “cane” (65) and recalls “[s]winging his stick” outside St Paul’s (216). In middle age, Bernard reflects: “I walked unshadowed; I came unheralded. From me had dropped the old cloak” (220). These references, and those to the apple tree, evoke Wotan’s and Bernard’s mortality: Neville refers to “the immitigable tree; the implacable tree with its greaved silver bark. […] we are doomed, all of us, by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree which we cannot pass” (17). The apple tree’s association with a man’s suicide and Percival’s death hints at Wotan’s metaphorical death when he gains the ash branch; it also evokes the near loss, in Das Rheingold, of Friea’s apples, on which the gods depend for eternal youth. Bernard is thus associated in middle age with Wotan; he has taken on something of the dignity of the disenfranchised, displaced god who has relinquished his attempts to prevent the collapse of the gods’ reign and the rise of men (“I walked alone in a new world, never trodden” [220]) and who has accepted death. Louis, in contrast, is frequently associated with mining, metals, and the subterranean, linking him to Nibelheim, the mines of the materialistic dwarfs. He reiterates: “My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver” (7, Cf. 8, 24–5, 71). Louis’s experience early in the novel, like ­Bernard’s, temporarily evokes the Nibelung Alberich: he is “alone” (7) until “struck on the nape of the neck” by Jinny’s kiss (8); Jinny, the Rhinemaiden, temporarily ends his isolation and “All is shattered” (8). Like Alberich, who must renounce love after the Rhinemaidens’ flirtation in order to forge the ring, Louis has made “denials” (101) and recognizes that power offers consolation for isolation: “I could know everything in

Woolf Rewriting Wagner  27 the world if I wished” (13); “I, who desire above all things to be taken to the arms with love, am alien, external” (70); “I have an immeasurable desire that women should sigh in sympathy” (95–6). Louis becomes wealthy and he is further associated—if parodically—with Alberich through the “brass snake” on the belt that supports his knickerbockers (7, 13, 184): the detail recalls Alberich’s transformation into a snake in ­ elmet forged from the gold. order to demonstrate the power of the magic h Even had Woolf not known Wagnerites like G.B. Shaw, whose Marxist study of the Ring, The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), argued that Wagner had intended Nibelheim as an indictment of n ­ ineteenth-century capitalism, she would surely have recognized the a­ nti-materialism of Wagner’s Nibelheim; arguably, Woolf’s representation of London (­particularly the Underground) as mechanical and industrialized, a “churning of the great engines” (148), bears traces of Wagner’s subterranean city. Woolf exploits intermittent allusions to Wagner’s characters further, critiquing Wagner’s sexual politics as the Wagnerian parallels flesh out The Waves’s discreet challenges to heteronormativity. Susan’s love for her father and her association with horses align her with Brünnhilde, leader of the Valkyrie warrior maidens who collect the bodies of dead heroes from the battlefield and transport them to Valhalla: anticipating the summer holidays, Susan reflects, “The great horses of the phantom riders will thunder behind me and stop suddenly” (39).41 Susan’s affinities with Brünnhilde are even more extensive in the drafts: Brünnhilde’s defiance of Wotan in rescuing Sieglinde, pregnant with Siegfried as a result of sibling incest, is evoked in Susan’s reflection that “Brother & sister lie together in those cottages. Why not? What does it matter?” and in her perception that “Now I am terrible; eager; awake; a huntress; a woman grown; with my desire fixed on a man.”42 Through the ­allusions to Brünnhilde, Woolf draws our attention to the Oedipal plot of the Ring. Like Brünnhilde, Susan is initially fiercely desirous of her ­father: “And there is my father, with his back turned, talking to a farmer. I tremble. I cry. There is my father in gaiters. There is my father” (46). Woolf’s skepticism about this father-daughter relationship emerges in her account of a performance of Die Walküre in 1925: Walküre completely triumphed, I thought; except for some ­boredom—I can’t ever enjoy those long arguments in music—when it is obviously mere conversation upon business matters between Wotan and Brunhilde: however, the rest was superb.43 As Brünnhilde is feminized through her relationship with Siegfried and loses her intimacy with Wotan, Susan becomes excessively domesticated, interested only in nurturing her numerous children. The association with Brünnhilde suggests the fierce, protective qualities of Susan’s maternity and the limitations of her conventional domestic role; however, the novel

28  Emma Sutton has no equivalent to Brünnhilde’s resounding celebration of heterosexual love, suggesting Woolf’s reservations about Wagner’s sexual politics. Yet it is at the very end of the novel that Brünnhilde is evoked most conspicuously, as Woolf’s novel reworks the conclusion of Wagner’s Ring. In its final part, Woolf’s text, like Wagner’s, privileges the narrative of one figure: Elicia Clements persuasively demonstrates the influence of Beethoven’s string quartets at this point,44 but Act III, scene iii of Götterdämmerung is also a vital inter-text here. Bernard’s last monologue places him in the position of Brünnhilde—after her long aria celebrating human love and her resolution to return the ring to the Rhinemaidens, Brünnhilde springs into Siegfried’s funeral pyre on her horse Grane. Compare Bernard: And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, un-vanquished and unyielding, O Death! (228) Woolf, we might recall, saw Die Walküre in 1925 and Die Götterdämmerung in 1926 and alluded several times in this period to the Ring’s final conflagration: she wrote to Vita Sackville-West that burning gorse in Cornwall was “exactly like the death of Siegfried: a crimson gauze rising over crags”45 and to Ethel Smyth during revisions that The Waves, “a very flickering flame at the moment, starts to draw.”46 ­B ernard’s final speech shares Götterdämmerung’s combination of destruction and renewal: the “canopy of civilisation is burnt out,” ­B ernard believes, yet in this destruction (as in that of the reign of the gods) is a “kindling,” the “eternal renewal” of the waves (228). The references to the destruction of one era, the “redness” of the landscape, the waves, and the renewal all suggest, even before Bernard’s challenge to Death, that Wagner’s cycle is a resonant inter-text at this point. And, just as both novel and opera cycle had begun with the waves, so both end: “The waves broke on the shore,” and the Rhine floods the stage. Woolf had parodied the conclusion of the Ring earlier in the novel when the burst pipe floods Bernard’s bookcase—“We shout with laughter at the sight of ruin. Let solidity be destroyed. Let us have no possessions” (163)—and in the first draft of the novel Bernard twice refers to a “river in spate” as his death approaches.47 Yet for all that

Woolf Rewriting Wagner  29 the novel has persistently undermined the totalizing aspirations of the Ring, the conclusion—like the opening—of Woolf’s text draws heavily, and surely admiringly, on Wagner’s work.

Notes 1 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975–80), II: 26. Hereafter Letters. 2 Grove defines leitmotif as a “theme, or other coherent musical idea, clearly defined so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances, whose purpose is to represent or symbolise a person, object, place, idea,” noting the variety (or inaccuracy) of literary applications of this technique. Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), 20 vols., X: 644. Woolf’s use of the leitmotif is not uncontested: see, for example, Peter Jacobs, “‘The Second Violin Tuning in the Ante-room’: Virginia Woolf and Music”, in Diane F. Gillespie, ed., The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf (Columbia and London: Missouri UP, 1993), 236. 3 William Blissett, “Wagnerian Fiction in English,” Criticism 5. 3 (1963), 259. John Louis DiGaetani, Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1978), 118. Raymond Furness, ­Wagner and Literature (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1982), 20. 4 See, for example, Gyllian Phillips, “Re(de)composing in the novel: The Waves, Wagnerian Opera and Percival/Parsifal,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 28.1–2 (Spring-Summer 1995) and Tracey Sherard, “‘Parcival in the Forest of Gender’: Wagner, Homosexuality, and The Waves,” in Ann Ardis and Bonnie Kime Scott, eds., Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries: Selected Papers from the Ninth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (New York: Pace UP, 2000), 62–9. 5 Elicia Clements, “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,” Narrative 13. 2 (May 2005), 160–81. For an alternative account of The Waves’s intermediality, see Gerald Levin, “The Musical Style of The Waves,” Journal of Narrative Technique 13.3 (1986), 164–71. 6 Clements, “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words,” 161. 7 For more detail see Emma Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013). 8 In 1907, she certainly saw Götterdämmerung and Das Rheingold, and probably the complete cycle, conducted by Hans Richter. See Letters 1.17; Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Pimlico, 2002), 156; Letters, I.293; Letters, I.478–9; and Letters, II.26. 9 Woolf certainly saw Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, Parsifal, and Lohengrin multiple times, and she probably knew Tannhäuser. See Letters I.331, 333, 382, 384, 404, 406–7, and 409. 10 Her first allusions to the novel occur in her diary on 26 November 1926; she began the first draft in July 1929 and completed the proofs in August 1931. See J.W. Graham, Virginia Woolf, “The Waves”: The Two Holograph Drafts (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1976). Hereafter Holographs. 11 They bought a gramophone in 1925; see The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925–30, eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Penguin, 1982), 42 and fn. For details of their listening practice, see Leonard

30  Emma Sutton

12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26

Woolf, “Diary of Music Listened to,” University of Sussex, Leonard Woolf Papers, LWP II.R.64 and Leonard Woolf’s Card Index of Gramophone Records, LWP.Ad.28. I am grateful to the University of Sussex for permission to consult these sources. The Card Index lists twenty recordings of Wagner’s music, including Tannhäuser, Parsifal, Lohengrin, Tristan, and Die Walküre; the Woolfs owned multiple recordings of several of the operas. The Diary begins in 1939, so it isn’t possible to establish in daily detail their listening practice before that date. Letters, III.186. See Leonard Woolf’s Diary, 3 June 1926, University of Sussex, Leonard Woolf Papers, LWP II.R.20. Götterdämmerung was performed that day at Covent Garden and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera at the Lyric, ­Hammersmith; as Woolf attended without Leonard, she probably saw the Wagner. Letters, IV.46. Letters, IV.303–5. The performance can be identified by her reference to the “murmuring among the forest leaves” (i.e. the “forest murmurs” from Siegfried, Act II). See Letters, III.254. Virginia Woolf, The Waves, ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 1991), 183. Hereafter cited in text. Letters, I. 407. See also Bernard’s assessment of Percival’s death in The Waves: “So the sincerity of the moment passed; so it became symbolical; and that I could not stand. Let us commit any blasphemy of laughter and criticism rather than exude this lily-sweet glue; and cover him with phrases, I cried” (204). Holographs, Draft I.1, 14v, 58v. Holographs, Draft I.6. Cf. pp. 9 and 42. Cf. Wagner’s 1853 letter to Liszt: “Mark well my new poem-it contains the world’s beginning and its end.” Cited in Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung”: A Companion, trans. ­Stewart Spencer with commentaries by Barry Millington, ­Elizabeth ­Magee, Roger Hollinrake, and Warren Darcy (London: Thames and ­Hudson, 1993), 2. See also The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4: 1931–35, eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Penguin, 1983), 10–11: “What interests me in the last stage was the freedom & boldness with which my imagination picked up used & tossed aside all the images & symbols which I had prepared. I am sure that this is the right way of using them—not in set pieces, as I had tried at first, coherently, but simply as images; never making them work out; only suggest.” See Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music, chapter 1. For more detail see Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music, chapters 3 and 5. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925–30, eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Penguin, 1982), 285. Furness, Wagner and Literature, 21. The Woolfs’ library contained a pocket-size edition of the libretto of Das Rheingold in German: Vorspiel zu der Trilogie, Der Ring des Nibelungen (Mainnz: Schott’s Söhne, n.d [c.1910]); see Julia King and Laila ­M iletic-Vejzovic, eds., The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-­ title Catalog (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 2003). The precise allusions to other libretti (such as a fin-de-siècle English translation of Tristan und Isolde quoted in The Voyage Out) strongly suggest that the Woolfs owned other Wagner libretti. Given her lack of fluency in German (she read the libretti with difficulty at Bayreuth [Letters, I.404 and 407]),

Woolf Rewriting Wagner  31

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47

the ready availability of English or bilingual editions of the libretto and (vocal) score from the late nineteenth century, and the frequency of her opera attendance, it seems very likely that she owned or had access to a translation of the Ring libretto. I have, therefore, used an edition contemporary with her early Wagner attendance for quotations from the libretto. It is even possible that Woolf’s late decision to italicise the interludes may have been intended to mimic the typographic conventions of Wagner’s score, the details of which she echoes so closely in the novel: see The Waves. The ­C ambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, eds. Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers with research by Ian Blyth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), lx. Stage directions in printed scores and libretti, as in play scripts, are of course conventionally italicised, and Woolf repeatedly alluded to the novel as a play, or as indebted to staged drama; Wagner’s innovative “music dramas” are arguably a part of this theatrical debt. The Rhinegold. Complete Vocal Score, [arranged by] Otto Singer, ­English translation Ernest Newman, German text rev. W. Golther (London: ­Breitkopf & Härtel, 1910), 3. All references to Das Rheingold are taken from this edition. Hereafter cited in text. Woolf saw Parsifal and Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 1909 produced by Siegfried Wagner who, until 1914, continued the conservative production practices of Wagner’s widow, Cosima. Holographs, 749. The last sentence of the novel also consists of six words, all monosyllabic, underlining, as Wagner does, the cyclical qualities of the text. Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley and LA: California UP, 1990), 261. E.g. “passionate songs,” 112. Holographs, Draft I.7, 9, 62 and 63. Holographs, Draft II. 402. Again, there are echoes of the libretto of Das Rheingold, scene i, in which the word “forge” is repeated, most conspicuously at the moment when Alberich manages to wrench the gold from the rock: “forge me the ring of revenge, for hear me ye floods: Love now curse I for ever!” (Wagner 64). Holographs, Draft I: 102. The fantasy collapses when Louis recalls his ­Australian accent: a critique, perhaps, of Wagner’s attempts to “forge” national identity? The ring is also associated with unity of the individual and between friends as well as lovers; most ring images occur before Percival’s death. For other associations of gold with love or desire in The Waves, see Neville (135) and the birds in the interlude (112). Holographs, Draft I.12. Siegfried: Complete Vocal Score, [arranged by] Otto Singer, English translation Ernest Newman (Leipzig and New York: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914), 54. Cf. Rhoda: “It is to this [“life”] we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses” (47). Holographs, Draft II. 502. Letters, III.186. Clements, “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words,” 163. Letters, III.309. Letters, IV.159. In September 1930, whilst working on the second draft of the novel, Woolf was reading a volume of Ethel Smyth’s autobiography with the apocalyptic title A Final Burning of Boats (Letters, IV.213). Holographs, Draft I.362 and 364.

2 “That’s the Music of the Future” Joyce, Modernism, and the “Old Irish Tonality” Katherine O’Callaghan

The hand that corrects their errors is almost sure to destroy their ­character. —Thomas Moore 1829 (iii–iv)1

The exiled James Joyce spent his adult life in a number of European cities at a time of considerable musical experimentation and innovation. The writer’s recurring allusions to traditional Irish songs and ballads in his works have been considered at odds with both the musical world to which he was exposed in the early decades of the twentieth century and his own avant-garde experimentation in prose. This essay suggests that Joyce saw a kinship between traditional Irish music and the radical developments he encountered in the European musical world. Joyce’s understanding of contemporary musical experimentations and musicological theories, in particular in relation to transcription and tonality, was in fact augmented by his existing knowledge of an earlier and similar debate concerning Irish traditional music, which resides in a liminal mode and resisted textualization. 2 Theories concerning the imperfections of any textualized mimesis of sound had dominated the discourse on music in Ireland for over a century. Joyce’s texts pinpoint an uncanny familiarity between the avant-garde and a much older Irish art. To explore this juxtaposition of modernity and returning past, three moments providing portals of discovery in Dubliners and Ulysses will be examined in this essay: the naming of the “Lass of Aughrim” as being in “the old Irish tonality” in “The Dead” (D 211), the description of the ballad “The Croppy Boy” as “Our native Doric” in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses (U 11.991), and the depiction of Stephen Dedalus playing a “series of empty fifths” on the brothel pianola in the “Circe” episode (U 15.2073). 3 In the case of the third incident, this essay will reveal the overlooked significance of the curious musical call into the night that ultimately brings together the city wanderers Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.

“That’s the Music of the Future”  33

“That’s the Music of the Future” (U 15.1368): Joyce’s Knowledge of Contemporary Music Given that throughout his life James Joyce entertained guests at his parties with traditional Irish melodies and the often-sentimental music of his Dublin childhood, it is assumed he was slow to embrace ­European contemporary music, at least at an emotional level. Nonetheless, living in cities with thriving musical scenes, Joyce’s knowledge expanded continuously; he regularly attended the opera and familiarized himself with formal and structural innovations in contemporary music and with the challenging work of composers whom he knew during his years in Paris, Trieste, and Zurich, showing an intellectual interest, for example, in the compositions of Arnold Schoenberg. Joyce attended one of the first productions of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra Comique.4 He also attended George Antheil’s Parisian debut in 1923, and a performance of Antheil’s riot-inducing Ballet Mécanique at the Théâtre des Champs in 1926. Paul Martin notes that “Joyce was also one of twelve guests invited to a private premiere of the pianola parts from the Ballet Mécanique.”5 Joyce was fascinated by the music and asked to hear a physically demanding section for a second time. Martin quotes from Bravig Imb’s memoir Confessions of Another Young Man: “Heard away from their context, these few bars lost none of their peculiar vitality. Mr. Joyce was highly satisfied. ‘That’s like Mozart,’ he said.”6 Antheil, who played “old English music” at Joyce’s birthday party, later wrote in his autobiography: Conversation with Joyce was always deeply interesting. He had an ­encyclopaedic knowledge of music, this of all times and climes. Occasional conversations on music often extended far into the night and developed many new ideas. He would have special knowledge, for instance, about many a rare music manuscript secreted away in some almost unknown museum of Paris, and I often took advantage of his knowledge.7 The strident, urban force of Ballet Mécanique, with eight pianos, airplane propellers, and doorbells, was considered to exemplify “machine age” art, an answer perhaps to Debussy’s query on the need to represent one’s own time in art: “Is it not our duty to find a symphonic means to express our time, one that evokes the progress, the daring and the victories of modern days? The century of the aeroplane deserves its music.”8 Joyce felt some affinity with Antheil’s cacophonous experimentation; in 1924, there was talk of the pair collaborating on an opera based on the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses. The first page of the unfinished project is entitled Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops.9 Indeed, in the decade preceding the

34  Katherine O’Callaghan arrival of such boisterous music, Joyce was already experimenting in text with a symphony of urban and mechanical sounds. In Ulysses, published in 1922, Leopold Bloom is acutely aware of the sounds of the newspaper office in the “Aeolus” episode: “Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt” (U 7.175–7). Bloom muses over the concept of such noises becoming music: “The machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump” (U 7.101) and later creates his own nightmusic from the urban soundscape: “Policeman a whistle. Lock and keys! Sweep! …It is music, I mean of course it’s all pom pom pom very much what they call da capo. Still you can hear” (U 11.1244–6). The final phrase is an exemplary Joycean flourish. We can indeed hear, and we can also complete the sentence ourselves, in the manner of someone listening to modern music and seeking to find meaning: “Still you can hear what the intention is,” or, perhaps, “still you can hear something in it.” The din and clamour of city life at the turn of the twentieth century that so inspired composers was already evoked in Joyce’s writing, but it was another aspect of contemporary musical debate that provided Joyce with material for his interrogation of the limits of language: the space between transcription and performance.

Losing Faith in the Art of Transcription: Busoni’s New Esthetic Beyond his familiarity with the new sounds of contemporary music, Joyce was also aware of the challenges that were emerging to the classical method of inscription. Joyce’s Triestine library contained a copy of composer Ferruccio Busoni’s innovative attack on traditional views of the structure and transcription of music.10 Busoni’s Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music, published in 1907, challenges the notion that music is that which we produce from a written score, the musicians approximating as best they can the score that is before them. Instead, the musical score is considered to be an approximation: a restricted, ultimately flawed attempt to pin down the elements of a pure universal music. ­Busoni states that the problem with the way in which music is written down, separated into twelve notes, is that we now hear it so. The traditional ­division of the musical scale into tones and semitones is, according to Busoni, an arbitrary division of natural music: “Nature created an infinite ­gradation—infinite! Who still knows it nowadays?”11 In an attempt to shake both the composer and the listener from this complacency, Busoni argues for new divisions of what we hear as the “tone,” not into semitones alone but into thirds and even sixths, impressively predating the development of European and North American music throughout the century to follow. Busoni comments on the act of writing down music, of the movement from the ethereal to the technical: “Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea. The instant the pen seizes

“That’s the Music of the Future”  35 it, the idea loses its original form. The very intention to write down the idea, compels a choice of measure and key” (85). This is a challenge to both how we hear music and how we then transcribe it textually, with tonality and transcription intricately linked and problematized. Busoni followed the line of thought that music allows us to see something that is beyond what we normally might experience: “The storm is visible and audible without aid from music; it is the invisible and inaudible, the spiritual processes of personages portrayed, which music should render intelligible” (83). In other words, it is “what’s behind” music that counts (U 11.703), that which cannot be experienced otherwise. Busoni’s own compositions were never as radical as his written ideas, but Otto Luening makes the point that “…compositions by Busoni in his Zurich years used multiple styles, a technique causing ‘consternation’ among purists, but it was a musical parallel to the multiple styles Joyce was using in Ulysses contemporaneously; Joyce, too, would unsettle many early readers.”12 The connection between Joyce and Busoni goes beyond retrospectively assigned parallels, although few Joycean critics even name Busoni.13 In his essay “‘Sirens’ after Schoenberg,” David Herman opens the issue of Joyce and modern music, situating the “Sirens” episode in the wider field of contemporary modernist movements. He is correct to point out that “commentators have failed to situate the structure of ‘Sirens’ in that early twentieth-century radicalization of fugal or polyphonic forms.”14 Herman’s essay moves far beyond those critics who classified the music in Joyce in terms of the words of songs and libretti of operas (483). He describes the general trend of the “immense cultural matrix” at the time as a movement towards “combinatory apparatus” (473). This is essentially an attempt to redefine what we now call modernism: “the modelling of an apparatus for combining and recombining more or less elementary units into (well-formed) structures” (473). Herman’s key point is that the “narrative form in Joyce, like the musical form in Schoenberg, points to the grammatical—more specifically, the syntactic—profile of the modern episteme” (473). Herman’s synopsis of Busoni’s essay focuses on the notion of systems or structures built up from elements and does not refer to what I would consider to be Busoni’s key point—that musical composition or transcription is, at best, an estimation, an approximation of music. Herman’s focus on the breaking down of music and language into elements (drawing respectively on Schoenberg and Saussure) results in an emphasis on formal structures, rather than on the full implications of Busoni’s idea of an ideal and undivided musical spectrum. While he presents an interesting idea regarding “Sirens” fitting in with the wider cultural movements of the time, his focus is on finding similarities in the “grammatical” or “syntactic” in music with those in literature. The situating of “Sirens,” or indeed any of Joyce’s work, within the development of a particular musical movement will prove insufficient if it is only the written aspect of the music, rather than its performative or aural aspect, that is considered. It appears at one point as though Herman

36  Katherine O’Callaghan is comparing the “Sirens” episode to a musical performance: “we read the text as we would listen to a fugue” (484). However, his subsequent arguments show that his actual comparison is between Joyce’s text and the composition of music, what he refers to as “musical grammar” (484). Busoni’s 1907 questioning of the arbitrary division of the scale and distrust of notation was in fact predated by a well-rehearsed cultural debate in the previous century in Ireland. His theory that a musical score is only ever an approximation, an attempt to force music into ­divisions that do not occur in nature, was considered daring. But B ­ usoni’s text—a chal­ usic and an lenge to the ability of the musical stave to truly represent m account of ambiguous modality and displacement of tonal c­ entrality— actually echoes the issues of contention in the Irish debate of the nineteenth century. While Busoni is undermining a music that had developed over the previous centuries on paper, rather than a music belatedly transcribed, there are sympathetic echoes between the distrust of textual encryption in his contention that “the instant the pen seizes it, the idea loses its original form” and in Thomas Moore’s lament on the need to distort Irish music for transcription for his Irish Melodies: “The hand that corrects their errors is almost sure to destroy their character.”15 Joyce exploits this coincidence in his description of music in the climactic “Nighttown” scene of Ulysses, as will be discussed in detail later.

The Ineluctable Modality of Irish Music The song seemed to be in the old Irish tonality and the singer seemed uncertain both of his words and of his voice. (D 211) Seán Ó Riada defines traditional Irish music as being “untouched, ­ nWesternized, orally-transmitted.”16 Traditional Irish music exists priu marily in the realm of performance, rather than in text-based scores. It resides in modes other than the major or minor scales that were conventionally used in Western classical music.17 In relation to the structure of classical music, such music might be read as being “in-­between,” or liminal.18 Its formal structure is dependent on variation and repetition, and it is cyclical, differentiating it from the developmental trajectory that tends to be found in Western classical music. In The Aran Islands, J.M. Synge describes a dream he had on one of his trips to the islands off the west coast of Ireland, at the turn of the twentieth century. The playwright writes that he heard an elusive music in an alternative modality: the music increased continually, sounding like the strings of harps, tuned to a forgotten scale, and having a resonance as searching as the strings of the ‘cello … I could not distinguish between the instruments and the rhythm and my own person or consciousness.19

“That’s the Music of the Future”  37 Synge clearly recognized the alterity of the music that Aran had inspired in him. However, what we might call, after Stephen Dedalus on Sandymount strand, the “ineluctable modality” of Irish music had to be proven and justified. The differentiations between the modes of traditional Irish and Western classical music were not always self-evident, and during the nineteenth century, there was a series of “tonal debates” to ascertain whether Irish music and an Irish scale were in fact sui generis. The modal form used in Ireland was generally not written down and was not intended to be.20 Thus, it was inevitable that difficulties would arise when scholars attempted to transcribe this modal music. Indeed, a century ­earlier, in the wake of the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival, scholars such as Edward Bunting were very familiar with the gap between the oral music and the possibilities of its transcription. The attempt to immortalize in print what was feared to be imminently in danger of loss revealed, in fact, the fallibility of the Western scoring system to contain what was being produced by the musicians. While the limitations of the stave were revealed, it was the music that would have to be altered to fit the scored system. The “tonal” debate is discussed at length in the publications of the Irish music collector Captain Francis O’Neill. In the prefaces to several of his collections, O’Neill displays his deeply held conviction that Irish music is unique. A year before the events of Ulysses, O’Neill wrote in Music of ­Ireland: “The compiler has aimed to preserve the characteristic tonality of Irish music to the best of their ability.”21 While recognizing “the great collectors, Petrie, Bunting and [P.W.] Joyce,” O’Neill is critical of previous attempts to transcribe Irish music, stating “Almost all Irish music heretofore published has been harmonized to meet modern demands and frequently in keys which deprive the airs of their chief attraction, their distinctive ‘Blas’ or ‘Accent,’ so called” (4). O’Neill emphasizes the gap between songs as sung in traditional Irish music and how they have been recorded on paper: As the harmonizing of Irish tunes is invariably entrusted to a ­musician of the modern German school they suffer alteration or ­mutilation in order to conform to the necessities of harmonization. […] In short, the harmonizers have robbed them of what has been aptly termed, their accent or distinctive charm. (2) Thomas Moore, whose songs Joyce alludes to extensively in all of his works, but in Finnegans Wake in particular, has been accused of distorting traditional Irish music to suit the taste of English homes. However, O’Neill quotes Moore describing his own discomfort at the textual distortion of Irish music: It has always been a subject of mortification to me that my songs as they are set, give such a very imperfect notion of the manner in

38  Katherine O’Callaghan which I wish them to be performed and that most of that peculiarity of character which I believe they possess, as I sing them myself, is lost in the process they must undergo for publication, but the truth is, that not being sufficiently practiced in the rules of composition to rely on the accuracy of my own harmonic arrangements, I am obliged to submit my rude sketches to the eyes of a professor before they can encounter the criticism of the musical world, and, as it too frequently happens, that they are indepted [sic] for their originality to the violation of some established law, the hand that corrects their errors is almost sure to destroy their character. 22 Moore’s recognition of the alterity of Irish music does not preclude him from judging it against Western classical form, its originality owing to its “violation of some established law.” Nonetheless, the underlying ­message here is that transcription is not just betrayal in some sense, but closer to destruction. Thomas Moore’s “O, Ye Dead” serves as a thematic inspiration to Joyce’s short story “The Dead”: it centers on the interaction between the living and the dead, one that is tinged with jealousy, nostalgia, and longing. 23 The folksong “The Lass of Aughrim,” which Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle sang, is a tonal inspiration. It appears within the text itself, transforming the events of the evening and infiltrating the consciousness of the narrative. 24 “The Lass of Aughrim” is sung by Bartell D’Arcy, almost as an afterthought as the Christmas party is ending. D’Arcy claims to have a sore throat and also to have forgotten many of the words of the song, and so the performance is fragmentary. The singer is “uncertain” both in his knowledge of the song and in his vocal capacity to perform it, and the narrative voice repeats the word “seemed.” Nonetheless, the performance is striking enough to temporarily freeze Gretta Conroy in a stance that her husband would describe, if it were a painting, as “Distant Music” and for Gabriel to recognise that the song is being sung in the modal key of Irish traditional music, “in the old Irish tonality” (D 211). The fragments of the song, which make their way out to Gretta on the stairway, evoke for her a memory of a past love, Michael Furey, who sang the same song and who died tragically. Gabriel misreads the situation and his expectations of the evening are shattered when his wife reveals the real reason for her distracted air when they return to their room in the Gresham hotel. Gabriel will again misread his wife at this point. For him, her story of the love recalled by the distant music signifies a cataclysmic event in their marriage, one that rewrites all that has gone before. However, by the end of the story, Gabriel manages to step back from his own anxieties and to understand the story of Gretta and Michael Furey from a more cosmic perspective. The “mutuality” (to use Richard Ellmann’s term) of the living and the dead is given space in the elusive

“That’s the Music of the Future”  39 language of the last paragraphs of the story, which draw on the technique of “O, Ye Dead”—whereby disembodied plural voices speak of these universal realities—and which imposes the modality of “The Lass of Aughrim” on the narrative voice. Joyce disconnects the text from both the “voice” that tells most of the story and Gabriel’s own limitations. The tonality of the song that provoked the narrative crisis returns, and the resulting tonal quality of the language in the final passages can be described as “plaintive,” the term used to describe Bartell D’Arcy’s singing: “The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief” (D 211). Within the story itself, the given words “O, the rain falls on my heavy locks/ And the dew wets my skin, / My babe lies cold” are poignant, but the political energy of the version that Joyce is using is omitted. The lines following those given would be “within my arms / Lord Gregory let me in.” By omitting this more specific reference, Joyce is evoking a universal sadness but not the context of colonial and gender power relations in the story of a young woman with her baby looking for help at the “big house.” The “searching resonance” of Synge’s music and the “plaintive tone” Gabriel hears in the “Lass of Aughrim” refer to an alternative musical modality that might be evoked in prose. In naming this “old Irish tonality” as such, Joyce adopts the stance of those who promoted Irish traditional music as unique. Gabriel may argue that he is sick of the country and that his language is English, but Joyce’s text ensures that Michael Furey returns in the form of a tonality that Gabriel cannot escape. Indeed, arguably, he eventually reconciles with it. 25 The overtone of the song infiltrates the final passages of the story, altering the manner in which the text operates, elevating the narrative/Gabriel’s thoughts and shifting the entire mode of the text from the gritty realism of the earlier stories to something that has an air of poetic magic realism. As the tonality of music is of great importance to the cause of national independence, its aesthetic success over Gabriel, the avowed skeptic who fears taking “up a wrong tone” (D 179), is noteworthy.

Our Native Doric In his essay “Assertions of Distinction: the Modal Debate in Irish Music,” Joseph J. Ryan reads the “modal debate” of the nineteenth century in its political context: “a people seeking to be regarded as a separate nation required to demonstrate that its culture warranted such recognition…the more pronounced the distinction, the stronger the claim to nationhood.”26 The argument over the existence of a uniquely Irish musical scale or scales was politicized by the need to authenticate an Irish autonomous culture as part of the justification for national independence. Attempts to differentiate Irish music from classical European

40  Katherine O’Callaghan music included linking it with ecclesiastical music and with early Greek modes. Ryan writes that it became “necessary to establish a scientific base for such claims of uniqueness in an age of modernization” (66). Ryan notes how Professor O’Curry (in 1862) drew a parallel between the three Greek modes of highest antiquity, the Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian, and what he describes as the three Irish musical feats of sleeping (suantraighe), laughing (gentraighe), and crying (goltraighe), a notion drawn from Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards. (67)27 Joyce alludes to this terminology in the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, where “HIS NATIVE DORIC” (U 7.326) appears as one of the headlines that intercept the text. Tom Kernan later asks for “The Croppy Boy. Our native Doric” in the Ormond bar in the “Sirens” episode (U 11.991). ­Gabriel Conroy’s recognition of the “old Irish tonality” is superseded by the easy musical acumen of the Dubliners gathered in an impromptu musical session in Ulysses. The “Sirens” episode involves allusions to numerous pieces of music, but there are only full performances of two songs, and Joyce is very specific about their key signatures. Father ­Cowley corrects Simon Dedalus and takes over the piano accompaniment of “M’Appari,” from Flotow’s opera Martha, by playing it “in the original. One flat” (U 11.602), which is D minor. Zack Bowen has read the “scuffle” between the two men over the desired key as indicative of Joyce’s sensitivity to the musicians’ sensibilities. It also serves to highlight the contrasting lack of an “original” key for the other piece performed in its entirety in the episode. “The Croppy Boy,” a ballad concerning the 1798 rebellion, also provokes a discussion concerning which key it should be played in: —What key? Six sharps? —F sharp major, Ben Dollard said. (U 11.996–7) The “Croppy Boy” cannot be played “in the original,” as Flotow’s piece can, and so there is a need “to compel a choice of measure and key,” to use Busoni’s terms, if it is to be performed accompanied by the piano. Joyce goes to great lengths to evoke the key of F sharp major, playfully conflating the key’s use of all of the black notes on the piano with the dark mood of the song: Bloom listens to the “black deepsounding chords,” “Chords dark,” “Curlycues of chords” (U 11.1031). 28 Joyce’s close attention to key signatures here alerts the reader to the fact that Irish music has already gone through an act of transcription, and, like the subject matter of the ballad, harks to an unattainable past.

“That’s the Music of the Future”  41 Joyce may have been informed of the details of the debate by W.B. Reynolds, the music critic of the Belfast Telegraph, who set several of Joyce’s poems to music and who was actively engaged with the issue of the unique status of Irish music. Joyce visited Reynolds in November 1909 in Belfast. 29 The Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society published an article by Reynolds called “The Irish Folk Scale” in 1911 addressing “the chromatic inflections evident in folk music applying particular attention to what he termed ‘the Irish chromatic quarter-tone’ between F and F-sharp.”30 Reynolds was a disciple of Revd Dr. Richard Henebry, who was “an influential figure in this debate…a voluble supporter of traditional music and an advocate of an insular musical policy”; Henebry believed that “the indigenous tradition was based on a scale at variance with the tempered scale of western music.”31 Henebry, who visited ­Francis O’Neill in Chicago and contributed to his collections, argued against the work of those who wrote down Irish music for posterity, stating that the “result was a string of notes altogether out of tune with the rules of modern composition on the one hand and totally unknown to Irish music on the other.”32 He “maintained the ardent belief that the tempered scale was a bland concoction that deprived what he termed ‘human music’ of its richness.”33

A Series of Empty Fifths Joyce’s own “transcription” of a musical incident later in the book ­explores not only the limitations of the textual encryption of music, but the ambivalence of musical representation. In the Nighttown of the “Circe” episode: “Stephen stands at the pianola on which sprawls his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths” (U 15.2071–3). “Quinto vuoto,” or empty fifths, were frowned upon within the western classical music tradition because of their ambiguity; lacking the middle third note of a chord, they cannot be classified as either major or minor.34 The “series of empty fifths” appears after one of many hallucinatory sections in the episode. Indeed, the density of the “Circe” episode, with multiple dreamlike sequences that challenge traditional chronology, obscures the narrative significance of this musical sequence. Stephen is described performing a repetition of a series of fifths (“he repeats once more”), propelling the enquiring reader back to find an earlier instance. We must, in fact, go back through hundreds of lines of text to find Leopold Bloom standing outside the brothel: “A piano sounds. He stands before a lighted house, listening” (U 15.1268–9). A little further on we find the following line: “Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played” (U 15.1317–8). Zoe, one of the prostitutes, says to Bloom “Are you looking for someone? He’s inside with his friend” (U 15.1283). We can deduce, first, that Stephen is already present in the brothel and a likely candidate as the piano player,

42  Katherine O’Callaghan second, that this slow “oriental” music may be the first “series of empty fifths,” and, third, that the intervening passages (between Bloom listening to the “oriental music” and Stephen’s repetition of “a series of empty fifths”) exist in a parallel chronology, outside of clock time. This textual event has received very little critical attention, however, in part because it is barely “audible” to the reader. In fact, Stephen’s transmission of a musical midnight call out into a city that hosts numerous beckoning musical calls far and wide, and Bloom’s corresponding ability to recognize and respond to that particular call, facilitate the encounter of the two protagonists towards which the book’s momentum has journeyed. Earlier in the day, Bloom displayed his ability to assess the identity and skill of a performer and the tuning status of a piano by ear alone: “Wonder who’s playing. Nice touch. Must be Cowley. Musical. Knows whatever note you play” (U 11.560); “Piano again. Sounds better than last time I heard” (U 11.650). Hearing the music emerge from the brothel, he comments of the first instance: “A man’s touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here” (U 15.1278). In Bloom’s classification of the empty fifths as instances of church music, he links them initially with the ecclesiastic mode.35 E.L. Epstein notes that Venetian composer Benedetto Marcello’s setting of Psalm 18 “Coela enarrant gloriam Domini,” to which Stephen later alludes, contains the interval of the fifth. 36 Zack Bowen also describes the series as Stephen playing Marcello’s psalms and notes that the composer set the psalms to “melodies patterned after ancient Hebrew musical settings for the poetry, acting on the assumption that these compositions were closest to the tonal patterns of the Greeks.”37 Stephen’s series, described as both “Oriental” (by the narrative voice) and “Church music” (by Bloom), is closely linked with the pealing of the church bells of Dublin that sounded repeatedly earlier in the day and that are recapitulated, and even anthropomorphized, in the “Circe” episode. However, Bloom, who is certainly conversant in the ideas of new ­music—he speaks earlier of the “Beauty of music you must hear twice” (U  11.1060–1)—comments upon hearing the fifths: “That’s the music of the future” (U 15.1368). Indeed, the “Oriental” aspect of the series might also refer to modernist musical innovations. Examples of “empty fifths” can be found in many older musical traditions, but towards the end of the nineteenth century they were embraced by French composers such as Debussy and Ravel, who used them in sequences to evoke a particular ambience. The development of new scales in music was influenced by the 1899 World Exposition in Paris, which introduced “Eastern” sounds (primarily Japanese) to the West and was attended by Debussy. Stephen’s “series of empty fifths” echoes, for example, the series of rising fifths that open Debussy’s piano prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie. Debussy draws on inspiration from both the Eastern pentatonic scale and medieval religious music to evoke an aural image of a mythical

“That’s the Music of the Future”  43 cathedral rising from the sea. Debussy’s rising fifths, which are marked pianissimo, also evoke the sound of church bells sounding from afar. In this reading, Stephen’s choice of notes is in sympathy with his “nodes or modes” discussion in the brothel scene (U 15.2089–90), which alludes (on the part of both character and author) to the structural interrogation that contemporary music was undergoing and the challenge to tonality that the fifths represent. Furthermore, the empty fifths are also a marker of that “old Irish tonality,” which resides in a modality neither major nor minor. Stephen may be sounding out what has already been classified in Ulysses as “our native Doric.” Stephen’s discussion of musical theory, as he stands by the pianola, suggests that it is indeed issues of modality that are of interest to him: “It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian” (U 15.2089-10). It appears as though Stephen is attempting, in a drunken fashion, to explain the stave system: “The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which…Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave” (U 15.2105–2112). Indeed, Stephen’s instructions to himself upon pressing the keys could be read as a neat summing-up of the manner in which the aural-centred traditional music of Ireland was performed and passed on from generation to generation: “Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa” (U 15.2495). ­Stephen then goes on to play a minor chord, thus inserting the “missing” third: ­“Minor third comes now. Yes. Not much however” (U 15.2500). ­Stephen is in fact unknowingly imitating the actions of his father, who, earlier in the course of the day, also plays a chord on a keyboard. In the Ormond bar, Simon Dedalus stands by the piano, holds up the lid, and, with the soft pedal down, presses “a triple of keys to see the thicknesses of felt advancing, to hear the muffled hammerfall in action” (U 11.293–4). The “Sirens” episode draws repeated attention to the idea of a chord or cord, culminating in an attempt by Joyce to evoke a chord in language—“Siopold” (U 11.752)—thus emphasising the importance of simultaneity to Joyce’s musico-linguistic experimentation. 38 The line “Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa” evokes a non-visual music, an oral tradition passed down by the father. As discussed above, Irish music itself was critically and politically linked in the nineteenth century with church music. There was also a notion that Irish music had an “Oriental” aspect. Sean Ó Riada, for example, considered Irish music to be “more Indian than Western” (Ó Súilleabháin 2004). And further, there was an attempt to link Irish music with the Greek modes to which Marcello alluded. Joyce has already signposted the significance of the Irish musical modality and the tonal debates—“HIS NATIVE DORIC”; “our native Doric”—and in this ­moment weighted with significance, where Stephen is in effect the Siren drawing a listening Bloom to him in the brothel, it is not unlikely

44  Katherine O’Callaghan that the calling note would be sounded into the night in a modality richly layered and laden with ambiguity, with overtones of both the modernity that Stephen wishes to enter and the Irish heritage passed on by the songs of his father (while the Marcello allusion suggests that there are both Greek and Hebrew heritages at play here, too). And it is Bloom who can recognize that they are not so very different. Indeed, the development of modernism in Ireland involved an alternative approach to primitivism, as witnessed in Synge’s attitude to finding his new voice in the Aran Islands. Rather than drawing on the “primitivism” of non-western countries as, for example, the fauvist artists did (often in what would now be classified as a form of “Orientalism”), the Irish literary renaissance drew on a reclaimed past as its creative inspiration. Terence Brown gestures towards the very “modern” music latent in Synge’s description of his dream music. But what the writings of Synge and Joyce indicate is that from the perspective of Irish aesthetics, developments in modernist music had an uncanny familiarity. While the description of the “Lass of Aughrim” in “The Dead” differentiates the song’s tonality from that of European classical music, in the “Circe” episode it is the similarities between the old Irish music and the emerging music of modernity that are played upon. The empty chords that provide the soundtrack to the climactic meeting of Bloom and ­Stephen are ambiguous, multi-faceted, and residing in a liminal mode, ­shimmering between an older “forgotten scale” and an uncentered modernity. On the one hand, when Stephen Dedalus sounds out his dissonant call of empty fifths, it may be a pre-echo of the sounds of modernist music to come, proleptic of the collapse of the music of the now crumbling empires, “shattered glass and toppling masonry” (U 15.4246). On the other hand, it may be Stephen’s announcement to the city of his ownership of “Our native Doric.” If the answer lies in what Stephen’s alter-ego, Joyce himself, was to subsequently write as Ulysses, that grand encounter between an old oral Ireland and a dissonant modernity, it must be both. Joyce is capturing a particular moment in which the liminal power of traditional music appeared to resonate, to sing in tune, with the emerging non-tonal music of a modern world. The playing of the “series of empty fifths” in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses may well be the crux at which the “old Irish tonality” becomes Bloom’s “music of the future.”

Notes 1 Thomas Moore, Melodies, Songs, Sacred Scores and National Airs (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1829), iii–iv. 2 Joyce’s interest in the history of Irish music is evident in his “Early Commonplace book,” written between 1903 and 1912. We cannot conclude whether Joyce had read or intended to read the books listed on several pages, but he was certainly gathering considerable information on traditional Irish music,

“That’s the Music of the Future”  45 with references to many books on music including Patrick Weston Joyce’s Ancient Irish Music and Song: A Collection of Songs in the Irish Language set to Music (1888), Alfred Perceval Grave’s The Irish Songbook, with Original Irish Airs (1894), and George Sigerson’s Bards of the Gael and the Gall (1897). 3 References in parentheses follow the conventions of Joyce scholarship: Dubliners (D page number), Ulysses (U episode and line number), and Finnegans Wake (FW page and line number). 4 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 126. 5 Paul Martin, “‘Mr Bloom and the Cyclops’ in Joyce and Antheil’s Unfinished Opéra Mécanique” in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian Knowles (New York: Garland Publications, 1999), 94. 6 Martin, “‘Mr Bloom and the Cyclops,’” 94. 7 George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1945), 153–4. 8 Cited in Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: A Concise History. Rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 98. 9 There is a reproduction of the “Mr Bloom and the Cyclops” page in Martin, “‘Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops,’” 105. 10 In Zurich, in 1919, Joyce attended a performance of Busoni’s Indianisches Tagebuch by the Tonhalle orchestra. The work is in four parts and is based around Busoni’s interpretation of Native American music, the score referred to “America’s Redskins,” and was composed by Busoni at the end of a trip to New York in 1915. 11 Ferruccio Busoni, Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music in Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music (New York: Dover, 1962), 89. Hereafter cited in text. 12 Cited by Ellmann, James Joyce, 409. 13 Richard Ellmann does refer to the fact that the two men met while they both lived in Zurich in 1918. The meeting was set up by Busoni’s assistant capellmeister Phillippe Jarnach, who lived beside the Joyces and who knew Joyce well. Joyce also attended performances of Busoni’s music but was not overly impressed by what he heard, referring to it as Orchesterbetriebe or “orchestral goings-on.” Ellmann, James Joyce, 409. 14 David Herman, “‘Sirens’ after Schönberg,” James Joyce Quarterly 21 (Summer 1994), 473–94. 15 Moore, Melodies, iii–iv. 16 Seán Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage (Portlaoise: The Dolmen Press, 1982), 19. 17 The Companion to Traditional Irish Music gives the following explanation of modes: “The simplest way of understanding how modes work is to play a scale upwards from each of the white notes of the piano in turn, using only the white notes. Each corresponds to a mode. […] The four which concern traditional music are C-C (Ionian), D-D (Dorian), G-G (Mixolydian) and A-A (Aeolian). It must of course be remembered that since folksong in many countries is modal, modality alone is not enough to account for the distinctive sound of Irish music. […] The use of these modes, together with the practice common in dance music of switching between one mode and another in the course of a tune, help to give Irish music its characteristically plaintive undercurrent, even in such a rapid musical form as the reel.” See Fintan Valleley, ed., The Companion to Traditional Irish Music (Cork: Cork UP, 2011), 243. 18 The word “modality” is, of course, nuanced and ambiguous. The Oxford Companion to Music notes that “before about 1600, it is more common to

46  Katherine O’Callaghan

19

20 21

22 23

24

25

26 27

speak of modality than tonality.” It can be defined as a “modal quality, a method or procedure” and also as “a form of sensory perception” (OED). Joyce also draws on the latter definition when Stephen Dedalus, in the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, draws on Aristotelian ideas to enter the “ineluctable modality of the visible” and the “ineluctable modality of the audible” (U 3.13), descriptions of the means through which we perceive the world in terms of space and time. J.M. Synge, Collected Plays and Poems and The Aran Islands (London: Everyman Library, 1992), 99–100. Joyce read Synge’s Riders to the Sea for the first time during his stay in Paris in 1903. Ellmann notes that Joyce was dismissive of the play that the playwright himself had lent him. However, we may get a better sense of Joyce’s opinion from his actions: he apparently learnt Maurya’s speeches by heart (see Ellmann, James Joyce, 124), he later translated the play into Italian when living in Trieste, and, in Zurich, was very involved in a production by the English Players in which Nora Barnacle took the part of Cathleen. Joyce may have appreciated the intensely musical quality of Synge’s writing, as did fellow modernist Djuna Barnes. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, a line of plainchant is printed (U 9.499), suggesting Joyce’s interest in the idea of an alternative means of portraying music on paper. Francis O’Neill, O’Neill’s Music of Ireland: Eighteen Hundred and Fifty Melodies: Airs, Jigs, Reels, Hornpipes, Long Dances, Marches, etc., Many of Which Are Now Published for the First Time (Chicago: Lyon and Healy, 1903), 4. O’Neill, Music of Ireland, 2. O’Neill does not provide a reference, but Moore’s comments can be found in the preface to Melodies, iii–iv. While it is not referred to in the text, the song can obviously be linked to the title of the story. It was apparently Stanislaus Joyce who told his brother of “O, Ye Dead,” which Joyce then memorized. See Judith Harrington, Suburban Tenor (Dublin: National Library of Ireland Joyce Studies, 2005), 15. Terence Brown writes that the song is “a west of Ireland version of the Child ballad ‘The Lass of Lochroyan’”; see Brown, The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 37. The Child Ballads are a collection by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century and published in five volumes. The “Lass of Roch Royal” is number 76 in the Child collection. I am grateful to Cathal Goan for guidance on this point. In his essay “The History of The Lass of Aughrim,” Hugh Shields points out that Joyce “gives no clue as to whether he was aware—or would have cared—that the song had a Scots origin and is also known as the ‘Lass of Roch Royal’”; see Shields, The History of the Lass of Aughrim,” in Irish Musical Studies I: Musicology in Ireland, eds. Gerard Gillen and Harry White (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990), 59. Shields’s essay gives a detailed history of the song from the early eighteenth century, identifying its first appearance in a Scottish manuscript as “Isabell of Rochroyall.” Terence Brown reads the song as being at odds with the family setting: “The music rises indeed as if out of some more primal, elemental, passionate ­I reland than the lower middleclass, respectable decencies of Usher’s Island or the suburban, attenuated cultural provincialism of Monkstown.” Brown, The Literature of Ireland, 38. Joseph J. Ryan, “Assertions of Distinction: the Modal Debate in Irish ­Music,” in Irish Musical Studies Volume II, eds. Gerard Gillen and Harry White (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993), 62. Professor O’Curry was giving the first of his Lectures “Of Music and ­Musical Instruments in Ancient Erinn” on 10 June 1862. Captain Francis O’Neill

“That’s the Music of the Future”  47

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

gives the following explanation in his “Introduction” to Irish Musicians and Minstrels: “The Ollamhs of music, or those raised to the highest order of musicians in ancient Erin, were obliged by the rules of the order to be perfectly accomplished in the performance of three peculiar classes of music, namely: the Suantraighe—soothing, or sleep-producing music; the Goltraighe—­ dolorous, grief producing or lamentation music; and the Geantraighe – joy, merriment and laughter-producing music.” See O’Neil, Irish Musicians and Minstrels (Chicago: The Regan Printing House, 1913), 19. In the “Telemachus” episode, Stephen painfully recollects singing “Who Goes with Fergus?” to his mother: “I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords” (U 1.249–250). Ellmann, James Joyce, 302. W.B. Reynolds, “The Irish Folk Scale,” Journal of the Irish Folk Song ­Society 10 (20 December 1911), 12–15. Ryan, “Assertions of Distinction,” 69 and 71. Henebry cited in Ryan, “Assertions of Distinction,” 71. Ryan, “Assertions of Distinction,” 70. “Blmstdp” in the “Sirens” episode is often cited as an example of a quinto vuoto. The “oo” sound has been removed, but can be inserted by the reader. “A variety of different modes or scales were in general use in European music from the early middle ages until about 1600, when they fell largely into disuse in art-music—with the exception of the Ionian modes, which became the modern major scale, and the Aeolian, which with the addition of a sharpened seventh became the modern minor scale. However, they continued to flourish in plainsong (Gregorian chant) and much folk music. Irish traditional music has continued to use four of these modes.” Vallely, Companion to Traditional Irish Music, 457. E. L. Epstein, “King David and Benedetto Marcello in the Works of James Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 6.1 (Fall 1968), 83–86. Zack Bowen, Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music ­(Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1995), 111. The exclamation “Siopold!” combines the names of the singer, Simon; the character in the opera who sings the aria, Lionel; and the listener, Leopold.

3 The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake Eternal Recurrence in Wagner, Woolf, and Joyce Jamie McGregor The most radical literary experiments of the two greatest exponents of high modernist English prose both derive their central structural image from that of Richard Wagner’s opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876). Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939)1 were notably influenced by precisely the same aspect of Wagner’s work: its cyclical form and theme. The influence of Wagner on English literature is a well-established field, with Joyce as its central figure, most obviously in Timothy Martin’s Joyce and Wagner (1991), which argues for “a pervasive Wagnerian presence” throughout Joyce’s work. 2 Woolf has received less, though nonetheless significant, attention, and there are some writers on Wagner’s influence who consider Woolf and Joyce. Among these, John Louis DiGaetani and Raymond Furness specifically discuss Wagner’s influence on both The Waves and Finnegans Wake, but without connecting the two cases. This seems a surprising omission considering their remarkable similarity, which can be seen at a glance when one juxtaposes the principal Wagnerian features observed in each: The Waves’s “cyclical structure, the beginning and the end in water, the images of light and burning gold, the arc of fire gleaming on the horizon and the blazing sea” and Finnegans Wake’s “cyclical structure, in the presence of the river at both its end and its beginning, in the triumph of eternal Nature over ephemeral civilisation.”3 My purpose in this essay is to redress this omission; first, by outlining the relevant features of all three works; second, by examining where, how, and why each text refers to the Ring cycle; and third, by comparing their respective responses to it.

Cyclical Form The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake, are all, first, cyclical works: they portray sequences of events that, in some sense, return to where they started. In each case, these cycles are primarily natural, typified by the recurrent alternation of night and day, and there is an obvious implication both for individual human life and universal history. Second, all three works compound images of light, water, and woman to express

The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake  49 an archetypal sense of nature as transcendent and timeless. Each work nonetheless takes a markedly different approach to this common material and has a somewhat different purpose in view. The Ring, despite its length, is a tightly constructed drama with an impressive forward momentum, driven by events of heightened significance: the theft of the gold, the curse on the ring, the entry into Valhalla, and so on. Its content, literally the stuff of mythological epic, is metaphorically a commentary on the modern world, the politics of power, the means and ends of production, the depletion of the environment, and the emptiness of life. Indeed, it is so vast a work that “[i]t can almost be said without facetiousness to be about everything.”4 Its cyclical form is first and foremost a function of its plot. The tragic primal events of Das Rheingold5 are reversed or inverted at the end of Götterdämmerung6 (suggesting a cyclical pattern repeated in the image of the Ring itself): the stolen gold returned to the Rhinedaughters, the renunciation of love counteracted, the curse on the ring annulled by Brünnhilde’s sacrifice, and the inauguration of the gods’ reign mirrored by their spectacular self-immolation. At the same time, the symbolic level of the drama refers to actual human history. Das Rheingold in particular is an indictment of nineteenth-century materialism, while the rest of the cycle explores a series of ever more strenuous efforts to combat it. This historical dimension is compounded by the cycle’s mythic evocation of a time scale far surpassing merely human history—­apparent from the Rheingold prelude, which is almost invariably taken to portray the creation of the universe.7 Emerging with infinite slowness out of the silence that precedes it, an at first hardly perceptible drone becomes a fuller, but still formless, sound, and only then the inevitable gradual stepwise rhythm of the Nature or Becoming (Werde) motif (Figure 3.1):

Figure 3.1  Nature motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.

An undulating variation of this then prepares the way for the fuller, more purposeful rhythm and harmony of the Rhine motif proper (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2  R hine motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.

50  Jamie McGregor The impression is that of unconscious nothingness without purpose spontaneously generating matter in space and time. That the same material, transposed from E flat into C sharp minor, becomes the motif of Erda the ur-goddess helps identify her with this primordial being, makes her its correlative in the human mind—the unconscious, from which our perception of the world likewise emerges (Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3  E  rda motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Finally, the inversion of Erda’s rising motif into the sinking “Götterdämmerung” motif perfectly illustrates the conception that everything will fall back into that same nothingness from which it arose (Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4  Twilight of the Gods motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.

It is thus not only human civilization that must pass away, but the world itself. On the face of it, The Waves could hardly be more different. Six ordinary people meet in early childhood at a countryside boarding school, grow up, and go their separate ways, all six meeting up again on just two memorable occasions, and, one by one, simply cease to be. This near-total non-eventfulness is balanced by the unusual narrative style: the bulk of the text consists of the characters’ alternating monologues, really their poeticized impressions of lived experience, succeeding one another without comment and in no fixed order. The impression created by the whole is of a continuous stream of life passing inevitably by, a close imitation of consciousness in its randomness, sudden shifts of focus, seemingly illogical associations, and ceaseless activity. Prefacing each of the novel’s nine sections is an italicized passage describing the changing effects of the sunlight upon the sea. As each successively charts a later point in the day, progressing from dawn to nightfall, an obvious correspondence is created with the sections of the narrative proper, which likewise follow the characters’ lives from ­childhood to old age. The point is simple but effective: human life is a cycle too, its stages analogous to the hours of a day or the seasons of a year—an often bewildering succession of experiences, moods, and impressions, intensely felt but fleeting, and “rounded with a sleep.”8

The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake  51 Cyclical form is not here inherent in the plot, unless in the sense that we all come from nothing and go back to nothing; it has to be imposed on the otherwise formless material by means of the frame passages. It is in this respect to be further distinguished from the Ring, in that there are no apocalyptic events, no cosmic crises to be overcome, only life to be lived—though that is both event and crisis enough. The importance of the form is determined, rather, by the sunrise/­ sunset passages and their relation to the stages of life they preface. The effect, as in the Ring, is to present the natural world as an immensity that dwarfs human life and its significance. It also suggests endless recurrence, transcending the finitude of mortality, a view supported by such details as Louis’s awareness of his former lives, Bernard’s belief in connecting with others, Susan’s sense of kinship with the earth, and so on. At all times, the individual perspective seems to open out on a universe that stretches beyond its purview in all directions. Despite the novel’s preoccupation with the seemingly small lives of ordinary people, then, its scope does extend beyond that of the human lifespan. While eschewing the grandiose conflicts, millennial events, and epic significance of the Ring, The Waves is thus quite as concerned with the timeless and universal. Finnegans Wake is something else entirely. This ostensible novel9 retells the same simple story (an indistinct and crudely comic domestic version of the Fall) innumerable times. This endless repetitiveness is cyclical in itself—and decidedly counter-dramatic, while the inexhaustible, kaleidoscopic permutations, uproarious Hibernian grotesquerie, and sheer audacity of the language so overwhelm the reader as to render any sense of narrative movement both incoherent and irrelevant. The overall structure of the novel is well known to be based on the four-part cycle of history outlined in Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1725). Hence, the text itself falls into four parts, and there are four subcycles of four chapters each,10 creating a movement referred to in the (relentlessly self-reflexive) text as, for example, a “millwheeling vicociclometer.”11 The sentence that starts at the end of the last page is finished at the beginning of the first and so “brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back” (FW 03.02) to where we started. This circularity appears to be primarily a matter of form, to an even greater degree than in The Waves, but it ultimately derives from the idea underlying the whole vast construction: that all human experience is infinitely recurrent and its pattern that of perpetual rise and fall; consequently, all times, events, and personages throughout history and literature are as one. In this sense, the same story really is being enacted and recounted over and over again, and the Wake is thus a faithful reflection of the way things are. So it is that the Earwickers are simultaneously everyone else in every story ever told, from Adam and Eve to Parnell and Kitty O’Shea and from Diarmuid and Grania to Humpty Dumpty.

52  Jamie McGregor Such seemingly absolute all-inclusiveness makes the work even more obviously about everything than Wagner’s Ring. Unlike The Waves, then, the Wake shares the Ring’s overt interest in history as a whole, as well as in prehistory or mythology, in the epic, the cosmic, the immense, and the superhuman; but, unlike the Ring, it shares The Waves’s interest in the ordinary, the everyday, the seemingly trivial. Where it differs from either is in the degree to which it conflates the two, making everything analogous to everything else, great and small alike. And whereas the Ring only hints at the possibility of the whole vast cycle beginning over again, the Wake loudly asserts that it will never cease from doing so.

Wagnerian Parallels in The Waves Like Rheingold, The Waves begins in “predawn darkness”12 and moves swiftly to a climax in which a female figure heralds the increasingly bright golden light spreading over the water: [T]he arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon…raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire… fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it into a million atoms of soft blue… until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.13 But it is not Rheingold alone that Woolf evokes. The spectacular spread of light upwards across the sky, the burning incandescence ascending “into a million atoms of soft blue” closely resembles the dawn sequence in Siegfried Act III, in which the magic fire “dissolve[s] into a fine rosy mist… ultimately revealing the bright blue sky of the day,”14 while the “bonfire” image appears to look as far ahead as the end of ­Götterdämmerung. Both the zenith of the hero’s career and the fiery end of everything are already inevitable, being implicit in the dawn that heralds them—a strain of Wagnerian imagery that resonates still more richly in the novel’s subsequent interludes: “a girl couched on her greensea mattress tired her brows with water-globed jewels that sent lances of opal-tinted light falling [like] the flash of a falling blade” (111). As well the Rhinedaughters’ “glittering toy” and “golden trinket,”15 the imagery here again suggests the sun-hero Siegfried, wielding the bright sword Nothung in his glorious ascendancy. This restriction to rather obvious images actually masks a far more profound engagement with Wagnerian themes. In discerning this, it is necessary to develop DiGaetani’s formulation that at least “one basic

The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake  53 meaning of a ring, its circular form symbolising a circular concept of life’s progression, is used in both The Waves and the Ring.”16 How these life cycles operate in each work has already been outlined above; what remains is to probe into what each appears to be saying about life and time, our relationship to the world, and the possibility of transcendence. A recurrent idea in Woolf’s novel is the identity of human beings with the earth and growing things. Louis imagines, “My roots go down to the depths of the world…. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing” (7). Susan says, “I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees” (72). A related concept is the identification of individuals with one another. This is a favorite theme for Bernard, for whom “we melt into each other with phrases” (10), and who later elaborates, using a version of the ring motif always associated with him: “I do not believe in separation….A smoke ring issues from my lips … bringing him into contact…we are not single, we are one” (49–50). Later still, he becomes aware that this unity is threatened by the uniquely human problem of self-consciousness: “I am not part of the street—no, I observe the street. One splits off, therefore” (86). But he prefers to reject this, because “We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies” (186), and instead contemplates “streaming away mixed with Susan, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, Louis” (215)—aptly characterizing the blending effect of the novel’s sestet of voices—or else proceeding “without a self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion” (219). In places, these Schopenhauerian suggestions of a transcendent unity are appropriately illustrated by images recalling Wagnerian myth: “[W]e only wish to rejoin the body of our mother….We are scarcely to be ­distinguished from the river” (179). River and universal mother, closely identified cosmic symbols, here coincide in a manner analogous to their musical proximity in Wagner’s score. That Erda is further associated with that other primal nature symbol, the world-ash Yggdrasil, underlines Louis’s tree motif, notably so when it acquires overtones of the all-knowing earth-spirit who, in Siegfried, claims “My sleep is dreaming, my dreaming brooding, / My brooding weaving of wisdom….Mistveiled move in my mind the deeds of men” (179–80): My roots go down through veins of lead and silver, through damp, marshy places that exhale odours, to a knot made of oak roots bound together in the centre. Sealed and blind, with earth stopping my ears, I have yet heard rumours of wars… the hurrying of many troops of men flocking hither and thither in quest of civilisation… remembering all this as one remembers confused cries and toppling pillars and shafts of red and black in some nocturnal conflagration.17 I am for ever sleeping and waking. Now I sleep; now I wake. (71)

54  Jamie McGregor This unmistakable reference to Erda’s prophetic dream of the gods’ downfall is bolstered by frequent suggestions of that quintessentially Schopenhauerian–Wagnerian idea, redemption through the denial of the Will-to-live, especially when achieved through a strangely ecstatic evocation of apocalypse: listen…to the world moving through abysses of infinite space. It roars; the lighted strip of history is past and our Kings and Queens; we are gone; our civilisation; the Nile; and all life. Our separate drops are dissolved; we are extinct, lost in the abysses of time, in the darkness. (173) But beyond even this cosmic annihilation, and hints of a new dawn succeeding it, together suggesting a pattern of endless recurrence, the cycle Bernard imagines ultimately points beyond itself, to Nirvana: we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now…hear silence fall and sweep its rings to the farthest edges. (172) Continually repeated, the images of ring, tree, river, light, and darkness typically suggest that to relinquish the busy instinct to strive and achieve, to build empires and found civilizations, and to cultivate in place of it an air of detachment, of trancelike stillness, in which large-scale movements and events seem small and far off, is to bypass the limitations of individual self-consciousness and of life in time. In this, there is a profound affinity with the spirit of Wagner’s cycle that goes far beyond mere allusion; it is the achievement of epic distance, of cosmic perspective, of world-overcoming.

Wagnerian Parallels in the Wake The Wagnerian effect in Finnegans Wake is apparent right from the opening “riverrun,” which provides an exact equivalent to the primordial “Werde” motif from which Wagner’s subaqueous world arises; motif and word alike emerge from the preceding silence and provide the first step, tentative but necessary, that sets the world in motion. Furthermore, the manner in which the Wake’s final “the” returns to this opening even provides a counterpart for the inversion of the rising “Werde”/Rhine/ Erda motif into the falling “Götterdämmerung” motif. That “riverrun” continues “past Eve and Adam’s” (FW 3.01) reminds us of the primacy

The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake  55 of the Fall theme in the Wake; it would not have been lost on Joyce that the opening scene of Rheingold is Wagner’s version of the Genesis story. Martin18 also notes the phrase “rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface” (FW 3.13–14), which condenses the circular structure of the Ring by alluding simultaneously to the parallel closing tableaux of the tetralogy’s first and last parts. In the first, the gods cross the rainbow (German “Regenbogen”) into Valhalla, which they have paid for with the gold stolen from the Rhinedaughters, whose accusations are heard from the depths; in the last, the Rhinedaughters triumphantly hold up the recovered ring in the reflected firelight as Valhalla goes up in flames. Moreover, the “end to the regginbrow” is both spatial—Valhalla itself—and temporal—its ultimate destruction (already implicit in the hollow blazing grandiloquence of the Rheingold finale). Joyce thus highlights the circularity of his own epic by alluding to the way Wagner does the same thing with his; the announcement that prelapsarian events are about to start happening all over again signals the return to a beginning that already contains the seeds of its inevitable end. In contrast to the interludes of The Waves, the Wake indicates its circularity through continual self-reference (as in “the book of Doublends Jined” [FW 20.16]). In addition, there is the constant presence of the four-part Viconian structure, which depicts the cycle of history in four distinct arcs: the theocratic, aristocratic, and democratic ages and the subsequent “ricorso,” a chaotic collapse heralding the return of the gods to begin a new cycle.19 Martin correctly emphasizes the parallel between Vico’s system and the four-part structure of the Ring, a coincidence that Joyce could scarcely have overlooked. Although the story of how Wagner supposedly wrote the text backwards and the music forwards has now become part of musical folklore, it is rarely noted how much care Wagner lavished on giving each part a distinct identity, resulting in a gradual shift from a pre-human golden age to a tired grey world from which the gods have all but vanished. Indeed, so neatly do the four operas correspond to Vico’s cycle that Joyce, knowing them as well as he did, 20 could hardly have failed to add them to the mythic mix of the Wake, in places even describing Vico’s ages in distinctly Wagnerian terms. For example, “a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s well” (FW 117.5–6) are, according to Martin, allusions to the clap of thunder in ­R heingold, the “poor marriage” of Sieglinde and Hunding in Walküre, 21 the awakening of Brünnhilde in Siegfried, and Valhalla [Walhall] burning in ­Götterdämmerung (114). (I venture to suggest, however, that “fore marriage” is more likely to refer to the prophecy that the Valkyrie will wed the man who awakens her; all four phrases would then allude to the final climaxes of the respective parts.)

56  Jamie McGregor The Ring also provides Joyce with some colorful characters to add to his already immense cast. HCE himself, the eternally falling and ­resurrecting father figure, along with the male characters Jehovah, Adam, Ibsen’s master builder (who falls from his own tower), and the bricklayer Tim Finnegan (who falls from his ladder), easily corresponds to ­Wagner’s Wotan in his aspect of first lawgiver and founder of ­civilization. The erection and destruction of his fortress Valhalla parallels those of Babel (an obvious parable for the polyglottal nature of the text) and Wall Street (with which it not only chimes but also resembles in being founded upon gold). The fortress’s superhuman immensity, with just a hint or two of its ultimate fate, are, for instance, vividly conveyed as a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all, hierarchitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with larrons o’toolers clittering up and tombles a’buckets clottering down. (FW 4.35–5.04) Like Wotan, “Haveth Childers Everywhere” (FW 535.33–4) is a procreator of note, while his consort “Annah the Allmaziful” (FW 104.01) resembles Erda the ur-mother, who bears Wotan’s favorite daughter Brünnhilde and corresponds to him as female to male principle. That she is embodied in Anna Liffey, the river-woman flowing through her husband-city, strengthens this connection. But for Joyce, ALP subsumes all women, as HCE all men; and that each is the other’s true spouse at every level of their complex identities is reflected in the way their combined initials spell CHAPEL, just as Dublin and its river—or “Howth Castle and Environs” (FW 3.03) and his “Missisliffi” (FW 159.12–13)— are geographically united in the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod, 22 where the Earwickers reside. In this, too, Joyce echoes Wagner’s complementary symbols of everflowing, eternal female river and male mountaintop fortress, emblem of a dominance doomed to pass away time after time. It is notably man who rises and falls, sexually and historically, and “­everchanging… neverchanging” woman who endures (U 688): “Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be” (FW 215.24). This pattern is taken over in the succeeding generation. ALP’s d ­ aughter Issy (also Isolde) comes in time to take her mother’s place, effortlessly and without struggle, as the river flows out to sea and rises anew in the mountains. By contrast, HCE’s twin sons, Shem and Shaun, all rival brothers and warring nations, are perpetually divided against one another, until such time as they reunite to rebel against and overthrow their father. In this way, they become a new HCE, as they are the two poles contained within his all-inclusive personality.

The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake  57 This theme of Oedipal conflict recurs throughout Joyce’s works, and is almost always reinforced by its classic image in Wagner, the clash of the free hero Siegfried with his grandfather Wotan, whose power and authority are jeopardized by the younger man’s ascendancy. 23 Contrasting, but also complementing, this masculine aggression and competitiveness is the motif of the river-woman, who, together with the world-ash, completes the Ring’s trinity of primal nature symbols. It is from ­Yggdrasil that Wotan originally breaks the branch that forms the shaft of his spear, an act Deryck Cooke has shown to stand in elaborate parallel to ­A lberich’s theft of the Rhinegold. 24 Both despoil the natural world for the sake of individual (typically masculine) power. And almost all aspects of this are suggested in the Wake’s numerous world-ash allusions, such as “the gigantig’s lifetree” (FW 55.27), “Woodin Warneung…. An overlisting eshtree?” (FW 503.28–32), and the suggestive bilingual pun “Esch so eschess” (FW 588.28). 25 HCE himself is an “Yggdrasselmann” (FW 88.23), an immense tree being one of his chief manifestations—“the first to rise taller through his beanstale than the bluegum ­buaboababbaun or the giganteous Wellingtonia Sequoia” (FW 126.10–12)—just as the river is one of his wife’s. Interestingly, these gender affiliations directly invert those in the Ring, where the Rhine is the “father” referred to by his three daughters. This fact is easily overshadowed, however, by ­Wagner’s consistent association of natural symbols with female figures and of artifacts (ring, spear, sword, fortress) with male ones. For Joyce, on the other hand, the tree is generally male: “this preeminent giant, sir A ­ rber…our sovereign beingstalk…[with] cock robins muchmore hatching out of his missado eggdrazzles for him” (FW 504.15–36), a “­treemanangel” and an “Upfellbowm”26 so high that “nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it” (FW 505.17–33). One result of the Wake’s complex of mythic image clusters is its suggestion of a comic diagram of the world. The passage quoted above describing the cosmic tree is a typical instance, where the hatching “cock robins” suggest, in close-up, the profusion of life erupting at all points from the whole vast superstructure. The prevalence of present participles, typical of such passages, in conjunction with abundantly listed detail and the continual presence of topical local allusion, creates the wonderfully vivid impression that this is the world as it is right now— but also, of course, as it always has been and will be. As more and more such details agglomerate, the effect is one of panoramic immensity, as well as interminably proliferating chaos. This, as well as a marked tendency to depict historical process in terms of juvenile, not to say simian, sexual enterprise (“climbing to her crotch for the origin of spices… gibbonses and gobbenses, guelfing and ghiberring…chucking overthrown milestones up to her to fall her cranberries” [FW 504.26–33]), creates an overall tone of genial bemusement, of contemplating the human insects

58  Jamie McGregor from a standpoint of achieved serenity—comparable to Wagner’s at the end of the Ring, but substituting humor for grandiloquence.

The Universe as Subject The exquisite lyricism of The Waves and the comic abundance of ­Finnegans Wake are about as different from one another as each of them is from the massive dark intensity of the Ring. And yet each literary text appears to take more from the Ring than motifs and images only and echoes its tone in modified form. For Woolf, it is the cycle’s lighter textures, the watery sunlight, babbling nymphs, and forest birds that are evoked, as are the subtler and gentler harmonies of the work she ultimately preferred, Parsifal. For Joyce, it is almost the opposite: crude pagan brutality, lumbering giants, thunder, and booming chthonic noises are emphasized, transformed by genial caricature and a closer spiritual affinity to his own “favourite Wagnerian opera,” Die Meistersinger. 27 It is also fairly clear that Joyce alludes to Wagner in far more detail than Woolf; this is not to say that The Waves is not a highly allusive text by normal standards, but normal standards do not apply to ­F innegans Wake, where “every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings” (FW 20.14–15). Martin cites several references not only to the Ring but also to other Wagner operas, as well as to aspects of the composer’s life and theories. Overall, this suggests a strong general interest in Wagner and his ideas that contrasts with the predominantly atmospheric and emotive use of allusion by Woolf. In the end, however, differences in tone and emphasis appear relatively superficial beside the impressive fact that both texts allude to the Ring not only in minute details but in the grand design: the cosmic image of the world-encircling river unifying all time and space. Joyce and Woolf alike are clearly attracted above all to Wagner’s impressive use of ancient myth to express a modern Weltanschauung. For Joyce, perhaps the most attractive feature of the Ring is the way it shows how “[t]he work of man is self-destructive, sterile, fleeting; the work of maternal nature is resilient, self-sustaining, eternal.”28 For Woolf, similarly, the cycle offers a rare depiction of life as a fluid stream of impressions better enjoyed by immersion than vain efforts to impose order. In all three works, the universe itself is the principal subject: vast, random, and mysterious, an indivisible entity in which all things are interrelated. Human beings, in their ongoing foolish efforts to pretend they are separate and autonomous, would be better advised to seek absorption in one another, in the contemplation of natural objects, the enjoyment of physical sensation, and the acceptance of transience, even the extinction of consciousness itself.

The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake  59 For Wagner, this quasi-religious message is most clearly expressed in the so-called “Schopenhauer ending” he wrote but chose not to add to the Ring, believing it was unnecessary to do so given how movingly it was conveyed by the music alone. For Woolf, it appears in Bernard’s impression that [t]he canopy of civilisation is burnt out… But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn…. There is a sense of the break of day…. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again. (228) For Joyce, it is present in innumerable convolutions, typically stressing the dissolution of warring opposites in feminine fluidity: “If hot ­Hammurabi, or cowld Clesiastes, could espy her pranklings, they’d burst bounds agin, and renounce their ruings, and denounce their doings, for river and iver, and a night. Amin!” (FW 139.25–28) For all three ­artists, final transcendence is achieved through a heroic Liebestod, from Anna Livia’s “I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels” (FW 628.09–10), through B ­ ernard’s “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” (228), to Brünnhilde’s soaring motif of redemption (Figure 3.5):

Figure 3.5  R  edemption motif from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.

60  Jamie McGregor

Notes 1 For the purposes of this essay, Finnegans Wake is treated as a modernist rather than a postmodernist work, one that carries the strategies of Ulysses to their logical limit rather than departing from them in the new (and largely opposite) direction taken by Beckett, for example. 2 Timothy Martin, Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xiv. 3 Raymond Furness, Wagner and Literature (Manchester: Manchester ­University Press, 1982), 20–21; Martin, Joyce and Wagner, 141. 4 Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 331. 5 Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold (piano score), trans. Ernest Newman (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1912). 6 Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung (piano score), trans. Ernest Newman (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1914). 7 For Carl Dahlhaus, the Nature motif is quite simply “a musical image of the elemental, the origin of things.” For Michael Tanner, this music “is potent with hyper-natural associations” and the opening bars alone “suggest that we are being taken back to the beginning of all things.” I would submit, moreover, that one hardly needs to be told this, that it is ­something almost any listener is likely to perceive. See Dahlhaus, The New Grove Wagner (London: Macmillan, 1984), 149; and Tanner, Wagner (Princeton: ­Princeton University Press, 1996), 48–49. 8 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1, line 158. Bloomsbury Arden, 2011, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. 9 Some distinguished critics have demurred on this point. Tindall finds it unclassifiable, having “the expansive abundance of the novel, the texture, rhythm, and density of the poem, yet it is neither one nor the other.” See William Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 239–40. 10 Strictly speaking, there are two such subcycles in the first part and one in each of the middle parts, while the last part consists of only a single chapter. 11 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992), 614.27. Hereafter cited in text. 12 John Louis DiGaetani, Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1978), 118. 13 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Penguin, 1992), 3. Hereafter cited in text. 14 Richard Wagner, Siegfried: Complete Vocal Score, trans. Ernest Newman (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1914), 207. Hereafter cited in text. 15 Wagner, Rheingold, 59 and 62. 16 DiGaetani, Richard Wagner and the British Novel, 120. 17 Cf. the parallel Wagnerian image following Stephen Dedalus’s invocation of “Nothung” in Ulysses: “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.” James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 542. 18 Martin’s book-length study of Joyce’s work in relation to Wagner’s inevitably sets the benchmark for comparisons between the works in question, though many of the same conclusions were reached by previous critics and have continued to be revisited by others since. In dealing with Finnegans Wake in particular, Martin himself confesses the material available for exegesis is inexhaustible: “[N]o list of allusions in Joyce’s work can claim to be definitive… the compiler must consider many allusions that can only be called ‘possible’…My aim [is] simply to gather and increase our store of

The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake  61

19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

information about Joyce and one of his most important ‘parental’ sources and to show Wagner’s pervasiveness in Joyce’s work without pretending to close the subject…I must offer this list certain that many references to ­Wagner remain to be discovered” (185–86). In this section of the essay, therefore, I attempt an original and greatly condensed account of the similarities that seem to me most pertinent to the broader three-way comparison the essay as a whole tries to make, while acknowledging where Martin has made the same points, or others closely resembling them. My overall aim remains to show how closely Finnegans Wake and The Waves overlap in their responses to the Ring. Many commentaries on the Wake have elaborated its Viconian structure; one of the very earliest, for example, emphasizes it early on, comparing it to similar patterns in Spengler, Goethe, Greek mythology, and Hinduism, all of which are claimed to be amalgamated in Joyce’s “colossal tragicomical vision of the Morphology of Human Destiny.” See Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Skeleton Key (London: Faber & Faber, 1946), 14–15 and passim. Martin is the most authoritative source for this knowledge, one who in his own words “demonstrates Joyce’s thorough exposure to Wagner, both ­direct, through his habituation of the library and the opera house, and indirect, through conduits like Shaw, Yeats, Moore, Symons, Nietzsche, and D’Annunzio” (xiv). Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, trans. Ernest Newman (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1912). Derived from “Chapel of Isolde,” the name also points towards the Wake’s complex web of allusions to Wagner’s Tristan. The reader interested in pursuing these and other Wagnerian patterns in Finnegans Wake (and elsewhere in Joyce’s writings) is directed to Martin’s thorough, though hardly exhaustive, catalogue (185–221). Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner’s Ring (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 148–49. Joyce could hardly have forborne from exploiting the potential meanings Wagner had inadvertently offered him by making an “ash” the fuel for the gods’ conflagration. Cf. the German Apfelbaum (“apple tree”). Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 473. Martin, Joyce and Wagner, 115.

4 Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End Towards Modernity Isabelle Brasme

The young Ford Madox Ford—then Ford Hermann Hueffer—seemed destined to be a musician. His father, Francis Hueffer, was a renowned musicologist and music critic and a fervent Wagnerian.1 His sister was a Wagnerian singer with some recognition. 2 Ford started his artistic ­career by composing music. Even though he eventually devoted himself to writing, the influence of music is very much present throughout his literary work. Ford’s early novels have been said to be musical in their extensive use of assonances and, more specifically, Wagnerian in their sometimes-heavy use of leitmotifs. 3 However, musical influences in the Parade’s End tetralogy, which is usually considered Ford’s achievement in maturity, are richer and subtler. I shall explore the presence of musicality in Parade’s End 4 and show how, whilst drawing inspiration from nineteenth-century music in an apparently traditional and somewhat expected manner, Ford’s writing enacts a transition towards modernist writing. The musical paradigm in Parade’s End is threefold: it may be analyzed in terms of symphony, of the structural use of leitmotifs, and of a shift from a contrapuntal mode to one of atonality. Ford’s writing in Parade’s End first partakes of elements of the nineteenth-century ­symphony, but also of the military marches that were prevalent in the musical soundscape of the novel’s context; the tetralogy’s very title refers to a ­military and therefore highly institutional and conventional musical form. Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march, which includes the Land of Hope and Glory song, is explicitly mentioned in the narration. It was first performed in 1901 and was played at King Edward’s coronation in 1902. In this respect, the tetralogy may seem to acknowledge an allegiance to tradition—and to one that is specifically English. The “parade,” however, is at an “end;” the use of leitmotifs and tonal shifts makes the musical influence much more complex and innovative than it may initially appear. Secondly, leitmotifs are not merely used in the novel as themes ­structuring the action; as in a Wagnerian opera, they are worked into an intricate network that points to hidden meanings; they tell us more about the story than is made explicit through the narrative. It is through

Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End  63 this powerful use of leitmotifs as inspired by Wagner’s works, then, that Ford’s text departs from a traditional linear narrative to generate a complex web of meanings and is thus endowed with modernist qualities. The multifarious echoes generated by the various leitmotifs come to be superimposed whilst retaining their distinctiveness, in a manner redolent of fugal music. The mode of the counterpoint is even more potent on a smaller scale through the dialogues: voices are made to coexist, yet each remains separate. The absence of unison highlights the variety and irreconcilability of individual perspectives and thus points to a major concern in modernist aesthetics. The narration calls attention to its own musical influences: characters mention music in an offhand or even derisive manner, thus inviting the reader to reconsider the seemingly reverential treatment of conventional music. Indeed, the apparently flawless symphony of voices performed by a quintessentially English high society quickly dissolves into a grotesque cacophony. Just as the perspective shifts, sometimes imperceptibly, from one character to the next, so the tonality moves constantly from a major key to a minor one, from a perfect chord to a more disturbing and complex set of irreconcilable notes, finally giving way to atonality.

Musical Motifs and Overtures Ford highlighted early in his career the fundamental symbiosis he felt between words and music. Sondra Stang and Carl Smith underlined the powerful influence Ford’s father had on his son in this respect: Ford speaks of Wagner’s “message…in the language of united tones and words,” a phrase that refers to his father’s abiding faith that words and music must be, indeed, “united”,—as they were pre-­ eminently by the troubadours. (188) Structural motifs can be found throughout Parade’s End. The ­tetralogy’s main title and those of each of the four novels thus function as recurring motifs that structure the novels and contribute to strengthening the “progression d’effet”5 imparted on the reader. A broad analogy may therefore be drawn between the effect created by recurring ­motifs in Parade’s End and the musical themes that serve as frameworks in ­nineteenth-century symphonies. However, the analogy is more specific than a mere similarity in the structuring of the work of art. Let us ­examine a specific motif. Christopher Tietjens, the main character in the tetralogy, is repeatedly animalized throughout the four novels. His wife Sylvia and his future lover Valentine, although antithetical in most respects, both assimilate him to a bullock: Valentine sees him running through a gate “like a mad bullock” (SDN 109); Sylvia considers he is “no more responsive”

64  Isabelle Brasme to women “than a bullock in a fatting pen” (NMP 415).6 Tietjens compares himself to a buffalo: “why was he born to be a sort of lonely buffalo outside the herd?” (SDN 128), a phrase later echoed by his wife: “he was the lonely buffalo” (NMP 438). Sylvia also compares him to a sick bulldog that she tortured in the past (NMP 416–17); this is also the final image we receive of him at the end of the fourth volume: “heavily, like a dejected bulldog, Christopher made for the gate” (LP 835). The animal theme that runs through the four novels is therefore sustained with words that are oddly consonant: “bullock,” “buffalo,” and “bulldog.” The choice of words may therefore seem conditioned more by their sonic proximity than by their actual meaning. The alliterations that can be heard throughout the text, from one motif to another, thus endow these repetitions with the dimension of an actual musical theme. It is as though Ford put into practice the concept of “tone,” as defined by Roger Scruton in terms of causality and intention: When we hear music, we do not hear sound only; we hear something in the sound, something which moves with a force of its own. This intentional object of the musical perception is what I refer to by the word “tone.”7 The succession of notes that generates a tone is established by the composer; unlike sounds, its causality is independent from physical laws. Likewise, the succession of metaphors assimilating Tietjens successively to a bullock, a buffalo, and a bulldog appears much more determined by aesthetic intention than justified by physical verisimilitude. A genuine tone seems to be building up along the narration—a tone in this instance attached to Tietjens’s character, which follows him and contributes to his characterization throughout the four novels. An analysis of the tetralogy’s opening page may sustain the analogy between Parade’s End and nineteenth-century symphonic works. In the manner of a musical overture, the incipit introduces a variety of themes that shall be constantly recalled and interweaved within the course of the novel, at a lexical and at a symbolic level. The description of the train compartment that serves as a backdrop to the first scene is particularly pregnant with meaning: The two young men—they were of the English public official class— sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. (SDN 3)

Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End  65 The phrase “virgin newness” shall find an ironic pendant in the depiction of Tietjens’s marriage, since Tietjens’s wife Sylvia had a lover before marrying him, and since her son, born seven months after the wedding, may not be Tietjens’s. This theme, or rather its inverted reflection, constitutes a central element in the tetralogy’s plot, and obsesses many a character over the course of the novels. Similarly, the dragon pattern gracing the train’s upholstery is the work of a German geometrician: while this may evoke the intellectual, philosophical, and artistic influence of ­Germany over English society, it may also herald ironically the World War to come: Some Do Not… opens in 1912. The two main themes of the narration in Parade’s End—the question of Sylvia’s fidelity and of her son’s paternity, on the personal scale, and the subject of the Great War, on the historical scale—therefore underlie the tetralogy’s very first sentences. In a subtler, but no less significant manner, elements of the incipit also recur uncannily in the opening of the second part of No More Parades: In the admirably appointed, white-enamelled, wickerworked, be-mirrored lounge of the best hotel of that town Sylvia Tietjens sat in a wickerwork chair […]. (NMP 379) The echo with the tetralogy’s first sentence is both lexical and syntactic: to the initial clause “in the perfectly appointed railway carriage” corresponds the phrase “in the admirably appointed […] lounge”; the adverb merely changes from “perfectly” to “admirably,” which remains very close in meaning. The first sentences in each opening are built along a chiasmus: the first sentence in Some Do Not… starts with “the two young men […] sat” and then mentions the location; the opening in No More Parades begins with the location before stating Sylvia’s position: “Sylvia Tietjens sat.” The second incipit is thus built as a symmetrical reflection of the first one—a notion further sustained by the mention of many mirrors in both passages. However, the reflection is radically altered if one considers the contexts in which each incipit takes place: England in 1912 in the case of the first, France in 1917 for the second, just a few kilometers from the front. The recurrence of the same themes therefore takes place in two drastically different contexts. In this respect, these two incipits may bring to mind opera overtures, which introduce and highlight the action on stage. In Verdi’s La Traviata,8 for example, we find the very same melodic line in the first nine bars of Act I and Act III—the prelude to Act III being set just a halftone above that of Act I, and the tonality thus shifting from C# minor in the prelude to Act I, to C minor in the prelude to act III (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). In both openings, the background is the eponymous character’s interior. The action is, however, dramatically altered, since the first act displays a festive scene, while the final one stages Violetta’s death. The use of the

Figure 4.1  Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata, Act I, Prelude.

Figure 4.2  Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata, Act III, Prelude.

68  Isabelle Brasme exact same melodic line to open both acts renders the changes between the first and the third act all the more salient and gives the listener or spectator a more poignant sense of the passing of time. In the two opening sentences we have described from Parade’s End, as in these opening melodic lines, the atmosphere created by the first occurrence is simultaneously recalled and inflected through the second occurrence, which sounds like the first one, yet takes place in a context that has shifted significantly. Within the Verdian repertoire, the trilogy that exploited this effect of themes most notably, La Traviata, Rigoletto, and Il Trovatore, dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century (1851–53). The influence of symphonic music on Parade’s End thus reaches relatively far back in time. However, the most obvious and most frequently noted musical influence on Ford’s work is that of Wagner, an influence highlighted when Sylvia hums the beginning of Tannhäuser in No More Parades (NMP 442). Wagner’s most imposing work, Der Ring des Nibelungen, is also a tetralogy: the coincidence may not be entirely fortuitous. An analysis of the writing in Parade’s End along Wagnerian paradigms shall establish that Wagner’s influence on Ford reaches more deeply than studies on Ford have hitherto made evident.

Wagnerian Leitmotifs: Repetition and Modernity Ford’s first novel, The Shifting of the Fire, was classified as “ ­ Wagnerian” by Sondra Stang and Carl Smith: “The Shifting of the Fire, his first published novel, is saturated in Wagner (and Berlioz), leaning hard on the leitmotiv in its structural organization” (218). The Shifting of the Fire is indeed structured along themes related to specific words that recur obsessively within the narration. The most obvious theme is that of the title: in each crucial moment of the plot, the characters see the fire shift within the grate. Furthermore, alliterations and assonances are numerous, and at times labored to the point of clumsiness, bespeaking the young author’s manifest interest in creating a musical dimension to his text; leitmotifs and musicality are worked out in a subtler and more complex manner in the later work Parade’s End. Wagner’s works yield themselves easily to literary analysis because of the representational inflection Wagner impressed on melody. This change is often considered the starting point for a major revolution in the history of music and of its reception. Roger Scruton explains the way in which melody acquired a representational status in Wagner’s operas: it was Wagner who did most to change our musical understanding, so as to approach the representational paradigm. Although his use of the leitmotif had been anticipated, he transformed the device into something very like an orchestral language, permitting the musical articulation of thoughts that could be conveyed in no other way:

Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End  69 like the thoughts conveyed by the Greek chorus, which show the defective understanding of the protagonist, by supplying what the protagonist himself cannot conceive.9 Scruton then goes on to illustrate this notion through an analysis of the final scene in Die Walküre, the second part of the Ring tetralogy: The melodic line [sung by Wotan], at once repeated by the orchestra, gives the theme which had been sung by Brünnhilde herself, when she revealed that Sieglinde is pregnant by Siegmund, with a child who will be the greatest of heroes. […] We recuperate from the music a complex and indeed astonishing thought, namely this: Brünnhilde has chosen mortality through her defiance, precisely in order to love the child of Siegmund with a human love; while Wotan has conferred mortality on her precisely so that the hero of whom he stands in need should enjoy her help and protection; at the same time, Brünnhilde does not consciously intend what is now inevitable, just as Wotan does not consciously understand. […] Had the thoughts I have just sketched been expressed by either of the characters, the drama would have collapsed entirely. The wonderful climax of this opera depends entirely on the subconscious nature of the forces that are coming to fruition, now in this character, now in that.10 The unravelling of Wagner’s tetralogy draws its major strength from the fact that the deepest truths about the characters, truths that go beyond their own understanding, are not expressed explicitly, through the ­characters’ words, since they are not conscious of them; instead, they are suggested through the leitmotifs performed by the orchestra. Leitmotifs thus act both as a signal for and as a commentary on the action. The same process is at work in Parade’s End. It is probably most manifest in the development of the love relationship between Valentine and Tietjens. The lexical symmetries achieved by the narration between Valentine and Tietjens serve as a virtual means of union between the two characters. In the second part of Some Do Not…, Valentine remembers the cart ride she took with Tietjens at the end of the first part. The event had initially been exclusively narrated through Tietjens’s perspective; Valentine’s feelings were then absent from the narration, since they were impenetrable to him: She appeared golden in the sudden moonlight. Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but irresistible ­impulse! He exclaimed: “Steady, the Buffs!” in his surprise. She said: “Well, you might as well have given me a hand.” […] He couldn’t believe she could be so absolutely calm: the after-wash of that impulse had been so strong in him that it was as if he had tried to catch her to

70  Isabelle Brasme him and had been foiled by her. She ought to be indignant, amused, even pleased…. She ought to show some emotion…. (SDN 137–38) Valentine’s own recollection of this same event, in the second part of the novel, both reflects and inflects Tietjens’s perception: There came back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden lapse, like the momentary dream when you fall…. (SDN 235) The parallelism of the phrase “the impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him” highlights the fact that Valentine, unlike Tietjens, is conscious of the reciprocation in their ­emotions; interestingly, as well, the key word in both Valentine’s and ­Tietjens’s reflections is the same: “impulse.” Another chiasmus is established within this same page: Valentine thinks she hears Tietjens call her “dear”: “He added: ‘It’s queer, dear…’ In the tumult of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said ‘dear’” (SDN 235). During the cart ride in the first part of Some Do Not…, Tietjens has a similar doubt: “He wasn’t certain she hadn’t said: ‘Dear!’ or ‘My dear!’” (SDN 140). These mirrorings connect the characters beyond their own consciousnesses, since Some Do Not… does not end on the resolution of their affair. It is only at the end of the third novel in the tetralogy, A Man Could Stand Up—, that the characters become lovers. Significantly, when Valentine decides to become Tietjens’s mistress on Armistice Day, she thinks again about the cart ride they took six years earlier—referring here to Tietjens as “it”: Once she had been out with it for a whole night in a dog-cart! […] And she had certainly wanted it to kiss her—in the moon-lit mists […] If, then, she did it to-day… to-day… today—the Eleven Eleven! Oh, what a day to-day would be…. (AMCSU 522) This ultimate reference to the event confirms the structural role this ­leitmotif carries out in the development of the love relationship within the novel, beyond the characters’ own consciousnesses and beyond what is articulated by the narration. It becomes apparent here how leitmotifs in Parade’s End do not merely structure elements of the plot into a network; they express and make us sense the action in a way both subtler and more efficient than would be possible through narration alone. With the use of leitmotifs, a sub-text is thus established that reveals

Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End  71 the characters’ underlying and still subconscious feelings. Through his musical competence and his deep interest in Wagner, Ford explores the Wagnerian leitmotif in a manner both precise and innovative, which ­eschews—and helps us avoid—a pitfall in the interpretation of ­Wagner’s work. Ford’s accurate use of the leitmotif indeed reminds us of the risk that consists in seeing a Wagnerian influence at play in a literary work simply because of the presence of musical themes. Karl Beckson has highlighted this oft-made mistake: Wagner is perceived as the primary influence on a great many a­ uthors and works, when, it seems, the source of the influence is far broader, for the entire Romantic movement in nineteenth-century culture is involved, of which Wagner is a major manifestation.11 It is possible to delineate a difference within Parade’s End between a broader nineteenth-century influence, such as in the symphonic use of themes which we observed, and a more specifically Wagnerian use of motifs. Indeed, the Wagnerian use of leitmotif is more complex and modern than is often considered. As we just observed, it is not a mere theme underlining and structuring the action in the manner of broader ­nineteenth-century musical motifs, but bears a definite—if s­ ubterranean— influence on the action. It is through the full exploitation of the leitmotif in a specifically Wagnerian sense that Ford’s text achieves a major shift from tradition to modernity. The modernity of Ford’s writing comes into play within the detail of the text, where truths are revealed obliquely through an underlying musical network and not through the main voices. Wagner’s marginal and transitional status among the ­European musical movements of the end of the nineteenth century may be likened to Ford’s own situation within the literary movements of his time. Ford’s use of the Wagnerian leitmotif may even pave the way towards a radically innovative aesthetics at work within Parade’s End. Scruton notes that Wagner compared the function of the leitmotifs played by the orchestra and that of the chorus in a Greek tragedy: The music in the orchestra pit is in a crucial sense no part of the action: it was likened by Wagner, with some truth, to the chorus in the Greek theatre. The music is responding to what occurs on the stage, feeding from it, and feeding into it. When the characters sing, they attach their feelings to the musical line, borrow the great force of sympathy with which the orchestra surrounds their action, and project their emotions into our hearts. But this is not representation. Rather, it is a special case of expression, in which the orchestra sometimes joins in the feeling expressed, sometimes withdraws from them – resonating, as Wagner perceived, like the chorus in a play.12

72  Isabelle Brasme Max Saunders uses the very same analogy to demonstrate that the structural motifs interspersed within Parade’s End are less traditional than they may appear. He thus illuminates the recurrence of the phrase “some do not” in the tetralogy’s first novel: Certainly here Ford wants the phrase to stand for more than a network of private allusions […] He wants to elevate these into the dominant subjects of the novel. But when he has an old tramp, who has no more involvement with the story, echo the full phrase yet again, […] there is more at stake: “‘Some do!’ He spat into the grass; said ‘Ah!’ then added: ‘Some do not!’” [280]. It is a moment of disconcerting unreality, disconcertingly dual because the phrase is also the title of the novel we are reading, so it places us dually within and without the fiction at the same time. While doing so, it gives an intimation of a controlling force operating behind the story. It represents a departure from the Conradian scruple of “justification”—of building up a sense of inevitability by preparing each effect (such as making it seem inevitable, rather than fortuitous, that these onlookers should utter the mots justes). They act like the chorus in Greek tragedy.13 The overtly artificial quality of the leitmotif, as it signals the novel’s own constructedness, breaks the fictional illusion and thus offers a discourse on the literary act, on the notion of realism, and on its limits. Acting as a chorus, leitmotifs do not only underline or shed light on the action, but also constitute a metatextual commentary on the act of writing. Such a gesture is decisively innovative. Ford thus brings forward the literariness of his fiction and intimates a reflection on the act of fabulation. With this use of metatext brought about by the deliberate highlighting of the leitmotifs’ constructedness, Parade’s End does not merely break away from traditional realist fiction and tie in with modernism; the gesture may seem to reach even beyond modernist preoccupations. Wagner’s and Ford’s tetralogies also share an ultimate common trait. Both leave their reader or audience with an impression of monumentality. The musical dimension is thus paired with a powerful material aspect. Parade’s End and Wagner’s Tetralogy indeed both offer us the experience of a complete artwork—Gesamtkunstwerk. This is due as much to their actual length (Parade’s End runs over a thousand pages in a paperback edition; a performance of the Der Ring may last thirteen to seventeen hours) as to the impression of duration created by the work of art. The action in Parade’s End takes place over about twelve years, but its ramifications in the past are infinitely far-reaching: they imply not only the characters’ past and heritage, starting with the first Tietjens in the seventeenth century, but also that of Western civilization, which led to the 1914–18 cataclysm. The sudden accelerations and slowdowns in the narration also contribute to the notion of length. Similarly, in Der

Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End  73 Ring, time is being handled both on a colossal scale and in a contrasted manner: the plot is sometimes protracted over several generations, and sometimes, on the contrary, extremely contracted. The immense scale also touches on the mythical status of either world described, each in its own context—Nordic mythology or twentieth-century history. Both describe the jeopardized destiny and the collapse of a world and of a civilization, be they divine or human. Both end with the image of a new world emerging from the ruins of the old one. In both cases, such vastness may daunt and even discourage the reader or audience. Listening to or attending a performance of Der Ring in its entirety is no mean achievement; the same holds true, some may say, for Parade’s End. This immensity may also lead to inconsistencies—­ suggesting that these works may prove somewhat unmanageable for their creators as well as for their public. Unless, one may consider, these inconsistencies are deliberate and contribute to create the impression of a work that may never be fully mastered. In the case of Ford, this notion is deepened through the shift towards atonality.

Counterpoints, Modulations, and Atonality Ford’s extensive use of leitmotifs generates a multitude of echoes that reverberate constantly within the text. They create a variety of musical voices and of melodic lines that propagate and interweave as the text unfolds. Besides the deferred echoes studied above, the text is also interspersed with more immediate echoes. The narration thus occasionally shifts into a stichomythic dialogue, as in the following exchange between Sylvia and her mother: “Mother, didn’t you one day…say that you had done with men? […]” Mrs. Satterthwaite said: “I did.” “And did you keep to it?” Sylvia asked. Mrs. Satterthwaite said: “I did.” “And shall I, do you imagine?” Mrs. Satterthwaite said: “I imagine you will.” (SDN 28–29) The progression of this dialogue, marked by a striking economy of words, hinges on the modulation of the auxiliaries: “didn’t” is followed by “did,” “shall” becomes “will.” The text thus proceeds through anadiplosis: its progression is based on subtle variations within the repetitions that characterize the passage. These variations are themselves underscored by the repetition of the clause “Mrs. Satterthwaite said.”

74  Isabelle Brasme The phrase, recurring each time in the exact same form, resonates in the manner of a continuous bass part. The melodic line, which may appear to be broken through the swift stichomythia, is therefore actually sustained throughout the dialogue. This feature is common to many conversations in the novel. Vladimir Jankélévitch’s definition of the counterpoint proves here highly relevant: Le contrepoint lui-même a une âme, en ceci que le parallélisme de ses voix a été expressément réglé note pour note par une volonté musicienne qui fait chanter ensemble ou converser plusieurs parties mélodiques également expressives, et pourtant l’une sur l’autre brodées dans le colloque vivant de la polyphonie.14 Counterpoint itself has a soul, in that the parallelism of its voices was expressly set note for note by a musical will that has several melodic parts sing together or converse, parts that are yet stitched onto one another in the living colloquium of polyphony. (my translation) The alternation of a questioning, responding, and narrative voice in the aforementioned passage implies three different inflections and may thus evoke a contrapuntal song. The analysis may be pushed further and reveal the presence of a fugal composition, in which three melodic lines respond and interweave.15 Ford highlighted his attachment to the fugal form in a later work, Provence: The—literally and only literally—meaningless contrapuntal ­passages of Bach are infinitely more emotional and the cause of e­ motion— and they are much more mystically so than the most realistic programme-music founded on the most earnest and ingenious renderings of the snorting of dragons, Valkyrs or serpents.16 Ford is therefore not only inspired by Wagnerian or nineteenth-century symphonic works; the influence of baroque music is also at work, and may even seem to be favored as a superior influence. As with his literary influences, Ford’s musical inspiration is characterized by a deep eclecticism. The sixth chapter of Some Do Not… opens onto a monologue by ­Tietjens that makes the musical analogy explicit while introducing yet another radically different musical reference, through Elgar and the ­parade music: “Land of Hope and Glory!”—F natural descending to tonic, C ­major: chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C major…. All absolutely correct! (SDN 106)

Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End  75 Tietjens offers us here a masterly tonal analysis. While revealing on this occasion his own competence as a musician, Ford confirms our intimation that musical references in Parade’s End are not fortuitous, but highly significant. However, his intention here reaches far deeper. The text also suggests the possible musical models that might have inspired and informed its genesis. The Parade’s End tetralogy certainly does not strive to imitate a march like that of Pomp and Circumstance, here mentioned by Tietjens: as its title signals, the “parade” here is at an “end.” Tietjens’s tone is profoundly derisive; his feigned wonder at the march’s alleged perfection, “absolute correct[ness],” is antiphrastic. The pervasive irony in Ford’s writing introduces modulations to the mainstream discourse. The ideological system depicted by the novel may thus be assimilated to a symphony made up of shifting, if not discordant, tonalities. The ideological representation in the novel is i­ndeed constantly inflected by satire, which is conveyed in the text by an often disconcerting mix of tones. Tonalities in Parade’s End are multiplied and mixed-up to the point of being sometimes heard simultaneously and therefore voiding one another, giving in to a strikingly ­innovative atonality. The breakfast at the Duchemins’ rendered in the first novel (SDN 90–104) provides an illustration of this phenomenon. The weekly breakfast hosted by Reverend Duchemin is celebrated within the ­British elite portrayed in the novel as an eminent rite of preservation of traditions, at the heart of the sanctuary of good manners that constitutes the Duchemin rectory. Yet this very ritual provides the occasion for the cracks in the civilizational edifice to become most apparent. The ­collapse of values is conveyed through a vertiginous polyphony. As conversations superimpose and intermingle, so do tonalities. The most obvious key of the passage is that of social satire—yet the scene also partakes of the burlesque, through Reverend Duchemin’s obscene remarks and ­Macmaster’s heroicomic efforts to restrain him; of the pathetic, when Mrs. Duchemin’s distress is depicted; and of the romantic, through the nascent understanding between Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin. Establishing a dominant tonality proves impossible, as is also occasionally the case with Wagner, notably with the oft-noted Tristan prelude: We may be reluctant to say that the prelude to Tristan und Isolde is really “in” A minor—not because it is in some other key, but ­because it is “in” no key at all.17 This shift towards atonality in Wagner heralds the musical experiments of the twentieth century, such as the works by Arnold Schoenberg or ­A lban Berg, which bring tonality to a point of crisis. Similarly, Ford’s text enacts a transition between nineteenth-century influences and an aesthetics of rupture. With Ford, polyphony shifts towards cacophony.

76  Isabelle Brasme Every character tells his or her own part, yet fails to be heard by the others. Discourses overlap without any manifest link, precluding the emergence of any apparent harmony. The many instances of defeated conversations in Parade’s End testify to this: every character pursues aloud their own interior monologues, without any concern for the interlocutor’s attention or answer. Dialogues in Parade’s End often sound more like ­double— and often dissonant—monologues than like actual conversations: each follows his or her own train of thoughts independently of the other. These deliberate harmonic ruptures place us specifically in an aesthetics of the counterpoint, such as it is used in twentieth-century composition: “Counterpoint endows simultaneous voices with melodic independence, within a single harmonic structure.”18 Instances of this phenomenon are everywhere to be found in the ­tetralogy. Here are just a few examples taken from the first volume: “But Tietjens was not listening” (Tietjens not listening to General Campion, SDN 77); “but he was following his own train of thought, just as she wasn’t in the least listening to him” (Tietjens and Valentine, SDN 113); “She hadn’t really been listening” (Valentine not listening to Mark, SDN 228); “Valentine, for the first time in her life, hardly listened to what he said” (Valentine and Tietjens, SDN 253). The narration makes this conversational malfunctioning explicit during a conversation—or rather, precisely, a non-conversation—between Sylvia and Tietjens: They played that comedy occasionally […] So they would talk, sometimes talking at great length and with politeness, each thinking his or her thoughts till they drifted into silence. (SDN 164) The crisis of the Western harmonic system is most patent in the musical rendering of the senselessness of war. On this occasion, the fugue imagery is made explicit in one of Tietjens’s considerations on the noise made by the soldiers on the front: From outside came a continuing, swelling and descending chant of voices; at times it would seem to be all one laugh, at times one menace, then the motives mingled fugally, like the sea on a beach of large stones. (NMP 319) Tietjens assimilates the noises of the war to an incoherent fugue, a “chant” that keeps changing keys and never settles on a definite tonality. The Great War shed a glaring and unequivocal light onto the crisis of Western civilization. Through his highly operative use of musical

Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End  77 imagery and a heightened sense of cacophony to render the world at war, Ford reveals the necessity for a new medium—be it musical, literary, or a conflation of both—to express the loss of a stable system of thought and values. Ford’s enlightened use of techniques borrowed from music thus shapes his exploration of new narrative forms. His use of the musical paradigm throughout the text is endowed with a metapoetic quality, which invites a reflection on the obsolescence of conventional aesthetics and of the necessity for a radically new mode of artistic expression.

Notes 1 Francis Hueffer was the chief redactor of the Times’s musical section from 1878 until his death in 1889. See Sondra Stang and Carl Smith, “‘Music for a While’: Ford’s Compositions for Voice and Piano,” Contemporary Literature 30.2 (1989), 183. Hereafter cited in text. 2 See Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 1 (Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 1996), 100. 3 For more information on Ford’s experience with music and on the influence of music on his earlier works, see Stang and Smith, “‘Music for a While,’”. 4 The Parade’s End tetralogy was first published as Some Do Not… (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up— (1926), and Last Post (1928). 5 “Every word set on paper—every word set on paper—must carry the story forward and […] as the story progresse[s], the story must be carried f­ orward faster and faster and with more and more intensity. That is called progression d’effet, words for which there is no English equivalent.” Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Gerald ­Duckworth, 1924), 210. 6 References between brackets are all to Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001). Hereafter cited in text; abbreviations ­refer to the four novels: Some Do Not… (SDN), No More Parades (NMP), A Man Could Stand Up— (AMCSU), and The Last Post (LP). 7 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 19–20. 8 Although there seem to be few traces of Ford mentioning Verdi, there is no doubt that the composer was an important part of Ford’s musical education. The analogy is striking between the opening sentences of the Parade’s End chapters here mentioned and the opening bars of La Traviata’s first and third acts. This analogy, I confess, is one drawn from my own experience of both Ford’s and Verdi’s works; however, I believe it may provide a new and useful perspective on Ford’s art of composition in Parade’s End. 9 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 136. 10 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 136–37. 11 Karl Beckson, “A Review Essay: Perfect and Imperfect Wagnerites,” Modern Language Studies 14.1 (1984), 91. 12 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 135–36. 13 Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2.273–74. 14 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 224.

78  Isabelle Brasme 15 “A polyphonic composition constructed on one or more short subjects or themes, which are harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint, and introduced from time to time with various contrapuntal devices.” “Fugue,” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 16 Ford Madox Ford, Provence (New York: Ecco Press, 1979 [1935]), 233. 17 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 261. 18 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 262.

5 The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore Fugue as Bridge to a New Feminist Awakening Renée Dickinson Olive Moore is both a mystery and a conundrum. As a working-class, second-generation, female modernist writer, her life and work reveal her struggle with what it means to be a modern woman and resituate established modernist writers and their culture, such as Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. We know very little of Moore’s life and work. Her birth and death dates, most of her manuscripts, and her life are still largely subject to speculation, and little literary criticism has been published on her work.1 Born Constance Vaughan in Hereford around 1904, she published four books in the early 1930s, then slipped into obscurity until the 1990s, when the Dalkey Archive Press republished her novels posthumously. Vaughan published four books in rapid succession under her pen name Olive Moore: three novels, Celestial Seraglio in 1929, Spleen in 1930, and Fugue in 1932, and one collection of aphorisms or “­notebooks,” The Apple is Bitten Again, in 1934. She was part of the Charles Lahr Red Lion Street circle, a literary and political meeting place in Lahr’s Holborn bookstore from which Lahr ran his Blue Moon Press that initially published Moore’s novels. 2 In addition to writing fiction, she wrote features and reviews for John O’London’s Weekly and The Daily Sketch under her birth name. Until recently, the only detailed information about Moore’s life and work was available in Alec Bristow’s appendix of the Dalkey Archive Press’s Collected Writings.3 To fill in these gaps in her biography and bibliography, several students and I have conducted research on Moore’s life, and we have so far unearthed documents proving that she was married to the sculptor Sava Botzaris in 1924 and that they had a child, Peter, in 1925.4 So far, I have not reliably traced her life past 1934, nor have I found a manuscript of the theatrical endeavor she discussed with friends, Amazon and Hero. I have located, at The University of London’s Senate House Library, the handwritten manuscript of Fugue, as well a few letters by Moore, and I have plumbed The British Library’s Newspaper Library that holds microfilm copies of The Daily Sketch for which she wrote as a staff writer. To date, I have found thirty-seven articles written by Moore for The Daily Sketch as Constance Vaughan, as well as a few additional early articles written for John O’London’s Weekly.5

80  Renée Dickinson In her journalism for The Daily Sketch and John O’London’s Weekly, Vaughan/Moore caters almost solely to a conservative crowd, although arguably a bit tongue-in-cheek. For example, in one of her earliest ­journalism pieces, she states that “all men who flatter themselves that they understand women—flatter themselves.”6 Written when she was perhaps nineteen, almost ten years before the publication of her novels, this statement both criticizes the male ego and hearkens forward to Virginia Woolf’s “looking glass” ideas in A Room of One’s Own, where Woolf argues that “women have served all these centuries as ­looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”7 But unlike Woolf, Moore does not then counterpoint with a valorization of women. Instead, she consistently posits men’s voices as dominant over women’s as men are the judges of women, even when men prove unworthy or foolish. One sticking point for Moore is the role of what she terms the “natural law” in gender roles. In the 1924 Sketch article titled “What a Woman is Not Worth,” she describes how men are the adjudicators of women due to this natural law: “the tragic-comedy of woman will always be that, whatever the foolish anti-biological arguments for sex equality, her ‘worth’ is always at the mercy of man,” because the estimate of woman rests on man’s valuation, and try as we will, with all the defences of equal rights and modern freedom, we cannot gainsay this natural law, which, with all due apologies to American notions, is not, mercifully, founded upon purely cash values.8 Moore sees patriarchy as an unbreakable, unshakeable law that positions man to judge woman so that woman is objectified and summed up by “man’s valuation.” In the same article, she further asserts that this objectification is not just a natural law but is also the fault of the “modern woman”: The present boom in feminism, fostered by cheap films and the fact that almost every girl nowadays has a pretty face, is responsible for the flock of standardized flappers who call for this trivial over-­ emphasis of their value in the scheme of things. Moore defines feminism here by the image of the modern woman cum flapper as emphasized in her focus on the “pretty face” of “almost every girl.” Ultimately, her criticism is of women overvaluing of themselves “in the scheme of things,” implying that Moore finds something more important than women, if not more important than these women. Namely, it is clear that it is men who are what is more important and, also, more capable of judging women. This “scheme of things,” then, is the “natural

The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore  81 law” that posits men as subjects to judge the object of woman. If her definition of feminism is of an image of the female body, her feminism, at this point, sees women as only worthy of being objects, inherently making them subject to and dependent upon man’s gaze, action, and evaluation. In other articles, she continues to criticize women’s intellect as well as appearance. In “The Most Remarkable Novel” (1925), she writes: our own tussle with the mannish woman was waged these thousand years ago, when three young princes sat in their room discussing the eternal Eve well into the night… “If only she could contrive to be a little less mannish!” A dissertation ending with a piece of wisdom unmatched today. Sometimes indeed a woman should even pretend to know less than she knows, or say only a part of what she would like to say…9 (ellipses hers and the end of the article) In this passage, it is clear that “mannish” does not describe appearance but cleverness. Not only is the feminine woman more appealing to men than the “mannish” woman, this appeal includes self-edited naiveté: women should pretend to not know so much. Women must appeal to men and patriarchy and must deny themselves, an edict which smacks of self-hatred and reveals her own contradictory position on feminism: an outspoken woman supporting herself through her writing and wit, yet critical of women who think too much. Her conflicted position as wit and woman is once more present in her 1926 Sketch article, “Modern Man Revolts.” She clearly states that she considers herself: not a feminist. Judged by the surprise this at times occasions, it is, I understand, unusual. I find myself willing enough to admit that women in public life can be both unnecessary and inefficient, and am old-fashioned and self-indulgent enough to believe a woman’s place is in the home.10 The “surprise” she indicates here suggests that she is often perceived as a feminist: she is described by Alec Bristow in the appendix to Dalkey Archive Press’s Collected Writings as “intimidating” and as one who “made her presence felt in any company” through her “carrying voice and penetrating laugh” (424). Her conclusion to the article—“personally I am entirely in agreement with anyone who assures me that my proper place is in the home—because it is quite the most enthralling place to be in”—reads as sarcastic if not ironic in tone, considering her own role as a working woman. Her conflicted position on women becomes increasingly clear as, in this same year, she begins to criticize women’s financial dependence on

82  Renée Dickinson men. In “How It Feels Being ME: A Modern Girl Explains Herself” (1926), she writes that her disagreement is with what the people who complain call The Modern Girl. Their criticisms seem to me to centre round that flaunting, extravagant queen, shingled, lip-sticked, exposing her knees and her independence with impudent self-consciousness, and despising parental control while accepting parental cheques…. But is this not woman of all ages throughout the Ages? Has not what is popularly arraigned as the Modern Girl been railed at by every publicist and satirist from juvenal onwards? And is it quite fair that we really modern girls whose outlook is evolving beyond the old parasitic instinct should be penalized for a product which has shown no variety, no progress, since human society first fashioned itself into its ill-assorted patterns? […] Everything that is young, dear critics, is not modern.11 As we will see, her critique of “woman of all ages throughout the Ages” will reappear in her last published work, The Apple is Bitten Again. In the above passage, she describes herself as a “really modern gir[l] whose outlook is evolving” beyond reliance on image, men, and (read “patriarchal”) family. Instead, she prefers to look 300 years forward when “one may dream of the brave things which will be accomplished, without much hope of taking part in them.”12 Although she can envision a future in which the “really modern girls” will do brave things, she sees that “other day girls seem either not to have questioned, or, having questioned, groaned under the tyranny of still wasting life: We question and live accordingly!” Her conflict here becomes the really modern woman who questions “tyranny” and the pretty woman who “pretend[s] to know less than she knows.” Later, in this same article, Moore grapples with the defining difference between a young woman and the truly modern woman. She writes about seeing a film in which a wife has to ask/beg for money from her husband to go to the theater: It may be I had mislaid my sense of fun that day, but the uncouth scene, with its laughter, brought home to me with a warm gladness the significance of having dipped my hand into my own pocket for my own money for the privilege of witnessing this doleful entertainment, and that that same pocket must supply throughout my life whatever needs or desires I may have…. Of the young girls around me I thought: when they cease to laugh they may cease to beg… Wherein lies, possibly, the dividing line between the young girl of any day and the modern girl of today. Truly modern women, then, are financially independent and not at the “mercy of man.” At least, that is, financially. Here, Moore seems to

The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore  83 agree with Woolf who, in A Room of One’s Own, describes the “power of [her] purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically” (37). The significant difference, of course, is that the income Woolf describes is inherited (as well as earned) and, from what we understand, Moore’s income was only earned, and earned outside of the home. At this point in her life, Olive Moore, approximately twenty-two years old, was married and had given birth to a son. However, in none of the sources that the Dalkey Archive Press appendix cites, nor in my own archival and biographical research, is there any evidence of knowledge of her marriage and maternity, neither within the public at large nor even her immediate social circle. During this time, although her bylines in The Daily Sketch are few, she traveled to New York with Botzaris and transitioned from women’s journalism to fiction: her novels Celestial ­Seraglio, Spleen, and Fugue were published around this time. Fugue, her third novel, may provide the best lens with which to view Moore’s continued evolution and struggle to define the modern woman. At first reading, Moore’s choice of the word “fugue” seems curious, as the novel contains no overt reference to music or psychology. However, the layered definition of “fugue” points to the multiple mechanisms at work in the text and signals, too, Moore’s play with formal technique. “Fugue,” meaning “to flee” or “flight,” denotes both a musical form and a psychological condition.13 Through her experimentations with narrative and form, Moore explores and exposes all these meanings in her text. In brief, Fugue tells the parallel stories of Lavinia Reade and her former lover, Harrion. As Harrion repeatedly tries to flee the newly pregnant Lavinia, she pursues him from London to the rural ­A lsace region. The narrative repeatedly shifts from the Alsace present to the London past and between the stories of Lavinia, Harrion, and their tumultuous love affair. Ultimately, Harrion departs Alsace alone, traveling to Paris, where he daily observes the smoke and, occasionally, the burning bodies in the crematorium. Lavinia, accepting the end of her relationship with Harrion, stays in Alsace and transfers her affections to another expatriate, Sebastian. The novel’s twin narratives stop abruptly, leaving ­Harrion watching the rising smoke and Lavinia and Sebastian in a moment of post-coital bliss in the Alsatian pastoral. As a psychological condition, “fugue” refers to a mental state of dissociation or “dissociative amnesia plus travel” that “is accompanied by either confusion about personal identity or the assumption of a new identity, either partial or complete.”14 Fugue explores issues of ­psychological dissociation through both its characters and its narrative construction. Fugue thus performs the psychological definition of “fugue” as it portrays the various flights of the characters through the dissociation between mind and body of both Harrion and Lavinia and the physical split between London and Alsace. Here, fugue’s root meaning “to flee” manifests itself as the subject dissociating from a physical location in order

84  Renée Dickinson to escape a psychological condition. Harrion and Lavinia both “flee” to Alsace (and ultimately Paris for Harrion) and experience “confusion about personal identity.” In both cases, the fugue state of the characters contributes to their sense of being “lost” in their physical and psychic disorientation. Fugue explores the musical form of “fugue” through its contrapuntal narrative techniques. In music, “fugue” is a composition in which “a succession of notes in one part is taken over in another part, with due regard for the mode, and especially for the position of whole- and ­half-tone steps.”15 The fugue uses imitative counterpoint where the musical theme is developed through reversal, inversion, augmentation, or diminution. More than a round, a fugue expands or plays with the theme in each voice, typically returning to a restatement of the theme. In a “double fugue,” two subjects simultaneously develop throughout the piece either concurrently or consecutively, again elaborating each subject until the conclusion. In other words, “simple fugues are based on a single theme; multiple fugues are as a rule summarily called double fugues.”16 Fugue references and even borrows the structure of the musical fugue for its narrative(s); Fugue overlaps the two narratives of Lavinia and Harrion, eventually moving oppositely and beyond a point-­counterpoint structure. Harrion is not simply the counterpoint or inversion of L ­ avinia. Instead, his narrative develops and moves independently from Lavinia’s, often working through counterpoint, but ultimately ending up in a very different place. Thus, Fugue works as a double fugue, developing two subjects simultaneously, keeping them (mostly) separate throughout. However, the novel never reconciles the two themes by returning to a unified restatement. Instead, Fugue’s counterpointed form breaks the traditional fugue form, ultimately exposing the psychological dissociation of the modern subject’s split subjectivities. Let’s briefly review the narrative’s portrayal of psychological dissociation by analyzing the formal experimentations of the text. Moore’s contradictory characterizations of Lavinia—she is both “bold” and “silent,” full of both “sorrow” and “laughter”—suggest that the feminine causes rifts in subjectivity.17 Lavinia’s evident lack of self-awareness here points to a further split: she is an agent separate from her mind. Later, Harrion says of her: “[b]y [the stars’] light her face took on a luminous unreal surface-quality of stone” (239).18 Thus, Lavinia embodies the split subjectivity of the modern woman: she is both “independent” and reliant on her relationships with men, she is both a “torch” and “flame,” and she has the “unreal surface-quality of stone.” Additionally, Lavinia’s mind acts on its own, in contradiction to her body. When Harrion first meets Lavinia, it is her un-self-conscious separation from her body that attracts him: Perhaps he liked the wide and eager smile with which she had greeted him; the scarlet frock: a frock a child would choose for best…. And

The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore  85 not once did she pose for him: neither aware of her legs, nor her nose, nor her hair, nor her wants. (249) Here, Lavinia cannot escape the “wide and eager” performance of her body and what her body does all by itself: how it marks her as sexual and as female although she is not “aware” of it. Her female body not only summons sexual desire, but also inherently grants it, splitting her mind from her body’s activity. At this point in the novel, she is not consciously fleeing from her feminine status, but her mind is already displaying signs of its dissociation from her body through her lack of awareness of her body’s performance. The feminine split from the masculine plays out in Harrion and ­Lavinia’s sexual relationship, leading eventually to their relational and psychological dissociation. With Harrion, Lavinia’s body is not only sexualized; it is an object acted/sexed upon by Harrion, revealing not only her status as sex object but ultimately as sex toy: For it was horrible the way he held her down and consumed her. It was no longer a mutual act, but a thing dark and fearful which he performed despite himself. She thought at first it was because he was a man who had been long denied. But that phase was past and it continued like a war waged against a secret enemy. It seemed a thing he did in fear and secrecy. Some dark forbidden thing, a thing avid, sinful, that he fought to shut out as he held her down, impaled; impaled on the drawn sword between man and woman; enmity eternal. Yet he seemed scarcely conscious of her. He drained her in this dark and secret way. And the result left her lost and impaled, so that she sat and waited for his return; a thing she had never done and could not have conceived herself ever doing. (251–52) Harrion’s dissociation in this passage is clear: sex is something he “perform[s] despite himself… that he fought to shut out as he held her down…. scarcely conscious of her” (251–52). Lavinia’s dissociation also emerges here as she is left “lost and impaled” (252). More importantly, she “waited for his return; a thing she had never done and could not have conceived herself ever doing” (252), indicating her transition from independence to reliance and her dissociation as both “lost” and acting in a way she “could not have conceived.” The disassociation from her body signals her entrance into a fugue state through her emphasis on being “lost” and prefaces her own flight to Alsace and, eventually, into her relationship with Sebastian. The effects of dissociation on Lavinia’s psyche emerge as, despite her ­ arrion conceptions of herself and despite her description of her sex with H as “awful,” “horrible,” and “dark and fearful” (280), she continues

86  Renée Dickinson to wait for him. Lavinia admits she is a “fool” and she “allowed herself” to be used by Harrion with “nothing for her” (252).19 She is now aware of her split subjectivity, half performing with/for Harrion, half recoiling and analyzing her performance. However, the form of Fugue reverses the cycle of dissociation for women by continuing to search out new female subjectivities through textual experimentation and resistance to conclusion. Lavinia states: “No more words (thought Lavinia Reade), no more words. At least not just now. Not on a Sunday afternoon…. Could one not resuscitate or invent some god or hero to whom Sunday afternoon could be sacred in silence?” (306). Her longing for silence is in direct conflict with the text’s attempts to find release from the entrapments of female embodiment and subjectivity through its language. 20 Here the narrative, and a narrator of Fugue, professes to desire the abandonment of language to silence. However, the form of Fugue seeks to resuscitate the text for a feminine subjectivity outside of such inscriptions by creating a text that seeks to exist outside of conclusion—modernist, patriarchal, or otherwise. This conflict between narrative and form creates a textual fugue: the open form in counterpoint to the closed narrative. Although Moore adopts an antiquated mode of the musical fugue, she adapts it into a modernist composition that, despite its portrayal of inescapable embodiments of the feminine, resists conclusion and remains without resolution. Thus, Moore indicates her opposition to these deeply rooted musical, corporeal, and narrative inscriptions. In presenting both the point of the form and the counterpoint of the narrative, Moore acknowledges the context in which female subjectivity must emerge in order to create an Edenic place in which to launch it. Fugue insists not only that all of the voices of the modern polyphonic chaos are present, but also that they are all necessary to understand the inherent difficulty of creating alternate feminine subjectivities. David Harvey asserts that high modernists exalt textual experimentation to “establish a new mythology”: “the exploration of aesthetic experience…became a powerful means to establish a new mythology as to what the eternal and the immutable might be about in the midst of all the ephemerality, fragmentation, and patent chaos of modern life.”21 Fugue, however, does not offer reconciliation of the modernist subject and modern life. Moore does not exalt textual experimentation as a way to do so: its modernist form does not make sense out of modern life, nor does it suggest that it can. Rather, Fugue performs the “ephemerality, fragmentation, and…chaos of modern life” and sends its characters and narratives reeling in divergent directions. Fugue reveals how these seemingly connected lives of Harrion and Lavinia are truly disparate. Any perceived connections completely unravel by the end into ­haphazard ­liaisons like that between Lavinia and Sebastian.

The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore  87 Additionally, with its resistance to conclusion, Fugue asserts a version of the feminine through the form of the text. The open-ended (un) structure of the text with its doubled in/conclusions place it within what Friedman and Fuchs describe as “the radical forms—nonlinear, nonhierarchical, and decentering—[which] are, in themselves, a way of writing the feminine.”22 The close of Fugue includes the inconclusions of the two primary subjects or voices in the novel, Harrion and Lavinia. First, Harrion’s narrative is interrupted as he watches the mourners come to the crematorium, realizing that he will not be allowed in to watch the body burn and instead must remain outside to watch the smoke of the burning: He leaned against a pillar to steady himself, with nostrils distended like an animal flaring the scent of another; and it came surprisingly quickly after the black burning of the wood, the thin grey column in ascension perpetual with its stench of grease and putrescence. He smiled, and held up his face. (333) Immediately following Harrion’s crematorium moment is a hard break in the text, followed by this last, post-coital scene with Lavinia and Sebastian: From a height the sun chose, drowsy fastidious bee, now this village, now that. —There is a future for these people, Sebastian was saying. And Lavinia Reade, shading her eyes from the bright look of the day, and gazing down at the Bacchic frieze of grapes, the tumbling children and burdened, fields, and oxen remote in their unhurried condescension, said: No! There is an eternity. (333) As the text poses these twin endings, it asserts its resistance to conclusion by asserting the continuance of both narratives. Neither subject/ voice/storyline resolves satisfactorily, if at all. Rather, the text suggests that each will continue and continue in its devolution. This inconclusivity, according to Lavinia, as well as Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, with its disruption of linear (read patriarchal) narratives, is specifically useful in conveying the feminine. Earlier, in her rumination on Alsace, Lavinia states, “[t]his village was big enough. This was a world. A woman’s world: world without end” (309), indicating in the narrative Moore’s link between inconclusion and the feminine. For Lavinia, at least, the unending quality of the world of Alsace is specifically related to its status as “a woman’s world” (309). In this instance, Moore aligns form and narrative, for once asserting her authorial

88  Renée Dickinson position through her protagonist. Through these experimental modernist forms that break from traditional and modernist (both typically patriarchal) forms, Moore finds a greater opening for the emergence of feminine alterity. Textual orientation, then, is not something arrived at, but something gestured toward as the text points toward a new direction to be discovered in female subjectivity. Moore’s textual experimentations seek to navigate a way out of the abject status of female subjectivity and, instead of a closed, repetitive textual form that would return the feminine to its inescapable inscriptions as maternal and sexualized, offer an open-ended, inconclusive form that opens the way for new versions of the feminine to be expressed. The hesitancy of the text to conclude itself suggests the expectation of further possibilities. When her journalistic record continues seven years later, in the article, “Men and Monuments: What the Sentimental Sex Does With Its ­Memorials” (1933), Moore’s position on women and feminism has clearly changed as she now criticizes men and their objectification of the female image: “men have made them all [public monuments and statues]. And they never vary.”23 Not only does she criticize men’s use of women’s bodies in general, she also criticizes the use of these images as propaganda for war that women do not support: Yet women, being the practical and not the romantic sex, really dislike war. They see no sense in it, very little fun and no glamour at all. But you cannot keep her off the war memorials! She is always rushing in front, or catching up behind, or floating over the top. Always there. 24 Moore goes on to describe the monuments of women’s bodies further: No disaster is complete without her. No ship can sink, no aeroplane crash, no earthquake quake, no trains collide. But somehow, inescapable in bronze, stone or marble, more-or-less undressed, sits that dreadful Female Figure, symbolizing whatever Man wishes to convey of the heroic, the rash, the tawdry, the self-sacrifice of the occasion. Moore’s criticism of man’s usurpation of the female body for patriarchal and imperial purposes highlights the objectification of the female figure as pliable, molded to the purpose of the moment. Moore’s feminism has turned upon itself: she now criticizes the image that before she encouraged. By 1934, when she writes in the article “White-Headed Women Are the Interesting Women,” her ideas about women and men coalesce into a kind of androgynous figure: Nearly all the white-haired women I have met have been without that most fatal of all women’s failings: self-consciousness…. They have

The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore  89 never posed, or bothered with small feminine subtleties to impress, or be other than simple, downright, and outspoken as a man…. She hasn’t got to bother any more. She is, at last, complete mistress of herself and her words…. She is very human. She may be completely disillusioned, but she is not bitter. You will never find, I have discovered, in an elderly woman that intense bitterness which seems woman’s own particular inheritance…. Indeed, the great charm of an elderly woman, a clear-minded, slightly-humorous woman, is that she takes on—at long last!—the finer characteristics of a man…. Also, have you noticed her face mirrors (at last) her character? It is like a man’s face. Nothing can be done to it, so she leaves it alone. Like a man. Like a nun. Like a child. You must take her as you find her. She is no longer wearing a mask of paint and face creams. She is HERSELF.25 Four times in this article she states that the older woman is “like a man” who is not self-conscious or bitter, does not paint the face but is mistress (or master?) of one’s self. In other words, the privileged, essential self is a self that is masculine if not male. Is this, then, the “woman of tomorrow” that Moore discussed in “How It Feels Being ME: A Modern Girl Explains Herself?” A woman who is male? Has her feminism really evolved at all or has it simply tempered in tone? To begin to answer these questions, it is useful to refer to her collection of notebooks of epigrams that form her last book-length publication, The Apple is Bitten Again, where Moore’s vitriol against women returns. In “On Woman,” Moore again purports stereotypical images of women and nature: “Woman is the vacuum which Nature abhors and must see filled. Consequently woman is always slightly ridiculous unless stretched on a bed or with a child in her arms.”26 Moore here reinscribes the image of woman as maternal or sexual vessel waiting to be filled. In addition, in “Girl Guides in Passing hold-up a Tram,” she continues her critique on women and women’s sexuality: “No wonder men rape children! They seem the only female things that have softness, gentleness, curiousity, sex-appeal, and no moral consciousness. From fourteen onward they harden to granite. Frigid, and with strident hygienic voices” (346–47). Moore’s ideas of sexuality here rely on a Madonna/whore duality that, apparently, leads men to long for the innocence of young girls. In Apple, Moore’s biting and confusing anti-feminism lashes out at Bloomsbury as well, and specifically at Virginia Woolf. In the following response to Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Olive Moore displays her indebtedness within her critique of Woolf, thereby demonstrating the frustrations of second-generation modernists with their predecessors’ attitudes regarding class, gender, and artistic production and suggesting changes in the perspectives, if not the realities, of young women on

90  Renée Dickinson the supposed limits placed on their achievement. In The Apple is Bitten Again, Moore writes: Five hundred a year and a Room of one’s Own. If creative achievement were a matter of a room of one’s own, then since the first dawn in which the first woman was pushed to safety in the first cave, she should have been the world’s creative artist. At no time in the world’s history has woman been without a room of her own. But it has always been the kitchen. Then write on the kitchen table! Paint on the kitchen walls! Draw on the kitchen floor! Carve into shape the pastry and the butter! And so she would have had it been essential to her nature. The bitter story of the Arts urges one to ask what man has ever had a room of his own that he did not have to earn with cadging, pandering, humiliation, fill with wives and children and bailiffs, and still produce by the spirit-alchemy of sweat and desire the works he is remembered by? As though England were not honeycombed with passive aesthetically sterile women of all ages, in rooms of their own ranging from five hundred to five thousand a year! Possibly it produces a local (­village) industry. That is as much as five hundred a year will produce anywhere. To the creative artist 500 is not enough. It must be five millions. Or five pence. (386) Olive Moore wrote this long passage in one of her “notebooks” prior to its publication in The Apple is Bitten Again in 1934, when she was about twenty-nine years old. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, to which Moore clearly responds, was first published in 1929 and based on lectures Woolf gave in 1928, when she was forty-seven years old. 27 Moore refutes Woolf’s arguments in A Room of One’s Own and, in doing so, places the blame solely on women’s shoulders, on their “­passive aesthetically sterile” and “essential… nature[s]” (386). No longer is the patriarchal structure responsible for making changes for women; women must make the changes themselves. Yet this passage articulates Moore’s contradictions between her ideas about women’s subjectivity and the enacting of her own: Moore’s bold fiction writing (and one suspects her living as well) clearly situates her in a different camp from the women she describes in this passage whose “nature[s]” limit them from achievement in or out of the world of men. Although there are many counterpoints to Moore’s rebuttal, her turn toward criticism of Woolf’s feminism signals a new era in feminism and, potentially, for women writers and writing. Most particularly, it demands an address of the voices of working class women and their

The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore  91 desire for what she later calls “security.” In a notebook entry in The Apple is Bitten Again, under the title “Tea-Shoppe,” Moore supports Woolf’s notion of independence for women, which leads to this security: “A ­comfortable income; a room of one’s own; respectability for others. In short, woman’s trump card: security” (388). She does not, however, elaborate on how this security is to be established. Herein lies the difficulty in locating Moore’s feminism: she acknowledges women’s need for financial and domestic independence and security, but she resists a kind of feminism that sees patriarchy as oppressive and obstructive in the process of women’s independence. The fugal voices of her feminism strike only dissonant chords without any move toward resolution. Most clearly, Moore articulates contradictions between her position on women’s subjectivity and the enacting of her own. This tension within the split subjectivity of the modern woman emerges between the possibility for women and what Moore sees as their animalistic, dependent nature. The ambiguity of her own life, as an independent writer with marital and maternal secrets, coupled with her tenuous relationship to feminist ideas, reveals the continued struggle for women and for feminism’s identity in the new modern world of the 1930s. Ultimately, Moore’s writings reveal that there is something inherent in the feminine that requires a splitting of consciousness or of the subject, that there is something inherent in the feminine that requires fugue-ing. Although Fugue, through its primary focus on Lavinia, is mostly concerned with the effects of the fugue state on the modern woman whose split subjectivity is inherent in her position as female, the modern condition, according to Fugue, is one in which neither men nor women are at home in the bodies or lands in which they reside. Moore’s journalism reaffirms this fugue state of the modern woman writer, demonstrating across Moore’s oeuvre the tenuous and shifting position of the female subject and the multiple registers in which she must play.

Notes 1 Per an interview with David Goodway, who is cited in the Dalkey Archive Press’s appendix as suggesting that Moore died sometime after 1970, I learned Charles Lahr simply did not speak of Moore as being alive after 1970. Goodway suggested to me that she might have died anytime after 1934. 2 From the manuscript of Fugue at the University of London’s Senate House Library, we find that Lahr published very small runs of her novels and also sold special editions that included a hand-written manuscript of the novel. 3 Alec Bristow, “Appendix,” in Collected Writings, ed. Olive Moore (­Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992). Hereafter cited in text. 4 I am fully indebted to the dedicated and often tedious work of Cindy M ­ oran, Shelley Gentry Jessee, Bethley Giles, and Brenton Spivey and to their diligence in excavating all possible avenues of biographical research. In addition, I have recently been contacted by Vaughan and Botzaris’s grandchildren, who verified that Peter Botzaris had been adopted. They did not have any additional information on Vaughan/Moore’s life and work.

92  Renée Dickinson 5 My advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement received no response. For additional discussion of Moore’s fiction, please see my Female ­Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel: The Corporeum of ­Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore (New York: Routledge, 2009), as well as Jane ­Garrity’s recent articles: “Found and Lost: The Politics of ­Modernist ­Recovery,” Modernism/Modernity 15.4 (2008); and “Olive Moore’s ­Headless Woman,” Modern Fiction Studies 59.2 (2013). 6 Olive Moore, “[title unknown?],” John O’London’s Weekly, 21 June 1923. 7 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harvest, 1957), 35. Hereafter cited in text. 8 Olive Moore, “What a Woman Is Not Worth,” The Daily Sketch, 11 July 1924. 9 Olive Moore, “The Most Remarkable Novel,” The Daily Sketch, 6 March 1925. 10 Olive Moore, “Modern Man Revolts,” The Daily Sketch, 21 September 1926. 11 Olive Moore, “How It Feels Being ME: A Modern Girl Explains Herself,” The Daily Sketch, 15 April 1926. 12 See Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and her discussion of the imaginary Shakespeare’s sister who “would come if we worked for her” as a later and complimentary text (114). 13 Alfred Mann, The Study of Fugue (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), 154. Mann continues: The term fugue, which Matteson properly explains as a piece in which the voices answer each other, has been derived by some musical scholars from fugare, to chase—since one part chases the other, so to speak—and by others, from fugere, to flee—since one part flees another. (154) 14 Philip M. Coons, “The Dissociative Disorders Rarely Considered and Underdiagnosed,” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 12.3 (1998), 638–39. Additionally, see W.H.R. Rivers’s discussion: [t]he fugue usually comes into being owing to the fact that some unpleasant experience has become unconscious by the unwitting process of suppression or is tending to pass into the unconscious through the agency of the writing process of repression. In such a fugue the dissociation is complete. On return to the normal state there is no memory of the behavior during the fugue or of any conscious processes which accompanied this behavior. W.H.R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses (London: British Psychological Society, 1919), 73 15 Mann, The Study of Fugue, 80. Mann elaborates thus: When one part flees, pursued by another, this is actually nothing but what has been explained as imitation … . A fugue arises when a succession of notes in one part is taken over in another part, with due regard for the mode, and especially for the position of whole- and half-tone steps. (80) 16 Mann, The Study of Fugue, 157. 17 Olive Moore, Fugue in Collected Writings (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992), 250–51. Hereafter cited in text.

The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore  93 18 In an interesting biographical aside, of the two images available of Olive Moore, one is a photograph of a bust of Moore sculpted by her partner/ husband, Sava Botzaris. See Collected Writings for a photograph of the sculpture. 19 Lavinia’s description of Harrion’s approach to sex parallels his description of his visits to the crematorium, extending the connection between Lavinia and the abject feminine through the abjection of the corpse: Here once more desire returned to him. Once again life held an interest; an interest that now could never fail and which he shared alone. For here and at last one could love without fear or rebuff. Indeed, could be so filled with a love for all mankind as to burn in a glowing heat of ecstasy that made one’s footsteps light and suspect. (329) 20 See Patricia Ondek Laurence’s The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991) for a discussion of the use of silence in Woolf, which may be applied here to Moore. Laurence argues that the “‘blanks’ are not blinders but are infused with the psychic life and historical sense of a woman” (9), “not an ‘emptiness’ dependent on the notion of lack or absence. It is a presence to be acknowledged” (33–34), so that “Woolf’s valuing of the silence of women undermines not only patriarchal but also Western notions of talk and silence” (8). 21 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the ­Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 18. 22 Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, “Contexts and Continuities: An ­I ntroduction to Women’s Experimental Fiction in English” in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, eds. Ellen G. Friedman and ­M iriam Fuchs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3. 23 Olive Moore, “Men and Monuments: What the Sentimental Sex Does With Its Memorials,” The Daily Sketch, 17 August 1933. 24 See Woolf’s Three Guineas (New York: Harbinger, 1963) for a further discussion of women’s participation in the rhetoric, imagery and public support of war. 25 Olive Moore, “White-Headed Women Are the Interesting Women,” The Daily Sketch, 15 December 1934. 26 Olive Moore, The Apple is Bitten Again in Collected Writings (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992), 343. Hereafter cited in text. 27 In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf writes, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4).

6 A Strict Arrangement Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, and the Kretzschmar Lectures Maria Kager

Ich fühle es wohl, daß mein Buch selbst das werde sein müssen, wovon es handelt, nämlich konstruktive Musik. —Thomas Mann, in Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus

Theme, Content and Narrative mode: Music in Mann’s Novels Music has long occupied the highest place on the German shortlist of most popular arts, and the affinity of music and literature within German-language culture is well known. Steven Scher notes: “music as an art form has traditionally been taken more seriously in the ­G erman-speaking lands than in other countries—especially by poets, writers, and critics.”1 The close association of music and German writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the era of Goethe to the age of Romanticism, resulted in such music works as Wilhelm Wackenroder’s Herzensergießungen (1797, a work of joint authorship with Ludwig Tieck) and his Phantasien über die Kunst (1799); Tieck’s Die Verkehrte Welt (1799); E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck (1809); Eduard Mörike’s Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (1856); and many more. This trend continued even more strongly into the beginning of the twentieth century, with writers like Hermann Broch, Herman Hesse, and Rainer Maria Rilke joining the pan-European modernist fashion of musicalizing fiction—imitating music in words—as attempted by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, André Gide, and, arguably most famously, James Joyce. Thomas Mann is probably the writer most fixated on music in the German tradition. The attention he pays to music in his fiction derives from a love that dates back to childhood. As a young man, inspired by his mother who was a skilled amateur pianist with a beautiful singing voice, Mann played the violin and, like his character Hanno ­Buddenbrook, enjoyed improvising on the piano. He was an enthusiastic ­opera- and concertgoer, and in later life he became a passionate record collector, organizing frequent gramophone evenings for his family. He had a number of composers and musicians among his friends, especially

A Strict Arrangement  95 after he immigrated to Pacific Palisades, California. Many artists lived in exile there during the years of Nazi occupation, and as a consequence, composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Hans Eisler as well as famous directors and performers like Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, and Arthur Rubinstein were all practically neighbors. Music plays a significant role in almost all of Mann’s major works and in several of his stories and novellas. His 1903 novella Tristan, for instance, features the tubercular and emotionally repressed Gabriele Klöterjahn, who dies shortly after playing the Todesmotiv from the second act of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. She literally succumbs to the emotions that her playing of Wagner’s music awakens in her. In this way, Mann’s story constitutes an ironic commentary on Wagner’s music. Wagner famously wanted his music to be intoxicating and ecstatic, and in Tristan, he is so successful that the elation brought on by his opera causes the death of the performer. In Buddenbrooks, too, the dangerous exaltation of music plays an important role. Here, the creativity of the musical Hanno Buddenbrook is contrasted with what Mann, in his 1918 essay “Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen,”2 calls the typical Protestant “Berufspflicht,” or work ethic, of Hanno’s father, Thomas Buddenbrook. Hanno finds it impossible to meet the demands of this work ethic. He dislikes and avoids his day-to-day tasks, and instead of doing his homework, he sits behind the piano and improvises for hours on end. Yet his music gives him no relief from life’s pains. He is unhappy with his compositions and complains to his friend Kai that they amount to very little: “What about my music, Kai? There is nothing to it […] I can play very little […] I get so tired of things. I’d like to sleep and never wake up. I’d like to die, Kai!”3 Fate complies, and at age fifteen, Hanno dies. All his zest for life has gone into his music, and when this comes to nothing, he loses the will to live on. As happened in Tristan, music seduces Hanno into death. Music causes him to lapse into a fatal passivity from which he cannot stir. The contradiction between a lethargic death wish and the Protestant work ethic returns in Der Zauberberg, but here, conversely, music helps to restore the protagonist Hans Castorp’s love for life. The advocate for the work ethic in Der Zauberberg is Settembrini, the Italian anticlerical idealist and rationalist, and Hans Castorp’s “klare Mentor.” Settembrini disapproves of the passive, listless, indifferent attitude that Hans has come to adopt during his stay on the magic mountain. When he finally leaves in order to join the crowds in the lowlands to fight for his country in the first World War, Settembrini laments: “I would have wished to see you go in some other way […] I hoped to send you off to your work, and now you will be fighting alongside your fellows.”4 Settembrini alerts Hans to the power of music to “numb us, put us asleep” (112), 5 to function as a dangerous opiate, yet contrary to the

96  Maria Kager situation of Hanno Buddenbrook, in Der Zauberberg things work ­exactly the other way around. Hans’s life has all but come to an end after seven years on the mountain. He no longer takes an interest in life, he neglects his appearance, and he has lost touch with his friends and family back home. Yet it is a song, Schubert’s “Lindenbaum,” which helps to resuscitate him. This song, to which he listens on the sanatorium’s gramophone, alone, late at night, rouses the lethargic Hans to dreams of heroic action. He is re-inspired by this “Zauberlied” to care once more about life, and he goes into battle humming the lines of the song: the music has managed to relieve his inertia. In Doktor Faustus, as we shall see, music is no longer capable of this. Music can no longer present itself as a medium for salvation because it needs salvation itself. In Doktor Faustus, music has become clichéd, and it will be the lifework of the modern composer Adrian Leverkühn to reinvigorate music by means of his Satan-inspired breakthrough. In his fiction, Mann used music not just as theme and content, but also as a narrative mode. From the beginning of his career, he attempted to imitate certain musical structures, techniques, and effects in his writing. To Bruno Walter, he once wrote that it had long been his goal and his desire to blend the essence of music with that of the word, to transfer music’s way of weaving and of connecting to literature,6 and this is ­precisely what he attempts to accomplish in his works. Mann’s novella Tonio Kröger,7 for instance, has frequently been said to display structural analogies to the sonata form8 and is his first endeavor to employ music as a shaping influence in his art. Similarly, as has been well-­documented by now, both Buddenbrooks and Der Zauberberg are structured as a dense web of leitmotifs, and Sabine Lichtenstein convincingly argues that the opening passage of Mann’s last novel Der Erwählte, a book that is not usually seen as particularly musical, is composed in a polyphonic style of writing.9 In Doktor Faustus, Mann refines the adaptation of music and musical devices even further. Through an elaborate use of leitmotif and harmonic echo-effects, one gets the idea of Doktor Faustus as a densely woven web of references. These musical techniques become the most important shaping force of Mann’s novel and contribute to the composition of the book as a unifying web of verbal echoes reminiscent of a musical composition. The reason why Mann was so interested in blending words and music in his works has been the subject of many decades of critical speculation. It is too large a topic to answer or even engage with fully in the present article, yet a convincing motive is suggested by Alex Aronson in his 1980 study Music and the Novel. Here, Aronson proposes that writers frequently use music and musical techniques in their works in order to transcend cultural divides:

A Strict Arrangement  97 That music and the musical experience may have a truth to communicate which lies beyond any specific cultural context within a given social group is a theme repeatedly hinted at by contemporary novelists. For what music, at its deepest level, communicates transcends the self which listens and responds. It dwarfs the present moment into insignificance and reveals aspects of consciousness of which the listener had previously been unaware.10 Aronson’s observation resonates with Walter Pater’s famous claim that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,”11 although, as the critic Jon Green suggests, “it is not fully clear what that condition implies beyond the interpenetration of form and subject.”12 “It has,” Green writes, “something to do with the expressive realms of nonverbal reality that modern novelists have accessed by means of musical allusions, devices or structures—the nonverbal strategies they have used to unlock elusive universal truths beyond any specific cultural context.”13 Following Pater, perhaps we can say that musical modernist writers such as Thomas Mann do not merely speculate about the aspirations of their art, literature, but try to realize these aspirations, regardless of whether this was what Pater had in mind.

The Musical Prose of Doktor Faustus Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des Deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde is, as the title indicates, a novel about music—a “Musik-Roman,” as Mann called it himself (GW XI 171), the biography of a fictional musician. It is with this novel that Mann carries his musical ambitions furthest. Here music is not merely one of several topics but the central theme, and in no other novel has Mann so thoroughly, self-consciously, and, arguably, successfully attempted to blend words and music. Yet Mann’s knowledge of music was not solid enough to write his “Musik-Roman” without outside help. His appreciation of music was, by his own admission, that of an informed and enthusiastic amateur. In Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, his novel about the composition of his novel,14 Mann explains that while in his previous “musical” novels music functioned as a “universal element,” in Doktor Faustus a universal approach to music will not be sufficient: “The trouble was that this time the ‘universal element’ did not suffice […] No, concrete reality, exactitude, were needed.”15 But Mann’s musicological expertise is limited, and he dislikes studying the technical aspects of music;16 he shall, therefore, have to rely on skilled outsiders. And so he writes to Bruno Walter about his new project: “The hero, incidentally, will be a musician (a composer). I intend to risk it—but can already foresee that I shall

98  Maria Kager occasionally have to turn to you for advice and factual information.”17 The most famous of these helpful outsiders became, of course, Theodor W. Adorno.18 Mann was also concerned with the problem of plausibly fitting his fictional composer into the actual scene of modern music. To create a credible place for Adrian Leverkühn, Mann creates a context of “real” music. Thus, the novel abounds in references to other, “real” composers, to actual contemporary conductors who bring Adrian Leverkühn’s works into the limelight, to existing orchestras and ensembles that execute them, and to real music periodicals and publishers with whom Adrian is supposed to be in contact. In this way, Mann successfully enhances an air of authenticity surrounding Leverkühn and his compositions. The most important thing for Mann was, however, to write musical prose, to write fiction with obvious musical qualities. This had already been his aim before he started writing Doktor Faustus (Mann dedicated a copy of Der Zauberberg to Arnold Schoenberg with the words: “From someone, who also attempts to compose music”19) but became still more urgent once he commenced Doktor Faustus. In letters to various friends, he wrote about the musical aspirations he had for his novel. To Adorno he wrote, for instance: “This book, a music-novel, almost the novel of music, tries to become the thing it is about.”20 And when “real” musicians expressed admiration for his musical understanding, he would be thrilled and triumphantly quote this praise to others. In a letter, again to Adorno, he wrote: “I read Bruno Walter the chapter about opus 111. He was ecstatic. ‘This is terrific! Never have better things been said about Beethoven! I had no idea that you understood him so well!’”21 (Later, he had Adorno improve this same passage.) Similarly, in Die Entstehung, Mann proudly mentions how Ernst Toch, an Austrian composer, had spoken about Mann’s way of writing in Doktor Faustus as “Musizieren” (GW IX 170). The way in which Mann tries to make Doktor Faustus musical is by composing it along the lines of what Adrian calls his “strict arrangement”: “the complete integration of all musical dimensions, their neutrality towards each other due to complete organization.”22 In Die Entstehung, Mann admits his debt to Wagner’s “neuen thematischen Gewebe- und Beziehungstechnik,” his “new thematic weave and connection technique,” to the way in which his method, the “Themen-Gewebe,” the “wove of themes,” is not just worked through single scenes but throughout the entire drama, 23 and it is in a complex of Wagner-style leitmotifs that the musical structure of the novel can be located. Carl Dahlhaus suggests that the texture of the novel is founded to a large extent on a Wagnerian web of motifs whose aesthetic function is to suggest “formale Geschlossenheit” in a way that reminds one of the formally closed works composed by Leverkühn himself. 24

A Strict Arrangement  99 Doktor Faustus is constructed around a set of leitmotifs concerning psychological and corporal qualities such as Adrian’s coldness, his laugh, his migraine, or his eyes, some of which are developed independently and concurrently, in what Vaget has called “symphonic fashion.”25 The motif of the butterfly Hetaera Esmeralda, for instance, is one of the most important themes in the novel, if not the most important one. It is moved and modified in such a way as to denote a human being, the prostitute whom Leverkühn calls Esmeralda. The description of the girl Esmeralda in Adrian’s letter to his friend Serenus Zeitblom (who would later become his timorous and awkward humanist biographer, the exemplary “undemonic medium” through which the demonic will pass), is a verbatim repetition of the description of the butterfly in Chapter 3. The real butterfly, “in durchsichtiger Nacktheit den dämmernden Laubschatten liebend,” is described as resembling in its flight “einem windgeführten Blütenblatt” (GW VI 23). 26 In the brothel in Leipzig, Adrian describes the girls he finds there as “Glasflügler, Esmeralden, wenig gekleidet, durchsichtig gekleidet” (GW VI 190). 27 In his valedictory, the same words recur as he recounts to his friends how he followed his beloved into damnation: Den es war nur ein Schmetterling und eine bunte Butterfliege, ­ etaera Esmeralda, die hatt es mir angetan durch berührung, die H Milchhexe, und folgt ihr nach in den dämmernden Laubschatten, den ihre durchsichtige Nacktheit liebt, und wo ich sie haschte, die im Flug einem windgeführten Blütenblatt gleicht. (GW VI 660)28 The name Hetaera Esmeralde is also encoded musically in Leverkühn’s work. Represented by the notes h-e-a-e-es, this name forms the basis of his serial system. In his last oratorio, “Dr Fausti Weheklag,” Adrian moves from a five “letter” or tone word to a twelve-syllable sentence as the prime form of his composition: “Denn ich sterbe als ein böser und guter Christ” (GW VI 646). Yet here, too, the h-e-a-e-es motif recurs: “everywhere where there is reference to the bond and the vow, the promise and the blood pact” (489).29 It functions as a symbol for a beloved woman and as a constant reminder of the cause of Leverkühn’s disease, the start of the pact with the devil, the source of evil. In this way, Esmeralda serves as a leitmotif both in the novel and in Leverkühn’s compositions.30 Dozens more such leitmotifs can be pointed out. All are interwoven together among themselves and within the story; along with repetitions, variations, and, especially, echoes, they result in a dense and complex web of motifs. Each of these motifs is connected to the others and performs a thematic function in the book, and it would be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to point out an element in the novel that does not fulfil a function in its overall design. With regard to the twelve tones in his

100  Maria Kager strict musical arrangement, Adrian comments: “Not one [tone] might appear which did not fulfil its function in the whole structure” (191). 31 The same thing can be said about Doktor Faustus, where not one motive occurs that is not somehow functional in the “Gesamtkonstruktion” of the novel. Both the plan and the separate parts of the novel are determined by a set of themes, of leitmotifs, that occur throughout the book in different variations and with differing ramifications.

Hearing the Kretzschmar Lectures An important position within the “Themen-Gewebe” that is Doktor Faustus is occupied by the Kretzschmar lectures of Chapter 8, narrated by Serenus Zeitblom from his remarkably accurate memory. The four lectures that Wendell Kretzschmar, the heavily stuttering city organist and Adrian’s music instructor, delivers at the “Gesellschaft für gemeinnützige Thätigkeit” in Kaisersaschern occur at a crucially symbolic point in the novel.32 As Zeitblom explains, justifying the great detail in which he reproduces them in his biography, why do I ascribe such significance to them? […] It is simply this: that Adrian heard these things then, they challenged his intelligence, made their deposit in the vessel of his feelings, and gave matter to feed or to stimulate his fancy. (70)33 The lectures take place at a vital moment in the development of Adrian’s perception of music, since he is at a young, impressionable age, only sixteen years old, when he hears them. The lectures constitute the most forceful descriptions of music in the novel. Because of Kretzschmar’s manner of enthusiastically mimicking with his mouth what his hands are playing, it becomes very easy to follow the music while reading the text. His evocations of, for instance, Beethoven’s piano sonata opus 111 exactly reproduce the rhythmical pattern of the Arietta theme. “Bum, bum—Wum, wum—Schrum, schrum” (GW VI 74) “he went, as he played the grim and startling first notes of the first movement.” He sings “in a high falsetto the passages of melodic loveliness” (54), 34 and he passionately chants along with his playing of the Arietta theme: With labouring hands Kretzschmar played us all those enormous transformations, singing at the same time with the greatest violence: “Dim-dada!” and mingling his singing with shouts. “These chains of thrills!” he yelled. “These flourishes and cadenzas! […] ­Dim-dada! Do listen […] dim-dada!” (54)35

A Strict Arrangement  101 The music is even easier to follow when he renders the theme not just with “bum bum” and “dim-dada,” but also captures it with actual words. He describes the melodic development of the theme, from its original D-G-G form to its altered, parting form with a C and C-sharp added before the D-G-G as follows: “After an introductory C, it puts a C sharp before the D, so that it no longer scans ‘heav-ens blue,’ ‘mead-­ owland,’ but rather ‘O-thou heaven’s blue,’ ‘Green-est meadowland,’ ‘Fare-thee well for aye’” (55). 36 When you listen to the second movement of the Beethoven sonata, you hear that these words exactly follow the rhythm of the motif in its original and its altered forms. Thus, readers who know the theme get the feeling of indirectly experiencing the music while reading this passage. The halting manner of Kretzschmar’s speech as he ­vociferates his comments in between and over the music reinforces this, as it creates a staccato, music-like effect. Some critics have objected to what they call Mann’s unscholarly, gushing, and tasteless renderings of ­Beethoven’s music.37 Yet in so doing, they miss the comedy of the situation: because of his heavy touch on the piano, Kretzschmar has to shout at the top of his voice to make himself be heard. He hollers his comments and passionately sings along, the grim passages in a deep voice and the gentle passages in a high falsetto causing great hilarity among his small audience. He takes literally the “cantabile” of ­Beethoven’s “adagio molto semplice e cantabile.” In the lectures, Kretzschmar talks and stammers and splutters about Beethoven’s sonata opus 111, about Beethoven and the Fugue, about music and the eye, and about the elemental in music, always illustrating his arguments on a rickety piano and with chalk on an old blackboard, all for a very small audience that includes the young Adrian and Serenus. (Not only did Kretzschmar’s heavy stutter keep people away, the residents of Kaisersaschern simply did not care why, for instance, opus 111 has only two movements instead of the usual three.) The philosophical and historical music issues that Kretzschmar discusses in his lectures trigger long debates between Adrian and Serenus, which Mann often adopted almost literally from outside sources. This is, for instance, the case with the first of the four Kretzschmar lectures, where Mann integrates Adorno’s hand-written comments into his description of the Arietta theme, occasionally embellishing Adorno’s professional remarks with metaphors that symbolically fit the story. Kretzschmar’s method of analyzing the music while performing it on the piano can also be traced back to Adorno. In Die Entstehung, Mann reports, for instance, how Adorno played him the sonata opus 111 “in a highly instructive fashion” while Mann stood by the piano and, he adds, “I had never been more attentive” (48).38 He then relates how he rose early the following morning and immersed himself in a “thoroughgoing revision and extension of the lecture on the sonata” to the great “enrichment and embellishment of the chapter and indeed of the whole book” (48). To extend his gratitude

102  Maria Kager to Adorno, he integrates the name “Wiesengrund”—or “Meadowland,” Adorno’s father’s name—into the analysis. Mann mainly based the content of this analysis on conversations with Adorno and on Adorno’s 1937 article “Spätstil Beethovens.”39 In a letter that Mann sent Adorno to thank him for his explanations with regard to Beethoven’s opus 111, he wrote: “Wundern Sie nicht, wenn er [Kretzschmar] dergleichen noch in seine Suade aufnimmt! Ich scheue in diesem Fall vor keiner Montage zurück.”40 In another letter, he apologizes to Adorno for “borrowing” from him without asking his permission first or without acknowledging his debt to him in the novel.41 And indeed, we can retrace Adorno’s ideas in Kretzschmar’s analysis of the sonata. For instance, Kretzschmar’s talk adopts verbatim Adorno’s idea that the joining of death and greatness brings about an objectivity with an inclination towards convention: “Where greatness and death come together, he declared, there arises an objectivity tending to the conventional” (53).42 These and other explanations of musical problems are supposed to convince the reader of the necessity for the breakthrough from “the solemn isolation of art in Romanticism to the daring world of new feeling” that Adrian will accomplish with his music.43 Throughout the remainder of the novel, we find references to and echoes from these four lectures, of which the first and the last are the most important for Adrian’s musical development. Beethoven’s leave-­ taking of the sonata as a form and Johann Conrad Beißel’s “alberne Ordnung,” his peculiar system of master and servant tones, put Adrian on the musical track he will continue to follow throughout his professional career as a composer and that will eventually lead him to develop “his” dodecaphonic music. The lectures sow the seed of Adrian’s ideas concerning the need for order in music and make him aware of the problem of music that will continue to occupy his thoughts: the decline of subjective harmony as opposed to objective polyphony. Polyphony is an older system, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, whereas harmony was developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Originally, polyphonic music was joined to the word of the Church and was thus objective: it was based on “truth,” on Logos, unlike harmony, which was based on the individual and hence subjective. The Florentine “Camerata,” founded in 1576 by the humanist Giovanni de’ Bardi, were fierce opponents of the polyphonic style of the sixteenth century and put the human voice first and foremost. Most prominent among the adversaries of polyphony was Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo). Galilei no longer regards music as “an incarnation of divine logos”; instead, he wants to imitate ordinary speech, to represent human feelings.44 From the “stile rappresentativo” or “seconda pratica” developed by Galilei and the Camerate evolved the art of the recitative,

A Strict Arrangement  103 which eventually gave rise to the first operas. This new movement from Florence was the beginning of subjective harmony, which would culminate with Beethoven. When, toward the end of his career, Adrian says he wants to revoke Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that he wants to take back the “good and noble […] what we call the human” (478), he alludes to the entire development of subjective harmony that started with the seconda pratica in Florence.45 With the decline of subjective harmony came a decline of the idea that an individual can be placed at the center of the universe, and in this light one can see dodecaphonic music as a renaissance of polyphony. According to Kretzschmar, this decline commences with Beethoven’s opus 111, which he explains as a farewell from the sonata as a form. This is why Beethoven did not write a third movement to the piano sonata opus 111: his sonata is a departure from the idea of subjective harmony and consequently from the sonata, that free, subjective form. As Kretzschmar puts it: “A third movement? A new approach? A return after this parting? Impossible! It had happened that the sonata had come, in the second, enormous movement, to an end, and end without any return” (55). And when he says “the sonata,” he means not only this one in C minor but “the sonata in general, as a species, as traditional art-form […] it had fulfilled its destiny” (55).46 Beethoven has said farewell to subjective harmony, to the idea that a God may hide in every human being. This old notion is no longer valid and thus the need arises to create a new system, a new order—Adrian’s twelve-tone music. Unlike musicians such as the composer and music theorist JeanPhilippe Rameau, Leverkühn does not see the chord as given by nature, but as a manifestation of human subjectivity, of subjective randomness. He wants to discard it and return to polyphonic music. In Chapter 9, the chapter following the lectures, he explains to Zeitblom that one should “not honour the chord as such, rather despise it as subjective and arbitrary” (74).47 Adrian wants to break through to an archaic form, and he accomplishes this “Durchbruch” with serial music. He is not, however, conservative. He does not want to conserve, he wants to return to the past. The Kretzschmar lectures exert a crucial influence on the young Adrian. The second part of Beethoven’s sonata opus 111, for instance, is more a variation than a “real” sonata. A variation is an older, stricter form than the sonata, which is more modern and less restrained by musical rules, and hence can be seen as an expression of ­human ­freedom, ­human subjectivity. With his return to this older, stricter form, B ­ eethoven not only influences but also foreshadows Adrian’s developments as a composer, whose final work, the “Dr. Fausti Weheklag,” represents a regression to the seventeenth century and the style of Monteverdi. Thus, both for Adrian and for (Kretzschmar’s version of) Beethoven, the ­future is a return to the past.

104  Maria Kager

Musical Echoes There are echoes from the Kretzschmar lectures throughout Doktor Faustus, and the lectures foreshadow several other parts of the novel. The “Watch with me” that begins the last chapter (492), for instance, is an echo of the second lecture, in which Beethoven is described as addressing his sleeping maids after a night of hard work: “Could you not watch one hour with me?” (58)48 —as well as, of course, of Jesus’s reproach to his apostles and of Doctor Faust’s request of his friends in Adrian’s oratorio. Leverkühn’s explanation of his strict musical style echoes the third lecture, “Die Musik und das Auge,” in which ­K retzschmar argues that certain jokes, certain tricks in music, can be spotted in the score more easily by the eye than by the ear in performance. Kretzschmar even suggests that it is perhaps the deepest wish of music to be seen, not heard, and this notion is echoed by Adrian in response to Zeitblom’s reproach that it would be impossible to hear some of the devices that Adrian wants to apply in his music: “‘Hear?’ he countered. ‘Do you remember a certain lecture given for the Society of for the Common Weal from which it followed that in music one certainly need not hear everything’” (192).49 Similarly, there are numerous echoes of Beißel and his “alberne Ordnung” (GW VI 94) throughout the book. As Mann puts it in Die Entstehung, the memory of the “skurilen ‘Systemherrn’ und Schulmeisters” resounds throughout the entire novel (GW XI 170). The echo as a musical device is of significance for the novel as a whole. It is with good reason that Zeitblom emphasizes the echo-effects à la Monteverdi in “Dr. Fausti Weheklag” and that his young nephew Nepomuk Schneidewein, Adrian’s last love and one of the most important characters in Doktor Faustus, refers to himself as “Echo,” a corruption (or echo) of the abbreviation “Nepo.” Here, too, the description of Beethoven’s Arietta theme takes up an important place; Gunilla ­B ergsten has demonstrated how it echoes (or is echoed in) the episode of the ­illness and subsequent death of little Nepomuk “Echo” Schneidewein. 50 A look at the description of the motif in its original form, the D-G-G in which it first appears, suffices to make the echo with Echo obvious: The arietta theme, destined to vicissitudes for which in its idyllic innocence it would seem not to be born, is presented at once, and announced in sixteen bars, reducible to a motif which appears at the end of its first half, like a brief soul-cry—only three notes, a quaver, a semiquaver, and a dotted crotchet to be scanned as, say: ‘heav-en’s blue, lov-ers’ pain, fare-thee well, on a-time, mead-ow-land’—and that is all. (54)51 The very first characterization of the theme might have been a description of Nepo, who in his idyllic innocence did not seem to be born for the

A Strict Arrangement  105 misadventures that become his destiny. The “brief soul-cry” with which the theme is depicted reminds us of the illness and agony of the little boy and is also an allusion to his role in the novel as a whole—which is, indeed, like a brief soul-cry. The words with which Kretzschmar chants the theme, too, can be seen as allusions to Nepo. “Heaven’s blue” refers to his clear blue eyes, which are repeatedly emphasized, “lovers’ pain” characterizes Adrian’s relationship with his nephew (because with Echo’s death, Adrian loses his last chance of love and is left heartbroken), and “Fare thee well,” finally, refers to Adrian’s farewell from Nepomuk. Just before the change in the theme occurs, from melancholy to s­ udden gentle consolation, the motif is described as follows: an utterly extreme situation, when the poor little motif seems to hover alone and forsaken above a giddy yawning abyss—a procedure of awe-inspiring un-earthliness, […] a start of fear as it were, that such a thing could happen. (55)52 Here the description of the motif is both a reference to Echo’s death-­ struggle as well as to Adrian’s despair as a result of Echo’s suffering and death. In the music, the idea of the motif floating above a pit concerns a bass and descant that are very far apart: the left hand and right hand are so far removed from each other that the motif seems somehow suspended. Echo and Adrian find themselves in a comparably extreme situation, suspended between life and death, heaven and hell. Both are lonely and desolate, Adrian in his grief and Echo in the throes of death; and where for Nepomuk the abyss is his imminent death, for Adrian it is the madness to which he will succumb following Echo’s death. The fearful dismay about the occurrence of something so horrific belongs to all the characters that are part of Echo’s life, but mostly to Adrian, who blames himself for his nephew’s death since he dared to love him, contrary to the devil’s decree. By “killing” Echo, Satan has punished Adrian for his disobedience.

Conclusion Although many of Mann’s works are to some degree “musical,” his ­ambitions to blend words and music are nowhere carried as far as in Doktor Faustus. “Ich fühle es wohl, daß mein Buch selbst das werde sein müssen, wovon es handelt, nämlich konstruktive Musik” (GW XI 187), writes Mann in Die Entstehung. By merging words and music, he has harmonized the form of his novel with its content into a dense web of intricately connected themes, leitmotifs, and echoes. Thus, Mann’s last epic work has indeed come as close to “constructive music” as a work of literature possibly can.

106  Maria Kager

Notes 1 Steven Scher, “Musicopoetics or Melomania: Is There a Theory behind Music in German Literature?” in Music and German Literature: Their Relationship since the Middle Ages, ed. James McGlathery (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1992), 329. 2 Thomas Mann, “Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen,” GW XII, 145. All references to Mann come from Gesammelte Werke in Dreizehn Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990). 3 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1959), 592. “Was ist mit meiner Musik, Kai? Es ist nichts damit […] Ich kann beinahe nichts […] Ich werde so müde davon. Ich möchte schlafen und nichts mehr wissen. Ich möchte sterben, Kai!” (GW I 743). 4 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John. E. Woods (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995), 702. Hereafter cited in text. “Anders hatte ich dich reisen zu sehen gewünscht […] Zur Arbeit hoffte ich dich zu entlassen, nun wirst du kämpfen inmitten der Deinen” (GW III 989). 5 “Die Kunst ist sittlich, sofern sie weckt. Aber wie, wenn sie das Gegenteil tut? Wenn sie betäubt, einschläfert, der Aktivität und dem Fortschritt entgegenarbeitet? Auch das kann die musik, auch auf die Wirkung der Opiate versteht sie sich aus dem Grunde” (GW III 162). 6 “Früh war es mein eigener Ehrgeiz und meine Lust, Wesen und Wirken der Musik mit dem des Wortes zu verflechten, ihre Art zu weben, zu ‘­denken’ und zu verbinden, auf jenes zu übertragen und die Erzählung als Themengespinst und Kontrapunktik, als klingende Ideenarchitektur, erstehen zu lassen” (GW X 479). 7 Thomas Mann, GW VIII, 271–338. 8 For instance, by Werner Wolf in The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 126. 9 Sabine Lichtenstein, “For Whom the Bells Toll: A Polyphonic Fragment in Thomas Mann’s Der Erwählte, Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie,” Dutch Journal of Musical Theory 15.2 (2010). 10 Alex Aronson, Music and the Novel: A Study in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), x. 11 A dictum that can be seen as an elaboration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ­notions concerning music and language, especially his idea that the tragic separation of music and language has been one of the greatest catastrophes for humankind. Walter Pater, “The Dialectic of Art: The School of Giorgione” in Essays on Literature and Art, ed. Jennifer Uglow (London: Dent, 1973 [1877]), 45. 12 Jon D. Green, “The Sounds of Silence in ‘Sirens’: Joyce’s Verbal Music of the Mind,” James Joyce Quarterly 39.3 (2002), 489. 13 Green, “The Sounds of Silence,” 489. 14 And it is indeed more a novel than an accurate report of his working process. Dirk van Hulle’s genetic research on the text has shown that Mann’s account is “at times deliberately deceptive” (Dirk van Hulle, Textual Awareness. Proefschrift aan de Universiteit van Antwerpen, 1999, 118). 15 Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel, trans. Richard and Ckara Winston (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1961), 40. “Das Schlimme war, daß diesmal das ‘Universelle’ nicht ausreichte […] Hier galt es Realisierung, galt es Exaktheit” (GW XI 171). 16 “Technical studies frighten and bore me,” The Story of A Novel, 40. “Technische musikalische Studien schrecken und langweilen mich” (GW XI 171).

A Strict Arrangement  107 17 Letters of Thomas Mann, ed. and trans. Clara Winston (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1971), 419. “dessen Held übrigens nun wirklich einmal ein Musiker (Komponist) sein soll. Ich will’s riskieren—sehe aber kommen, dass ich Sie noch gelegentlich um Rat und Sachliche Information werde bitten müsse,” Briefe 1937–1947, Herausg. Erika Mann (Frankfurt A.M: S. Fischer Verlag, 1963). 18 The debate concerning the extent of Mann’s usage of Adorno’s writings and advice is ongoing, with recent critics suggesting “that Adorno’s contribution exceeds the modest label of ‘adviser’ on avant-garde music” and that Adorno should in fact be regarded not just as an adviser on musical technicalities but as “co-author of Doktor Faustus.” Evelyn Cobley, “Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Theodor W. ­Adorno’s ‘Philosophy of Modern Music,’” New German Critique 86 (2002), 44, 45. The latter quote is cited by Cobley from Hansjörg Dörr, “Thomas Mann und Adorno: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung des Doktor Faustus,” in Thomas Manns Dr. Faustus und die Wirkung, ed. R. Wolff (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983), 50. 19 “vonEinem, der auch Musik zu bauen versucht.” Quoted in ­Volkert ­S cherliess, “Zur Musik im Doktor Faustus”. Und was werden die Deutschen sagen?. Herausgegeben von Hans Wißkirchen. (Lübeck: Dräger, 1997), 113. 20 “Das Buch, ein Musik-Roman, beinahe der Roman der Musik, sucht zu sein wovon es handelt”. Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Briefwechsel 1943–1955 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), 62. 21 Adorno and Mann, Briefwechsel, 21. “Ich habe Bruno Walter die Abschnitte über opus 111 vorgelesen. Er war begeistert. ‘Nun, das ist grossartig! Nie ist besseres über Beethoven gesagt geworden! Ich habe keine Ahnung gehabt, dass Sie so in ihn eingedrungen seien!’” 22 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1948), 191. Hereafter cited in text. In this essay, English translations are followed by a footnote citing the original German. “die vollständige Integrierung aller musikalischen Dimensionen, ihre Indifferenz gegeneinander kraft vollkommener Organisation” (GW VI 255). 23 “sich nicht nur über eine Szene, sondern über das ganze Drama [ausbreitete]” (GW IX 521). 24 Carl Dahlhaus, “Fiktive Zwölftonmusik,” Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung 1 (1982), 34. 25 Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Mann, Joyce, Wagner: The Question of Modernism in Doctor Faustus,” in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: A Novel at the Margins of Modernism, ed. Herbert Lehnert (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1991), 181. 26 I quote the original German here, as it doesn’t work in Lowe-Porter’s translation “in transparent nudity, loving the duskiness of heavy leafage” “a petal blown in the wind” (14). 27 Lowe-Porter’s English translation: “clear-wings, esmeraldas, et cetera, clad or unclad” (142). 28 Lowe-Porter’s English translation: For it was but a butterfly, a bright creamlicker, Hetaera Esmeralda, she charmed me with her touch, the milk-witch, and I followed her into the twilit shadowy foliage that her transparent nakedness loveth, and where I caught her, who in flight is like a wind-blown petal. (498) 29 “überall da nämlich, wo von der Verschreibung und Versprechung, dem Blut-Rezess, nur immer die Rede ist” (GW VI 648).

108  Maria Kager 30 By weaving this name into his compositions, Adrian follows in the footsteps of Bach, who encoded his own name, the motif b-a-c-h, in the last fugue of Die Kunst der Fuge. As Zeitblom remarks, “Leverkühn war nicht der erste ­Komponist und wird nicht der letzte gewesen sein, der es liebte, Heimlichkeiten formel- und sigelhafter Art in seinem Werk zu verscliessen” (GW VI 207). 31 “Keiner [Ton] dürfte auftreten, der nicht in der Gesamtkonstruktion seine motivische Funktion erfüllte.” (GW VI 255–56). 32 (GW VI 69). 33 “Es ist einfach der, daß Adrian diese Dinge damals hörte, daß sie seine Intelligenz herausforderten, sich in seinem Gemüte niederschlugen und seiner Phantasie einen Stoff boten, den man Nahrung nennen mag, oder Reizung, denn für die Phantasie ist das ein und dasselbe” (GW VI 96). 34 “machte er bei den grimmig auffahrenden Anfangsakzenten des ersten Satzes” (GW VI 74). 35 “und Kretzschmar spielte uns mit arbeitenden Händen all diese ungehueren Wandlungen, indem er aufs heftigste mitsang: ‘Dim-dada’, und laut hineinredete: ‘Die Trillerketen!’ Schrie er. ‘Die Fiorituren und Kadenzen! […]‘Dim-dada’” (GW VI 74). 36 “Nach einem anlautenden c nimmt es vor dem d ein cis auf, so daß es nun nicht mehr ‘Him-melsblau’ oder ‘Wie-sengrund’ sondern ‘O – du Himmelsblau’, ‘Grü-ner Wiesengrund’ […] skandiert” (GW VI 76). 37 Ute Jung, for instance, takes issue with what she calls Mann’s ­“pathetisch-subjektiven Interpretationsstil.” She calls Mann’s evocation of Beethoven “eine absolut nicht ins Wissenschaftliche noch ins Kritische ­gehende Auslegung”: “So bilden die Lautmalereien wie ‘Bum, bum – Wum, wum – Schrum, schrum’ oder ‘dimdada’ eine naiv-derbe Geräuschkulisse, die der Illustrationskraft der comic strips eines Walt Disney nicht nachsteht” [Ute Jung, Die Musikphilosophie Thomas Manns (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1969), 5–6]. 38 “Dann spielte mir Adorno, während ich zuschauend bei ihm am Flügel stand, die Sonate opus 111 vollständig und auf höchst instruktive Art. Ich war nie aufmerksamer gewesen” (GW XI 175). 39 Theodor W. Adorno, “Spätstil Beethovens,” Der Auftakt 17.5/6 (1937), 65–67. 40 Adorno and Mann, Briefwechsel, 9. 41 “Fussbemerkung: ‘Dies stammt von Adorno-Wiesengrund’? Das geht nicht.” Adorno and Mann, Briefwechsel, 20. 42 “Wo Größe und Tod zusammenträten, erklärte er, da entstehe eine der ­Konvention geneigte Sachlichkeit” (GW VI 74). 43 Vaget, “Mann, Joyce, Wagner,” 183. 4 4 Ibid. 45 “es soll nicht sein. Das Gute und Edle […] was man das Menschliche nennt, obwohl es gut ist und edel. Um was die Menschen gekämpft, wofür sie Zwingburgen gestürmt, und was die Erfüllten jubelnd verkündigt haben, das soll nicht sein. Es wird zurückgenommen. Ich will es zurücknehmen” (GW VI 634). 46 “Ein dritter Satz? Ein neues Anheben – nach diesem Abschied? […] Unmöglich! Es sei geschehen, daß die Sonate im zweiten Satz, diesem enormen, sich zu Ende geführt habe, zu Ende auf Nimmerwiederkehr,” “die Sonata überhaupt, als Gattung, als überlieferte Kunstform: sie selber sei hier zu Ende” (GW VI 77). 47 “Man sollte […] den Akkord aber nicht ehren, sondern ihn als subjektivwillkürlich verachten, solange er sich nicht durch den Gang der Stimmführung, das heisst: polyphonisch ausweisen kann” (GW VI 101).

A Strict Arrangement  109 48 “Wachtet mit mir!” (GW VI 651), “Könnt ihr denn nicht eine Stunde mit mir wachen?” (GW VI 80). 49 “‘Hören?’ erwiderte er. ‘Erinnerst du dich an einen gewissen gemeinnützigen Vortrag, der uns einmal gehalten wurde, und aus dem hervorging, daß man in der Musik durchaus nicht alles hören muß?’” (GW VI 257). 50 Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus: Untersuchungen zu den Quellen und zur Struktur des Romans (Lund: Berlingska Boktryckeriet, 1963), 234–36. 51 “Das Arietta-Thema, zu Abenteuern und Schiksalen bestimmt, für die es in seiner idyllischen Unschuld keineswegs geboren scheint, ist ja sogleich auf dem Plan und spricht sich in sechzehn Takten aus, auf ein Motif reduzierbar, das am Schluß seiner ersten Hälfte, einem kurzen, seelenvollen Rufe gleich, hervortritt,—drei Töne nur, eine Achtel-, eine Sechzehntel- und eine punktierte Viertelnote, nicht anders skandiert als etwa: ‘Him-melsblau’ oder ‘Lie-besleid’ oder ‘Leb’-mir wohl’ oder ‘Der-maleinst’ oder ‘Wiesengrund’, und das ist alles” (GW VI 75). 52 “eine extremste Situation, wo das arme Motiv einsam und verlassen über einem schwindelnd klaffenden Abgrund zu schweben scheint,—ein ­Vorgang bleicher Erhabenheit, dem alsbald ein ängstlich Sich-klein-machen, ein banges Erschrecken auf dem Fuße folgt, darüber gleichsam, daß so etwas geschehen konnte” (GW VI 76).

7 Sounding Bodies Eroticized Music-Making in Proust’s À la Recherche Axel Englund

In order to broach anew the time-honored topic of music in the work of Marcel Proust, I would like to briefly recall an anecdote from 1916. At this time, the war had reduced the musical life of Paris to a minimum, making it difficult to experience live concerts. On one of the evenings when he felt well enough to leave his home for a dinner party, Proust heard the Princess Soutzo praise the music-making of the Quatuor ­Poulet. Consequently, he called on Gaston Poulet at eleven o’clock in the evening and persuaded him to assemble his fellow musicians for a private performance that very night: according to Poulet, Proust claimed to be “tormented by the desire [tourmenté par le désir]” to hear them play César Franck’s string quartet.1 Franck’s quartet was thus performed in Proust’s cork-lined bedroom, which, as the quartet’s violist recalls, was “lit only by candles, leaving a zone of shadow for a divan, next to which a mountain of manuscripts was heaped.”2 Proust’s choice of words is noteworthy: his wish for music is a desire so tormenting that it must be satisfied immediately. The gratification, moreover, seems to demand the bodily presence of the musicians rather than a mediating technology, and the recumbent one-person audience, the nocturnal bedroom setting, and the soft lighting seem to evoke a mildly erotic atmosphere. The following account offers an interpretation of music in his great novel, which places precisely these aspects in focus. It emphasizes the physical intimacy of chamber music-making in À la recherche du temps perdu, seeks to understand it in the light of ­fi n-de-siècle notions of transgressive sexuality, and questions the received notion of music as a model for literary creation in the novel. Before this argument can be developed, however, some remarks concerning the way music has typically been understood in the vast body of Proust criticism need to be made. Specifically, I will focus on two aspects that contrast with the hic et nunc of bodily presence: on the one hand, the technological mediation noticeably lacking in the scene of listening described above, and, on the other, the Narrator’s not-so-straight path towards aesthetic insight. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of technological innovations to modernism in general and to Proust in particular, not

Sounding Bodies  111 only as a recurrent element in narratives, but also as a crucial factor in the sensory perception of the world. 3 Such innovations exerted an inestimable leverage on music and listening. In a 1928 essay on this topic, Paul Valéry looked back on the preceding decades (that is, roughly the time during which À la recherche was written and published): “After the last twenty years, neither matter, nor space, nor time are the same as they had always been.”4 Among the arts, Valéry claims, music is the most susceptible to these transformations of modernity: “Its nature and the place it occupies in the world marks it as the first to be modified in its procedures of distribution, reproduction and even production.”5 The perspicacious Valéry is already aware that music is on the way to becoming available at any place at any time. Nothing could be more natural than a sequestered music lover like Proust taking interest in this revolution of technological reproduction of music. Indeed he did: for instance, we know that Proust subscribed in 1911 to a novel service known as the “théâtrophone,” which allowed him to listen to performances from several theatres and opera houses at home in his bed, through a landline.6 Such reproduction even seems to align itself with Proustian aesthetics, so often construing temporal and spatial distance as a privileged route to insight.7 It does not, however, figure in À la recherche. There is no théâtrophone in the novel, and the few times when the phonograph is mentioned, it is evoked without any connection to music, as a metaphor illustrating the uncanny effect of a well-known voice speaking from a strange source.8 The fact of the matter is that in the whole vast construct of Proust’s novel, technological reproduction is not once allowed to compromise the corporeality and liveness of music. Whereas the personae, above all the Narrator, frequently admire paintings, sculptures, and architecture in photographic or lithographic reproductions, when they listen to music, it is without exception performed live. In a novel written in and about an age where the nineteenth-century practice of domestic music-making was being supplanted by the phonograph as the primary channel for musical reception and written by an author whose interest in technological innovations and their effects on aesthetic experience was as profound as his interest in music, this state of affairs is a conundrum worthy of a critical attention that it has yet to receive. It is safe to say that research on Proust and music has directed the bulk of its attention elsewhere, namely at music’s function as a paradigmatic model of aesthetic transcendence of the temporal world (and, of course, at the question of Proust’s real-life sources for Vinteuil’s music, which I take the liberty to bracket here). Support for this view is given above all by Vinteuil’s sonata and posthumous septet and the different modes of reception showcased by Charles Swann and the Narrator, respectively. Such is the perspective adopted not only by Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Proust as Musician—which still remains a central point of

112  Axel Englund reference—but also, whether explicitly stated or implicitly assumed, by a host of other treatises and essays.9 This argument is closely aligned with the influence of Schopenhauer, from whom a trajectory of musical thought reaches via the symbolists’ understanding of Wagner and onward into Proust’s novel. In this intellectual lineage, which had a profound impact on later modernist thought, the significance of music lies above all in its being imaginary and silent. Conversely, the function of music actually heard is invariably to point beyond its own physicality, into this realm of the ideal.10 Simply put, this view of music is what the Narrator arrives at after observing the error of Swann’s ways, and by avoiding them himself, he gains the insights that, finally, allow him to heed his calling as an author. From this perspective, the source of the novel’s unified structure and the primary model for the Narrator’s development can be sought in music—a conclusion still supported, for instance, by the work of Antoine Compagnon.11 I want to emphasize that I am not attempting to deny the relevance, let alone the existence, of this trajectory. As recent scholarship has begun to point out, however, the  desire to construct a coherent, unidirectional development ­towards the Narrator’s aesthetic epiphany tends to leave out a plethora of ­elements that complicate this narrative.12 The emphatic physicality of musical performance is one. Whenever ineffability is projected on musical experience, as Proust repeatedly does, it escapes logos in one of two directions: the spiritual, immaterial one that soars above reason and language and the bodily one that revels in the mud below them.13 In studies of Proust and music, the insistent presence of the latter has typically been suppressed in favor of the former, just as the evocatively unheard music produced by an imagination akin to that of the symbolists has been privileged over the heard music produced by the mouths and fingers of the characters in the novel. What is needed in order to redress this imbalance is an account of the liveness of music-making in À la recherche, geared towards bodily interaction and erotic intimacy. A recent article by Áine Larkin is an important attempt in this direction: Larkin notes the link between “musical performance and the mise-en-scène of sexuality” in two specific episodes from the novel, but ends up confirming the idea of music as a model for the Narrator’s aesthetic calling.14 In contrast to this conclusion—shared by Nattiez, Compagnon, and countless others— the following account presents a reading of À la recherche that throws doubt on music’s purported role as the Narrator’s paragon of creation. By situating the novel’s music-making within the context of fin-de-siècle notions of musicality and illicit sexual desire and by pointing to its repeated deployment for the purpose of ribald humor, I argue that music is conceptualized by Proust as a profoundly ambiguous activity, which cannot be entrusted with something as important as the purified experience of art. While this realization in no way precludes an enthusiastic

Sounding Bodies  113 attitude toward music, it does mean that music, in the end, needs to be repressed in order for the sought-after aesthetic truth to come across as credible. It is difficult not to begin an account of Proust and music with the ­little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata, the five-note fragment that “continued to be associated in Swann’s mind with his love for Odette” (I:233/1:335). The sensual significance of this phrase is prophetically announced by Mme Verdurin as she seeks to whet Swann’s appetite before the performance of the Andante at her home: “Now it’s you who are going to be caressed, caressed aurally” (I:205/1:294). This emphatic physicality, which will seduce Swann “like a perfume or a caress” (I:343/1:496), repeatedly returns to haunt his experience of the sonata, in marked ­contrast to the passages that describe it as “sine materia” (I:206/1:295). Crucially, when he visits Odette in her apartment, Swann goes on to transfer this idea from imagination to reality: He played with the melancholy which the music diffused, he felt it stealing over him, but like a caress which only deepened and sweetened his sense of his own happiness. He would make Odette play it over to him again and again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, as she did so, she must never stop kissing him. (I:234/1:337) What is interesting here is how important the combination of music and eros appears to be to Swann. He cannot do without either: he needs the music (and not just any music, but these exact notes) and he needs it to be played by a body (not just any body, but Odette’s—despite the fact that her playing is mediocre at best). Simply put, the phrase becomes a sexual fetish for Swann. Odette, who does not appear to share his inclination, finally refuses to deliver the combination: “Make up your mind what you want: am I to play the phrase or play with you [faire des petites caresses]?” (I:234/1:337). For Swann, in other words, the distinction is difficult to sustain. When the physical and erotic side of music is emphasized in this manner, it becomes a vehicle for the transgression of boundaries both social and aesthetic. Swann deploys it deliberately as a means of dissolving the borders that would otherwise separate his bourgeois self from a highend prostitute, as well as the related ones that would seal his aesthetic judgment off from her lack of it. The libidinal energy that is channeled by music, then, is a transgressive one. This notion, it should be noted, does not originate with Proust. It is a recurrent phenomenon in bourgeois society, which saw the pinnacle of domestic music-making and was eminently attentive to the subtlest signs of sexual impropriety. The most striking illustration in a late nineteenth-century context is Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata (1890), which shares the preoccupation

114  Axel Englund with jealousy found in Proust and makes Beethoven’s violin sonata the supreme signifier of erotic transgressions. The bitter cuckold and wifekiller Pózdnyshev remarks: A couple are occupied with the noblest of arts, music; this demands a certain nearness, and there is nothing reprehensible in that and only a stupid jealous husband can see anything undesirable in it. Yet everybody knows that it is by means of those very pursuits, especially of music, that the greater part of the adulteries in our society occur.15 In the social worlds inhabited by Pózdnyshev and Swann, then, musical performance can serve as a culturally sanctioned channel for otherwise unacceptable desires. In Proust’s novel, the desires that need to be thus channeled are above all homosexual ones, which repeatedly intermingle with music-making. The most obvious example is Baron de Charlus, who plays a vital role in Proust’s accounts of homosexuality. When, in the famous opening scene of Sodome et Gomorrhe, Charlus seduces the tailor Jupien and proceeds to have sex with him in his nearby boutique, the Narrator compares the mating dance to Beethoven’s habit of preparing a harmonic modulation with an insistent repetition of a single phrase: Thus, every other minute, the same question seemed to be put to Jupien intently in M. de Charlus’s ogling, like those questioning phrases of Beethoven’s, indefinitely repeated at regular intervals and intended – with an exaggerated lavishness of preparation – to introduce a new theme, a change of key, a “re-entry.” (III:7/4:7) In fact, not only the seduction, but also the intercourse itself, which the Narrator hears through a wall, is described in terms suggestive of music: “these sounds were so violent that, if they had not always been taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought that one person was slitting another’s throat within a few feet of me” (III:11/4:12). The rough sodomy, then, is presented as a duet between tenor and bass, moving in parallel octaves. A similar notion is voiced later in the same volume, once Charlus has entered into the relationship that will eventually cause his demise with the talented young violinist Charles Morel. When the baron, believing himself to be above any suspicion, brings Morel along to stay over for two nights at La Raspelière, his hostess is anything but unaware of their activities: Mme Verdurin would then give them adjoining rooms, and, to put them at their ease, would say: “If you want to have a little music,

Sounding Bodies  115 don’t worry about us. The walls are as thick as a fortress, you have nobody else on your floor, and my husband sleeps like a log.” (III:431/4:602) The association between debauchery and music-making pertains not only to Sodom, but also to Gomorrah. The Montjouvain scene in the first volume, where the composer’s daughter and her friend give the Narrator his first glimpses of lesbian eroticism through a window, is prefaced by Doctor Percepied’s drawing laughter with the following remarks “in a gruff voice”: What d’ye say to this, now? It seems that she plays music with her friend, Mlle Vinteuil. That surprises you, does it? I’m not so sure. It was Papa Vinteuil who told me all about it yesterday. After all, she has every right to be fond of music, that girl. I’m not one to thwart the artistic vocation of a child: nor Vinteuil either, it seems. And then he plays music too, with his daughter’s friend. Why, good lord, it must be a regular musical box, that house! What are you laughing at? (I:145/1:207) Then, as the Narrator watches the goings-on of the girls, he sees an exact parallel to a scene that he has previously witnessed through the same window: on the table where Vinteuil himself once placed some sheet music in order to haphazardly stumble upon it and perform it during a visit from the Narrator’s parents, the daughter now places the composer’s portrait that is to be sadistically defiled once her friend arrives. In the words of Elisabeth Ladenson, “M. Vinteuil’s own artistic exhibitionism thus comes back to haunt him in sexualized form.”16 The scene that inaugurates the novel’s obsession with same-sex desire, then, also launches the succession of passages that, throughout the novel, construe musical performance and erotic interplay as analogues. Let us pause and consider the ideas involved in such analogies. ­Malcolm Bowie, who often emphasizes the notion of the impure in Proust’s views on art, has observed that, in Proust’s account of sex, “sexual appetite is subject to displacement and endlessly transferable into other areas of ­human thought and behaviour.”17 To Bowie, this includes music, but only as one item on a potentially endless list (“shall we say, music, religion or yachting”).18 While it is true that (almost) anything may partake of the erotic in Proust, music-making does so with an insistence that goes far beyond this general tendency, and we need to consider the reason for its special status in this regard. To begin with, chamber music involves a certain intimacy resulting from the necessary physical proximity, intense rhythmic interplay, and attentive communication of the participants, and these aspects are underscored in Proust by the fact

116  Axel Englund that the music is always performed live rather than technologically reproduced. When it comes to the specifically homosexual connotations, however, the burgeoning field of sexual science can furnish us with some further clues. The idea of homosexuals having a gift for artistic creation in general, and for music in particular, circulated widely in fin-de-siècle Europe. To cite a particularly influential author, Richard Krafft-Ebing comments in Psychopathia Sexualis on what he labels “Angeborene conträre ­Sexualempfindung” [Innate contrary sexual feelings]: In the majority of the cases one finds mental anomalies (a brilliant gift for the fine arts, especially music, poetry and so forth, alongside poor intellectual capacity or eccentric distortions) ranging all the way to clear-cut states of mental degeneration (feeble-mindedness, moral aberrancy).19 Notably, one of Krafft-Ebing’s interviewed subjects delivers a list of preferred music that reads almost like an enumeration of the composers most prominently featured in À la recherche: “And in music, I am also most attracted to the nervous, exciting music of a Chopin, Schumann, Schubert or Wagner.”20 In England, Havelock Ellis makes note of the same idea in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897), as well as the association with nervousness: “It has been extravagantly said that all musicians are inverts […] [Oppenheim] remarks that the musical disposition is marked by great emotional instability, and this instability is a disposition to nervousness.”21 From a context closer to Proust himself, one might cite Ali Coffignon, whose La corruption à Paris (1888) conceals its semi-pornographic portrayal of Parisian prostitution, sadomasochism, and homosexuality only by the thinnest veil of scientific concern and moralist outrage. In Coffignon’s account, the male homosexuals come across as something of a Freemasonic brotherhood, who instantly and infallibly recognize each other wherever they meet. For the benefit of those excluded from the secrets of this circle, Coffignon offers some advice: “The pederast always displays an affected politeness, […] his gaze possesses a quite specific languor, he generally has a passion for jewellery and perfumes; even more frequently, he is a lover of music.”22 Regardless of whether or not Proust actually read any of these authors, it is obvious enough that he was aware of the stereotypes that were promulgated in their writings and incorporated them in the deliberations on his own “invert” characters. During a musical soirée at La Raspelière, when Morel is at the center of attention, the baron suddenly sits down at the piano to make music with his protégé. To the general astonishment, M. de Charlus, who never spoke of his own considerable gifts, accompanied, in the purest style, the closing

Sounding Bodies  117 passage (uneasy, tormented, Schumannesque, but, for all that, earlier than Franck’s Sonata) of the sonata for piano and violin by Fauré. […] But I thought with curiosity of this combination in a single person of a physical blemish and a spiritual gift. […] Who would ever have detected that the rapid, nervous, charming style with which M. de Charlus played the Schumannesque passage of Fauré’s Sonata had its equivalent—one dare not say its cause—in elements entirely physical, in the Baron’s nervous weaknesses? (III:334/4:479–480) As Larkin notes, “the protagonist attributes the baron’s artistic gifts ­directly to his sexuality.”23 This observation, however, needs to be ­understood in the context of the above-cited clichés of fin-de-siècle sexology, by which the passage is clearly informed. In this way, we become aware that musical performance in Proust is not just linked to sexuality in general, but specifically to a transgressive or illicit variety. This includes not only the idea that a homosexual inclination coincides with a gift for music, but also, and more specifically, to the idea of nervousness ascribed to the final movement of the Fauré sonata. Fauré, incidentally, belonged to the small circle of Proust’s favorite composers. His piano quartet was another one of the pieces Proust asked the Quatuor Poulet to play (a few weeks after the performance of Franck’s quartet), and in Poulet’s opinion, Fauré “is surely the musician closest to his sensibility.”24 In March 1912, Proust delivers, in a response to a letter with a rather vulgar joke by Montesquiou, the following interpretation of a piece by the same composer: As for the mixture of litanies and semen [mélange de litanies et de foutre] that you speak of, the most delicious expression I know of that is found in a slightly antiquated but intoxicating piano piece by Fauré, which is called perhaps “Romance without words”. I like to think that it is what a pederast might sing while raping a choir boy [ce que chanterait un pédéraste qui violerait un enfant de chœur]. 25 As Proust was writing these lines, psychoanalysis was already articulating the idea that the necessity of a clandestine attitude towards one’s sexual inclinations or fantasies gives rise to a heightened awareness of secret signs through which those inclinations may be expressed without punitive consequences. When Proust projects a fantasy of pederastic rape on a piece of light salon music, it seems reasonable to assume that the pleasure he derives from the joke depends on the fact that such a piece is played in a context obsessed with propriety, good taste, and, not least, homophobia. The same dynamic is present when Charlus and Morel play the Fauré sonata at the Verdurins. Even though the Narrator asks who could have detected the rapport between Charlus’s musical

118  Axel Englund gift and style and his homosexuality, the fact that he himself does detect it stresses that it is an open secret. As a result of the associations that cluster around musicality and homosexuality, the practice of intimate music-making becomes a safe channel of expression for a sexual behavior perceived as deviant: it is safe, because music-making belongs to the appropriate activities of the salon, yet is a channel of expression, because the more attentive of those present, such as the Narrator, are perfectly aware of the erotic connotations. The keyboard, as it were, becomes an accessory in what Eve Sedgwick has memorably termed Charlus’s “glass closet.”26 A similar pattern lies behind the idea that homosexuals are always secretly able to identify each other at a glance (which, in its more ­homophobic variants, turns into the fear of a secret international league of homosexuals, as described by Coffignon). 27 Proust makes use of this notion, too, when Charlus first lays eyes on Morel, only two days before their performance of the Fauré sonata. This happens at a train station, where the Narrator runs into Charlus, who is about to catch the train to Paris. Upon catching a glimpse of Morel, however, the baron suddenly changes his plans. He sends the Narrator over to fetch him, adding that he is “in the regimental band” (III:254/4:352). The Narrator innocently believes that the young man in uniform is related to Charlus, who brusquely delivers a proposition: “I should like to listen to a little music this evening,” he said to Morel without any preliminaries, “I pay five hundred francs for the evening, which may perhaps be of interest to one of your friends, if you have any in the band.” Knowing as I did the insolence of M. de Charlus, I was none the less astonished at his not even bidding goodday to his young friend. (III:255/4:352) It is not difficult to hear in this sudden and eccentric overture an echo of Proust’s own invitation of the Quatuor Poulet to his home, especially since we have already learned that Charlus has done the same thing. Not long after they become acquainted in Balbec, the baron’s nephew ­Saint-Loup tells the Narrator of his uncle that he “wanted once to hear some Beethoven quartets again […] and arranged for some musicians to come and play them to him and a few friends once a week” (II:110/2:451–452). When it comes to Morel, however, the sexual purpose of the bargain is explicitly stated as the Narrator suddenly realizes what is going on: Charlus does not know Morel at all; he is merely dazzled but also intimidated by a soldier even though he carried no weapon but a lyre […]. And remembering the manner in which M. de Charlus had come up to Morel and myself, I saw at once the

Sounding Bodies  119 resemblance to certain of his relatives when they picked up a woman in the street. The desired object had merely changed sex. (III:256/2:353–354) The lyres on the uniform are the first thing the Narrator notices about Morel, and they are presented as a cipher within the same musical code that Charlus uses in making his advances on Morel. In fact, military music is also mentioned by Coffignon as an epicenter of the homosexual circles. As one of the few public places where homosexuals may find each other in broad daylight, he cites “the public gardens during the military concerts”: I have already mentioned that pederasts are very often music lovers. The music also attracts charming youths, around which the soldiers can be seen to flutter; now, the presence of the soldiers is an attraction to certain rivettes [one of Coffignon’s subcategories of pederasts] who have a passion for uniforms […]. 28 The relationship between Charlus and Morel reaches its crisis in La ­prisonnière, at the soirée where the latter participates in the first performance of Vinteuil’s septet. This musical event is of obvious structural significance in the novel: not only does it set off the baron’s demise and descent into public humiliation, but it is also a momentous aesthetic experience for the Narrator, which revives his faith in the importance of his vocation. For Nattiez, as for most other critics, the septet plays the role of the redemptive work of art in À la recherche, and upon hearing it, the Narrator achieves the insights into Vinteuil’s music—and, by extension, into the essence of Art itself—that were unattainable for Swann due to his erotic instrumentalization of the caressing little phrase. In Nattiez’s reading, the septet is “an imaginary work which represents the pure, absolute work that escapes every contingency.”29 Such interpretations find ample support in the Narrator’s own reflections during the performance. Continuing the trajectory of my argument, however, I would like to point to some details that chafe against this reading, suggesting that the erotic associations that cluster around the music have not been, and indeed never will be, conclusively transcended in the Narrator’s mind. The performance itself is the offspring of two analogous same-sex relationships: not only that of Morel and Charlus, who arranges the concert to promote his protégé, but also that of Vinteuil’s daughter and her friend, the latter having laboriously put together the score for the septet from the composer’s illegible notes. The Narrator is well aware of these services to Vinteuil’s music: these works had been assisted, no less than by Mlle Vinteuil’s relations with her friend, by the Baron’s relations with Charlie, a sort of

120  Axel Englund short cut, as it were, thanks to which the world was enabled to catch up with these works. (III:768/5:352) Just as the performing body is the prerequisite of the projection of aesthetic purity on music, then, these homosexual liaisons are prerequisites of—the road along which one can reach—the performance that forms the musical telos of the Narrator’s quest. 30 Just like the erotic appeal of the performing body, moreover, these liaisons keep interrupting and deflating the purity of the aesthetic experience, not only for Charlus— for whom the climactic moment of the septet is when a lock of Morel’s hair falls onto his forehead (III:791/5:383)—but also for the Narrator himself. At several instances during the performance, he is distracted by his association of the music with the sexual activities of Mademoiselle ­Vinteuil (the composer’s daughter), whom he suspects is seeing ­A lbertine. For instance, having just had the idea that all Vinteuil’s previous works were mere attempts at that of which the septet is a consummate expression, he immediately draws a parallel to his own amorous experiences, all of which have been nothing but preparations for his great love of Albertine: “And I ceased to follow the music, in order to ask myself once again whether Albertine had or had not seen Mlle Vinteuil during the last few days” (III:757/5:336). The Narrator even repeats, more or less verbatim, Swann’s way of experiencing Vinteuil’s phrases in terms of sensual stroking. First, while the music is being performed: “at the moment when I thus pictured her waiting for me at home […] my ears were caressed by a passing phrase, tender, homely and domestic, of the septet” (III:757/5:337). Then, during the ensuing conversations, he sees in his mind “the semi-conscious image of my home, where Albertine awaited me—an image associated with the intimate and caressing motif of Vinteuil” (III:809/5:408). In short, the Narrator’s experience of the septet always retains residues of Swann’s eroticized perception of music, and it is very far from that of a pure, absolute work that escapes every contingency; rather, it is the catalyst of a plethora of subjectively motivated projections, which certainly include the purity and absoluteness that the Narrator wants the music to confirm, but also the jealousy, love and erotic desire that he cannot help but hear in it. Towards the end of La prisonnière, some hundred pages later, the Narrator offers an account of how Albertine is playing music—including Vinteuil’s—on the pianola in his bedroom. The pianola enjoyed a brief but significant popularity during the first decades of the twentieth century, and Proust himself bought one in 1914. 31 Here, then, we actually have a scene in À la recherche where a technological novelty is employed in the service of music. Crucially, however, the pianola needs to be operated by a living body, and the importance of this fact is made very

Sounding Bodies  121 clear. The Narrator, of course, is lying down: “I remained in bed, and she would go and sit down at the end of the room before the pianola, between the two bookcases” (III:874/5:501). The pianola scene—which, just like the septet performance, contains contrasting passages that point towards an immaterial essence of art—is perforated by the sexually charged intimacy of bedroom music-making: “Descriptions of her performance repeatedly emphasize the physicality of her playing,” as Larkin puts it. 32 Indeed, while Albertine is playing, the Narrator embarks on an elaborate fetishistic description of her body parts, concocted out of a mixture of memory and desire: Her shoulders […] now leaned against my books. Her shapely legs, which on the first day I had with good reason imagined as having manipulated throughout her girlhood the pedals of a bicycle, now rose and fell alternately upon those of the pianola […]. Her fingers […] rested upon the keys like those of a St Cecilia. (III:884/5:515) In sentences too long to quote here, he proceeds to dwell on his enamored impressions of her neck, eyes, and hair while she is playing. When, for once, Proust does incorporate a technological means of music production in his novel, he thus takes pains to underscore the fact that the music is produced by the labor of a living body, the discrete parts of which form the focal point of the Narrator’s erotic attention. In this passage, symptomatically unmentioned by Nattiez, the Narrator is still repeating the pattern, established by Swann and Charlus, of letting his musical experience be penetrated by sexual desire. What conclusions can be drawn, then, from the musical performances and their erotic overtones? Larkin ends up claiming that they “ultimately prove germane to the conception and realization of the protagonist’s literary vocation,” in that both books and music rely on “physical engagement with creative artworks” in order to yield their truths. 33 While this last statement is quite obviously true, I would suggest that it overlooks a fundamental incompatibility between music’s semi-secret eroticism and the literary project envisioned by the Narrator, which in the end necessitates the exclusion of the former in order for the latter to be formulated. It is not until the final, revelatory insights of Le temps retrouvé that the Narrator is able to enlist Vinteuil’s music for the purpose of his aesthetic ideology. In the famous scene in the library of the Guermantes, he can at last conclusively distance himself from Swann’s eroticization of music and posit it as the antithesis of his own creative endeavor. In the light of the affiliation between musical performance, bodily presence, and illicit sexuality that I have attempted to trace here, what I find particularly intriguing about this scene is its framing. The library where Proust stages the Narrator’s revelations is a site that carefully expels

122  Axel Englund a number of interconnected elements in order to make those insights possible. It expels the world of social interactions in favor of solitude; it expels the temporal existence that will strike him as soon as he comes back to that world and sees how much the well-known faces have aged; and, finally, it expels music. The absence of music in a library is hardly remarkable. What is remarkable, however, is how explicitly Proust lets this absence frame the scene. When the Narrator enters the Guermantes mansion, he has just had another experience of involuntary memory— stumbling on some uneven cobblestones, he is brought back in his mind to Venice—and tries again to understand why these mental images give him such a profound pleasure: Still asking myself this question, and determined today to find the answer to it, I entered the Guermantes mansion, because always we give precedence over the inner task that we have to perform to the outward role which we are playing, which was, for me at this moment that of guest. But when I had gone upstairs, a butler requested me to wait for a few minutes in a little sitting-room used as a library, next to the room where the refreshments were being served, until the end of the piece of music which was being played, the Princess having given orders for the doors to be kept shut during its performance. (IV:446/6:257) Proust, then, kindly assists his Narrator’s quest by shutting the doors on the social world and on music. The Narrator is well aware of the limited space and time that the exclusion affords him: “The piece of music which was being played might end at any moment, and I might be obliged to enter the drawing-room” (IV:448/6:259). Over the next fifty pages, he formulates the aesthetic program that will be the foundation of his great work. As soon as he is done, the servant returns: “At this moment the butler came in to tell me that the first piece of music was finished, so that I could leave the library and go into the rooms where the party was taking place” (IV:496/6:332). The isolated solitude of the library is an emblematic image of modernism’s dream of autonomy. But contrary to what is usually the case— and even more often is simply assumed—music does not serve here as a model for that autonomy: the musical performance is temporally coextensive with the Narrator’s revelatory insights and necessary to their portrayal, but its task is that of the excluded Other. Music, here, is located in the world of social and bodily interaction, together with which it has to be expelled for autonomy to seem plausible. Thus, Nattiez is wrong to see in it a universal key to aesthetic redemption. At regular intervals, the Narrator projects onto music notions of purity and absoluteness, but the eroticism of the performing body insists on intervening. To be perfectly clear: what I am arguing is not that the novel sees the

Sounding Bodies  123 essence of music as located solely in the physical world—that would be a thoroughly un-Proustian conclusion—but that the labor of the human body is an essential substrate to the specific way in which the art of music projects its movement beyond that world, namely by blurring the boundaries between the aesthetic and the erotic. Therefore, to make room for the Narrator’s revelation, there needs to be placed between his aesthetic cognition and the sonorous bodies of music a firmly shut door (and, try as I might, I cannot resist the temptation to think of this door as that of a closet). On a final note, I would like to underline that once the door is opened and the Narrator comes out into the salons, we get another passing glimpse of the side of music from which the Narrator has now distanced himself. A little scene is played out, which is almost always suppressed in accounts of Proust and music, but which in fact contains the last musical performance in the whole novel. As the conclusion to the novel’s engagement with music, it is a parting reminder of the bodiliness and intimacy that adheres to chamber music in Proust’s universe: In one or two smaller sitting-rooms we came upon special friends of our hostess who had preferred to get away from the crowd in order to listen to the music. One of these was a little room with Empire furniture, where […] a chaise longue […] disclosed the figure of a young woman lying at full length. […] Although it was broad daylight, she had asked for the curtains to be drawn as an aid to the silence and concentration which the music required and, to prevent people from stumbling over the furniture, an urn had been lit upon a tripod and from it came a faint, iridescent glimmer. (IV:601/6:493–494) Does not this scene of listening, covered in artificial night lit only by a weak flame and displaying the listener passively receiving the music stretched out on a chaise longue, show us a fictional mirror of Proust’s own private bedroom concerts with the Quatuor Poulet? The Narrator confirms this association by suggesting bodily ailments as the possible reason for her listening in this curious position: I do not know whether it was owing to some malady of the stomach or the nerves or the veins, or because she was about to have or had just had a child or perhaps a miscarriage, that she lay flat on her back to listen to the music and did not budge for anyone. (IV:602/6:495) Most remarkably, however, the piece that is played is Beethoven’s ­K reutzer Sonata. Given the central role played by violin sonatas in Swann’s and Pózdnyshev’s stories of violent jealousy, it seems quite unlikely that

124  Axel Englund Proust, who once dubbed Tolstoy a “Dieu serein,” would evoke this particular composition without recalling its role in Tolstoy’s novella, where it is the supreme channel of libidinal energy.34 From this perspective, the final musical performance in À la recherche prompts us to recall, and the Narrator with us, that music in performance cannot be trusted to lend its support to a purified experience of art. Its reliance on close bodily interaction and its affinity with sexual desire makes it a paradigmatic symbol not of aesthetic purity, but of the tendency of supposed aesthetic purity to blend and merge with erotic intimacy. To my mind, there can be no doubt that, throughout the novel, the Narrator’s fascination with music depends precisely on that ambiguity, as does that of Swann, and perhaps even that of the musically inclined reader of Proust’s novel.

Notes 1 Gaston Poulet, et al., “Proust et la musique,” Bulletin de la Société des amis de Marcel Proust et des amis de Combray 11 (1961), 425. All translations by the author unless otherwise noted. 2 Poulet et al., “Proust et la musique,” 433. 3 See, for instance, Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, ­Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 4 Paul Valéry, “La conquête de l’ubiquité,” in Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), II:1284. 5 Valéry, “La conquête,” 1285. 6 Cf. Marcel Proust, Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1970–93), X:250 and XII:110. 7 This argument has been made in Cormac Newark, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and John Hamilton, “‘Cette douceur, pour ainsi dire wagnérienne’: Musical resonance in Proust’s Recherche,” in Proust and the Arts, ed. Christie McDonald and François Proulx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 8 Cf. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89), I:377 and IV:522. References to this edition of À la recherche hereafter cited in text. First, I give the volume (I–IV) and page of the original, then the corresponding volume (1–6) and page of the English edition from which I am quoting: Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols., trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (1–5), Andreas Mayor (6) and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 2003). Hamilton places the gramophone at the center of Proust’s conflation of music and memory (cf. “Cette douceur,” 92). However, the passage on which this reading hinges (III:311) does not refer to a gramophone at all in the French original, but to a player piano (cf. III:1525). 9 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Proust as Musician, trans. Derrick Puffett ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Other significant works exemplifying this tendency include Pierre Costil, “La Construction musicale de la ­Recherche du temps perdu” (Part I & II), Bulletin de la Société des amis de Marcel Proust 8–9 (1958–59); and Georges Matoré and Irène Mecz, ­M usique et structure romanesque dans la “Recherche du temps perdu” (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972). 10 In addition to Nattiez’s book, this side of music in Proust has been foregrounded in, for instance, Anne Henry, Marcel Proust: Théories pour une

Sounding Bodies  125

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

esthéthique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981); Peter Dayan, Music Writing Literature, From Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 79–95; and Sindhumathi Revuluri, “Sound and music in Proust: What the Symbolists heard,” in Proust and the Arts, ed. Christie McDonald and François Proulx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). On the notion of music as a guarantor of unity, see also Antoine Compagnon, “Fauré, Proust et l’unité retrouvée,” Romanic Review 78.1 (1987). For two examples of challenges to this narrative, which pertain specifically to sexual and interart relations, cf. Colleen Lamos, Deviant Modernism: T. S. Eliot, James Joyce & Marcel Proust (Port Chester: Cambridge ­University Press, 1999), 170–173, and Christie McDonald and François Proulx, eds., Proust and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–2. Malcom Bowie has written beautifully on the interrelation between the two. His discussion of music and sex, however, is granted only two pages: Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 215–17. Áine Larkin, “Albertine and Other Performers: Aesthetic Agency, Love, and Jealousy in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu,” Romance Studies 32.2 (2014), 113. Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude and J.D. Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 139. Elisabeth Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 65. Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, 211–212. Ibid., 212. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1892), 227. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 250. Quoted in Rachel Lewis, “Ethel Smyth and the Emergence of the Lesbian Composer,” in Sapphists and Sexologists; Histories of Sexualities: Volume 2, eds. Sonja Tiernan and Mary McAuliffe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 215. Ali Coffignon, La Corruption à Paris (Paris: Librairie Illustrée, 1888), 329–30. Larkin, “Aesthetic Agency,” 113. Poulet, “Proust et la musique,” 434 and 426, respectively. Proust, Correspondance, XI:79. See also Compagnon, “Fauré, Proust, et l’unité retrouvée,” 115. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 228. Coffignon, La corruption à Paris, 328–29. Ibid., 346. Nattiez, Proust as Musician, 60. Nattiez reads Vinteuil’s work as the redemption of homosexual love (Proust as Musician, 68–70). This reading only takes account of the lesbian relations of Mlle Vinteuil—Charlus’s homosexuality is far from redeemed. Proust, Correspondance, XIII:31. Larkin, “Aesthetic Agency,” 115. Larkin, “Aesthetic Agency,” 112, 121. See Philippe Chardin, “Tolstoï (Léon),” and “Tolstoï,”, in Dictionnaire ­M arcel Proust, eds. Annick Bouillaguet and Brian Rogers (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014), 1004–1007.

8 Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal Suddhaseel Sen

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is remembered in the West today as a poet, novelist, and sage who was briefly catapulted into international recognition through the twin efforts of Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats.1 His range of activities, achievements, and influence was, in fact, much wider. Tagore set two thousand of his poems to music that he composed himself. He correctly predicted that these songs, collectively known as Rabindra-sangīt, would be the most enduring part of his output; 2 many of these songs have achieved enduring popularity among Bengalis in India, Bangladesh, and the global diaspora. They have had considerable influence on music in India and Bangladesh and, to a lesser extent, in Sri Lanka over the course of the twentieth century. Tagore was also an innovator in the fields of drama, dance, and education, and late in his life he took up painting, producing works that were exhibited both in India and in prestigious galleries in Paris and elsewhere in Europe and drew the admiration of some European modernist painters. 3 Nearly a century before ecological questions assumed global significance, ­Tagore drew attention to the devastating effects of unchecked ecological exploitation in plays such as Mukta-Dhārā (1922) and essays such as “Robbery of the Soil” (1924), and he made students at his university plant trees annually.4 Finally, Tagore recognized early on the dangers of the kind of European nationalism that led to the two World Wars, as well as of religion-based völkisch nationalism. This led him to propound the kind of multicultural model for independent India that was taken up by ­Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, which proved to be highly influential in post-Independence India till the slow but steady ascendance of right-wing Hindu nationalism from the 1980s onwards. While Europeans thought of Tagore as a kind of Oriental mystic-­ troubadour who had become known to twentieth-century European artists, reminding them of their own cultural past, 5 Bengalis—and Indians who do not have access to Tagore’s texts in the original ­B engali—regard him as one of the most important figures of modern Indian literature. This view can also be easily extended to his contribution to music. Critical attention has been paid to reconfigure modernism from its traditionally narrow and often Eurocentric definitions, and it is not surprising

Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity  127 that the figure of Tagore has often emerged in such discussions. Strikingly, Tagore’s musical aesthetic has not received similar critical attention within modernist studies. In what follows, this essay will elaborate on Tagore’s musical modernism, a critical terrain that will address a significant lacuna in viewing Tagore as a modernist. Such a claim for Tagore can be made if one moves away from ­definitions of modernism as an essentially European movement in the arts.6 ­Tagore, ever the judicious eclectic, sought to draw inspiration not only from ­European art forms but from other Asian cultures as well, displaying his penchant for combining international, Indian classical, and folk models.7 For example, for his own nritya-nātya (dance dramas), he drew upon Javanese, Balinese, and Kandyan dance, among other international dance forms; Kathakali and Manipuri dances from Indian classical dance forms; and Santhal and Chhau dances from Indian folk cultures.8 In the realm of literature, Tagore rebelled, as did his distinguished predecessors Michael Madhusudan Datta and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, against the slavish adherence to literary models derived from age-old Sanskrit literature, and he sought to develop a body of new Bengali literature by taking into account mārga (i.e. Indian classical, or Sanskrit), deshi (i.e. modern Indian), and European literatures. And as a musician, Tagore rebelled against the strictures of the Hindustani (i.e. North ­Indian) classical tradition and sought to create a personal idiom based on ­Hindustani, Carnatic (i.e. South Indian), Bengali folk, and European musical traditions. The latter included both Irish and Scottish popular airs, some of which Tagore adapted, as well as some German Lieder and French mélodies, from the repertoires of which Tagore is known to have sung songs in his early days, when he was much in demand as a singer.9 Although Pound left behind a few musical compositions, both he and Yeats had a different relationship with music than did Tagore; consequently, their interest in Tagore had little to do with Tagore’s own creative strengths and aspirations and had more to do with their own a­ esthetic interests and predilections in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Pound’s brief but intense interest in Tagore, whom he knew as being both a poet and a musician, coincided with his interest in the music of Baroque composers, such as Antonio Vivaldi, back to the songs of Medieval troubadours, which Pound transcribed in 1906 during a doctoral research year in Europe.10 Pound was also a language consultant to three editions of troubadour melodies11 and set the works of p ­ oets such as François Villon (1431–?) to music. Pound the poet, however, was more concerned with the song-like aspects of poetry without music and wrote in 1919, with regard to two poems by Villon and a sonnet by Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1255–1300), that music was already made by the words. A renewed interest in the sonic—and, by extension, musical—aspects of recited poetry interested Pound and Yeats, neither of whom, according to Ann Saddlemyer, was able to hold a tune.12 She adds that

128  Suddhaseel Sen Yeats had always chanted his poetry and insisted on “heightened speech” in his plays. […] On rare occasions, Yeats did not even want the words to be too clearly recognizable; he was after a combination of rhythm, sound, and the relationship between the two rather than a recognizable melody that would force them apart. Basil ­Bunting’s later pronouncement may well have come from either Yeats or Pound: ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound – long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another.’13 Although recordings of Tagore’s own recitations reveal an element of “heightened speech,” Tagore attached great importance to melodic lines. His word-setting is frequently melismatic, and many of his melodies, far from springing out from the sounds inherent in the spoken words, are enjoyed in purely instrumental versions as well. It is not surprising, therefore, that Tagore proudly acknowledged in a lecture he gave in 1881 that he sometimes composed verses around a given melody instead of making the latter subservient to the poetic text.14 It is interesting to note in this regard that it was Leoš Janáček, one of the most fervent admirers of Tagore the poet, who made the sonic aspects of spoken words the basis for some remarkable musical innovations in his operas. However, it does not appear that either Pound or Yeats was interested in Janáček, whose works travelled outside the Czech-speaking lands only after the 1930s, often in editions touched up by other hands. Pound’s interest in the music of composers from Johann Sebastian Bach back to earlier periods of European history was consonant with some of the major strands of European musical modernism. Nineteenth-­ century French composers and theorists such as Louis-Albert Bourgault-­ Ducoudray, Maurice Emmanuel, and some of the composers associated with the Schola Cantorum, established in Paris in 1894, were interested in the music of ancient Greece as well as exotic lands such as India and used modal harmonies to enrich the language of Western ­music.15 ­Emmanuel’s Fourth Sonatina for Piano, for example, is based on ­Carnatic modes, while Erik Satie and Albert Roussel, both of whom studied at the Schola Cantorum, showed their interest in Greek and Indian themes, respectively, through works such as Satie’s Gymnopédies (1888) and Gnossiennes (1889–97) for piano and Roussel’s orchestral Evocations (1910–11) and the opera Padmâvatî (1913–18). Even in the much more Eurocentric circles of Austria and Germany, Anton Webern, pupil of Arnold Schoenberg and one of the leading figures of twelve-tone music in his own right, had written his doctoral thesis on the music of the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac (Schoenberg’s friend and, for a brief period, teacher of composition Alexander von Zemlinsky composed what is at present the most famous of Tagore settings by a Western composer, the Lyrische Symphonie, in 1922–23). And in the

Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity  129 Anglophone context, a keen interest in Greek modes and modern Indian music was shown by Maud MacCarthy (1882–1967), a violinist-turned-­ specialist in Indian music associated with the circle of Annie Besant, and by her second husband, the composer John Foulds (1880–1939). In his pieces influenced by South Indian melākartās (rāgas arranged in terms of ordered pitch classes, rather than melodic formulas), Foulds “adopted almost as strict an approach to composition in his modes as Schoenberg did in his note-rows” by avoiding strictly any note outside of the pitch classes of the melākartā in question.16 This, too, was a development in European musical modernism against which Tagore’s own work went, since he decided to depart from the pitch classes of rāgas according to his own free will—but more on that later. Yeats, who collaborated with MacCarthy and Foulds over some projects, admitted to the latter that no composer has been able “to enhance his poems” by setting them to music and that “the effect of the songs was appreciably less than would have been the case had the poems been beautifully declaimed without music” (Foulds  69).17 Both MacCarthy and Foulds knew of Tagore’s work as a musician, and MacCarthy’s observations on Rabindrasangīt hold the key to understanding some of the underlying features of Tagore’s musical modernity.18 Pound’s interest in music from older periods was, therefore, shared by many modernist musicians of the time. In the person of Tagore, the roles of the poet and the composer were unified, a combination that Pound also found in a figure like Guido Cavalcanti, on whom he wrote one of his radio operas.19 But admiration based on such grounds could not but wane as Pound’s artistic interests changed, and by 1929, when Pound’s and Yeats’s interest in Tagore had waned for good, both of them started taking a keen interest in the music of George Antheil (1900–1959), the American avant-garde composer, pianist, writer, and inventor. Praising Antheil’s setting for his play Fighting the Waves, Yeats wrote of Antheil’s music: If I knew one tune from another I should probably hate it for I judge from Ezra’s conversation that [Antheil’s] affinities are all with the youngest of the young. Not knowing anything about music however I am delighted to find a man whose theories about the relations between words and music seem to be exactly my own […] I begin to think what my friends call my lack of ear is but an instinct for the music of the twelfth century. 20 In other words, Antheil, rather than Tagore, became more valuable to Yeats at this stage of his life since the American composer’s aesthetic ­position regarding word-music relations echoed Yeats’s own, at least in the latter’s mind. Such an attitude on Yeats’s part is perhaps characteristic of creative figures with strong personalities, which, in Yeats’s

130  Suddhaseel Sen case, led him to having an “almost limitless belief in his own role as cultural critic and adjudicator of poetic and cultural value in a modern ­European context.”21 But larger cultural-political prejudice cannot be ruled out either. As Collins has pointed out, D.H. Lawrence dismissed the “wretched worship of Tagore” as “sheer fraud,” and wrote in his letter of May 24, 1916 to Lady Otteline Morrell that the East is marvellously interesting, for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so it can start on a new phase. 22 One may argue that Yeats, unlike Pound or Lawrence, was Irish and knew some of the most significant figures of the Irish Rebellion that eventually gave rise to Ireland’s independence from Great Britain. But what unites all three figures—Pound, Yeats, and Lawrence—is the confidence with which they felt entitled to pass judgment on a poet and composer of whose cultural traditions they had at best only a limited understanding. Ana Jelinkar aptly sums up the situation when she writes that “there is indeed something unsettling about Yeats’s identification with the English point of view in his relation with Tagore,” which made it “possible for the Irishman Yeats, himself a colonized subject of the British, to contribute to British misconceptions of Tagore.”23 Tagore, in addition to being a poet, was extremely creative ­musically— he composed at least 1721 songs, and the lyrics for a further 194 (their tunes have not been recorded). 24 In addition, he was a fine singer. It appears that neither Yeats nor Pound could sing, and Pound’s musical creativity was far more limited than Tagore’s. As a creative artist, Tagore was comfortable in the two different media—words and m ­ usic—that come together in song, even though, it must be noted, Tagore always resisted taking systematic formal training either in Indian or in Western music and had to depend on his associates to have his songs notated. 25 Tagore’s approach to word-music relationships was informed by his command over both media and was, therefore, fundamentally different from that of his one-time European champions; a summary of some of his aesthetic goals as a composer can be found in Radice. 26 Although Tagore’s views regarding word-music relationships changed from time to time, he often wrote insightfully on that topic as well as on music generally. Furthermore, it is possible to trace in his work as a composer a trajectory of change. He began from a position in which he sought to give greater importance to words, both in terms of content and in terms of matching verbal and musical stresses in his songs, than was the case in Hindustani classical music. In the early part of his career, even though Tagore was able to forge an individual melodic style, his melodies betrayed their indebtedness to the melodic prototypes from the three principal musical traditions from which he drew his ideas—Hindustani

Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity  131 classical, Bengali folk, and Western music. As he matured, his range of musical interest widened, and later in life he produced a number of remarkable songs inspired by Carnatic music. In this later phase, however, Tagore transformed his original sources of musical material to such an extent that the connections between the musical source materials and their transformed versions in Tagore’s songs are all but impossible to discern without ­Tagore’s acknowledgement of influence. Furthermore, ­Tagore’s frequently melismatic approach to word-setting was as far removed as possible from Yeats’s and Pound’s efforts to locate the musical in the declamatory aspect of poetry itself. Like Verdi and Janáček, ­Tagore matured as he grew older and produced some of his best songs in his later years. How, then, did Tagore develop as a composer of songs, and what is “modern” about Tagore’s work in this field?

Tagore and Music By the time Tagore began his career as a composer of songs, music in Calcutta (now renamed Kolkata) was a confluence of three different ­musical traditions—North Indian classical music, of which the vocal genre known as the tappā was developed in Calcutta by the inventive poet-­ composer “Nidhubabu” (Ramnidhi Gupta, 1741–1839); Bengali folk music; and, to a much lesser extent, Western music. The latter had also started making its impact elsewhere in India, for example, on Carnatic musicians of the Tanjore court from the first decade of the nineteenth century onwards, and the trajectory of reception of Western music there was very different from that in late nineteenth-century Bengal. Amanda Weidman has argued in her book Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern (2006) that, in attempting to define modern Carnatic classical music, Indian commentators have used Western conceptual categories to makes distinctions between “classical” and “popular” music, sought to insulate “classical” music from the political realm, and have valorized the autonomous “composer” as opposed to the performer-improviser. 27 At the same time, they have sought to pit the Carnatic classical tradition against the Western. Whether or not one agrees with Weidman’s thesis, 28 Tagore and his younger successors did not feel the need to draw ideas and concepts from Western music, indigenize them, and then deny the Western influence, since they were more openly and judiciously eclectic. This was partly because Tagore and others could not have made claims for Bengali song, which they argued held words and music in a finer balance than in the music-dominated Hindustani classical tradition, 29 as being part of an age-old tradition. Nor were they interested in reinventing Indian tradition along Western conceptual categories: ­Tagore was the most senior among a number of Bengali poet-composers such as Dwijendralal Ray (1863–1913), Rajanikanta Sen (1865–1910), ­Atulprasad Sen (1871–1934), and Qazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), who

132  Suddhaseel Sen sought to create distinctive song styles and to preserve and propagate their music through recordings and print media. Since the music was no longer improvised, Tagore and Nazrul, two of the most gifted among the group, chose to move from one rāga to another within the course of a song, or even depart from the notes of any given rāga, thereby flouting a fundamental compositional/performance practice in the Hindustani classical tradition. In essays such as “Sangīt o Bhāb” (“Music and Feeling,” 1881), “Sangīt” (“Music,” 1912), and several others that have been collected and published as Sangīt-Chinta (Thoughts on Music), Tagore sought to justify his departures and advocated the use of harmony and of Western notation for his music.30 All these theoretical writings went hand-in-hand with Tagore’s compositional practice: unlike many of the modernists, Tagore wrote and composed prolifically, and the considerable body of works he left behind helps us trace how Tagore’s musical ideas changed over time.31 Although melody played a far more significant role in his songs than it did in the aesthetic position taken by Yeats and Pound, Tagore did seek to bring words and music into a much closer relationship with each other than was the case with Hindustani music. In attempting to do so, ­Tagore initially depended on traditional tālas (rhythmic structures), while keeping his melodic lines close in style to one of the oldest forms of Hindustani classical music, the dhrupad. Indeed, Tagore’s early songs reveal more clearly their links to the musical traditions from which they were derived—not just those based on Hindustani classical music, but also those based on Western ones. As Tagore started departing from the strict conventions governing the usage of rāgas, he started combining the periodic phrase structure of Western melodies with rāga-based tunes (Mitra 18–21); and eventually, he started composing songs in which phrases and even whole sections were based on pitch classes foreign to those of the rāga, whose pitch classes otherwise dominated the melodic contours of any given song. Correspondingly, he also created new tālas such as the rupkaurā, shashthī, and jhampak instead of confining himself to the ones used in Hindustani classical music.32 Tagore’s development as a melodist, and his individual approach towards rāgas can be seen when one compares the song, “Aundho jonē dēho ālo” (“Give light to those lacking sight”), a devotional song from 1886, with “Mor bīnā othē kon shurē bāji” (“To which tune does my veena play?”), composed in 1919. Both are based on the rāga Bhairavi, a rāga that has a wide range of emotional connotations, but is especially associated with compassion, devotion, and the poignancy of separation.33 In “Aundho jonē,” Tagore’s melody adheres closely to both the musical idiom (or chāl, in Indian terms) of Bhairavi, while its words emphasize the themes of compassion and devotion associated with the rāga. In contrast, the later song “Mor bīnā” flouts convention at multiple levels. Instead of the free, asymmetric phrases of “Aundho jonē,”

Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity  133 “Mor bīnā” uses the periodic phrase structure more commonly found in Western music from the Classical period onwards. The leaps in the melodic line of the later song (e.g. the one up a seventh at the very beginning of the first phrase) brings it closer in idiom to Western music, as well as later Indian popular music, rather than to traditional Bhairavi. Its lyrics, through which Tagore celebrates nature, also depart from traditional ­extra-musical connotations associated with that rāga.34 When compared to “Aundho jonē,” “Mor bīnā” might sound less “Indian” to Western ears, but what Tagore was doing was quite original: he was the first to combine successfully a rāga-based melodic idiom with the periodic phrase structure of Western music. Over time, Tagore would combine different elements from various musical traditions with greater facility to create a recognizably unique melodic idiom. A parallel can be noticed in the case of Tagore’s use of Western music. A comparison of any performance of “Robin Adair” with Tagore’s song “Shakali phurālo swapanaprāy” (“Like a dream all is gone”), composed in 1882, soon after Tagore’s return from his first trip to England, shows that, at this early stage, he incorporated his musical source material virtually without any change.35 By 1895, however, Tagore was able to write a song, “Ami chini go chini tomārey, ogo bideshini” (“I know you well, you lady from abroad”), whose words were inspired by lines from a Baul song36 and whose tune sounds like a modally inflected waltz with the seventh degree of the scale flattened. Its text teasingly displays some ambivalence about the addressee, who could be simply a foreigner (a reading Tagore himself had in mind when he sang the song to the Argentinian writer Victoria Ocampo, and which the extra-musical connotations of the waltz reinforce at a musical level). Alternatively, the addressee could be universal nature, as Sukanta Chaudhuri has argued. 37 By the 1930s, Tagore would go much further, creating tunes that combined easily the periodic phrase structure of Western melodies from the Classical period onwards with scalar and melodic materials largely derived from, but not confined to, any single rāga. A song like “Ogo swapna swarupinī” (“O the distant beloved of my dreams”) (1939), for example, is based on rāga Paraj (which Tagore mentions in the song’s text), but uses pitch classes foreign to the rāga in ways that enable Tagore to modulate to the subdominant in the sanchārī (i.e. the third section of the song). Usually, such departures are attributed to Tagore’s genius, but whether such departures from the notes of a rāga have any underlying pattern—and, therefore, structural significance—is a question that has never been adequately answered, since such departures can be analyzed only when analytical tools from both Indian and Western music theories are brought to bear on the music of a composer who grew up hearing music of both India and Europe. The term “bimusicality,” coined by ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood, comes in handy in this regard, except that Tagore drew upon multiple musical traditions within India itself,

134  Suddhaseel Sen not to speak of Western music, to create songs whose melodic lines bore his unmistakable stylistic fingerprint. 38 If the examples presented so far are of Tagore’s adaptations of North Indian classical and traditional Western melodies, one must also remember Tagore’s indebtedness to different kinds of Bengali folk music, a wellknown example of which is “Grām chhārā oi rāngā mātir path” (“The red path that leads away from the village”) (1909). 39 And although Tagore also drew upon Carnatic traditions from early in his career, he produced some of his best songs from the last decade of his life after his interest in Carnatic music was renewed by a visit to Madras (renamed Chennai) in 1919. There, he heard Savitri Devi Krishnan sing and promptly invited her to Santinketan along with her sisters.40 A song like “Bājē koruno shurē” (“The plaintive tune”), composed early in 1931,41 was based on “Nīdu charanamulē,” a devotional song or kriti usually attributed to the Tanjore-based composer Tyāgarāja (1767–1847).42 While in his own song Tagore retained some of Tyāgarāja’s original words, he moved away from their explicitly religious connotations and, instead, classified “Bājē koruno shurē” as a love song in Gītabitān, the standard collection of Tagore’s song lyrics (first published 1931). Melodically, Tagore’s song shows traces of the source material, but in terms of emotional affect, it sounds very different indeed. Both songs make prominent use of the augmented fourth interval—the tritone—as the melody descends from the tonic in its opening phrase. In his film Monihārā (1961), the score for which he had composed himself, the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray gave the song a further twist by making transformations of the opening phrase of Tagore’s song the basis for the entire score. Monihārā was Ray’s only excursion into the sub-genre of the “horror” film. Since the tritone has traditionally been associated with the phrase diabolus in ­musica—the devil in music—in Western musical thought, Ray’s innovative use of what was initially a devotional hymn to Lord Rāmā as the musical basis for a horror film is testament to the fact that musical modernity in Bengal was both influenced by indigenous and Western musical traditions, as well as by a sense of individual autonomy. In both regards, it was Tagore who played a vital role in changing the musical landscape of Bengal.

Conclusion The transmission in Bengal of a song like “Nīdu charanamulē” shows both Tagore and Ray departing considerably from their immediate role models without taking recourse to parody or to a contestatory Bloomian mode vis-à-vis a powerful artistic predecessor. In the Indian context, however, it would have taken—and still takes—a creative artist with a strong sense of the self to reinterpret a previous work of art, especially if its creator enjoys canonical status, and make such a reinterpretation

Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity  135 the basis for a new creation. In the context of Bengali literary culture, such a breakthrough was made decisively in the year of Tagore’s birth by ­M ichael Madhusudan Datta, whose Mēghnādavadha-Kāyva (1861), a retelling of the ancient Hindu epic, the Rāmayana, from the point of view of the defeated Lankans, enabled Bengali writers to make use of their freedom as artists to engage with works of art of the past in ways they chose, instead of accepting and passing on traditional values. In the field of Bengali music, it was Tagore who took on a similar task, enabling future composers to take freedom with rāgas and tālas if their artistic spirit so demanded. The desire to depart from tradition happens especially when members of a cultural community come into contact with people from, or products of, other cultures. As I stated earlier, Tagore sought inspiration from various different musical cultures both Indian and foreign, resulting in later Bengali musicians becoming exposed to, and engaging with, different kinds of music. After Tagore, later creative figures like Ray felt the freedom to negotiate multiple musical influences in inventive and original ways. By such means, they sought to develop a culture of what has been variously termed “rooted cosmopolitanism” by Kwame Anthony Appiah43 and “local cosmopolitanism” by Neil Lazarus.44 Such creative artists were ready to engage with works from various cultures and periods, and yet were also strongly aware of their embeddedness in a particular socio-cultural milieu. We need to distinguish, therefore, between the Tagorean kind of cosmopolitanism with that of the transnational cosmopolitanism of later postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie, who have lived the major part of their lives in countries different from those of their birth and have written not in their native languages but in the language of their ex-colonizers.45 Once we make the distinction between local and transnational cosmopolitanisms, it would be easier for us to accept Tagore as a cosmopolitan of the former kind, rather than as not being cosmopolitan at all, as Michael Collins has argued, based on Tagore’s association of the term “cosmopolitan world” with “a kind of lowest common denominator at the level of elite culture in which deep-rooted cultural differences, and indeed history itself, were glossed over.”46 Both his essays on music in Sangīt-Chintā as well as the songs Tagore composed suggest nothing if not a mind open to engage with different art from different countries without sounding derivative. Having drawn inspiration from Sanskrit and German poetry, Carnatic music and Irish folk songs, Balinese and Santhal dances, and Haida art and African ritual masks, and having written a song celebrating different parts of India that eventually became the country’s anthem, Tagore, in his rich and complex corpus of works in different art forms, provided the widest possible basis for imagining a local or rooted cosmopolitan tradition in Bengal. It was through such local cosmopolitanism that Tagore helped modernity flourish in Bengali culture and thought, and the most well-known Bengali artists, scholars, and intellectuals

136  Suddhaseel Sen who followed him benefitted from the opening up of the intellectual horizons that Madhusudan had triggered decisively and that flourished under Tagore’s influence. Tagore’s brush with early t­ wentieth-century European modernism may have resulted in an ephemeral, if spectacular, success, but his contribution to Indian modernity was more multifaceted and abiding than has usually been acknowledged.

Notes 1 I would like to express my thanks to Subhasis Sen, Niladri Ray, A. P. ­Rajaram, Debashish Raychaudhuri, Anna Schultz, and Anupama Mohan for their help and advice in preparing this essay. Financial support for this research was provided by a Stanford Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship, a Steven Wisch Fellowship (Stanford), and a research visitorship under the Balzan Research Project, “Towards a Global History of Music.” 2 William Radice, “Keys to the Kingdom: The Search for How to Best Understand and Perform the Songs of Tagore,” University of Toronto Quarterly 77.4 (2008), 1107. 3 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the AvantGarde 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 65–78. 4 Tapati Dasgupta, Social Thought of Rabindranath Tagore: A Historical Analysis (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1993), 142. 5 Michael Collins, “Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Friendship,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 35.1 (2012), 123. 6 Whether or not the origins of modernity should be located in Europe is a question that I do not have the space to discuss in this essay. I agree with scholars who argue that European modernity, despite being perhaps the most influential one of our times, is one of multiple manifestations across different cultures; therefore, neither should modernity be thought of in the singular, nor is it possible to locate it in a single point of origin going back to the European Renaissance, unless the histories of many other global modernities are willfully ignored. For theoretical critiques of modernity and Eurocentrism, see Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002); Arif Dirlik, “Modernity as History: Post-Revolutionary China, Globalizaton and the Question of Modernity,” Social History 27.1 (2002); and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Many Renaissances, Many Modernities?” Theory, Culture & Society 28.3 (2011). For Asian modernities, see Raka Shome, “Asian Modernities: Culture, Politics, and Media,” Global Media and Communication 8.3 (2012). On modernism and empire, see Anupama Mohan, Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 64–66. 7 Tagore did translate some poems by T. S. Eliot, and admired Walt W ­ hitman, from whom he derived the concept of prose poetry. In general, however, he admired more the works of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Heine, and Goethe, and had sufficient German to read the latter poets in the original language. See Taraknath Sen, “Western Influence on the Poetry of ­Tagore,” in R ­ abindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume 1861–1961, eds. S. ­Radhakrishnan et al. (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2010), esp. 272–75. 8 Mandakranta Bose, “Indian Modernity and Tagore’s Dance,” University of Toronto Quarterly 77.4 (2008), 1089–1091. 9 Examples of the latter include Gounod’s “Sérénade” and his setting of ­Longfellow’s “If thou art sleeping, maiden,” as well as Beethoven’s “Adelaide.”

Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity  137

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18

See Santidev Ghosh, Rabindrasangīt (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 1962), 175–76, and Reba Som, Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and His Song (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2009), 26–35. Pound and his mistress, the violin virtuoso Olga Rudge, played an important role in restoring Vivaldi back to the pantheon of Baroque masters through concerts organized by Pound and Rudge at Rapallo between 1933 and 1939 and by Rudge cataloguing, at Pound’s instigation, Vivaldi’s 300-odd instrumental pieces at the National Library in Turin, in 1936. Rudge went on to co-found the Centro di Studi Vivaldiani in Siena, leading to the widespread performances of Vivaldi’s music. See H.C. Robbins Landon, Vivaldi: Voice of the Baroque (Hammersmith: Flamingo, 1995), 8. Margaret Fisher, “Ezra Pound: Composer,” liner notes, Ego Scriptor Cantilenæ: The Music of Ezra Pound, perf. Conductus Ensemble et al, cond. Robert Hughes (San Francisco: Other Minds, 2003), 16. Ann Saddlemyer, “William Butler Yeats, George Antheil, Ezra Pound: Friends and Music,” Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 2 (2012), 60–62. Saddlemyer, “Friends and Music,” 61. Som, Rabindranath Tagore, 42 and 204 n19. Bourgault-Ducoudray, for instance, declared as early as 1878 that “all modes, old or new, European or exotic … must be admitted by us and used by composers.” His ideas left their strongest impression on Claude Debussy, whose encounter with the music of Vietnam and Java in the Expositions Universelles in Paris in 1889 and 1900 deeply influenced his future work. Bourgault-Ducoudray quoted in Jann Pasler, “Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” in The Late-Romantic Era: From the Mid-19th Century to World War I, ed. Jim Samson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 392. Neil Sorrell, “From ‘Harm-omnium’ to Harmonia Omnium: Assessing Maud MacCarthy’s Influence on John Foulds and the Globalization of ­I ndian Music,” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 40 (2009), 122. John Foulds, Music Today: Its Heritage from the Past, and Legacy to the ­Future (Binsted, Hampshire: Noverre Press, 2010), 69. For Yeats’s collaboration with MacCarthy and Foulds, see John Harwood, ed., “Olivia ­Shakespear: Letters to W. B. Yeats,” in Yeats and Women. ed. Deirdre Toomey (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 327n.3. Since the time of Harwood’s essay, Foulds’s music has undergone substantial critical reevaluation and coverage on CD. A collection of the correspondence with Yeats can be found as part of the MacCarthy Foulds Family Papers, housed at the University of York (Borthwick Institute for Archives), esp. MCF 5/1/1/40 and 5/3/3/4 (11). Fuller studies of Foulds and MacCarthy can be found in Malcolm ­Macdonald, John Foulds and his Music: An Introduction (London: Kahn and Averill, 1989); Nalini Ghuman, Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination, 1897–1947 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), chapters 1 and 6, and ­Sorrell, “Assessing Maud McCarthy’s Influence.” I have examined MacCarthy’s insights into Tagore’s music, as well as the implications of the differences between Foulds’s and Tagore’s divergent ­approaches towards retaining the pitch classes of rāgas in my essay, “Orientalism and Beyond: Tagore, Foulds, and Cross-Cultural Exchanges between Indian and Western Musicians” (Routledge, forthcoming). MacCarthy’s encounter with Tagore provides a much happier example of cross-cultural encounter based on mutual respect and understanding than is the case with the vast majority of Tagore’s encounters with European and North American literary figures.

138  Suddhaseel Sen 19 Pound’s operas have been studied in detail in Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2002). It must be noted that Pound was not insensitive to either the verbal or the musical aspects of Tagore’s songs; but since he did not know either Bengali or Indian music, Pound could not but have only a very limited understanding of Tagore’s innovations at the levels of language and music. On Pound’s observations on Bengali and Indian music, see ­Nabareeta Dev Sen, “The ‘Foreign Reincarnation’ of Rabindranath ­Tagore,” Journal of Asian Studies 25.2 (1966), 276–77. 20 W. B. Yeats, Letter to Sturge Moore, 24 March 1929, quoted in Saddlemyer, “Friends and Music,” 63. 21 Collins, “Politics of Friendship,” 138. 22 Quoted in Collins, “Politics of Friendship,” 125 (emphases in original). 23 Ana Jelnikar, “W. B. Yeats’s (Mis)Reading of Tagore: Interpreting an Alien Culture.” University of Toronto Quarterly 77.4 (2008), 1009. 24 This is the number suggested by the noted musicologist Subhash Chowdhury in Gitabitānder Jagat, (Kolkata: Papyrus, 2009), 170–71. He adds that if one includes song fragments and recitatives (“shurē sanglāp”), the number goes up considerably. In his more inclusive chronological catalogue, P ­ rabhatkumar Mukherjee attributes 2178 songs to Tagore. 25 Tagore’s grandfather Dwarkanath, among the richest Asian businessmen of his time, was wealthy enough to be trained both in Indian classical m ­ usic and Western operatic music—he impressed the Indologist Max Müller by his singing in Paris in 1846. Dwarkanath’s son Debendranath was also trained in North Indian music and piano performance, while Tagore’s older brother Jyotirindranath was a capable pianist who played Beethoven’s piano sonatas and accompanied himself on the piano when singing. 26 Radice, “Keys to the Kingdom,” 1099–1100. 27 Amanda Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006). 28 As Richard Wolf observes in his review of Weidman’s book, such an ­approach is not without its potential drawbacks: “The assumption of a single ­modernity also allows Weidman to apply theories of modern selfhood (Taylor 1989), nationalism (Chatterjee 1993), colonialism and modernity (Mitchell 1988; Mitchell 2000) to matters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without considering the extent to which the processes described are versions of what has come before,” See Wolf, review of Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India by Amanda J. Weidman and From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India by Lakshmi Subramanian. Ethnomusicology Forum 17.2 (2008), 290. 29 On Tagore’s claim of there being a greater word-music balance in Bengali song, see Radice, “Keys to the Kingdom,” 1099. 30 One such collection of twenty-six songs was published during Tagore’s lifetime by his musical associates A. A. Bake and Philippe Stern in 1935. 31 For further English-language discussions on Tagore’s aesthetic innovations in music and his theoretical observations on the same, see Radice, “Keys to the Kingdom”; Suddhaseel Sen, “Orientalism and Beyond”; and ­Matthew Pritchard, “Cultural Autonomy and the Indian Exception: Debating the Aesthetics of Indian Classical Music in Early 20th-Century Calcutta” (Routledge, forthcoming). 32 Som, Rabindranath Tagore, 42–44. 33 Joep Bor, ed., The Raga Guide (Monmouth, NP: Nimbus Records, 2002), 34.

Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity  139 34 Recordings of the two songs are currently available on YouTube. For “Aundho jonē,” perf. Subinoy Roy, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 3w-OyaRbUMU; for “Mor bīnā,” perf. Swagatalakshmi Dasgupta, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJQX8iiagN4 (both accessed 16 December 2016). Bengali texts, English translations and transliterations, and background information, can be found at http://geetabitan.com/­lyrics/A/andhojone-deho-aalo.html and http://geetabitan.com/lyrics/M/mor-binaa-otthekon.html. 35 For further information on this Tagore song, see http://geetabitan.com/­ lyrics/S/sakali-phuralo-swapon.html. For recordings on YouTube of “Robin Adair,” perf. Adelina Patti, and of “Shakali phurālo,” perf. Kanika ­Banerjee, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWy-whYsn40 and https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=8CrooTLYASI respectively (both accessed 16 December 2016). 36 The Bauls are an itinerant group of mystics of both Hindu and Islamic Sufi origin, who have lived traditionally in Bengal. On Tagore and the Bauls, see Jeanne Openshaw, “The Radicalism of Tagore and the Bauls of Bengal,” South Asia Research 17.1 (1997): 20–36. 37 Sukanta Chaudhuri, “Tagore Looks East.” NSC Working Paper 2 (May 2011), 11. For background, text, and translation of this song, see http://geetabitan. com/lyrics/A/aami-chini-go-chini-tomare.html. A YouTube recording, perf. Chinmoy Chatterjee can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 2d7QX6Di8a8 (accessed 16 December 2017). 38 I have made an extended analysis of “Ogo swapna swarupini” in my forthcoming essay “Orientalism and Beyond.” 39 These include Bengali boatmen’s songs, the Bhātiyali and the Sharigān, and, more importantly, the music of the Bauls. 40 Som, Rabindranath Tagore, 146–47. 41 Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra-Rachanābalī, Vol. 7 Songs, eds. Shaoli ­M itra et al. (Kolkata: Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2013), 340. 42 Tyāgarāja’s authorship has been questioned, though without any proof adduced, by his biographer, P. Sambamoorthy, who has instead attributed it to an editor of Tyāgarāja’s works and writer of books on Carnatic music, K. V. Srinivasa Ayyangar (d. 1929). See P. Sambamoorthy, Tyagaraja (Chennai [Madras]: Indian Music Publishing House, 1970), 260. 43 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006). 4 4 Neil Lazarus, “Cosmopolitanism and the Specificity of the Local in World Literature,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46.1 (2011), 119. 45 In this matter, I club Ray with Tagore since he regarded Bengal as providing his primary viewership base, despite his international reputation. After accepting an invitation to work in Hollywood, he quickly turned his back to the US; and even in India, he made only two films in Hindi/Hindustani, the most widely spoken language in India, and made the rest of his thirty-odd films in Bengali, his native language. 46 Collins, “The Politics of Friendship,” 120–21.

9 Words for Music Perhaps W. B. Yeats, Music, and Meaninglessness Adrian Paterson

Recovering from fever in February 1928, William Butler Yeats determined to spend his remaining winters where he had sailed the seas and come: Rapallo, a small town on the Ligurian shoreline of Italy, along the coast from Genoa. In rather the same way that he discovered the mountains “shelter the bay from all but the south wind,” and “bare brown branches of low vines and of tall trees blur the outline of the mountains,” the poet decided to shelter there his aging body, his mind open southwards to the sea and “the line of broken mother of pearl along the water’s edge.”1 Suffering a succession of serious illnesses, Yeats came, and returned, to get well and to escape the astringency and ritual of Irish politics. His term of office as Senator in the Irish Free State was coming to an end; he was asked to stand for reelection, but he did not. Determinedly “resigning from everything he can resign from,”2 Yeats cast aside the empty figure of his poem “Among School Children”: “smiling public man” no longer, he hoped instead to become a smiling private man.3 The space and energy he wrested from public affairs would be filled with work, rest, and new poetry. As Yeats wrote to his old friend Olivia Shakespear, he hoped that: once out of Irish bitterness I can find some measure of sweetness, and of light, as befits old age—already new poems are floating in my head, bird songs of an old man, joy in the passing moment, emotion without the bitterness of memory.4 This piece tells the story of the poems that transpired. Taking firm root in the following winter of 1928–9, they sprung up in spring, in quick unaccustomed succession, and were carefully tended and added to over the next two years. From the first they were conspicuously, confessedly musical: “bird songs of an old man,” as his early inspiration had promised. That they were so should be no surprise, except for those who persist in believing a pervasive myth (in part, it must be said, put about by the myth-making poet himself) of his being “hostile (or at best indifferent) to actual music.”5 Writing to Olivia Shakespear about poems eventually entitled Words for Music Perhaps, Yeats had confided, and critics gratefully repeat, that

Words for Music Perhaps  141 “for music is only a name—no one will sing them.”6 Those who consider them perforce have emphasized the Perhaps and tended to ignore the music.7 Unquestionably, the half-playful sally of the title suggests the reticence about music Yeats had long learnt to perform, as well as the musical gestures and sinuousness of poems not quite meant to be performed. But first it should be remembered that this word Perhaps was a later addition to Words for Music. This might be considered significant when all of Yeats’s poems were professedly composed for the ear rather than the eye: “I wanted all my poetry,” he insisted, “to be spoken on a stage or sung.”8 The poems of Words for Music Perhaps take their place among Yeats’s many expressly musical projects, from his experiments in “Speaking to the Psaltery” to his Noh plays and radio broadcasts.9 ­Second, and more important, not performing poems does not empty them of all music: those small matters of form and rhythm, never mind recurring thematic resonances, should indicate that. And Yeats’s writings again and again concern themselves with music: a dispassionate observation shows them to be saturated to the point of obsession with musical themes, most especially with emblems of song and dance. The question is, then, not simply to what degree can we consider these poems musical, but can thinking about music help us understand them? Believing that it does, this chapter attempts to uncover a less familiar side to Yeats’s poetic work that concerns itself not only with images and ideas of music, but with musical practice, theory, and philosophy, so participating directly in that heightened modernist desire to combine and recombine words and music in new ways. These “bird songs of an old man” would open up new ways for the modernist tradition and new ways for Yeats himself. They were certainly conceived of as a new departure. As he wrote from Rapallo to Lady ­Augusta Gregory: Here I shall put off the bitterness of Irish quarrels, and write my most aimable [sic] verses. They are already, though I dare not write, crowding my head. The Tower astonishes me by its bitterness. (Collected Letters 5109)10 The monumental volume The Tower, published by Macmillan that same month of February 1928, began with a famous poem of departure; Yeats, though, had sailed not to a posthumous artistic haven in Byzantium, but to a historical one in Italy. Rapallo, not as grand as nearby Portofino, was a peaceful retreat, and in the company of the German playwright Gerhard Hauptmann, represented in its retirement aspect something like a country for old men. Still, the area had a tradition of words and music; along the coast were the Romantic ménages of Livorno and Pisa, where Byron sang and Shelley penned “To Jane, with a Guitar” together with the ecstatic final music of Prometheus Unbound, one of Yeats’s sacred

142  Adrian Paterson books. Yeats was delighted to discover that it was whilst walking the hills surrounding Rapallo that Friedrich Nietzsche had conceived the Wagnerian verses of Thus Spake Zarathustra, its “Dance Song” and “Night Song” recasting opera and philosophy as joyful conflict. In Rapallo, then, Yeats could imagine a music with European resonance.11 And music was on his mind. That spring of 1928, as Yeats informed Olivia Shakespear, he had rewritten “a poor threadbare poem of my youth called ‘The Dream of a Blessed Spirit’ and named it ‘Countess Cathleen in Paradise’” (Letters 731). What was really an entirely new poem now contained the lines: Did the keen of Mother Mary Put that music in her face? (Poems 78) To suggest that beauty and softness of facial expression is related to the play and softness of music recalls Pater’s description of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, which Yeats would pluck from The Renaissance and versify for his Oxford Book of Modern Verse: She is older than the rocks among which she sits; And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, And lives Only in the delicacy With which it has moulded the changing lineaments, And tinged the eyelids and the hands.12 If, in Pater’s conception, “La Giaconda” is (almost) beautifully indifferent to the music of history, in Yeats’s poem musical sound moves Cathleen to what is both a religious ecstasy and empathy. It is a mother’s keen that troubles her, causing a music conceived synaesthetically through the patterns and expression of her face. Any reader can note the particular Irish flavor of that word “keen,” a vocal cry of a sharply different piercing quality from Pater’s abstract instrumental accompaniments, the “lyres and flutes” of the ages. If Yeats’s question mark openly wonders about the effect of contemplating sounds unheard in the poem, such a reader might wonder that even the heavenly clouds of paradise can soften but not blunt the pain of loss so painfully vocalized. Such vocal expressions of loss powerfully affected the kind of music pictured in these poems. If it sounded saccharin, Yeats’s sense of “sweetness and light” owed more to its origin in The Battle of the Books (1704) by Jonathan Swift, whose acerbic oeuvre Yeats was rereading, than to Matthew Arnold’s vatic sentiment. The p ­ oems that Yeats first envisaged in February 1928, when they arrived a year later, came embattled by and entangled with Irish affairs. Still

Words for Music Perhaps  143 a senator, Yeats objected violently to the Censorship of Publications Bill passing through the Irish Free State Dáil that summer. The wide terms of the Bill would, he argued, exclude Darwin, Marx, half the Greek and R ­ oman classics, and “all great love poetry.”13 Writing love poetry was in this context a political act: the unabashed, even confrontational sexuality of the poems loudly voiced Yeats’s objections. ­Mediterranean light might be understood to flood these poems, but they grew “out of bitterness” as much as they grew apart from it. Hardly poems of the “sucked sugar stick” that Yeats would overheatedly deplore in Wilfred Owen, their seaside tang and salt of music lent them a different flavor. Many of these elements can be tasted in the poem “Three Things,” which combines sweetness and salt, Ireland and distant shore, sex and the dead – the last two the “only two topics […] of the least interest to a serious and studious mind,” as Yeats commented to ­Shakespear (Letters 730).14 All of these themes are bound together by the sea.  In  March 1929, Yeats reported that three poems of his new sequence were written, “one the best for some years I think.” “They are the opposite of my recent work,” he wrote, “and all praise of ­joyous life, though in the best of them it is a dry bone on the shore that sings the praise” (Letters 758).15 Rapallo’s shoreline had given birth: Three Things

“O cruel Death, give three things back,” Sang a bone upon the shore; “A child found all a child can lack, Whether of pleasure or of rest, Upon the abundance of my breast”: A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind. “Three dear things that women know,” Sang a bone upon the shore; “A man but if I held him so When my body was alive Found all pleasure that life gave”: A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind. “The third thing that I think of yet,” Sang a bone upon the shore; “Is that morning when I met Face to face my rightful man And did after stretch and yawn”: A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind. (Poems 379)

144  Adrian Paterson An early draft verse described how a man fetched his “deepest thought” from the “blind/Ignorant” mind of a woman, as if half-recalling the genesis of A Vision.16 Although blindness and the irrational source of ideas are themes underlying many of these poems, such unfeminist metaphysical speculations drop away from the finished version, leaving its attention purely on the physical. The female voice Yeats personifies is determined to recall only pleasure. So, the three things the poem celebrates are the physical pleasures of child, man, and woman: all are mediated, experienced, and voiced through woman, thus revealed as the central figure in human experience. Three things, accordingly, are most striking about the poem: its sexual quickening, exemplified not only in the man’s pleasure in her body but also in the (by no means scrupulously faithful) woman’s post-coital stretch and yawn; the sere presence of Death, the poem’s alleged addressee; and closely associated with both, the refrain. Refrains are hardly a new feature in Yeats’s verse, but their extensive use in this period is unprecedented, even taking into account his early ballads. This refrain gives the poem its bite—its posthumous quality, its mystery, its irony, that pointed reminder of death amidst “all the pleasure that life gave.” It possesses a formal force particularly insistent in a poem about “Three Things”: one third of the whole is composed by refrain, two lines from six in each verse, or six lines from eighteen in total. The subject three things are introduced and undercut by the refrain’s thrice-repeated last words; and from the unconventional physical trinity that the poem articulates, the one thing that remains, three-in-one and one-in-three, is death. However, this refrain, this deathly burden, is anything but dead, because it repeatedly insists that the poem is a song: both by the convention of its italicized typeface and by repeating three times that the bone “sang,” a careful change from “cried” in early drafts. Bones cannot sing, we know, but perhaps the alliterative blowing of w in each of the last lines, and each stanza’s final blowing of wind, gives us a clue as to how they might. As archaeologists in the early twentieth century were beginning to realize, the oldest surviving pitched musical instruments are flutes made from bone, the earliest from bird-bone, now thought to be around 40,000 years old.17 As well as antiquity, this knowledge lends a precise musical validity to the phenomenon the poem purports to overhear. Yeats knew of such flutes: he had joyfully observed flocks of Mediterranean herons at Algeciras, for, in his play Calvary, the First Musician imagines “a flute of bone/Taken from a heron’s thigh” being “cleverly, softly, played.”18 Yeats’s singing bone, then, is not simply a poetic fantasy, but as so often when his musical images are analyzed, more accurate than we are accustomed to think. It might be objected that despite the poem’s consummate physicality, there is no physical presence on the shore to breathe into the bone; but in one final irony in a poem about physical presences and absences, it is, perhaps, the wind on the shore that causes the bone to sing. Moreover, that a wind-blown

Words for Music Perhaps  145 bone might seem to sing raises the question, as in Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds poems, that hearing things in the sound of wind is a mark not only of astonishing imaginative facility, but of madness—­ although here the madness must lie in us, as listeners, in perceiving these parts of the poem at all. There is then a sophisticated series of ironies even in such a discardable poem that exemplifies at the very least the poet’s sound grasp of audience and the ironies of song—and, we might think, an unsung awareness of the technologies and properties of music. At this point in Yeats’s career, song mattered, and not only because a golden singing bird represented “Sailing to Byzantium’s” alleged hope for a poetic afterlife. Arriving in Rapallo, Sarah Patmore and ­R ichard ­A ldington visited the Yeats’s apartment where they heard “Three Things,” just completed, intoned in a rhythmic chant by its author.19 As many have testified, Yeats often read poetry this way, but it would appear there was a pressing reason to do so with these poems. 20 As he had confessed in the same letter to his former lover Olivia Shakespear, he was writing “Twelve poems for music […] not so much that they may be sung as that I may define their kind of emotion to myself. I want them to be all emotion and all impersonal” (Letters 758). 21 To conceive from the beginning a suite of twelve poems for music makes more than a nice round number. Yeats, a consummate numerologist (as “Three Things” might suggest), had been playing with the sevens and twelves of tones and semitones in musical poems since the nineties. 22 Still, in writing to Shakespear, Yeats remained somewhat guarded about his intentions: Shakespear, as the poet Basil Bunting (himself shortly to arrive in ­Rapallo) would testify, was a connoisseur of music, whose evenings of Elizabethan music recital influenced, Bunting believed, the looser metrics of Pound and Yeats. 23 To her critical ear, Yeats was not quite prepared to confess the poems as songs, written for musical setting. Others close to their composition, however, described his intentions differently. To the poet Thomas MacGreevy, George Yeats instead described a more immediate and perhaps more accurate version of their genesis: William is exceedingly well, has been writing verse hard and says he is full of themes—yesterday came dashing along from his cot to announce that he was going to write twelve songs and I had got to purchase “a musical instrument” at once and set them to music […] all said songs being of a most frivolous nature!24 This letter seems to make plain Yeats’s original intentions: he was writing songs which were designed, as described and entitled, as twelve poems for music. Hence the refrains and simplified language and syntax, at least initially; hence also, perhaps, their libidinous freedom. Having displaced his ultra-conservative “musical censor” Eva Ducat in favor of his literary agent A.P. Watt, at this time Yeats relied on George for

146  Adrian Paterson musical advice, and a note of amusement in her commentary on Yeats’s concerted desire for an imprecisely described “musical instrument” is perceptible. But Yeats’s sincerity was evident, and there is every reason to believe he had music in mind. Just a few months before, in June 1928, Yeats had written thoughtfully to his wife on hearing Edith Sitwell recite and broadcast her poems from the Arts Theatre club. 25 Sitwell’s ongoing and experimental words and music collaborations with William Walton over Façade (1922–9) were in earshot, and perhaps in his mind’s eye as Yeats composed his new “frivolous” songs. Not all of George’s letter strikes quite the right note: in the event, these songs, comic, ironized, sexual, and sharp, were hardly frivolous: their sexual frisson, even in the “Crazy Jane” lyrics, commanded deeper resonance. Nor, as a suite, were these poems eventually set to music. 26 It is not clear quite how far Yeats’s envisaged settings were pursued, or how far Yeats’s ambitions could weather his wife’s amused skepticism. The prospect of music, however, shaped these poems, more even than the title later admitted. Even if many of these poems never found answering musical settings, there is, I think, considerable interest in trying to define the kind of emotions Yeats associated with lyrics that wanted to be musical. It was hardly the first time his poetry had evoked music: from “The Ballad of Moll Magee” to “Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” many titles had deliberately suggested a relationship with sung forms. Of these, one common denominator was a poetic persona: the projected singing voice was not quite the poet’s own. That his new songs featured personae and were to be in that knotty phrase “all emotion and all impersonal” aligned them with this history. Distanced from the poet’s voice yet calling on the heightened emotion associated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century with music, they appropriated the thematic license of song just as they sought its formal restrictions. Yeats had his doubts about this, and the ease with which he was writing: in March he told Olivia Shakespear, “I have written eleven lyrics in the last two months—nine of them Words for Music, these last unlike my past work—wilder and perhaps slighter” (Letters 760). 27 He quoted a “Lullaby” about “wild Tristram” containing anything but soporific energy, as in this second stanza: Sleep beloved such a sleep As did that wild Tristram know When, the potion’s work being done, Roe could run or doe could leap Under oak and beechen bough, Roe could leap or doe could run. (Poems 380)

Words for Music Perhaps  147 It needs no great Wagnerian insight to sense how slight and daring a replaying (with the help of earlier mythology) this is of Tristan und Isolde’s liebestrank; the narcotic powers of the magical harp in Yeats’s endlessly rewritten play The Shadowy Waters having already shown his understanding, even overplaying, of Wagner’s central symbolism. The redundant returns of those fourth and sixth lines, so different from the posturing dramaturgy of the nineties, arrived ironically after considerable effort: the original letter and drafts had promised a time when “the world begin again.”28 Rather than spell this out, Yeats instead allowed the movement of the lines picture this for him; restarting themselves, they now possessed the freedom and casual energy to begin again via a different kind of music, one that might play a spiritual and poetic rebirth. The kinds of contradictory emotion Yeats was defining to himself in poems with designs on music can perhaps be better illustrated by a wild poem, earliest of the sequence, “Mad as the Mist and Snow”: Bolt and bar the shutter, For the foul winds blow: Our minds are at their best this night, And I seem to know That everything outside us is Mad as the mist and snow. Horace there by Homer stands, Plato stands below, And here is Tully’s open page. How many years ago Were you and I unlettered lads Mad as the mist and snow? You ask what makes me sigh, old friend, What makes me shudder so? I shudder and I sigh to think That even Cicero And many-minded Homer were Mad as the mist and snow. (Poems 380–1) Originally addressed to a scholar who is urged to “pull the curtains tight,” barricaded inside a book-lined room, the outside world a threatening storm, the poem seems at first seems to reverse Yeats’s old unequal comparison between life and dry scholarship. Yet as all certainties of rational thought are besieged, a philosophic skepticism seems already to underlie every verse: each one admits a doubt. Any sure ground is undermined by

148  Adrian Paterson the first stanza’s admitting “I seem to know”; the second cannot answer its own question, while the third discovers doubt dwelling even in that rational Cartesian verb “think.” The final shock that even Homer and Cicero were mad disrupts even the solid interior world of books, composed as they are by beings themselves irrational, subject to madness, “many-minded” like Homer’s doubly epitheted hero—a hero who must himself plunge repeatedly through just such Mediterranean storms. In refrain, such storms provide the poem’s demonic drive: in turning “mind” to “mist” and blinding “know” with “snow,” no refrain better embodies an irrational, implacable madness beyond human correction. Strictly speaking, this seems to have little to do with music. But the nostalgia emanating from “unlettered lads” tired of the “open page” (in the drafts accented by a “yonder glows the written page”) hints that the logic and practice of reading is itself contaminated. 29 In line with Yeats’s bitter comments about print’s “dead words on dead paper,” the poem evokes a pre-literate age in youth and historical time. A world, in other words, in which song and orality held sway, and which might come again, however disruptively. The poem seems to know that Plato found all but the most sober music and musicians too dangerous for his Republic, that blind Homer was sung by rhapsodes, as Yeats’s essay “Speaking to the Psaltery” and lyric “A Woman Homer Sung” acknowledged. In the refrain’s blind but insistent return might be found a formal reminder of the Dionysian disordering potential of sheer sound. In this context, the poem is not as despairing as it seems. In Yeats’s lexicon, the shudder is frequently creative—a “shudder” in the loins that engenders the children of “Leda and the Swan”—and even the sigh is often an exhalation exuding sexuality, and together with the wind here recalls the exhortations of the wind-dried bone of “Three Things.” To Sturge Moore, Yeats wrote that he was impatient with recent criticism of poetry and philosophy, claiming that instead his generation “sought ecstasy not solidity.” However troubling madness, blindness, sound, and unreckonable irrationality might seem to be, these poems flirted with all these qualities, often finding a powerful meaninglessness barely kept in check by refrains. In weighing all these emotions, Yeats’s notes to the 1933 volume of The Winding Stair and Other Poems make interesting reading: Then in the spring of 1929 life returned as an impression of the uncontrollable energy and daring of the great creators; […] I wrote “Mad as the Mist and Snow,” a mechanical little song, and after that all that group of poems called in memory of those exultant weeks “Words for Music Perhaps.” […]Since then I have added a few poems to “Words for Music Perhaps,” but always keeping the mood and plan of the first poems. (Poems 760)

Words for Music Perhaps  149 Though hardly a complimentary term—around this time Yeats noted hopefully of A Vision “all that is laborious and mechanical is ­fi nished”30 —there is something mechanical about the poem, no doubt because of its (relative) consistency of stress, 4/3/4/3/4/3, extending a ballad stanza by half. Of course, these overbearing metrical repeats made it singable, a “little song.” The prospect of music then, even in insistent repetition, was what started the engine for an exultant period of creative growth. The letters, as well as the poems themselves, make clear how much this was dependent on thoughts of music. A letter to Lady Gregory made obvious Yeats’s excitement, and something of the constellation of interests present in Rapallo: I have written seven poems—16 or 18 lines each—since Feb 6 & never wrote with greater ease. The poems are two “meditations” for “A Packet for Ezra Pound” which Lolly is printing & the first five of “Twelve Poems for Music”. The getting away from all distractions has enriched my imagination. I wish I had done it years ago. Anteille is here & has started on a musical setting for a trilogy consisting of “The Hawks Well” “On Bailers Strand” & the new version of the “Only Jealousey” which I call “Fighting the Waves.” If he persists & he is at present enthusiastic it means a performance in Vienna in the autumn. (Letters 759–60)31 “Anteille” was George Antheil, the young American composer and admirer of Stravinsky, known in Paris for his hammering piano suites and his controversial score to a film by Fernand Leger, Ballet Mécanique, which pretended to require the use of aeroplane propellers. It was in Paris that the Abbey director Lennox Robinson had approached Antheil to compose music for Yeats’s ballet sketch based on The Only Jealousy of Emer, Fighting the Waves. According to Pound, who had signaled his adoption of Antheil by writing a book called Antheil and the Theory on Harmony (1927), the American was making it new by creating “a musical world.. of steel bars, not of old stone and ivy.”32 Where better to turn after the crumbling masonry of The Tower? Moreover, Yeats’s “mechanical song” was recognizably born of Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. Yeats always carefully measured his collaborations. Antheil appealed to Yeats as “revolutionary,” a “musician of the most modern school” with European avant-garde credentials, and a “riot of almost Abbey intensity” in his background (Letters 760). Yeats was particularly impressed by his success in Vienna in setting Oedipus, texts Yeats himself had recently adapted: to the poet his letter of introduction “sound[ed] like a welcome to continental art.”33 Meeting Antheil a year later in Rapallo under Pound’s auspices, Yeats found they had much in common: he waxed lyrical about ancient Arabian and Egyptian musics (“how little western music knows about the East, and how vast that

150  Adrian Paterson Eastern music is”) and the vitality of the inherited aural tradition that its lack of exact notation ensured. 34 These being touchstones for Yeats, Antheil’s iconoclasm in the crucial matter of putting words and music together appealed. All that spring, Yeats was impatient to hear Antheil’s score, repeatedly delayed through illness: though here Yeats’s considered self-deprecation tells us much about why a Perhaps became attached to what was until 1930 still “Words for Music”: If I knew one tune from another I should probably hate it for I judge from Ezra’s conversion that his affinities are all with the youngest of the young. Not knowing anything about music however I am delighted to find a man whose theories about the relations between words and music seem to be exactly my own. In my moments of personal hopefulness – Edwin Ellis’s definition of vanity—I begin to think that what my friends call my lack of ear is but an instinct for the music of the twelfth century. (Collected Letters 5229)35 This encapsulated a strategy Yeats had been employing for years; disarmingly admitting ignorance of music, he could proceed to pronounce his decided opinion on it. In word-setting, he insisted on the rhythm and even pitch of the words coming first, and although at times vague, his gestures to musical history found serious answering echoes in ­A ntheil’s theories, as later those of Harry Partch. 36 When it came to Fighting the Waves, while banishing melismas except in terrifying wordless chants, Antheil did not entirely respect the patterns of Yeats’s words: his imperative was Stravinskyian, unsympathetic to mere syllables. Unusually though, Yeats did not seem to mind, in print disclaiming his lyrics’ importance, “sung to modern music in the modern way they suggest strange patterns to the ear without obtruding upon it their difficult, irrelevant words” (Vision 370), and in private writing to Robinson after hearing Antheil on the piano: What he played to me seemed to me the only dramatic music I have ­ eroic. ever heard, a powerful beat, strangeness, something hard and h When you selected Antheil I think it was [a piece of] divination. (Collected Letters 5240)37 This collaboration, at its height as Yeats was writing Words for Music Perhaps, inevitably colored these poems and indelibly impressed on the poet the importance of rhythm. Perhaps for the first extended period, they found Yeats experimenting with a powerful beat, a structure-driven rhythm independent of words’ subtleties, and words that meant by sound as much as sense. Antheil’s rhythmic drive produced a fine and unusual score, a surprising success at the Abbey, but its dissonances

Words for Music Perhaps  151 could not disturb the poet: strange as it may seem, an ear that skated over ­harmony and followed melody with difficulty would hardly balk at its expressive dissonances. Although Antheil did not set any further of Yeats’s plays to music, Yeats remained “deeply grateful for a mask with the silver glitter of a fish, for a dance with an eddy like that of water, for music that suggested, not the vagueness, but the rhythm of the sea.” This was no small matter when the sea, according to Yeats’s sources, symbolized “that concrete universal which all philosophy is seeking.”38 Rapallo’s sea winds were bearing fruit; precision and boldness in rhythm might prove their preservative. At the same time as communing with the most avant-garde art, Yeats was enjoying his role in Rapallo as an aging convalescent artist out of touch and out of time. This spirit drew on his outsider’s attitude to music, which, when mischievously conceiving a twelfth century musical instinct or hoping he might “hear with older ears than the musician,” had often taken a similar cast. 39 Yeats took such pleasure in presenting himself and his art as anachronistic in part that it seems to goad Ezra Pound. In A Packet for Ezra Pound, composed in Rapallo as a preface for A Vision, he addressed the ultra-modern American: “you and I […] are as much out of place as would be the first composers of sea-shanties in an age of steam” (Vision 27). His choice of profession is striking in its evoking of sea and repetitive song: the more so as this consciously anachronistic mood found an outlet in many of these poems. “Those Dancing Days Are Gone” borrows it as a motif for defying aging: Come, let me sing into your ear; Those dancing days are gone, All that silk and satin gear; Crouch upon a stone, Wrapping that foul body up In as foul a rag: I carry the sun in a golden cup, The moon in a silver bag. Curse as you may I sing it through What matter if the knave That the most could pleasure you, The children that he gave, Are somewhere sleeping like a top Under a marble flag? I carry the sun in a golden cup, The moon in a silver bag. I though it out this very day, Noon upon the clock, A man may put pretence away

152  Adrian Paterson Who leans upon a stick, May sing, and sing until he drop, Whether to maid or hag: I carry the sun in a golden cup The moon in a silver bag. (Poems 381) In a come-all-ye ballad-form nominally commenting on youth, age, and sex, this poem presented (open mouthed, tongue-in-cheek) an aesthetic manifesto. Its title drew on the familiar ballad “Johnny, I hardly knew ye,” while the refrain, as Yeats’s notes acknowledge, came from somewhere quite different: “‘The sun in a golden cup’ […] though not ‘The moon in a silver bag,’ is a quotation from somewhere in Mr Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos,’” in fact Canto XXIII.40 In making this mischievous addendum, the poem continued an argument with Pound about form, expressed in musical terms. The poets’ Rapallo conversations were characterized by such dissent: “All well here—Ezra explains his c­ antos, & reads me [his translation of] Cavalcanti & we argue about it quite amicably.” “Ezra has spend several hours explaining the structure of his Cantos, & all I know is that there is a structure & that it is founded on that of a Fugue.”41 A Packet for Ezra Pound describes Pound’s explanation of The Cantos’ structure more drily as a “Bach Fugue,” “mathematical,” depicting a dance of letters A B C D and J K L M representing emotions and events “all set whirling together” (Vision 12). Against a dizzyingly complex form apparently built from difficult numeric abstractions, Yeats tosses something that clearly is a song, and a simple ballad song at that. The refrain’s neat parallels and simplicity of language represent a discretely lobbed musical grenade. Hazard Adams notes that “if he does not actually control what sun and moon represent, he has mastered their meaning,” and this is true, but only if their meaning lies partly in meaninglessness.42 Louis MacNeice described as characteristic Yeats’s use of a “symbolist or nonsense meaning which hits the reader below the belt,” and here Yeats almost glories in the near-nonsense that a simple formal twin-line can provide.43 Of course, the refrain also drew on Yeats’s own work, remembering “The silver apples of the moon/The golden apples of the sun” of “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” and in particular taking on the desire for inextricability in art, “may the moon and sunlight seem/One inextricable beam,” in “The Tower” (Poems 94, 303). Such Nietzschean unification of sun and moon, Apollo and ­Dionysus, was impossible in art, just as it was impossible to carry sun and moon thus; but all the same, it might be comically, tragically invoked. It matters that Nietzsche’s model for such artistic and philosophical possibility in The Birth of Tragedy and Rapallo’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was music. Importantly, too, Nietzsche’s conception of music included dance,

Words for Music Perhaps  153 song, and drama. This poem, then, was not a literal disclaiming of dance—Fighting The Waves was a gratifying success later in the year when danced by Ninette de Valois at the Abbey—but it marked a shift in emphasis. In putting away eastern elaboration, the silk and satin gear he’d shared with Pound in the early years of the century (Pound’s “Come my Cantilations” remembered the “raw silk of good colour” that the decorous psaltery-speaking experiments had demanded of their female performers [Poems 134]44). Yeats was once again hoping to walk naked. But this time to sing naked, which in practice meant adopting a pose of studied insouciance, a careless defiant persona, who might “sing, and sing until he drop.” Neither dance nor instrumental music was to take over from words for music—nor though was poetry to be silenced into its print incarnation. So the poem defiantly proclaims in having itself declaimed “Curse as you may, I sing it through,” or, if necessary, crooned “Come, let me sing into your ear.” And such poems came in at the ear. Yeats’s native skepticism about larger instrumental forces which drowned out words found mischievous expression in the next poem in the sequence, “I Am of Ireland.” But the poem did not disclaim music: it took the form of a carol, or dancesong, thoroughly researched by Yeats with Frank O’Connor, who had unearthed the fourteenth-century fragment on which it was based. It is easy to conceive Yeats delighting in the account of carols given in the introduction to the just-published Oxford Book of Carols (1928), which included robust settings by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Peter W ­ arlock, and Martin Shaw. There, these “songs with a religious impulse that are simple, hilarious, popular, and modern,” whose “simplicity of form causes them sometimes to ramble on like a ballad” are considered as “rich in true folk-poetry” and national character, and moreover utterly opposed to “ecclesiastical propriety”: “a sign,” in fact, “of the emancipation of the people from the old puritanism which had for so many centuries suppressed the dance and the drama.”45 If the resonance for Yeats’s projects was palpable, so too are the direct echoes in his poem, one of those written later but “after the mood and plan of the first poems.”46 In an almost macaronic addition to the original, he inserts an outlandishly dressed and indeed rambling balladeer, “one solitary man/Of all that rambled there” whose mischievous spirit and words undercut any notion of purity or chaste national feeling in the chorus-refrain: ‘I am of Ireland And the Holy Land of Ireland, And time runs on,’ cried she. ‘Come out of charity, Come dance with me in Ireland.’ (Poems 382)

154  Adrian Paterson In Yeats’s version, the “religious impulse” is not all that is at work here, but also a spontaneous, desperate instinct for the kind of charity, or sexual love, that impels the dance. And, in a definition accepted today, the Oxford Book of Carols squarely asserted the carol’s origin in a ringdance, and indeed speculated that the word carol remembers the Greek choraules, the flute-player for the orkestra, the circular dancing place of the circular dancing chorus in Attic drama. Such dancing beginnings made the rounds of carols roundly sexy, and at once both ancient and modern: with no true examples extant before 1400, the carol, it was claimed, survived in broadsides and even “began the era of modern music, which has throughout been based on the dance.”47 So Yeats’s persona contrarily finds that in this genuinely “modern” form all other modern instruments (excepting the flute) are superfluous: ‘The fiddlers are all thumbs Or the fiddle-string accursed, The drums and the kettledrums And the trumpets all are burst, And the trombone,’ cried he, The trumpet and trombone’ And cocked a malicious eye, ‘But time runs on, runs on’. (Poems 382) Glorying in this noisy destruction of the noisy modern orchestra (the “lutes belly cracked” didn’t make the cut) in favor of the Greek orkestra was not a turn from music: anything but.48 All that is essential in music and poetry remained: attention to the present, movement, a voice; here a voice that can take malicious pleasure in the pastness of the past, “But time runs on, runs on,” just as its ancient refrain persistently, insistently asserted its presence: “Come out of charity/And dance with me in ­Ireland.” Time ran on, but returned, as this return suggested (“runs on, runs on”) and when sung with drumroll accompaniment on the radio for a BBC broadcast called “In the Poets’ Pub,” the musical energy of the rhythmic, somatic, circling returns was audible.49 No wonder Frank O’Connor, despite serious initial doubts about Yeats’s ear, concluded he had “known the most musical poet after Shakespeare.”50 Yet perhaps the most profound musical return of an ever-expanding, 25-poem sequence was that which closed it, where we began, in paradise. “The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus” laid bare the philosophical intent underpinning all these poems, and its basis was music: Behold that great Plotinus swim, Buffeted by such seas; Great Radamanthus beckons him,

Words for Music Perhaps  155 But the Golden Race looks dim, Salt blood blocks his eyes. Scattered on the level grass Or winding through the grove Plato there and Minos pass, There stately Pythagoras And all the choir of Love. (Poems 384) This heavenly vision rewords Stephen MacKenna’s translation, just published, of Porphyry’s “Life of Plotinus,” but with crucial differences. As he struggles through seas and storms, the “bitter waves” of this “blooddrenched life,” Plotinus’s notorious bad eyesight is transformed by Yeats, who also suffered, into a real blindness, his life’s physical effort (“salt blood”) preventing him from seeing the life to come. 51 Berkeley’s philosophy of esse est percipi, in play here from Yeats’s contemporary rereadings, 52 suggested it matters exactly how things are perceived, even the afterlife. In the second stanza, obscure to Plotinus but in that determined deictic indubitably “there,” beautifully, sinuously arranged spatially on dry land beyond the sea-struggle, are the “heavenly consort”: Pythagoras, the Greek, Neoplatonic, and medieval apotheosis of proportion in music (whose calculations on monochord strings of the music of the spheres “what a star sang” feature in “Among School Children” [­Poems 325]), and all those who “form the choir of Immortal Love, there where the heart is ever lifted in joyous festival.”53 How can we know they are there? How might Plotinus perceive them? The only possibility is through hearing their music above the sound of the waves, a music built on heavenly ratios, not instrumentally abstracted, but beautifully, sinuously sung where “all is unison,” and distantly, tantalizingly audible to those with ears to hear. As Yeats had asserted long before, in the final condition of fire “is all music and all rest.”54 In this life, the perfect combination of words and music would always be elusive, and always require a perhaps; in the next, such concerns drop away, and “the choir of Love” to close the suite stands ready to sing, even wordlessly it may be, without harmonies it may be, the perfectly proportioned music of the heavens. Music then was a matter of belief, made real only by verse that remembered music. Considering the dry philosophy of A Vision in the midst of the poems’ composition, Yeats confessed: Even my simplest poems will be the better for it. […] I have constructed a myth, but then one can believe in a myth – one only assents to a philosophy. Heaven is an improvement of sense – one listens to music, one does not read Hegel’s logic. (Letters 781)55

156  Adrian Paterson Music in these poems carries philosophy, but does not make philosophical propositions. If music resumed the status of myth, it was the more powerful for its utter undeniability. Listening to Words for Music ­Perhaps is an act of belief: reading them as we must represents a quiet musical education that heaven’s “improvement of sense” might take place in us. Even Yeats’s simplest poems were the better for the presence of music: as spur, as theme, as underlying rhythm, as accompaniment, as antagonist, as repeats and rhymes and half-rhymes, but most of all, as a permanent nagging presence, as this sequence again and again illustrates.56

Notes 1 W. B. Yeats, A Vision [B text] (London: Macmillan, 1962), 3. Hereafter cited in text as Vision. 2 Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 389. 3 W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children,” Yeats’s Poems, ed. A. Norman ­Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1996), 323. Hereafter cited in text as Poems. 4 W. B. Yeats, “Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 23 February 1928” in The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 737. Hereafter cited in text as Letters. All letters in print have been compared with the Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats InteLex electronic database, ed. John Kelly (2002). 5 Harry White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 266. 6 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. John Kelly, InteLex electronic edition (2002), 5352. Hereafter cited as Collected Letters and by accession number. 7 Even Hazard Adams, an acute critic of these poems, opines “the perhaps of the title expresses some reticence about claiming that the poems can actually be put to music, there being for the poet no singing school other than the studying of monuments of the soul’s magnificence.” I would add that available evidence suggests there was such a singing school, even though he is correct to intimate that not all these poems were in the end to be part of it. Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Poems (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 209. 8 See Yeats’s “An Introduction to My Plays” (1937) in Essays and Introductions. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 529. 9 See, for example: Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008); Adrian Paterson, Words for ­M usic Perhaps: W. B. Yeats and the Musical Sense (DPhil submission, ­Oxford ­University, 2007); and Adrian Paterson, “Music Will Keep out Temporary Ideas: W. B. Yeats’s Radio Performances,” in Word and Music Studies 12: Performativity in Words and Music, eds. Walter Bernhart and Michael ­Halliwell, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011). 10 W. B. Yeats, Letter to Augusta Gregory, 24 February 1928. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Night-Song.” Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. ­A lexander Tille. The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. II. ed. ­A lexander Tille. (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1899), 149–151; Friedrich Nietzsche, “The

Words for Music Perhaps  157

12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Dance-Song.” Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. Alexander Tille. The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. II. ed. Alexander Tille. (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1899), 152–155. W. B. Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936), 1. Quoted in R.F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch Poet 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 437. The Censorship and Thomas Aquinas’ Irish Statesman 22 Sept. The Irish Censorship, Spectator 29 September 1928. W. B. Yeats, Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 2 October 1927. W. B. Yeats, Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 2 March 1929. W. B. Yeats, Words For Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932), 459. For a detailed account of this, see Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006). While the nineteenth century preferred to think of flutes fashioned from reeds (hence The Wind among the Reeds [1899]), the twentieth century favoured the love and death associations of bone (see Sachs, 43ff). Since early century, the oldest pitched musical instruments (after the voice) are considered to be bone flutes, the earliest made from the hollow bones of birds; see Gérald Gorgerat, Encyclopédie de la Musique pour Instruments à Vent, 3 vols. (Lausanne: Éditions Recontre, 1955), II:138ff. The discovery of prehistoric flutes made 40,000 years ago from bird bones, vulture wings, whooper swans, and the like was confirmed in the Hohle Fels caves in the Swabian Jura, southwestern Germany; see Nicholas J. Conard et Al., “New Flutes Document the Earliest Musical Tradition in Southwestern Germany,” Nature 460 (2009), 737. W. B. Yeats, Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1952), 451. See Foster, W. B. Yeats, 435. Ronald Schuchard’s The Last Minstrels (2008) provides an enormously helpful compendium of Yeats’s verse-speaking experiments, and many descriptions of Yeats reading aloud. See also Adrian Paterson, ‘“The Curlew” and the Abbey’: Peter Warlock and W. B. Yeats. Irish Studies in Britain, ed. Brian Griffin and Ellen McWilliams (Sunderland: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010). W. B. Yeats, Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 2 March 1929. As for instance “A Spinning Song” or “There are Seven that pull the thread,” a song set by Edward Elgar for Diarmuid and Grania, Yeats’s collaboration with George Moore; or indeed the “seven angels” of “The Countess ­Cathleen in Paradise” (Poems 78). Basil Bunting, Basil Bunting on Poetry, ed. Peter Makin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), 35, 122. George Yeats, Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, February 1929, in W. B Yeats and George Yeats, The Letters, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 200. W. B. Yeats and George Yeats, The Letters, 192. Several individual poems were set to music and performed, for instance in Yeats’s 1930s radio broadcasts; see Paterson, “Music will keep out temporary ideas.” W. B. Yeats, Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 29 March 1929. W. B. Yeats, “Lullaby [XVI].” Words For Music Perhaps and Other Poems: Manuscript Materials, ed. David Clark. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), 471–490. Yeats, Manuscript Materials, 501. W. B. Yeats, A Vision [B text] (London: Macmillan, 1962), 7. Hereafter cited in text as Vision.

158  Adrian Paterson 31 W. B. Yeats to Augusta Gregory, 9 March 1929. 32 Ezra Pound, Antheil; and the Treatise on Harmony (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1927), 43. 33 W. B. Yeats to George Yeats, 25 February 1928, in W. B Yeats and George Yeats, The Letters, 190. 34 George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1947), 103. 35 W. B. Yeats, Letter to T. Sturge Moore, 24 March 1929. 36 Like Yeats, Partch demanded “the vitality of spoken inflections is retained in the music,” and conceived microtonal scales to achieve this; see Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974) and Paterson, “Music Will Keep out Temporary Ideas.” 37 W. B. Yeats, Letter to Lennox Robinson, late April 1929. 38 W. B. Yeats, Wheels and Butterflies (London: Macmillan, 1934), vi, viii. 39 W. B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1959), 218. 40 W. B Yeats, The Winding Stair and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1933), vi. 41 W. B. Yeats, Letters to George Yeats, 25 and 27 February 1929, in W. B. Yeats and George Yeats, The Letters, 190–191. 42 Adams, Book of Yeats’s Poems, 207. 43 Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Oxford UP, 1941), 131. 4 4 See Schuchard’s The Last Minstrels for pictures of the performers’ typical attire, and a description of the harp-like psaltery. 45 Percy Dearmer et al., eds., The Oxford Book of Carols (London: Oxford UP, 1928), v, viii. 46 Yeats, The Winding Stair, 89. 47 Dearmer, Oxford Book of Carols, v. 48 Yeats, Manuscript Materials, 523. 49 See George Barnes, “Account of Yeats at BBC,” National Library of Ireland, NLI MS 5919; see also Paterson, “Music Will Keep out Temporary Ideas,” 112. 50 Frank O’Connor, W. B. Yeats: A Reminiscence (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1982), 8. 51 Stephen MacKenna, trans., Plotinus: The Ethical Treatises: The Enneads, 5 vols. (London: P. L. Warner, 1917–1930), I.22. 52 For instance, see this letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 2 August 1931: “I Finished My Own Work on Berkeley Two or Three Weeks Ago and since Then I Have Been Writing Poetry” (Letters 782). 53 MacKenna, Plotinus, I.23. 54 W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959), 357. 55 W. B. Yeats, Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 9 February 1931. 56 All MSS and letters from Yeats’s hand are cited without corrections of spelling or punctuation.

10 “The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It” Ezra Pound’s the Pisan Cantos and the “Sequence of the Musical Phrase” Katherine Firth This chapter focuses on Ezra Pound’s engagement with music over four decades, brought into focus in the Pisan Cantos (1948). Towards the end of World War II, Pound was held as a US traitor in a prisoner of war camp outside Pisa. In those months, separated from his books and coterie, Pound produced a lyrical meditation in Cantos LXXIV– LXXXIV that draws heavily on his experiences and theories of music between 1907 and 1939. From 1907, Pound had worked as a musical agent, critic, antiquarian, composer, and theorist. He was closely involved with the emerging early music scene—collaborating with Walter Morse Rummel in Paris, W. B. Yeats and Arnold Dolmetsch in London, and Olga Rudge in Rappallo. He was also actively engaged with the musical avant-garde—working as the music agent for Katherine Ruth Heyman’s championing of Scriabin and Rummel’s of Debussy, learning composition from the modernist composer George Antheil, and being influenced by Igor Stravinsky.1 As well as Pound’s longstanding relationships with musicians and practical music making, Pound’s poetry and theories of poetry were deeply indebted to music. He drew on the troubadours and trouvères, both in his poems (such as the early “Sestina: Alteforte”) and in his essays. 2 Of three kinds of poetry, Pound had claimed, one was “melopoeia” (poetry in which the sound or music was most significant), and capturing the melopoeia of foreign language poetry is paramount in many of Pound’s translations (Literary Essays 25). Pound’s experiments with the music of poetry are captured in recordings in which Pound accompanied himself with kettledrums, reading aloud “The Seafarer,” the “Sestina,” and some of the “Cantos” (1939). 3 While his later recordings for Caedmon are unaccompanied, the rise and fall of the musical phrase is still strongly emphasized.4 Pound’s famously singsong delivery is ­produced because he adheres religiously to the individual vowel heights in the words.

160  Katherine Firth It is in The Cantos that Pound’s practical and theoretical engagement with music is most evident. Pound’s early descriptions of The Cantos’s form was “rather like, or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue.”5 In the Pisan Cantos, Pound includes musical allusions, scraps of notation, and even an entire violin transcription of a Jannequin chanson “Le chant des oiseaux” in Canto LXXV. Therefore, this article considers the poetry of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos in the light of his interest and involvement in music and his critical writings, particularly his theories of “composing [poetry] to the sequence of the musical phrase” and of the “absolute rhythm” of free verse poetry. These theories are used to assess the aural qualities of the poetry and relate them to musicality; that is, both that which captures the ear’s full and trained attention and the subject of study for musicologists. First, therefore, I will consider some of the ways in which Pound suggested we might hear poetry and his own practice when he read his ­poetry aloud, particularly in terms of what Katherine Ruth Heyman (whose discussions of poetry were heavily influenced by Pound’s ideas) called three-dimensional rhythm: “flow of the length of the vowels,” “dynamic accent,” and “chromatic stress.”6 Second, I will consider W. B. Yeats’s experiments in “Speaking to the Psaltery” with Arnold ­Dolmetsch and Florence Farr. Their “chaunting” is used as a methodological starting point to establish localized rhythmic and cadenced formal coherence in Pound’s free verse.7 I will then look at how these ways of hearing, speaking, and reading poems might help us to discern local forms within this section of Canto LXXXIII, a moment in time translated into a moment in the poem, when Pound rewrites Yeats’s poem “The Peacock” and their time together in “Stone Cottage in Sussex by the waste moor.”8 Finally, I will consider how this reflects on Pound’s practice in the Cantos more generally. The critical writings of early twentieth-century exponents of free verse, including Ezra Pound’s, repeatedly called for new kinds of criticism: new tools for dealing with new forms or different forms than covered by traditional prosody. They looked for the means to describe, accurately and demonstrably, what free verse does. One of the most useful, and least understood, of these methods was their harnessing of musical concepts and forms for their poetry. Most discussions of Pound’s musical forms use Formenlehre (reading through musical form), taking the fugue, sonata, 12-tone row, or folk cycle as a starting point.9 This is, of course, based on Pound’s own description of his long poem The Cantos as “Rather like, or unlike subject and response and countersubject in fugue” and of the sculptures of Henri ­Gaudier-Brezska as a “form-fugue” or “form-sonata,” which he connects to his own poetry through referring to melody, to Dante (whose Divine Comedy was written in cantos), and to “absolute rhythm” (Letters 210; Literary Essays 442, 9).

“The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It”  161 It is common to mistake “absolute rhythm” for being like an “absolute dictator,” a form that defines the unchanging heartbeat of the poem, and to suggest that musical analogies are a means of controlling the sprawling, irregular, asymmetric verse (form as a discipline).10 However, a musical and contemporary understanding of such ideas shows that instead they were means of freeing Pound’s verse.11 A fugue theoretically allows the introduction of as many voices as are desired. The voices may be musically related or not. The sonata allows the introduction of an imprecise number of themes or statements, which are then further varied, developed, and contrasted with counter-­ statements.12 The middle section of a sonata or fugue is even less constrained by structural rules: more new material may be introduced and given new musical treatments. Thus, a fugue or sonata is of little assistance in understanding how Pound’s poem is constructed (even ignoring Pound’s counter-claim that the poem is “unlike” a fugue). The analogy of a musical form is not needed to perceive that at the beginning of The Cantos, Pound introduces a number of themes. He later introduces new themes. In the final cantos, he recapitulates some of the earlier themes and tries to come to a conclusion (or coda) (Canto CXVI). In the middle sections, however, such forms fail to explain why Pound puts one thing after another on the page, how his poem is arranged or functions. Instead, in Eleven New Cantos, A Fifth Decad of Cantos, The Pisan Cantos, Rock-Drill De Los Cantares, and Thrones de los Cantares, a range of musical (and visual, mythological, and historical) forms and concepts liberate the poem from the narrative confines of epic, or Dante’s theological schematic.13 Musical models do not control the text, making it conform (as the epic genre or terza rima would have done); rather, they inform our reading of the text, and sometimes they help us describe the text.14 The range of musical models requires a corresponding range of musical reading strategies.15 Sometimes the models explain only a short passage within a canto. This is not because The Cantos are random texts, but because of the versatility and variety of vers libre. “The Melic poets…composed to the feel of the thing, to the cadence, as have all good poets since,” claimed Pound in his 1913 essay on “The Tradition” (Literary Essays 93). The poetry emerges from the essence of the “thing,” which is expressed in the musical phrase. In his essay “Über die Formfrage” (on the question of form) in Der blaue Reiter (1912), Wassily Kandinsky argued that when a line (in a painting, but also in poetry) is allowed to be a “thing in itself,” the “inner resonance” is “freed.”16 “Absolute rhythm” is etymologically “freed,” “vtterly fre and absolut from alle necessite.”17 In “Credo,” Pound wrote that “absolute rhythm” was inherent and authentic to language (Literary Essays 9).18 That such musical rhythms were in fact part of the words or lines themselves meant that verse could be freed from artificial restraints

162  Katherine Firth so that “the movement of poetry is limited only by the nature of syllables and of articulate sound, and by the laws of music, or melodic rhythm” (Literary Essays 93).19 Melodic rhythm was open to almost infinite variety, even within a system of time signatures, once liberated from the “sequence of the metronome” (Literary Essays 3). The “Music of Poetry” has, to some extent, become a cliché; but for Pound, clearly, its inherence and force on poetry was actively sought and exploited; not only in musical forms, but also in musical ideas, quotations, and references. Since the form of free verse is internal and instinctive rather than external and prescriptive, it negotiates local functions of cohesion and shape. The Pisan Cantos (LXXIV–LXXXIV, 1948) in particular are marked by small sections of lyrical beauty (of the lyre, of words set to music), which function like lyric poems (intense, short). The lines do fall into sound patterns, though not into metrical patterns. They are structured on a number of levels, laid in palimpsest over one another, but each structure lasts only for the moment. Furthermore, these local presents/presences emerge from Pound’s sense of making observable that which is immanent—what he was to call the “luminous details” or “magic moment.”20 Yet in these musical sections, they are discernable to the ear rather than to the eye. 21 Even more than the voice, the ear was seen to guide and shape the experience of a poem—whether silently or aloud. Yeats (who was for some time Pound’s mentor and employer) claimed, “I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase… written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for the ear alone.”22 Thus it was the ear that recognized the rhythms, the pattern of stresses, the consonances between vowels, the alliterations, the pitch and intonation, and the length of words and lines. English, as an accentual language with both word and sentence stresses, long and short vowels that have pitch, and in which sentences have a cadence, particularly required such an approach (Literary Essays 12, 93). It has “never been neglected by men with susceptible ears…[that] the way to learn the music of verse is to listen to it,” stated Pound in his book on how to read, the ABC of Reading.23 Pound argued that English metrical schemata do not actually reflect the sounds of words; they constrain rather than explain sound. Pound was particularly scornful of accentual stress as the only guide to poetic form: What they call “metre” in English means for the most part “jambic”…It may be only an old hankering after quantitative verse that is at the bottom of it. All languages I think have shown a tendency to lengthen the foot, in one way or another, as they develop. (Letters 80) Three significant ideas are embedded into this quotation. The first is an interest in metrical variety as reflecting speech patterns (thus disagreeing

“The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It”  163 with the often-stated claim that iambic meter most closely follows the natural patterns of English speech). Secondly, Pound promotes quantitative verse (the length of the syllable) rather than accentual meter, as in Classical Greek and Roman poetry.24 Thirdly, he shows a preference for a lengthened foot: this could suggest either amphibrachs, dactyls and paeons (trisyllabic and tetrasyllabic feet rather than the disyllabic iamb), or something more flexible, like William Carlos Williams’s “extended foot.” How does such a statement inform how we should read a line like “As it were the wind in the chimney” from Canto LXXXIII? Reading accentually, we get a hypermetric trocahic tetrameter; a longer foot gives us a tertius paeonic dimeter; a quantitative reading gives us a tertius paeon and a quartus paeon. The three ways of reading unhelpfully contradict one another, making the performance of the line more confusing rather than less. The readings conflict even within the one word: “chim-ney” is stressed on the first syllable, but the vowel is short. The second syllable is supposedly long, but is an unimportant suffix, one that is unlikely to be carefully enunciated. Furthermore, none of these readings actually reflect the prose rhythms of this colloquial sentence. 25 “As it” or “in the” are not painstakingly counted, but thrown away, elided into one another, swallowed. Instead, there is a need to notate the three-dimensional rhythm, the “flow of the length of the vowels,” “dynamic accent,” and “chromatic stress.”26 Length has already been considered. “Dynamic accent” seems to suggest sentence stress or performative emphasis rather than accentual metrics. “Chromatic stress” is created by the “rise and fall” of language.27 In Ancient Greek poetry, the stress may have indicated pitch rather than length. 28 In English, the vowel determines pitch. Onomatopoeically, “i” is a high, light, bright vowel and “o” a down low, slow vowel. 29 It is observing these vowel heights that gives Pound’s singsong reading style. He meticulously keeps every vowel pitch, unaffected by lexical stress or sentence inflection.30 Instead of counting each word as an equal beat, two or three unimportant words may take the time of a single short syllable, and two shorter syllables the time of a long-vowel syllable.31 The look of the page is also translated into aural terms, as Pound observes the typographical spaces in the lines as rests. 32 This then is how Pound reads his own poetry: as a complex interrelation of syllabic and phrasal intonations, lengths, and accents (see Figure 10.1). A similar effort at noting the pitch and flow of poetic performance had already been carried out by Yeats at the turn of the twentieth century.33 Together with the actress Florence Farr, Yeats tried “speaking through music in the ordinary way,” “quarter tones,” “wavy lines,” and even “Tibetan music” notation, until Arnold Dolmetsch built a new instrument, “half psaltery, half lyre,” and created a form of notation that was half metrical scansion, half parlando psalm notation (“Speaking to the Psaltery” (1902–07) 16–17). Dolmetsch’s notation (“Speaking to the

164  Katherine Firth

Figure 10.1  From Canto LXXVI: a transcription of Ezra Pound’s rhythm and intonation in reading Canto (Caedmon, TC1155, 1960).

Psaltery” (1902–07), 17) was refined by Farr (23–5) and Yeats himself. The poems considered in “Speaking to the Psaltery” were not free verse, so as well as the use of traditional or symmetrical meter and rhyme forms, the notation imposes pitch and inflection onto the performance of the poem (see Figure 10.2). Those who use such a transcription should “keep from singing notes and from prosaic lifeless intonations” (19). Though written out in musical notes, the poems were not sung. Following the instructions and reading these settings with a speaking voice, one discovers them to be effective performance guides and fascinating evidence of the poet’s own readings. These experiments were taking place in a wider context of exploration of the relationships between music and poetry at the turn of the century. Sidney Lanier’s The Science of English Verse (1896) and J.P. Dabrey’s The Musical Basis of Verse (1901), Thomas George Tucker’s Introduction to the Natural History of Language (1908), and L’Abbé Rousselot’s Principes de phonétique expérimentale (1897–1908) all attempted to explain their findings in scientific terms and through graphical means: on staves and oscillographs. 34 Furthermore, research into early music by Heyman (1918) and Arnold Dolmetsch in The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1915) brought a plethora of forgotten musical systems into currency, including any number of note-forms and wavy lines. 35

“The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It”  165

Figure 10.2  Yeats’s poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus” transcribed for performance with a psaltery (Essays and Introductions, 26).

At the end of 1908, Pound had left Venice for London, his first volume of poetry newly published and his job as an impresario for Kitty Ruth Heyman in that city complete. In London, he hoped to meet Yeats, in his view the best poet then writing in English. 36 In 1912, Pound wrote, as part of his series I gather the limbs of Osiris, fewer [people] still feel rhythm by what I would call the inner form of the line. And it is this “inner form,” I think, which must be preserved in music; it is only by mastery of this inner form that the great masters of the rhythm—Milton, Yeats, whoever you like—are masters of it.37 Thus, for Pound in 1912, Yeats’s poetry was already associated with musical rhythm and what Kandinsky had written just that year on “inner form” in Der blaue Reiter. For a time thereafter, Pound acted as Yeats’s secretary, and they lived together in Stone Cottage, near the Five Hundred Acre Wood, for three winters, 1913–16. 38 These years not only produced a number of important poems in Yeats’s Responsibilities and The Wild Swans at Coole and Pound’s Lustra, but they continued to haunt the drafts and versions of The Cantos.39 While it had been to his father that Ezra Pound had written his now famous “main scheme” for The Cantos (April 11, 1927), it was in

166  Katherine Firth A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929) that Yeats became the first of the “Bach Fugue” Canto theorists, even before the Draft of XXX Cantos was published in 1930. Yeats republished the Packet in A Vision (1937), just as The Fifth Decad of Cantos was published. Thus, it is appropriate to return to the influence of Yeats, and those years in Stone Cottage, to provide a counterpoint to the generalized descriptions of Pound’s work as a fugue and as a correction to those who misunderstand the significance of musical terms (or misread the poetry to make it fit a musical model).40 Yeats’s poem “The Peacock” memorialized Stone Cottage and, particularly, the peacock over the fireplace (see picture in Langenbach 52), celebrated as a made thing in the poem. More than seven years after Yeats’s death and three decades after they had lived together, Pound rewrote “The Peacock.”41 This section of the poem is both haunted and comic, starting with the “wind in the chimney” that “was in reality Uncle William / downstairs composing.” Yeats had written in “Speaking to the Psaltery:” Like every other poet, I spoke verses in a kind of chant when I was making them; and sometimes, when I was alone on a country road, I would speak them in a loud chanting voice…I did not always compose to a tune, though I sometimes did. (Essays and Introductions, 14–15) Evidently, in the “wind-beaten” and “wet” winter weather, Yeats might also chant loudly indoors.42 “The Peacock” begins: What’s riches to him That has made a great peacock With the pride of his eye? Pound rewrites the lines: that had made a great Peeeeacock in the proide ov his oiye had made a great peeeeeeecock in the… made a great peacock in the proide of his oyyee proide ov his oy-ee43 The evocation of sound, music, and local or momentary coherence is most clear because of, not in spite of, the contortions of language in Canto LXXXIII. Here, the natural rhythms and pitches are heightened, elongated, exaggerated, not in contrast to Pound’s (and Yeats’s) practice elsewhere, but in intensification of it.

“The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It”  167 Extant recordings of Yeats suggest that the heavy Irish accent in Canto LXXXIII is humorously exaggerated. It is not to be inferred from Yeats’s original poem, which rhymes “eye” with “die” and has a sight-rhyme with “grey.” This section is replete with such jocular moments perhaps so that “his ghost will be gay” (eight lines later, Yeats refuses to “eat ham for dinner / because peasants eat ham for dinner”). The recollections may be “gay,” but Yeats’s “ghost” and the ghost of his poem are presences in the present text, not just in the words but the rhythm. “The Peacock” is loosely anapaestic, the foot running over line ends, with two stresses to each line. Pound follows that pattern of two dynamic stresses per line (except in “so that I recalled the noise in the chimney,” where there are four: that is twice two). The “Peacock” section of The Cantos is particularly interesting because the quantitative and accentual scansion are the same, and equally irregular. Even the repeated lines are constantly altered, extended, and contracted by the number of words, the elisions, and the elongations. However, taking elongations, pauses, and elisions into account (as Pound tends to in his readings), all the lines fall into four whole beat lengths (give or take the odd semiquaver).44 That is to say, regardless of the number of syllables or words, or the position of the stresses, these lines are the same length to the speaker. Even the extended lines maintain an aural cohesion in spite of the words being chopped, extended, and repeated. Taking repeated letters as an indication of the length, “Peee-e-a[cock]” is about four times as long as “pea,” and “pee-e-e-e-e-e” about six. An ellipsis in Pound’s recordings is a rest the length of a long vowel. Thus “that had made a great Peeeeacock,” and “had made a great peeeeeeecock in the…” are eight beats long: that is, twice four. The lines sound as long as each other, although they do not look it, nor do they scan it (see Figure 10.3). The passage coheres because of the triumph of the ear over the mind, the musical phrase over scansion. The phrases also show the influence of the vowel cadence in forming a spoken melodic line. The lines of poetry tend to fall in repeated cadences, in a kind of vowel arc of mellifluous vowel sequences. “Who would not have ham for dinner” rises inexorably, while “A fat moon rises lop-sided over the mountain” rises and falls with a succession of alternating high and low vowel sounds. Thus, each word is positioned according to “the nature of syllables and articulated sound, and by the law of music, or melodic rhythm” (or “chromatic stress”).45 The “phrasal music” is therefore created not in spite of the words, but emerging exactly from the words. Once the words are “freed” from an imposed symmetrical rhythm and cadence, the fundamental, inherent music can be fully heard. It is only by listening and speaking aloud this section that the inherent resonances emerge. This section of The Pisan Cantos not only uses these techniques, but also performs the learning of the music of verse by listening to it. Not only does Pound listen to Yeats

Figure 10.3  F  rom Canto LXXXIII: Pound’s spelling and punctuation denotes how the poem should be read aloud, and how it is refashioned from the original, Yeats’ poem “The Peacock.”

“The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It”  169 composing poetry to a tune or chant; but Yeats listens to Pound reading “nearly all Wordsworth.”46 Such a way of reading the rhythms and pitches in Pound’s Pisan Cantos enables us to find other such sections, where repeated cadences or lines that sound the same length act to bring coherence to a small section of text.47 Yet, in other places, such as the score from Janequin (LXXV), “Libretto” (“Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest / Dolmetsch ever be thy guest,” Canto LXXXI [533–534]), or the notes on the wires “write the birds on their treble scale” (Cantos LXXIX [499–501] and LXXXII [539]), moments of verbal music are created with reference to actual musical works.48 Sometimes, this musical moment is created by a musico-­ historical reference, like in the reopening of the Salzburg F ­ estival recalled both in LXXVIII (494) and in the opening lines of LXXIX (498–9). Thus, we require a range of musical reading strategies to understand the Cantos. For an instant, these diverse musical influences may provide aural or intellectual cohesion, a “magic moment” of sounding or seeming consonance. They are not, however, able or intended to provide similar cohesion to other sections of the poem. Attempts to make the Janequin score a template or a viola da gamba sonata a map for the Cantos not only destroys the momentary perfection of these sections (intensified by the intentional imperfections, prosiness, difficulty, or ugliness of other sections, or sections with other agendas), but fails to illuminate Pound’s multi-stranded intentions. Sometimes, large-scale musical forms can be made to fit onto the poem as a whole, as with the fugue, but they do not explain the poem, do not make it more uniform, cohesive or easier to negotiate. It’s precisely because the fugue is so capacious that it was so useful to Pound. However, like Yeats’s experiments in “Speaking to the Psaltery,” Pound’s interest in aural forms and the oral performance of his poetry mean that reading The Cantos aloud is the first step to hearing its many musics. Instead of effecting an exchange of one kind of surface structure for another, to compose to the musical phrase suggests a concept of interior and exact “rightness” of form that is controlled from within itself, and is therefore “absolute.”

Notes 1 Pound worked as the agent for Heyman in Venice and London in 1907. Kitty Heyman turns up as a Beatrice figure in his poems influenced by Dante from 1903, and is particularly significant in the period of A Lume Spento [see in particular “Blake’s Rainbow,” “Scriptor Ignotus” and “For Katherine Ruth Heyman / (After one of her Venetian concerts)”]. From 1904, Pound stayed with and worked alongside Walter Morse Rummel on illuminated troubadour manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (leading to Neuf chansons de troubadours des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 1912). Pound met W. B. Yeats in 1909, and was strongly influenced by Yeats’s theories of chanting poetry to a lyre-like instrument, described in Yeats’s essay “­Speaking to the

170  Katherine Firth Psaltery” (1902). Through Yeats’s circle, Pound was introduced to A ­ rnold Dolmetsch, the music historian, in about 1914, who was described in Pound’s essays as “the God Pan” (see “Arnold Dolmetsch” and “Vers L ­ ibre and ­A rnold Dolmetsch,” 1915; Ronald Schuchard’s The Last M ­ instrels [2008]). From 1923, his friendship with George Antheil, “the bad boy of music,” inspired him to teach himself the bassoon, start composing, and to write Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924). Pound wrote three operas: Le testament de Villon (1923), Cavalcanti (1932) (not performed), and the unfinished O collis Heliconii (c. 1933). He also wrote violin works (1923–33), mostly for the violinist Olga Rudge, with whom he had a relationship from 1923–72. Together, Rudge and Pound established the concert series held at the Rappallo Town Hall between 1933–38 and worked towards the revival of Vivaldi’s modern reputation (Rudge is responsible for the recovery of over 300 of Vivaldi’s concerti). 2 Including “Troubadours—Their sorts and conditions,” “Arnault Daniel,” and “Cavalcanti,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968). Hereafter cited in text as Literary Essays. 3 “Ezra Pound,” Penn Sound, 23 April 2012, http://writing.upenn.edu/­pennsound/ x/Pound.php. See Pound’s “Harvard Vocarium Recordings” from 17 May 1939. 4 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound Reading His Poetry. LP. Caedmon, 1960. National Sound Archive Spool T5685wr, BBC archive LPs, Third Programme, 1958. 5 Ezra Pound, Letter to Homer L. Pound, 11 April 1927 in The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 210. Hereafter cited in text as Letters. See also W. B. Yeats in A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929) in Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937). 6 Katherine Ruth Heyman, The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1921), 64. 7 Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). 8 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 548. 9 Paul Scher, Verbal Music in German Literature (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1968); Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 99–100; Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Pimlico, 1991 [1971]), 371, 378, 416, 423; Kay Davis, “Fugue and Canto LXII,” P ­ aideuma 11.1 (1982), 15; Ezra Pound, “Introduction,” Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer (New York: New Directions, 1977), 22; Kay Davis, “Ring Composition, Subject Rhyme and Canto VI,” Paideuma 11.3 (1982); John Xiros Cooper, “Music and Symbol and Structure in Pound’s Pisan Cantos and Eliot’s Four Quartets,” in Pound in ­Europe, eds. Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 184, 188. 10 Stephen J. Adams, “Pound’s Quantities and ‘Absolute Rhythm’,” Essays in Literature 4 (1977); Sally M. Gall, “Pound and the Modern Melic Tradition: Towards a Demystification of ‘Absolute Rhythm’,” Paideuma 8.1 (1979). 11 R. Murray Schafer, “Introduction,” in Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (New York: New Directions, 1977), 17. Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Hanover, NH; London: UP of New England, 1987 [1948]). 12 This “sort of form-fugue or form-sonata” is discussed in Pound’s essay in relation to Gaudier-Brzeska, whose statues are full of contrasting planes and angles, in contrast to Brancusi, whose “one form” is a smooth ovoid figure

“The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It”  171

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

with only the smallest details to differentiate a bird from Osbert Sitwell’s head. See Pound, Literary Essays, 442. See W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937), 4: “no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two [musical] themes.” Davis, “Fugue and Canto LXII,” 15. Kay Davis, for example, has put forward two quite different musical forms as patterns in separate cantos in “Fugue and Canto LXII” and “Ring Composition, Subject Rhyme and Canto VI.” “Wenn also im Bild eine Linie von dem Ziel, ein Ding zu bezeichnen, befreit wird und selbst als ein Ding fungiert, wird ihr innerer Klang durch keine Nebenrollen abgeschwächt und bekommt ihre volle innere Kraft” (“If then, in a picture a line is freed from the aim of representing a thing, and instead functions as a thing itself, then its inner resonance (sound) is not weakened by any subsidiary role, and its full inner power is obtained.”) Wassily ­Kandinsky, “Über die Formfrage,” in Der blaue Reiter, eds. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, vol. III (München: Piper, 1912), 34. For Pound, these ideas were developed from Rousellot’s arguments about harmonics: “Dans un son complexe, on appelle son fondamental celui qui résulte de l’onde principale; harmonique, les sons partiels qui sont dus aux ondes secondaires” (“In a complex sound, fundamental sound results from the principal sound wave; harmonics are the partial sounds due to the secondary sound waves,”) P.J. Abbé Rousselot, Principes de phonétique experimentale, 2 vols. (Paris: M ­ acon, 1897–1908), vol. I, 7. See also Pound’s theory of “Great Bass,” (particularly in Pound’s “A Retrospect” (1917) and Guide to Kulchur, 73–75, 233–40. Compare: “there is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less an organ-base” (Literary Essays, 6–7); Guide To Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970 [1934]), 73, 153. This freed verse, however, is not a “free for all”; since, as he quotes Eliot, “no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job” (Literary Essays 12). “The individual rhythm of masterpieces that adjusts itself according to the demands of the material.” Schafer, “Introduction,” 6, 475n. One of the musical rules Pound may be referring to is the pure form idea of “absolute music.” See Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: the History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), 2–3. Pound, Letters, 210; Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber, 1973), 24. In contrast to the visual patterning of Pound’s “ideogrammic” method and in those sections where Pound structures the poem through references to visual media such as sculpture, painting, and architecture. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), 529. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1987 [1934]), 56. See Pound, Letters, 261: “The long vowel makes the syllable long, and a syllable that is open and easily sung long fits a long space.” Prose: See Literary Essays, 295; “Henry James,” “The long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lighting incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its ‘wu-a-wait a little’.” Heyman, Ultramodern, 64. Heyman, Ultramodern, 64. “Chromatic,” in musical terms, means based on an octave of 12 semitones, the full range of pitches. See “I gather the limbs of Osiris” and “On Music: III Pitch,” qtd. in Schafer, “Introduction,” 33. William G Ewan, “Explaining the Intrinsic Pitch of Vowels,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 58.S1 (1975).

172  Katherine Firth 30 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound Reading His Poetry. 31 Pound uses American note values; in 7/8 a measure, or bar, may be divided into “one 1/2 one 1/4 and one 1/8 rest” (a minim, a crotchet, and a quaver rest) “or any such combination.” 4/4 is therefore four quarter notes. This sense of the measure being a whole length informs Pound’s sense of hearing the line. 32 Sally M. Gall, “Pound and the Modern Melic Tradition: Toward A Demystification of ‘Absolute Rhythm’,” Paideuma 8.1 (1979), 21. 33 See Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrel: Yeats and the Revival of the ­Bardic Art (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), in particular Chapter 8, “‘As Regarding Rhythm’: Minstrels and Imagists.” 34 ‘L’Abbé Rousselot’ [sic] is mentioned in Canto LXXVII, 486, referring to P.J. Abbé Rousselot and his Principes de phonétique experimentale. Sidney Lanier, The Science of English Verse (New York: Scribner, 1896); J.P. Dabrey, The Musical Basis of Verse (New York: Longmans, 1901); Thomas George Tucker, Introduction to the Natural History of Language (London: Blackie, 1908). 35 Arnold Dolmetsch, The Interpretation of the Music of the XVII and XVIII Centuries: Revealed by Contemporary Evidence (Seattle: U of Washington Press, 1977 [1915]). 441, 475–80. 36 See James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (­Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), xi. See further, Schuchard, The Last Minstrel, on Yeats. 37 Quoted in Schafer, “Introduction,” 23–30. 38 Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 5. 39 Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 19–21. 40 In Pound’s view, Yeats’s comments were unhelpful because (like many poets) Yeats had as much understanding of “a fugue as a frog” (quite clear from his confused description of “whirling” alphabets). See Yeats, A Vision, 4–5, and Pound, “Frog,” to John Lackay Brown (1937) (Letters 293). 41 See Pound, Letters, 25–8; Stone Cottage passim, this passage discussed, 50–1, picture of the fireplace, 52. Further, See George Bornstein, “Pound and the Making of Modernism” 22–42, in Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1999), 26; Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1989), 54; Ron Thomas, The Latin Masks of Ezra Pound (Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI Research Press, 1983), 131; Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Pound, Joyce, Eliot and Auden (New York: Oxford UP, 1967), 69. 42 W. B. Yeats, “The Peacock,” in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1992), 172. 43 Ezra Pound, “LXXXIII,” in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 548. Hereafter cited in text as Cantos. 4 4 There is no recording of Pound reading this section of Canto LXXXIII, so his reading practice is extrapolated from other recordings of the Cantos. 45 Heyman, Ultramodern, 64. 46 Canto LXXXIII. Wordsworth himself was well known for chanting his poems. 47 For example, in LXXVI, from “(the dance is a medium)” to “dum capitolium scandet,” in which 30 lines of the poem are kept together by a sequence of a dozen short lines that scan very differently and include four different languages, but are the same “length” and have a repeated (though varied) stress pattern (Cantos 480–481). 48 For a fuller description of these moments, see Margaret M. Dunn, ‘Eine Kleine Wortmusik: The Marriage of Poetry and Music in the Pisan Cantos’, in Perspectives on Contemporary Literature: Literature and the Other Arts, vol. 13 (1987), 101–108.

11 Imagism’s Musical Sympathies Amy Lowell and Claude Debussy Debora Van Durme

Although she was the author of no less than nine books of poetry, ­Bostonian heiress Amy Lowell (1874–1925) has made it into the annals of literary history as a spirited poetry marketer rather than a poet. More particularly, she struck her contemporaries (and present-day critics still) as, in T.S. Eliot’s words, the “demon saleswoman” of Imagism. Lowell learned about the then London-based movement striving for “the direct treatment of the ‘thing’” shortly after the publication of her poetry debut A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass in 1912. Immediately intrigued by the Imagists’ poetics, she travelled to London in 1913 and, upon her return, quickly put herself forward as Imagism’s foremost American advocate, especially after Ezra Pound split off from the movement a year later. Her provocative mottos, like “Publicity first. Poetry will follow” or “I made myself a poet, but the Lord made me a business man,” attest to the extravagance of her marketing zeal.1 But there is, I believe, a more fundamental reason why critics have failed to recognize Lowell as one of Imagism’s representative writers, labelling her its chief broker instead: the enduring tendency to use Pound’s theorizing of the movement as a benchmark and to evaluate other Imagists by the standards he formulated. This occurs despite the admission that Imagism is an amalgamative movement and that its members need to be discussed in their own right. 2 For Lowell, the prevailing approach is hardly beneficent. Critics have consistently interpreted her take on Imagism as a watering down of the movement as it had been envisaged in Pound’s more intricate theory. This chapter seeks to rescue Lowell from such detrimental appraisals by proposing an alternative background for assessing her poetry: the Impressionist music of Claude Debussy (1862–1918). Partly predating, partly contemporaneous with Imagism, musical Impressionism, as exemplified in the work of Debussy, offers an alternative aesthetic response to a similar intellectual climate. Amy Lowell’s poetry, I wish to argue, fuses some clearly Poundian Imagist tenets with many elements that are more congenial to Impressionism, which Lowell got to know via Debussy’s compositions. The result is an idiosyncratic brand of ­I magism that makes her writing a noteworthy contribution to early twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

174  Debora Van Durme The critique scholars have most frequently levelled at Lowell’s Imagist poetry is that it degrades the Poundian image to “[no] more than a nice description,” mere “pictures pleasant and suggestive” and sheer “pictorial impression[s].”3 A superficial reading of Pound’s and Lowell’s pronouncements on Imagism quickly uncovers the foundation of such complaints. For Ezra Pound, the image constituted “a form of super-­ position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another.”4 It is, he phrased it elsewhere, both content-wise and formally a “pattern,” a “complex arrangement.”5 Concomitantly, the Imagist poet is not an inert “substance receiving impressions” but an active creator who ­conceives rather than reflects. The image, it follows, is not merely a product of perception, but mainly of intellection. Pound’s basic definition tellingly reads: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”6 Images, for Pound, are not primarily visual but intellectual configurations, cerebral transformations of reality that, according to Pound, relate to the world in the same way an equation in analytical geometry relates to it—that is, designating not one “particular” object, but “any” and “all” instances of that object, the essence of an object, “free of space and time limits.”7 In Amy Lowell’s writing on the image, by contrast, such a bias for intellectual-imaginative operations and patterning is almost entirely ­absent. To begin with, her focus is nearly exclusively on matters of presentation: she expounds in her critiques at length on the Imagists’ preferred verse form, vers libre, and emphasizes characteristics such as exactitude, concentration and suggestion, and the evocation of atmospheres rather than literal accounts.8 In addition, Lowell often avails herself of the term “picture” rather than image or idea. In “A Consideration of Modern Poetry,” she writes that the poet should phrase things in such a way that they “impose [themselves] upon the mind’s eye in an inescapable picture.”9 “We do not tell stories,” she stresses “we throw pictures on a screen.”10 Such an outspokenly visual, sensory focus without the complicating condition that at all times two or more pictures are superimposed, explains later complaints about Lowellian Imagism’s silting-up in sheer pictorialism.11 There is little point in denying that Lowell was a less subtle thinker than Pound, nor that his influence makes itself strongly felt throughout her critical writings on poetry. Even so, her ideas are not merely a weakened variety of his; they present a different aesthetic. I believe Lowell’s own most striking hint at such a supposition does not occur in the evident context of her remarks on (Imagist) poetry per se, but in her observations concerning the relation between poetry and music. Though Lowell never received musical training (in an unpublished letter she confesses “not being able to play a note”),12 she had a passion for music throughout her life. A keen concertgoer, she also regularly organized concerts herself in her Boston mansion “Sevenels.” In her choice

Imagism’s Musical Sympathies  175 of what to attend, as well as what to program, she let herself be guided by two composer-friends, Carl Engel and Edward B. Hill, who delighted in all things modern, but in contemporary French music in particular.13 Hardly surprisingly, her combined passion for music and poetry got her “intrigued…immensely” by the relationship between both.14 In her lecture “Some Musical Analogies in Modern Poetry,” where she details her claim that poetry and music are “extraordinarily sympathetic in their interests” and “have been influenced by almost the same trends,” Lowell concludes that “[p]oetry, indeed, needs a new criticism based upon its changed standards, and what these standards are can best be determined by a close observation of the sister art of music.”15 For her own brand of Imagism, Lowell had suggested earlier, this would involve a comparison of her verse with the work of Claude Debussy. Quite significantly, Pound paralleled his version of Imagism to the compositions of a very different—and in Pound’s view even diametrically opposed—composer: Johann Sebastian Bach. Both poets’ musico-poetic comparisons, then, clearly suggest what critics since the inception of the movement have refuted: that Lowell’s aesthetics are not simply a diluted version of Pound’s, but a different brand of Imagism.

Ezra Pound’s Pattern Music After the movement’s split, Ezra Pound reconceptualized Imagism as the literary variety of Vorticism. Its equivalent in music, he believed, was “pattern music,” music of form rather than color, whose indispensable basis is rhythmic precision and clarity. Pound claimed that pattern ­essentially consists of sharply defined rhythmical phrases, regardless of length, which can—but do not necessarily have to—be elaborated into horizontally developing larger structures. Such structures, he explains, are based on repetition: they unfold from a basic unit whose design is “so simple that one can bear having it repeated several or many times” either in the form of exact replication or of variation.16 For Pound, compositions from the “Bach-Mozart” period—music “before it went off into romance and sentiment and description”17—formed a perfect example of such music. Bach’s work, in particular, gratified Pound’s Vorticist predilection for pattern as rhythm and as larger compositional design.18 Within the thirty-one measures of the Fugue in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1, for instance, the subject is repeated no less than eight times, the first counter-subject goes through six repetitions, and the second counter-subject through five—reiterations that are varied by means of, for instance, modulations and exchanges between voices. Bach’s work is “pure music,” Pound opines: it first “rel[ies] on music alone” rather than on representation or emotion. “I do not mean that Bach is not emotional,” he elucidates, “but the early music starts with the mystery of pattern; if you like, with the vortex of pattern;

176  Debora Van Durme with something which is, first of all, music, and which is capable of being, after that, many things” (Music 38, 293). Like all music, it has sensuous appeal and addresses the listeners’ ears, yet it also directs itself to their intellect—challenging them to untangle its intricate structural makeup. For Ezra Pound, pattern music, be it in the form of Bach’s work or George Antheil’s, has its direct opposite in “impression music, colour music, programme music”—music he associates with the work of Claude Debussy (Music 122).19 Even though Pound admits that Debussy has “structural solidity,” he considers the composer above all “the pre-­ eminent colorist of our time”, the “maestro […] who wanted to substitute visual imagination for ‘musical’ or mathematically ‘pure’ imagination” (Music 347). Impressionist music does not find its impetus in a wish to create sheer pattern, but in an external impression that has impinged itself on the composer’s mind and that he or she wishes to express. It is first an impression, and then music, rather than the other way around (Music 38). Therein, Pound states, lies “the violent Bach-Debussy contrast.” “It is no mortal use,” he writes elsewhere about Debussy, “trying to play his music as if it were ‘pure,’ as if it were simply ‘sound’ arranged into time and pitch patterns for the expression of emotion” (Music 61–62). Rather, Pound writes, Debussy “wished to suggest scenes and visions and objects, and, to a great extent, he succeeded. He succeeded, I do not wish to be paradoxical, in writing music for the eye” (Music 71). A closer look at Pound’s Imagist poetry shows that his poetic predilections accord with his musical preferences—that is, with his bias for meticulously patterned pieces that appeal to listeners’ intellects as much as to their senses and that have a prominent and fastidiously articulated rhythmic makeup. Pound’s epitomic “In a Station of the Metro,” for instance, does not find its origin solely in a visual impression, but in a pattern: a superposition of an actually perceived scene and a remembered one. Similarly, the reader of the poem does not simply have to visualize what is given: the actually perceived objects—the faces—are not described in visual detail but merely named. Instead, the reader has to invent the sensuous characteristics of the faces and then reconstruct the entire image-­pattern or rhythm conceived by the poet. The reader has to weld together the imagined faces and the described bough not into a simple, two-­ dimensional picture but into a multi-layered structure resulting from the intellect’s continuous moving back and forth between two mental images. The interpretative effort, then—which is considerably aided by the poem’s pronounced rhythmical pattern, with its suggestive repetition of stressed syllables—is an intellectual-imaginative rather than a visual-sensuous one.

Amy Lowell and Claude Debussy If Claude Debussy provided Pound with an example of what he emphatically wished his poetry not to be, the composer’s music had the opposite

Imagism’s Musical Sympathies  177 effect on Amy Lowell. From 1916 onwards, she repeatedly remarked upon the close affinity between Debussy’s aesthetic and her conception of Imagism. “The whole attitude of approach” in Debussy’s compositions and Imagist poetry, she writes in “Some Musical Analogies in Modern Poetry,” “was the same” (128). And that “attitude of approach,” she explains further on, is the wish to convey an impression, to portray in music “the thing per se, just as it struck on [one’s] senses.” (135) She continues: “Debussy seems to say ‘This is what I heard and saw, what you would have heard and seen had you been there’ […] He has sensitized his mind to take and repeat an impression.” (135) His piano pieces “thro[w] [perceived objects] up for us in so vivid a picture that it drops back into words.” (140) Here, she concludes, lies the meeting ground between Imagist vers libre and Debussy’s compositions: the “unrelated presentation of something seen or heard,” “the same sensuous delight in mere colour, the same sharp sensitiveness to sound” (135, 140). For Lowell, as for Pound, Debussy is a creator of pictures. 20 A pictorial bias is not exceptional in discussions of Debussy’s music. In his own day, the composer’s work was associated with that of painters like Whistler, Monet, and Rossetti, and later critics formulated similar comparisons. A particularly widespread analogy, first used in 1887 and never relinquished since, links Debussy’s work to Impressionist painting. Among its many supporters was Lowell’s composer friend Edward Burlington Hill, who helped her write the “Musical Analogies” lecture in which she discusses the parallels between Debussy’s music and Imagist verse in most detail. Although Lowell herself never explicitly referred to Debussy as an Impressionist, Hill’s strong influence on her ideas about music, as well as the nature of her appraisals of Debussy’s work (almost all of which focus on and applaud clearly Impressionist characteristics) suggest that it was the “impressionism” of Debussy’s music that appealed to her and of which she approved. 21 In his Modern French Music (1924), Hill singles out “Reflets dans l’eau,” “Cloches à travers les feuilles,” and “Poissons d’or” as most characteristic of Debussy’s Impressionist aesthetics and remarkably akin to the paintings of Monet (221). 22 It can hardly be a coincidence, I believe, that Lowell selects the same three pieces to illustrate what she considers the strongest affinities between Debussy’s music and her own poetry. And to my mind, it is in Debussy’s Impressionism that Lowell detects analogies with Imagism. Imagism and Impressionism are part of an intellectual climate that problematizes the relationship between the world an sich, physical reality, and our perception of it. But they respond to it in different ways. Imagists believe that it is possible to grasp reality as it truly is. “Poetry,” Pound writes, “is in some odd way concerned with the gravity of things, with their nature. Their nature and show, if you like; with the relation between them, but not with show alone.”23 What is problematic is that

178  Debora Van Durme our understanding of that “true” nature has been distorted because we are too caught up in and immobilized by traditional ways of thinking and seeing. Imagism’s solution is to apply new concepts to things, and especially to use new intellectual and imaginative comparisons between objects. In Pound’s view, the Imagist poet actively changes received impressions. He or she can immediately grasp objects in their entirety and juxtapose or merge them. It is up to the reader to subsequently flesh them apart to discover the grounds for the comparison—to unclose the correspondences between Pound’s faces in the crowd and petals on a bow, for instance. By contrast, Impressionists tended to side with the belief that objects in the outside world could no longer be grasped as they really are, but only as they appear to their observer. That is, as “a continuous flow of impressions” out of which an object gradually takes shape (Barasch 38). 24 The Impressionist, Maria Elizabeth Kronegger has argued, with perhaps a tinge of exaggeration, “faces this world as pure passivity, a mirror in which the world inscribes or reflects itself.”25 An Impressionist artist sets out to minutely describe our sensations before cognition and reflection take over, to present the immediacy of undeveloped consciousness. Looking (and by extension all types of sensation) becomes a primordial experience sufficient unto itself rather than a means towards an end, be it as a window to the heart and soul or as a means of cognition enabling us to measure objects precisely. 26 To harken back to Ezra Pound’s terminology: Impressionists are concerned with the show of things rather than with their nature. They do not primarily look for permanence, solidity, and starkly outlined details in the world that surrounds them. Rather, they are after the constantly changing and fleeting movement of surfaces, the hazy reflections of colors and sounds, the atmosphere and mood emanating from objects. 27 They prefer a sense of distance, remoteness, and vagueness. 28 Debussy’s and Lowell’s devotion to Impressionist aesthetics makes itself felt on several fronts. To begin with, they do not ask their audience to primarily engage intellectually with their work. Debussy does not require his listeners to focus first and foremost on the recognition of themes and their harmonies, the play between elements of the theme, or the rhetoric of expectation based on principles of suspension and resolution by means of concord and discord contrasts. Although he undeniably has an eye for architecture and proportion, 29 he often veils that design, so that it is no longer the main source of artistic pleasure. Instead, prominence is given to the auditive and the expressive: Debussy invites us to rediscover sound. 30 Chords and intervals are no longer solely chosen in relation to a particular key, to the positions of notes in the scale, but for their sensuality. Tonal logic is replaced by the logic of the ear. Boyd Pomeroy’s analysis of Brouillards, a clear instance of

Imagism’s Musical Sympathies  179 Debussy’s typically Impressionist preoccupation with the vague, distant, and fleeting which we also find in Lowell’s poetry, can illustrate this. Pomeroy points at the piece’s procession of diatonic triads circling around the tonic, set against faster-moving chromatic figuration, doggedly shadowing the triads in the same register. As a result, the Prélude’s tonic of C major appears shrouded in a continuous chromatic haze or mist. The chromatic mist obscures not only the clarity of individual diatonic triads, but also the outline of larger-scale tonal relations, which consequently take on a somewhat unreal, disembodied quality.31 This reading makes clear that the effect of Debussy’s structural choices is an evocative appeal to the sensuous imagination rather than an analytical one to the intellect: Brouillards’ form successfully conjures up the mists referred to in the title. Some of Lowell’s lyrics likewise unsettle intellectually apperceived structure, even though, as in Debussy’s work, it is never entirely absent. “Thompson’s Lunch Room—Grand Central Station” is a case in point: Wax-white – Floor, ceiling, walls. Ivory shadows Over the pavement Polished to cream surfaces By constant sweeping. The big room is coloured like the petals Of a great magnolia […] Chairs are ranged in rows Like sepia seeds Waiting fulfilment. The chalk-white spot of a cook’s cap Moves unglossily against the vaguely bright wall – Dull chalk-white striking the retina like a blow Through the wavering uncertainty of steam. Vitreous-white of glasses with green reflections, Ice-green carboys, shifting – greener, bluer – with the jar of moving water. Jagged green-white bowls of pressed glass Rearing snow-peaks of chipped sugar Above the lighthouse-shaped castors Of grey pepper and grey-white salt. Grey-white placards: “Oyster Stew, Cornbeef Hash, Frankfurters”: Marble slabs veined with words in meandering lines.

180  Debora Van Durme Dropping on the white counter like horn notes Through a web of violins, The flat yellow lights of oranges, The cube-red splashes of apples […]32 The poem contains some metaphors that could be an onset to an image in the Poundian sense, inviting the reader to imaginatively merge a room with magnolia petals, chairs with seeds and oranges with horn notes. But the metaphors are not sustained into a carefully wrought structure. Instead, they are abandoned as suddenly as they are taken up, and irregularly interspersed with sense-impressions that remain one-dimensional pictures. The poem simply follows the eye as it roams around the room and randomly fastens now upon one object, then another, in an improvisatory manner. The repetition we do get is not syntactical but aural, by means of copiously scattered alliterations and assonances, and the sense of progression visual, as we are—with an Impressionist’s sensitivity to subtle gradations of color—gradually led from one shade of white to the next. All in all, the address is to the senses rather than the intellect. The “Impressionist” aspect of Lowell’s and Debussy’s works also makes itself felt in their thematic choices. Debussy stresses in his writings that instead of creating purely musical ideas or patterns (what he calls “metaphysics” rather than music), he wants to capture and evoke “realities”: the things he hears, sees and smells around him.33 Hence his decision to give many of his works titles referring to nature. “La musique est précisément l’art qui est le plus près de la nature, celui qui lui tend le piège le plus subtil,” he explains in his essay collection Monsieur Croche (239). He calls it “un art à la mesure des elements, du vent, du ciel, de la mer! Il ne faut pas en faire un art fermé scolaire” (296), and argues that the composer’s conservatory should not be “d’arbitraires traités” but “le rhythme eternel de la mer, du vent dans les feuilles, et mille petits bruits” (223). It is clear that Debussy’s interest lies more with the natural and inanimate than with the human world. According to Kronegger, that is a typically Impressionist bias. In the Impressionist universe, she writes, man “becomes the mere accessory of nature with no claims to specific rights and privileges” (66). Debussy makes nature the protagonist rather than the backdrop in his work. Constant Lambert writes: The majestic procession of clouds in Nuages is a procession of clouds – not a symbol of evanescence; the wild exhilaration of Fêtes is the exhilarating bustle of wind and rain, with nothing in it of ­human gaiety. The icy waves that lap the sirens’ rock are disturbed by no Ulysses and his seamen.34 Such a thematic role-reversal is echoed in Debussy’s disruption of ­conventional fore- and background hierarchies among formal elements

Imagism’s Musical Sympathies  181 of music. Traditionally, the melodic line is tantamount, and the function of harmony is merely to make that melodic line stand out, more particularly the harmonic progression it represents and the key it belongs to. In Debussy, however, the melodic line almost seems to be the consequence of the harmony, rather than the other way around, and thus subject and background are fused. Lowell, too, often lets nature—both inanimate and animate—take center stage in her poetry. She wants to “writ[e] in the décor,” to bring to the fore those things that usually constitute the background to human drama in literature.35 Many of her lyrics are pure descriptions of nature, and even in those poems that revolve around human action and emotion, such as the Men, Women and Ghosts lyrics and the historical polyphonic prose epics of Can Grande’s Castle, the elaborate and detailed descriptions of backdrops of land- and cityscapes tend to dominate. In her critical writings, Lowell proclaims this prioritization as a kind of poetic creed that she calls “unrelated method” and that she considers unique to Imagism.36 It is an “attitude,” she explains in a manner very similar to Lambert’s comment on Debussy, “which leads to so many poems on nature, on effects of trees and sky and water, by themselves, with no hint of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ to heighten interest.”37 For Lowell, landscapes (and, we can safely add, cityscapes or interiors) should never be “the mere background of a love-tale, or a death-tale, or something equally familiar and reassuring.”38 The poet should be allowed to portray “all the many parts of a landscape, merely as they appear to the eye or ear, or both” and to describe “a thing by its appearance only, without regard to its entity in any other way.”39 In their nature depictions, both Lowell and Debussy, like many Impressionist painters, paid much attention to the myriad forms of appearance a natural phenomenon can take and to subtle nuances within those appearances. Debussy was intrigued by different types of water masses, for instance, ranging from the play of waves and the jets of a fountain, to raindrops and the gently rippling surface or the dark depths of lakes. He also had a fascination for certain moments of the day and the varieties of color and lighting particular to them: for noon with its blinding clarity, or for the blurring of contours and blending of hues during sunrise and sunset.40 “Poissons d’Or” can exemplify the way Debussy succeeds in suggesting light, color, and texture in his music. The low register and concatenation of imperfect consonances in the piece’s opening melody and insistent high-speed tremolo accompaniment (Figure 11.1) evoke a sense of depth and fusion: one pictures deep waters with shady, blended colors like merging blues, greens, and grays in which the leisurely moving fish are not entirely visible. The fact that the passage is to be played pianissimo adds a sense of distance.41 When, after a two-measure transition, the melody refigures for the first time (Figure 11.2), its chordal structure has been replaced by a

182  Debora Van Durme

Figure 11.1  Claude Debussy, Poissons d’or, bars 3–4.

Figure 11.2  Claude Debussy, Poissons d’or, bars 10–11.

single voice, and so have the chords of the accompaniment, which now takes the form of a slightly slower ostinato pattern in which the notes are higher and stand out more clearly from each other. The contrasting effect is a sense of brightness, as though the fish are now bathing in light at the surface of the pond that glistens under the play of sunrays. The changed dynamics, now piano instead of pianissimo, decrease the sense of distance evoked earlier. Lowell’s poems testify to similar thematic preferences. We encounter ­water tossed up in a fountain (“Clear, with Light, Variable Winds”), ­curling in foam-topped waves (“A Japanese Wood-Carving,” “Sea-Blue and ­Blood-Red”), disturbed by darting fish (“An Aquarium”), multi-­colored under the play of sunlight (“Spring Day. Bath”), or lashing in spells of rain (“Afternoon Rain in State Street”). In “Spring Day,” divided in ­sections describing morning, midday, afternoon, evening, and night scenes, she indulges in exploring the peculiarities in light, movement, sceneries, and atmosphere at various times of day: from the greenish-white reflections of light in the morning bath-water, the slightly harsher whites and colors of the breakfast table and morning walk, and the flaming, golden hues darting off shop windows in the afternoon to the effervescence of stars and

Imagism’s Musical Sympathies  183 electric signs against the dark night sky. The congeniality of Lowell’s poetic with an Impressionist approach, here, is explicated in her “Preface” to the volume Men, Women and Ghosts in which the poem appears: I have endeavoured to give the colour, and light, and shade, of certain places and hours, stressing the purely pictorial effect, and with little or no reference to any other aspect of the places described. It is an enchanting thing to wander through a city looking for its unrelated beauty, the beauty by which it captivates the sensuous sense of seeing. (x–xi)

Impressionism with a Difference For all its close affinities with the eponymous visual arts movement, Debussy’s aesthetic is not Impressionism pur sang. His evocations of the natural scenes that inspired him are not intended as gratuitous, faithful sensory depictions of reality. In one of his letters, Debussy states that he had “un profond dédain” for Tonmalerei, for programmatic descriptions.42 Even though he himself, like many of his listeners, occasionally analyzed his pieces in terms that emphasize the descriptive and pictorial,43 he stresses that he never aimed purely for “une reproduction plus ou moins exacte de la nature,” but also sought to capture the “correspondances mystérieuses entre la Nature et l’Imagination,” the “transposition sentimentale de ce qui est ‘invisible’ dans la nature.” “Rend-on le mystère d’une forêt en mesurant la hauteur de ses arbres?” he adds, “Et n’est-ce pas plutôt sa profondeur insondable qui déclenche l’imagination.”44 Significantly, Debussy repeatedly placed his titles at the end of a piece rather than at the beginning and never included programmatic notes. In Printemps, for instance, he does not want to mimic a particular spring, but render the essence of the season, the abstract idea it symbolizes for us: the birth of life, the expansion of forces that lay dormant in nature. Or, in his forest evocation in the prelude to Pelléas et Mélisande, he does not literally imitate birdsongs or other aspects of nature, but stirs up mystery and darkness by using low dynamics and low-pitched instruments. He is not after a depiction of the forest itself, Caroline Potter explains, “but a composer’s imaginative response to the sensations of being in a forest.”45 The same observation goes for Lowell: most of her poems are more than purely Impressionist descriptions of scenery—not only because they often contain (onsets to) isolated Poundian images, but also because they repeatedly seek to convey a deeper meaning. “Red Slippers,” for instance, starts out as a strongly Impressionist depiction of the various shades of color that red shoes in a shop-window can radiate: […] Behind the polished glass, the slippers hang in long threads of red, festooning from the ceiling like stalactites of blood, flooding the

184  Debora Van Durme eyes of passers-by with dripping colour, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tramcars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the sleet, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas. […] They balance upon arched insteps like springing bridges of crimson lacquer: they swing up over curved heels like whirling tanagers sucked in a windpocket; they flatten out, heelless, like July ponds, flared and burnished by red rockets. Snap, snap, they are cracker-sparks of scarlet in the white, monotonous block of shops. They plunge the clangour of billions of vermilion trumpets into the crowd outside, and echo in faint rose over the pavement. […]46 As the lyric draws to a close, however, this seemingly noncommittal and disinterested impression of shoes in a shop window develops into a value judgment about different ways of seeing. Against the simple display of the slippers, Lowell opposes an intricate one of “a big lotus bud of cardboard whose petals open every few minutes and reveal a wax doll, with staring bead eyes and flaxen hair, lolling awkwardly in its flower chair.” Unlike the shoe window, which people pass indifferently and unheedingly, the lotus attracts a great deal of attention. But the poet thinks differently. She describes the cardboard flower in a very plain sentence with straightforward diction, devoid of action and colorless, while the language used to capture the slippers is vibrant, variegated, nuanced, energetic, and imaginative. Thus, the lyric reveals itself as an exemplification of poetic vision and its divergence from the view of ordinary people. “Red Slippers” is part of a small sequence called “Towns in Colour.” The sequence’s other lyrics similarly carry significance beyond their, at first sight, descriptive nature. The gilded splendor of an opera house described in the first lyric, for instance, is imbued with symbolism as the gold on the one hand comes to signify the shrill decadence of the parvenu audience (the “golden” sound of the brass is “crude,” “crass”, “fat,” and “parvenu”) and is exposed as a mere bubble bursting at the least touch. On the other hand, the opera’s golden reverberations are opposed to the audience’s gilded decadence, as the pure, “transparent,” and “iridescent” “gold bubble” of the prima-donna’s voice does not survive a collision with the cold crudeness of a bank manager’s lips and bursts. With its combination of Impressionist description, images, and symbolism, Lowell’s verse veers in between Poundian Imagism and Impressionism. Only a few of her lyrics, such as “Venus Transiens” or “The On-looker,” entirely answer to the Poundian Imagist demand for an intellectually imaginatively analyzable pattern in which two images are superimposed. Many of them, to the contrary, can be effortlessly aligned with the Debussyan creation of “pictures” with a high degree of sensuousness rather than an emphasis on cerebrally apperceived structure,

Imagism’s Musical Sympathies  185 interspersed with images in the Poundian sense. If one applies Jesse Matz’s definition of Impressionism to Imagism and designates the image as something keeping the middle ground between empirical sense and ideal thought, then Pound’s version of the image tends more to the ideal thought side and Lowell’s to the empirical sense. Reading Amy Lowell’s poetry not only against the background of Poundian Imagism, but also against that of Debussy’s Impressionist compositions, reveals a new brand of “Lowellian” Imagism, putting into practice what T.E. Hulme, purportedly the first theorist of Imagism, foresaw at the movement’s birth: that the “method of recording impressions by visual images” that “has found expression in painting as Impressionism will soon find expression in poetry as free verse.”47

Notes 1 Quoted in Melissa Bradshaw, “Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification.” Victorian Poetry 38.1 (Spring 2000), 142. 2 See, for instance, Stanley K. Coffman, Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 3. 3 Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and W ­ yndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 91. See also Patrick McGuinness, “Imagism,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 185; and John T. Gage, In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 135. 4 Ezra Pound, “Affirmations II: Vorticism,” The New Age 16.11 (14 January 1915). 5 Ezra Pound, “Affirmations IV: As for Imagisme,” The New Age 16.13 (28 January 1915). 6 Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1.6 (March 1913). 7 Pound, “Affirmations IV.” 8 See, for instance, Lowell’s preface to the second Some Imagist Poets anthology (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916) and her “A Consideration of Modern Poetry” in The Musical Quarterly 6.1 (January 1920). 9 Amy Lowell, “A Consideration of Modern Poetry,” The North American Review 205.734 (Jan 1917), 105. 10 Amy Lowell, “A Consideration of Modern Poetry” 105. 11 Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 104–106. 12 Amy Lowell, unpublished letter to Edward B. Hill, 11 September 1918, b MS Lowell 19.1, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 13 See Foster S. Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle. With Extracts from Her Correspondence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 159; and Jean Gould, Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and the Imagist Movement (New  York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1975), 87. 14 Amy Lowell, unpublished letter to Edward B. Hill, 11 September 1918. 15 Amy Lowell, “Some Musical Analogies in Modern Poetry,” The Musical Quarterly 6.1 (January 1920), 157.

186  Debora Van Durme 16 Pound, “Affirmations IV.” 17 Ezra Pound and R. Murray Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (London: Faber, 1978), 93. Hereafter cited in text as Music. 18 See Pound and Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music, 287 and Pound 1952: 153. 19 Antheil had a rather different view on Debussy, whom he greatly admired as an innovator. Antheil writes: ‘“Debussy is new and forever a great l­and-mark in musical composition,” because of his “new propulsion of time-spaces”’ (Music 263). 20 Such visual orientation in approaching music is not an isolated instance in Lowell’s writings. When describing musical compositions in her poetry, she often does so by evoking highly sensuous images. When Herr Concert-­ Meister Altgelt in “The Cremona Violin” plays his instrument, for instance, his wife Charlotta finds herself flooded with a variety of pictures, ranging from lilies waving “like fans in a hall of stone / Over a bier standing their in the center, alone”, to “wavelets flowing / In a splashing, pashing, rippling motion / Between broad meadows to an ocean / Wide as a day and blue as a flower, / Where every hour / Gulls dipped, and scattered, and squawked, and squealed.” See Amy Lowell, The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 92. Lowell was, for that matter, not exceptional in her visually slanted interpretations of music. Stefan Jarocinski discusses a host of composers and listeners, beginning in the eighteenth century, who were convinced that music could represent visual impressions just as it could portray feelings and ideas; He also notes the predominance of optical and spatial terminology in the music criticism of Lowell’s time (and up to the present), in which commentators talk of high and low, of pattern and ornament, and call melody “line” and harmony and dynamics “colour.” See Stefan Jarocinski, Debussy: Impressionnisme Et Symbolisme, trans. Thérèse Douchy (Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1970), 60, 66. 21 For the sake of completeness, I should mention that the comparison between Impressionism and Lowell has also been sharply criticized (see, for example, Stefan Jarocinski). Debussy himself did not, for that matter, approve of the label impressionist; he thought it a term “aussi mal employé que possible” (see Michel Fleury, L’impressionnisme et la musique [Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1996], 26). Yet he did write to Emile Vuillermoz in 1916 that he did him ‘a great honour’ by calling him “a pupil of Claude Monet” (see Nigel Simeone, “Debussy and Expression,” in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, ed. Simon Trezise [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 103). 22 Edward Burlingame Hill, Modern French Music (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924), 221. 23 Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship: The Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and Their Writings about Each Other, ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (New York: New Directions, 1982), 10. 24 Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art 3: From Impressionism to Kandinsky (New York: Routledge, 1998), 38. 25 Maria Elizabeth Kronegger, Literary Impressionism (New Haven, CT: ­College and University Press, 1973), 14. 26 Barasch, Theories of Art, 17. 27 See Christopher Palmer, Impressionism in Music (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 13; and Kronegger, Literary Impressionism, 42. 28 See, for example: Kronegger, Literary Impressionism, 43; and Fleury, ­L’impressionnisme et la musique.

Imagism’s Musical Sympathies  187 29 See, for instance, Roy Howat, “Modernization: From Chabrier and Fauré to Debussy and Ravel,” in French Music since Berlioz, eds. Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 6–12. 30 See Fleury, L’impressionnisme et la musique, 82, 90, 106. 31 Boyd Pomeroy, “Debussy’s Tonality: A Formal Perspective,” in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 166. 32 Lowell, The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, 149. 33 Fleury, L’impressionnisme et la musique, 26. Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 281. 34 Constant Lambert, Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline (London: ­Hogarth, 1985), 40–41. 35 Amy Lowell, Men, Women and Ghosts (New York: Macmillan, 1916), x. 36 Amy Lowell, Poetry and Poets: Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 107. 37 Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, 106. 38 Lowell, Poetry and Poets, 139. 39 Lowell, Tendencies, 312; Poetry and Poets, 107. 40 See Fleury, L’impressionnisme et la musique, 286. 41 Reduced dynamics such as pianissimos and their concomitant sense of distance are, for that matter, a favorite of Debussy. He creates a similar feeling of remoteness through instrumentation, preferring the softness of strings and woodwinds to the brasses, which are, when used, often muted. 42 Jarocinski, Debussy, 27. 43 About Nocturnes, for instance, he wrote: it is not meant to designate the usual form of the nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests. Nuages renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white. Fêtes gives us the vibrating atmosphere with sudden flashes of light […]Sirènes depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently, among the waves silvered by the moonlight, is heard the mysterious song of the Sirens as they laugh and pass on.  See Nigel Simeone, “Debussy and Expression,” 104 4 4 Jarocinski, Debussy, 111. 45 Caroline Potter, “Debussy and Nature,” The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 139. It is, among other things, because of Debussy’s concern with the essence of things that Jarocinski concludes that he is not an impressionist but a symbolist. I would not take it that far, but instead agree with Michel Fleury that Debussy’s aesthetic is a mixture of impressionism and other ideas, such as symbolism. 46 Lowell, The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, 149. 47 Thomas Ernest Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” in Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 72.

12 Expansive Musical Modernism in William Carlos Williams, Steve Reich, and Tom Leonard Peter Clandfield

In a 1961 interview with Walter Sutton, William Carlos Williams ­assents to the proposition that “painting is closer to [him] than music,” and adds, “Music doesn’t mean much to me. I like old-fashioned music, I think, but I’m not very sympathetic to this modern atonality.”1 Yet overall, Williams’s writings challenge the assumption that his attitudes to music are inherently more conservative, or less evolved in any sense, than his views on painting or on poetry. If it is not always a main theme for Williams, the twentieth-century status of music is a recurring and significant motif in his work. Early in his Autobiography, Williams describes his youthful search for an area “where I might be successful,” and at once adds, “It wasn’t music. The violin taught me that.”2 Yet, in its dismissal of music as a professional pursuit, this statement actually signals Williams’s regard for the art, implying that he had the critical capacity to perceive his own limitations as a musician. Slightly later in the Autobiography, Williams mentions Ezra Pound’s contrasting attitude: He could never learn to play the piano, though his mother tried to teach him. But he “played” for all that. At home, I remember my mother’s astonishment when he sat down at the keyboard and let fly for us—seriously. Everything, you might say, resulted except music. (56) Sensitivity to music registers here as an ordinary part of Williams’s awareness, and such is also true in his letters, which indicate that ­listening to and discussing music, live or recorded, was a regular activity for him. 3 Williams’s poems also treat serious interest in a range of music—from the “old-fashioned” to the modern and atonal—as a normal and vital part of twentieth-century life even for those who are not active musicians. Williams’s long and prolific career extends the traditional period boundaries of modernism, and musical interests manifest themselves throughout it. Several of the poems I will discuss most e­ xtensively—“The Desert Music,” “The Orchestra,” and “Tapiola”—come from the 1950s and powerfully gainsay the suggestion just cited that only “old-fashioned” music, if any, mattered to Williams by that time.

Expansive Musical Modernism  189 In a 2003 interview, Glasgow poet Tom Leonard refers to a “fence” between “[T.S.] Eliot, and all the other elitists hiding behind notions of decaying European culture,” and Williams, whom Leonard identifies with an outward-looking, anti-elitist modernism that he cites as enduringly valuable and influential.4 Among defining features of Williams’s work, for Leonard, is its interest in linking progressive social forces with innovations in poetic technique and in the arts generally. Yet, the fence metaphor in itself may be too simple and binary to do justice to the complexities of Williams’s work, and not all critics agree about the extent of Williams’s egalitarianism. 5 In a 2007 essay, Carla Billitteri concedes that Williams himself “was no fascist,” but contends that his writings, particularly his prose, betray a “politically conservative orientation” through a “devotion to form” and an investment in the “auratic,” or mystifying and ritualistic concept of art’s effects that Walter Benjamin theorized as characteristic of romanticism, and as retrograde, indeed dangerous, in the twentieth century.6 Since music can fuse form and content through techniques that are harder to describe verbally than are equivalent techniques in poetry or other forms of literature, the fairly frequent presence of musical devices and references in Williams’s poetry could be seen, or heard, as part of the auratic tendency that Billitteri diagnoses. I will argue, however, that musical elements of Williams’s poetry—both formal and thematic ones—work most effectively against romanticization, ritualization, or other mystification of creative activity. Rather, these elements encourage attention to the production of poetic meaning as an ongoing process that requires the active involvement of readers or listeners as well as the compositional skill of authors. Introducing the 1989 essay collection Music and the Politics of ­Culture, Christopher Norris expands on Susan McClary’s discussion of conflict between formalisms that “assimilate” music to “a realm of pure knowledge ideally untouched by mere vicissitudes of time and place” (8) and contrasting approaches that “put… music… back into its socio-­political context” (9).7 A parallel polarity can be identified between views and practices of modernism that assert its potential to transcend material considerations and ones that value its capacities to engage with the complexities of the twentieth-century world. While I will examine Williams’s use of musical elements in his poetry to articulate social and political concerns of his time, I will show that his work is also attuned to possibilities of music as a semi-autonomous art—and, further, to productive tensions and potential mixtures between transcendent and contextual understandings of music. Such ambiguities help to emphasize the importance of audiences’ active involvement with Williams’s work. Accordingly, I will develop my analysis with reference to two of ­Williams’s most musically active listeners: Tom Leonard himself, as both critic and poet, and the contemporary American composer Steve Reich. Their takes on Williams amplify ways in which musical modernisms resonate well beyond the high modern period.

190  Peter Clandfield Music has received less critical attention as a factor in Williams’s work than has his engagement with the visual arts, as Joseph Coroniti points out in a brief 1993 essay on Williams’s metaphorical “music of the imagination.”8 Most often noted among the musical connections of Williams’s work have been those with jazz, of which the indigenous American-ness and rhythmic innovation would seem to speak naturally to Williams’s concern with moving beyond European-derived poetic practice. Williams’s biographer Paul Mariani suggests that “the jagged patterns that distinguish Williams’ poetic lines” find their “central analogue” in jazz.9 Others, however, have noted that, given such parallels, evidence of Williams’s actual appreciation of jazz, and of its grounding in African American experience, is surprisingly limited. Aldon L. ­Nielsen, for instance, argues that genuine presences of jazz in Williams’s work result mostly from the way its pervasive cultural presence registers in the rhythms of his writing despite his ambivalence about the music and his sometimes-stereotypical ideas about the people who make it.10 Williams, by this account, functions as a kind of cultural antenna, picking up and retransmitting significant musical sounds from his surroundings. Williams tunes in to so-called “serious” or “classical” music just as significantly as to jazz, and perhaps more deliberately. Moreover, his attention to such music may be more consistently progressive in its implications than his takes on jazz and other kinds of music generally labelled as popular, in part because “classical” music carries auratic and elitist ­associations—like its very designation as “classical”—that, on the whole, Williams challenges. I will argue below that Williams’s most striking ­affinities in musical modernism are with composers who innovate without abandoning tonality. I will also return to the discord between such a pluralist approach to musical modernism and the more stringent views of influential mid-century theorists such as Theodor Adorno. In the early poem “The Death of Franco of Cologne: His Prophecy of Beethoven” (1913), Williams signals what will be his career-long interest in formal and metrical innovation. The poem is a Browning-esque dramatic monologue imagining the final statement of the titular character, the thirteenth-century German theorist who contributed crucially to the development of Western musical notation. The poem figures Franco’s “children” as “little black eyes” (musical notes) “that go playing / Over the five-barred gate” (the stave) and that, having escaped his control, will “some day […] get a master.”11 This last phrase suggests that notation may not merely be mastered by Beethoven but actually (be)get him. It thus highlights the poem’s concern with techniques for organizing sound on paper. So too do the poem’s own sounds: its rhyming couplets are rhythmically irregular, and its lines grow shorter toward the end, a change that presumably expresses the waning of the speaker’s energy, but also anticipates Williams’s own experiments with variable kinds of lineation, as he indicates in his retrospective annotations to the poem:

Expansive Musical Modernism  191 “We were bound to invent new poetry as he [was] the scale. I was searching for something beyond rime” (CP I 474). Particularly useful accounts of Williams’s structural use of musical procedures have come from other poets. Denise Levertov, in her 1984 essay “On Williams’ Triadic Line; or How to Dance on Variable Feet,” details ways in which reading Williams’s poems aloud entails decisions analogous to those involved in reading and performing a piece of ­music (143).12 Perhaps even more persuasive is Tom Leonard’s 1976 essay “The Locust Tree in Flower, and why it had difficulty flowering in ­Britain.” Developing a reading of the revised 1935 version of Williams’s “The ­Locust Tree in Flower” (CP I 379–380), Leonard emphasizes the ­“kinetics” of this 13-word, 13-line poem, showing that its final word/ line, “again,” “can function… as a musical instruction to the reader:… Repeat,” and that the resulting “re-enunciation” of the poem creates an analogue for the cyclical movement of the seasons. For Leonard, ­“Locust Tree” shows that “language is an object in the world” rather than vice-versa.13 Leonard’s reading of the poem thus points to the productive tension in Williams’s poetry (and indeed in his own, as I will illustrate later) between words as objects in themselves, which signify in part through the distinctive American (or Glaswegian) speech rhythms they register, and words as instruments for the articulation of ideas and meaning, including ideas about the meanings of music. Both poets often leave us asking, in the words of Williams’s 1952 poem “The Orchestra,” “shall we think / or listen?”14 (CP II 251). Williams’s “scoring” might appear to attempt to preempt improvisation and control the reader’s perception, but such would hold true only on the assumption that a musical performer is merely an instrument, rather than necessarily an active force in the realization of a score. Insofar as a reader of a Williams poem thinks about, or listens consciously to, its distinctive lineation as analogous to musical scoring—an awareness that Williams’s thematic musical references and allusions can only encourage—this perception, and the rereading and re-sounding it cues, invites awareness of the lines as constructs rather than as bardic utterances. Williams’s techniques of scoring establish that readers, especially of innovative poems such as his, have active roles in the production of meaning. Williams does also register the appeal of Romantic ideals of poets and composers as individuals distinguished by superior powers of control over raw material. Williams’s short 1921 poem “January” voices what sounds at first like a Romantic sense of the poet’s task of asserting order against chaos: Again I reply to the triple winds running chromatic fifths of derision outside my window: Play louder.

192  Peter Clandfield You will not succeed. I am bound more to my sentences the more you batter at me to follow you. And the wind, as before, fingers perfectly its derisive music. (CP I 151–152) Yet, the poem’s cyclical qualities, common in Williams’s poetry, complicate Romantic self-assertiveness, as does the suggestion that “the triple winds / running chromatic fifths of derision,” which sound like something from a tonality-stretching turn-of-the-century orchestral work, may triumph. Williams lends a more sympathetic ear to the artistic possibilities of harsh sounds in his essay on the 1927 Carnegie Hall concert that featured the American composer George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, a work of which the heavily percussive and rhythmically jagged evocations of the sounds of mechanized modernity elicited mixed audience responses.15 Williams derides those who were unwilling or unable to respond to Antheil’s innovations with more than distaste or bafflement: a woman of our party, herself a musician, made this remark: “the subway seems sweet after that.” “Good,” I replied […. ] I felt that noise, the unrelated noise of life such as this in the subway [… ] had actually been mastered, subjugated [….] By hearing Antheil’s music, seemingly so much noise, when I actually came upon noise in reality, I found that I had gone up over it.16 Billitteri characterizes Williams’s poetry as “inconsistent, contradictory” in its attitudes to ordinary people, but (focusing as she does on prose) leaves this assessment under-elaborated.17 There may be a measure of elitism in Williams’s suggestion in the Antheil essay that he is better-equipped than those around him to hear dissonant or otherwise unconventional music as a means of coming to terms with the noise and stress of modernity, but also noteworthy here is that modernity is represented by mass public transit, one of its most ordinary and communal manifestations. Williams’s poetic responses to such more daunting aspects of ­modernity as the political and social stresses of the 1930s and 1940s  also find notable expression in musical terms. “War, The ­D estroyer!” (1942), dedicated to the dancer and choreographer ­M artha Graham, voices a compact manifesto in response to both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. The poem concedes

Expansive Musical Modernism  193 the limited effectuality of cultural responses to armed conflict: “We cannot change it / not by writing, music / neither prayer.” It goes on, however, to propose the controlled violence of modern dance—which it evokes through an emphatic use of end-rhymes that is uncharacteristic for Williams—as a possible defiant response to the destructiveness of war: And if dance be the answer, dance! body and mind— substance, balance, elegance! with that, blood red displayed flagrantly in its place beside the face. (CP II 44) While the final four lines hint that such musical and artistic resistance may not save its practitioners from destruction, implied here is roughly the same principle as Williams’s endorsement of Antheil’s dissonance as an antidote or exorcising agent for the noise of urban modernity. In the immediate postwar context, the first of Williams’s “Two ­Deliberate Exercises,” subtitled “Lesson from a Pupil Recital” (1948), also addresses the potential value of music’s partial and temporary ­detachability from socio-political considerations: the music leads them—the racially stigmaed, the gross bodied, all feet—cleansing from each his awkwardness for him to blossom thence a sound pleading, pleading for pleasure, pleasure! at the tunnel of the ear. These lines imply that part of music’s socio-political value is precisely that it can show a way past socio-political divisions. The poem’s final lines, however, complicate this possibility: There remains the good teacher blinking from his dream before the hand-shakes of his constituents. (CP II 138)

194  Peter Clandfield This coda-like conclusion both acknowledges that musical t­ ranscendence may be at best an ideal, and highlights, with the final word, the political dimensions of musical production and education. The poem as a whole also illustrates the more general point that musical elements do not have fixed values for Williams, but draw on context and audience for their effects. Williams’s most ambitious linkage of music and politics may have been his effort to write the libretto for a projected opera about George Washington and democracy. He worked first, in 1932, with Antheil,18 then in 1933–35 with Tibor Serly. As Mariani describes it, the project was to involve “a dream of a new world felt as much in the very music as in the words themselves” (342) and was to be “a modernist declaration of independence against the whole sacrosanct tradition of European opera” (358). Perhaps not surprisingly, in light of this grand yet somewhat abstract mandate, the project was never realized. Possibly Williams’s most notable influence on music, and possibly his most successful collaboration with a composer, has come well after his death, through Steve Reich’s settings of portions of key poems from ­Williams’s 1954 volume The Desert Music in a 1984 choral/orchestral work of the same title. The main source poem for the lines Reich sets is, in fact, “The ­Orchestra,” included in Williams’s 1954 collection The Desert Music, rather than the 1951 poem that lends its title to Williams’s volume. However, “The Desert Music” itself (CP II 273–284) needs attention here, before I return to Reich, because it presents one of Williams’s most sustained, and productively ambiguous, explorations of links between musical and poetic composition and of relations between form and content. The poem begins “on the bridge / between Juárez and El Paso” (273), with the speaker (named as a version of Williams) crossing into Mexico to meet friends with his wife and stopping to contemplate what appears, once “inspected” (273), to be a homeless person huddled mid-bridge in “an inhuman shapelessness” (274). This contemplation cues the speaker to ask, “How shall we get said what must be said?” (274) and to think in turn of the power of “the counted poem” (274) to measure and order nature. The poem appears initially to posit a oneway relationship between material-worldly circumstances and the metaphorical music of the poetic imagination, with instances of human abjection repeatedly prompting the speaker/poet to appeal to the formal power of music. Seemingly, only the intervention of a composer— someone with the capacity to generate order—can bring dignity to a being like the formless, shapeless, placeless figure on the bridge, or the aging burlesque dancer described extensively in the middle sections of the poem (CP II 279–81). The return traversal of the bridge near the end of the poem brings a second contemplation of the homeless figure:

Expansive Musical Modernism  195 What’s that? Oh, come on. But what’s THAT? the music! the music! as when Casals struck and held a deep cello tone and I am speechless. (CP II 283–284) These lines could suggest that the enigmatic figure is now so abject as to be beyond all intervention. Following a paragraph break, the speaker emerges from his “speechless” state and returns to emphasize the ordering power of music. The poem concludes in what seems to be a self-­ congratulatory mode: And I could not help thinking of the wonders of the brain that hears that music and of our skill sometimes to record it. However, self-congratulation is tempered by the choice and arrangement of words: the collective “our” is given visual prominence (auditory prominence too, if we read the lineation as “scoring” light pauses between lines) and the contingent nature of poetic power is emphasized by the alliteration of “skill sometimes.” As Mariani details, Williams, who had suffered a stroke in March 1951, composed the poem under awareness of his own mortality and also under the stress of having agreed to perform it live at Harvard (632–36). The poem’s structural reliance on juxtaposition and repetition, and the semi-fragmentary syntax of its sentences, may thus evoke the uncertain movements of Williams’s own brain; yet, they might also be heard as analogous to the procedures of twentieth-century musical works (such as the symphonies of Sibelius) that move beyond or condense conventional movement forms yet still convey an overall sense of structural coherence. The poem’s most clearly significant musical feature, however, is the specific reference to Pablo Casals, rather than just to “a deep cello tone” from some unspecified source. Casals, the only musician mentioned by name in the poem, was known by this time not only for his preeminence among cellists but also for his refusal to separate his musical activities from his ethical commitments. For a period immediately following the Second World War, he not only lived in exile from Franco’s fascist Spain but also practiced “self-imposed exile from public performance in any country that continued to recognize the Franco regime.”19 Given its specific source, the “deep cello tone” can be heard not just as a manifestation of music in a transcendent or abstract sense, but as the key to the

196  Peter Clandfield poem’s emergent association of music with ethical awareness as vital components of poetry. It may be paradoxical that the poem expresses democratic sympathies through a reference that a portion of its audience (readers not interested in classical music) might miss, but the context of the reference also asserts that classical music has a place not just in the ritualized spaces of concert halls, but in the less orderly environments of the postwar urban North American world. The suggestion that appreciation of the power of music and of ­poetry is best grounded in material circumstances of time and place is a key feature that “The Desert Music” shares with “The Orchestra.” While Christopher MacGowan describes the latter poem as characterized by “abstractions,”20 Reich’s treatment draws out the way it speaks to concrete concerns of its context, particularly the threat represented by atomic weapons. “The Orchestra” (CP II 250–252) begins by likening the tuning-up of an orchestra to the rising of the sun, and goes on to combine the two processes into a further metaphor: Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note. (250) The poem’s next section, however, shifts emphasis to literal aspects of musical communication: The purpose of an orchestra is to organize those sounds and hold them to an assembled order. in spite of the “wrong note.” Well, shall we think or listen? Is there a sound addressed not wholly to the ear? We half close Our eyes. We do not hear it through our eyes. It is not A flute note either, it is the relation of a flute note to a drum. I am wide awake. The mind is listening. The ear is alerted. But the ear in a half-reluctant mood stretches . . and yawns. (250–51)

Expansive Musical Modernism  197 The speaker thinks he is listening, but the ear has its own ideas. This passage evokes the complexities of responses to music in several ways: do we respond with our intellect or with our emotions, or with both at once—the relation of one to the other? The passage points as well to the complexities of reading poetry—and particularly poetry that is rhythmically innovative—on the page: in a sense we do “hear it through our eyes,” since we need our eyes to transmit its words, and the spaces between them, to our mind’s ear and voice. The poem thus draws particular attention to the active, performative role that Williams’s work asks of its audiences. “The Orchestra” is often read, or heard, as a love poem, with  the  “wrong note” representing Williams’s shortcomings as a ­husband 21 and other elements evoking a vow to make up for these. As Reich’s take on the poem helps to show, though, there are also much harsher implications to its later stages. These are its final sections: Our dreams have been assaulted by a memory that will not sleep. The French horns interpose . . their voices: I love you. My heart is innocent. And this the first day of the world! Say to them: “Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.” Now is the time. in spite of the “wrong note” I love you. My heart is innocent. And this the first (and last) day of the world The birds twitter now anew but a design surmounts their twittering. It is a design of man that makes them twitter. It is a design. (252) Reich’s setting repeats (in the opening and closing part of a three-part middle movement, of which the center uses Williams’s lines about

198  Peter Clandfield repetition) the passage beginning with “Say to them,” which paraphrases Bertrand Russell’s 1951 book New Hopes for a Changing World (CP II 487n). In his Note on The Desert Music, Reich plausibly links the passage to Williams’s awareness of the threat of nuclear conflict, 22 and the music itself draws attention to this connection by accompanying the second appearance of the passage with amplified violas playing glissandos that memorably evoke the sound of air raid sirens. Music is a “design,” and so is the poem, but so are nuclear weapons. 23 “I love you. My heart is innocent” can be heard not just as a personal appeal but as representing the connotations of a passage of musical consonance. Correspondingly, the Russell paraphrase can be heard as the “wrong note”: a dissonant, disturbing intrusion of external circumstances into personal affairs. Crucial is the juxtaposition of dissonance and ­consonance—the relation of a “wrong” note to a “right” one. The long poem Paterson (1946–58), 24 of which the juxtaposition and quotation of diverse fragments makes it perhaps Williams’s most “dissonant” work, remarks—in connection, interestingly, with Marie Curie’s research on radioactivity—that “Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery” (CP II 176). The dissonance evoked in “The Orchestra” is clearly not the “scattering of false notes” that Adorno dismisses as characteristic of shallow simulations or dilutions of musical modernism, 25 but an intransigent presence. “The Orchestra” evokes both the value of music as refuge from the world and the danger of using it exclusively as such; it addresses the relation of a particular, and perhaps temporarily transcendent, musical experience to a particular social context. Reich’s response to Williams’s words serves to draw out musical implications of texts beyond those he sets. Last of Williams’s key musical poems is “Tapiola,” written in 1957 as a memorial to Jean Sibelius. The poem begins by proclaiming Sibelius’s immortality: “He is no more dead than Finland herself is dead / under the blows of the mass-man who threatened / to destroy her.” It goes on celebrate the Finnish composer’s “placing of sounds together, / edge against edge,” in a phrase that could serve equally to describe basic poetic procedures. The poem apostrophizes the composer in terms that recall those of “January,” though in a brighter key: Whee-wow! You stayed up half the night in your attic room under the eaves, composing secretly, setting it down, period after period, as the wind whistled. Lightning flashed! The roof creaked about your ears threatening to give way! But you had a composition to finish that could not wait. The storm entered your mind where all good things are secured, written down, for love’s sake and to defy the devil of emptiness.

Expansive Musical Modernism  199 Undoubtedly, the poem romanticizes Sibelius himself, who ceased composing, except perhaps “secretly,” for the final thirty years of his life, possibly because he felt misunderstood by critics and even by a­ dmirers, and possibly because he relied heavily on alcohol to “defy the devil of emptiness.”26 The poem exists in three different versions, 27 the variances of which point both to its importance to Williams and to the difficulties it presented for him. The phrase “Whee-wow!” seems conventional and arbitrary as an onomatopoeic evocation of the whistling of the wind, as do the alternatives in the other two versions, “Whee! yaugh!” (CP II 515) and “Yeough-waugh!” (CP II 516). Yet in a way, the poem gains value from its very imperfections: its three versions enact a compositional struggle analogous to the one it discusses. There is also the possibility of reading the “storm,” especially in light of Reich’s reading of “The Orchestra,” not just as a natural event or an individual psychological one, but also as evoking the political state of the contemporary world: “lightning flashed” in 1945 both in the American desert and in Japan. The “mass-man” mentioned at the poem’s beginning could represent either Stalin or Hitler, since Finland saw armed conflict both with the Soviets (1939–40 and 1941–44) and the retreating Nazis (1944–45). Either way, the poem puts music into a social context. On this view, the poem could also imply a way of listening to Sibelius’s Tapiola, the 1926 symphonic poem that provides Williams’s title—and that, “despite turning out to be his last major work, marked his advance into new areas of formal exploration.”28 The work’s climactic musical “storm” might be heard as an auditory representation of the threat of not-necessarily-­ natural catastrophe and violence. 29 Williams’s “Tapiola” closes, however, with the affirmative assertion that “Sibelius / has been born and continues to live in all our / minds, all of us, forever…. ”(CP II 434–435). Yet the final ellipsis implies a degree of uncertainty, which is apt inasmuch as Sibelius’s lasting value was under debate in the postwar era. During the early decades of the twentieth century, his music was popular and influential in the United States30 and in Britain.31 It was also appropriated as a symbol of Nordic culture by Nazi Germany, though Sibelius himself seems to have been uneasy with this development (see Mäkelä 171–73; Ross 175; Hepokoski). 32 Postwar, this reception history combined with the relative conservatism of Sibelius’s variety of musical modernism to make him representative of everything that critics and theorists such as Adorno anathematized as inimical to genuine musical (or social) progress. In his 1966 essay “Difficulties,” Adorno concedes grudgingly that Sibelius “found something like an individual style,” but asserts that adherence to tonality left his works “brittle,” “inadequate,” and at best “an experiment with a negative outcome.”33 Yet, in dismissing the work of composers who aimed to expand the possibilities of tonality and insisting as he does on its exhaustion, Adorno risks conceding all forms of music that appeal “not

200  Peter Clandfield wholly to the mind” (to adapt Williams’s phrase from “The Orchestra”) to the use of the same forces of commercialism and totalitarianism that he consistently and often trenchantly attacks in his writings. Williams’s work, through its influence on Reich, may be credited with an indirect role in the restoration of a place for tonal procedures among the resources available for serious composition in recent decades.34 The lasting influence of Williams is also to be heard in the work of Tom Leonard, which remains underappreciated and to which I now turn in conclusion. As Edwin Morgan notes, 35 Leonard adapts the name of Sibelius’s 1909 string quartet Voces Intimae for the title of his key book Intimate Voices: Selected Works 1965–1983, which includes both critical essays, including the one on Williams, and many of the major poems of ­L eonard’s relatively small output. Leonard shares with Williams and with Sibelius not only the combination of formal and technical innovation with ongoing regard for the engagement of audiences, but also what I would call a distinctive kind of expansiveness that involves the generation of richly resonant ideas from the careful arrangement of what seem initially to be simple materials. The fourth poem in Leonard’s 1976 sequence “Unrelated Incidents,” also known as “Scotsport,” is both concerned with music’s places in the world and musical in form, in a way visibly and audibly influenced by Williams’s methods of “scoring,” yet also characteristic of Leonard. The poem begins with its speaker sittn guzz lin a can a newcastle brown wotchn scotsport hum min thi furst movement a nielsens thurd symphony The mixture of beer, televised sport (football), and the Sinfonia Espansiva (1911) by Carl Nielsen conveys succinctly, and in a way reinforced by the Glasgow voice itself, that everyday working-class culture can and does coexist with understanding of classical music. The poem goes on to evoke parallels between the movement of ­Nielsen’s music—which, though hummable, marked an important stage in the Danish composer’s progress with tonal experimentation36 —and the kinetic action onscreen: jist faintn this way then this

Expansive Musical Modernism  201 way, hi turnd n cracked it; jist turnd n cracked it; aw nwan move ment; in ti thi net. Turning on the relation of (a hummed recreation of) music to (an act of watching) athletic action to (the expansive sensation provided by) a can of beer, the poem invites us to turn over the possibility that constructive appreciation of serious modern music need not be foreign to contemporary media-saturated life. The fact that the piece involved is specified (and is from the borders of the Austro-German mainstream) indicates that humming it is a considered choice for the speaker rather than a reflexive response to the kind of commodification of music that Adorno—not unwarrantedly—attacked. Finally, the fact that the poem has a Scottish poet using techniques developed from the example of an (Anglo-Hispanic) American precursor to invoke a Danish composer serves to suggest that musical modernism, though not necessarily a universal language, is durable and adaptable.

Notes 1 Lisa Welshimer Wagner, ed., Interviews with William Carlos Williams: “Speaking Straight Ahead” (New York: New Directions, 1976), 53. 2 William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967 [1951]), 27. Hereafter cited in text. 3 Musical references are especially notable in Williams’s correspondence with Louis Zukofsky, whose wife Celia Thaew Zukofsky produced a musical setting, at Williams’s suggestion, of his 1946 poem “Choral: The Pink Church”; see Barry Ahern, ed., The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 375. As the title hints, the poem “sings” a progressive political creed, and in 1952–53, it was one of the works implicated when Williams’s appointment to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress was revoked under the influence ­ illiams: of anti-communist paranoia; see Paul Mariani, William Carlos W A New World Naked (New York: Norton, 1981), 651–59. In a letter to ­Zukofsky dated January 16, 1953, Williams describes this injustice wryly through a musical allusion: “As toward the end of I PALLIACHI [Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera I Pagliacci], the comedy is played out” (Ahearn 453). In a more upbeat musical reference from a 1951 letter, Zukofsky adds a P.S. alluding to Williams’s ongoing efforts toward technical innovation: “Hindemith & Schoenberg did it for music—why not W.C.W. for poetry!” (Ahearn 441). Zukofsky’s choice of composers—one relatively cautious in progressive experimentation and one synonymous with atonality—evokes the range both of musical modernism and of Williams’s affinities with it. 4 Tom Leonard, “Interview with Attila Dósa,” Scottish Studies Review 5.2 (2004), 74.

202  Peter Clandfield 5 Leonard’s fence metaphor is also too schematic to stand as an assessment of Eliot’s influences: David Chinitz argues that “Eliot’s patented cadences […] were discovered in the sounds of popular music circa 1911.” David Chinitz, A Jazz-Banjorine, Not a Lute: Eliot and Popular Music before The Waste Land,” in T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music, ed. John Xiros Cooper (New York: Garland, 2000), 19. 6 Carla Billitteri, “William Carlos Williams and the Politics of Form,” Journal of Modern Literature 30.2 (2007), 56, 53, 43–44. 7 Christopher Norris, “Introduction,” in Music and the Politics of Culture, ed. Christopher Norris (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), 8, 9. 8 Joseph Coroniti, “‘An Assembled Order’: William Carlos Williams’ Music of the Imagination,” Antigonish Review 92 (1993), 83. 9 Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams, 716. Hereafter cited in text. 10 Aldon L. Nielsen, “Whose Blues?” William Carlos Williams Review 15.2 (1989), 7. 11 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 9. Hereafter cited in text as CP I. 12 Denise Levertov, “On Williams’ Triadic Line; or How to Dance on Variable Feet,” in Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, ed. James McCorkle (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 143. Levertov rebuts Marjorie Perloff’s “claims that Williams scored his lines for the eye, not the ear,” but a similar underestimation of Williams’s musical dimension shows up in Billitteri’s essay, which asserts that he “conceived his poems as visual designs devoid of any particular meaning” (48). 13 Tom Leonard, “The Locust Tree in Flower, and Why It Had Difficulty ­Flowering in Britain,” in Intimate Voices: Selected Works 1965–1983 ­(London: Vintage, 1995), 102. 14 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos ­Williams: Volume II, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New ­Directions, 1986), 251. Hereafter cited in text as CP II. 15 See, for example, Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 183. 16 William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1969), 60–61. 17 Billitteri, “William Carlos Williams,” 44. 18 See Mariani, William Carlos Williams, 336. 19 Robert Anderson, “Casals, Pablo,” in Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (2007), accessed 27 June 2008. Casals was also important to Williams ­because of their shared Puerto Rican heritage; see, for example, Glenn ­Sheldon, “William Carlos Williams’s Babel of Voices in the Long Poem The Desert Music,” CEA Critic 61.2–3 (1999), 51. 20 Christopher MacGowan, “Williams’s Last Decade: Bridging the Impasse,” Twentieth Century Literature 35.3 (1989), 401. 21 See, for example, Mariani, William Carlos Williams, 648. 22 Steve Reich, “The Desert Music—Note by the Composer,” in Writings on Music, 1965–2000, ed. Paul Hiller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 124. See also Mariani, William Carlos Williams, 506–507. 23 Compare modernist responses to the Great War, notably Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony (1922), which represents conflict through the relation of flutes and other woodwinds to a violently improvising side-drum. 24 William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1963). 25 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Aging of the New Music,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 182.

Expansive Musical Modernism  203 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34

35 36

See, for example, Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 155–77. See MacGowan, “Williams’s Last Decade,” 402–403. MacGowan, “Williams’s Last Decade,” 401. The harmonic complexities of Tapiola are much-discussed by musicologists: the work’s concluding arrival in B major could be heard as a Romantic gesture of transcendence, but also, in context, as dramatizing the fragility of peace in a violent world. See, for example, Daniel M. Grimley, “The Tone Poems: Genre, Landscape and Structural Perspective,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 115–16. See Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 171–73. See Peter Franklin, “Sibelius in Britain,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 192–93. See Tomi Mäkelä, “Sibelius and Germany: Wahrhaftigkeit beyond Allnatur,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171–73; Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 175; and James Hepokoski, “Sibelius, Jean,” in Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (2007), accessed 27 June 2008. Adorno, “New Music,” 646, 647. The Williams lines in The Desert Music serve as an implicit manifesto for Reich’s (so-called) minimalism: the music is based on repetition, but also on ongoing relations among different elements. We have to think about what to listen to, or listen repeatedly and think about what we hear differently each time; such involvement saves the music from monotonous effects and also encourages recognition of the music’s collaborative and polyphonic qualities. Edwin Morgan, “The Sea, the Desert, the City: Environment and Language in W. S. Graham, Hamish Henderson, and Tom Leonard,” The Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987), 41. See Povl Hamburger, “The Problem of Form in the Music of Our Time with an Analysis of Nielsen’s Sinfonia Espansiva (First Movement),” trans. Alan Swanson, in The Nielsen Companion, ed. Mina Miller (Portland, OR: ­A madeus Press, 1994), 386–87.

13 The Sudden Thing of Being No One Robert Creeley’s Rhythm Changes Steven Toussaint In an essay from 1966, Robert Creeley acknowledges a substantial ­deficiency in the poetics of his day, one that exposes a bias toward the finished literary artifact and a corresponding ignorance surrounding the process by which the poem is made: “I am myself hopeful that linguistic studies will bring to contemporary criticism a vocabulary and method more sensitive to the basic activity of poetry and less dependent upon assumed senses of literary style.”1 Certainly, the last four and a half decades have witnessed numerous revolutions and revisions in literary theory and criticism, but a firm sense of the “activity” C ­ reeley describes remains elusive, even as Creeley’s poems, especially those collected in his volumes from the 1960s, cannot properly be discussed without a grasp of this concept. His poems from this period seek, as Kevin M ­ cNeilly notes, “not to codify a static form, but to embrace what he calls the particularity of performance, the vital instantaneity and unrepeatability of the temporal, despite the spatial fixity of the printed text.”2 In this context, “performance” refers not to the public recitation of the poem, but to the activity of writing itself, reconceptualized as a primary site of aesthetic encounter, perhaps over and above its product, the finished text. It is significant that in the same essay, discussing the importance of timing—“an inherent periodicity in the weights and durations of words”—to his work, Creeley references his relationship to the recordings of bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker: Listening to [Parker] play, I found he lengthened the experience of time, or shortened it, gained a very subtle experience of “weight,” all by some decision made within the context of what was called “improvisation”—but what I should rather call the experience of possibility within the limits of his materials (sounds and durations) and their environment (all that they had as what Pound calls “increment of association” but equally all they had as literal condition, their phenomenological fact).3 Parker’s improvised solos, in other words, offer valuable analogies for thinking about how a poem is composed, which can be directed toward

The Sudden Thing of Being No One  205 the service of a phenomenology of poēsis, intent on the speculative reconstruction of what the poet experiences and negotiates in actu: the material facts of language (phonological sounds, meter, syntax), as well as Ezra Pound’s “increment of association,” by which he signifies the vast cultural heritage a given poet receives from the western tradition.4 The improvisations of modern jazz, superimposing expressive and inventive melodic phrases on the rhythm and chord structures of received forms, provide the model for Creeley’s late modernist poetic idiom, which looks back to Pound just as it points toward a postmodern poetics of “process.” In the course of this essay, I hope to surface the full implications of this influence. From references in essays, interviews, and letters, it appears that ­Creeley’s affection for modern jazz began in the early 1950s and developed from listening to recordings by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Milt Jackson, and, most importantly, Charlie Parker. 5 This affinity manifests itself over the course of his career, but is most evident in poems from his 1967 collection Words, where experiments conducted in earlier poems with punctuation, line-length, and syntax show their maturation in a mid-career style. The formal modalities of the poem “A Sight” are ­characteristic of the collection as a whole. I am by no means the first person to assert the importance of Parker’s music to Creeley’s poetics, nor am I the first to assess Creeley’s poetry in relation to bebop. In Jazz Text, Charles O. Hartman reads Creeley’s early poem “I Know a Man” as an example of “dialogic” poetry and invokes the examples of Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Lee Konitz to contextualize ­Creeley’s “syncopated” measure.6 Kevin McNeilly has written a brief but incredibly thorough treatment, which provides a history of Creeley’s (as well as friend and Black Mountain co-conspirator Charles Olson’s) relationship to jazz and attempts to unpack the aesthetic, ­philosophical, and political implications behind this relationship, “the differential engagement between reading and writing, performance and score, temporality and spatiality, which constitutes deep listening.”7 However, in his ­context-focus, McNeilly refrains from formally engaging with any of C ­ reeley’s poems from this period, and neither Hartman nor McNeilly draws comparisons between specific technical innovations in Creeley’s poems and Parker’s music, though both of them imply the value of doing so. In this essay, I will consider Parker’s influence on Creeley from this missing vantage.8 I dedicate the first half to a formal analysis of “A Sight” alongside Parker’s solo from the 1945 recording “Shaw ’Nuff” in order to trace specific techniques in Creeley’s poem to the angular contours of Parker’s melodic line and identify how the poem and the solo organize the experience of time in commensurate ways. Turning to Creeley’s process in the second half, I will explore how concepts derived from jazz musicology open up possibilities for thinking about the “activity” of poetry. In particular, I will discuss how Creeley attempts to literalize the cognitive “timescape” of jazz improvisation and its ensuing

206  Steven Toussaint sense of “overarching presence,” as defined in Ed Sarath’s essay “A New Look at Improvisation.” I will also discuss Creeley’s poetics in relation to Charles Keil’s notion of “participatory discrepancies,” a concept informing contemporary research on jazz structure and “swing feeling.”9 Before I look at the analogies between Creeley’s poem and Parker’s performance, I would like to briefly discuss some of the defining features of bebop. Bebop emerged in small nightclubs in New York City during the early 1940s. While they continued to perform the repertoire of popular swing bands, bebop pioneers like Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud ­Powell, and Kenny Clarke departed from what Ted Gioia calls the “populist trappings” of the big band era.10 Though their arrangements retained the chord structure of popular standards like George ­G ershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” the improvisational solos they derived from these chords reached new levels of harmonic and rhythmic complexity. Rather than provide a suitable accompaniment to dancing, bebop performers prized a more frenetic style. Improvised melodies were faster than ever before, and they often pushed the standard tunes past recognition. Parker’s alto saxophone solos, in particular, radicalize the improviser’s relationship to both the underlying harmonic structure of a tune, as well as the rhythmic base upon which it is built. His steady streams of eighth and ­sixteenth note phrases give the melodic lines an agitated, angular quality, full of unexpected shifts in direction. His phrases often start and end on typically weak beats, lending his solos an asymmetric quality and a propulsive momentum. Recorded on May 11, 1945, the Gillespie and Parker composition “Shaw ’Nuff” is a relatively early bebop release and is representative of many of the stylistic features mentioned above.11 It is worth briefly mentioning that the following analysis of the composition is conducted with recourse to both the recording of “Shaw ’Nuff” and the post-fact transcription of the piece contained in Scott D. Reeves’ Creative Jazz Improvisation. As an amateur listener rather than a practitioner of this music, I have supplemented my discussion of “Shaw ’Nuff” with the formal analyses found in Reeves and Mark C. Gridley’s Jazz Styles: History and Analysis. Doing so does not diminish the methodological challenges that arise in the study of jazz, chiefly the problematic nature of claiming an authoritative analysis of a piece of music invented in extempore, even when conducted by a professional musician or musicologist. In many ways, this problem is shared by any reading of Creeley’s “A Sight.” ­A lthough the poem was not invented in extempore—i.e. it is not literally “improvised”—Creeley’s emphasis on “activity” and his unconventional free verse measure problematize any attempt to conduct an authoritative scansion of the poem. Because traditional methods of scansion, which divide the line into feet of variant stress, weren’t developed to accommodate Creeley’s mode of free verse, an audio recording of Creeley reading the poem will provide some aid in approximating Creeley’s idiosyncratic

The Sudden Thing of Being No One  207

Figure 13.1  T  ranscription of first sixteen bars of Charlie Parker’s solo in “Shaw ’Nuff”. Source: Reproduced by permission from Reeves, Creative Jazz Improvisation, 159.

measure.12 I recognize the practical necessity of proceeding this way while acknowledging the conditional nature of both the musical analysis and my scansion of the poem. Having clarified my approach in this regard, I now return to “Shaw ‘Nuff.” The melody of the piece is based on Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” the underlying chord structure of which is known colloquially as “rhythm changes.” Each of the subsequent solos by Parker, Gillespie, and pianist Al Haig adheres to this 32-bar AABA form. After playing a brief open­ illespie, ing statement and delivering the tune’s melody in unison with G Parker embarks on his solo, its ascending and descending phrases punctuated at uneven intervals by rests and a considerable number of accentual displacements,13 as evident in Figure 13.1, which shows the first sixteen measures of the solo. Compared to earlier jazz performers like Louis Armstrong or Lester Young, who relied heavily on dotted eighth note and tied triplet figures to give their phrases a characteristic syncopated or “swing” feeling, Parker far more consistently uses something closer to what jazz performers call “straight eighth” notes. However, Parker is able to achieve a surprising, syncopated quality through a number of devices characteristic of his playing as a whole. As evident in bars 3, 4, and 11 (Figures 13.2 and 13.3), Parker accentuates typically unaccented beats (i.e. the second and fourth beat in the measure). As Thomas Owens notes in his exhaustive study of Parker’s evolving technique, one of the soloist’s signature devices is to divide the

208  Steven Toussaint

Figure 13.2  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 3 and 4.

Figure 13.3  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bar 11.

bar unevenly, grouping his lines into subphrases, the motion of which drives upward to accentuate the highest pitch in any given subphrase.14 In bar 3, this is especially evident, as is the placement of a rising triplet arpeggio, which not only displaces the flow of straight eighth notes, but also leads up to the high C. In addition, the eighth note rest that precedes this phrase leads Parker to begin on the weak part of the first beat, lending the opening measures their lively and volatile character. The opening stanzas of “A Sight” demonstrate a similar effect. This is created by the unusually high number of stressed syllables per line and the syntactical irregularity caused by enjambment and the frequent use of caesurae: Quicker 1 than that, can’t get off “the dead center of” myself. He/I 5 were walking. Then the place is/was not ever enough. But the house, if 9 admitted, were a curiously wrought complexity of flesh.15

The Sudden Thing of Being No One  209 / x Quicker / / / than that, can’t x / / get off “the / / x / dead center of” x / / / myself. He/I

1

5

Figure 13.4  S cansion of lines 1–5 of “A Sight”.

The first five lines constitute a single sentence, segmented at uneven intervals so that no single line provides a complete grammatical unit. This disrupts normative stress emphasis, which is typically organized around regular patterns of speech. The absent, though implied, subject of the sentence further complicates the reader’s ability to identify and stress appropriate syllables. The result is that more syllables receive stress ­emphasis—I count twelve over five lines (Figure 13.4)—than the sentence, rendered in prose, would call for.16 For instance, due to the enforced pause after the word “Quicker,” as well as the caesura before and the pause after the word “can’t,” the second line sustains three accented syllables in a row. The pauses—enacted in varying degrees by such tools as caesura, line break, and stanza break—resemble Parker’s use of rests in the opening measures of the improvised solo on “Shaw ‘Nuff.” Where the meter, tonality, and chord progression guide the listener’s expectations in “Shaw ‘Nuff,” in the poem the syntax creates commensurate expectations regarding the relationship between clauses and where stress should fall. Though Creeley is certainly not the first poet to stress typically unaccented syllables to expressive ends, the high rate of consecutive stressed syllables is remarkable and is analogous to the numerous rhythmic displacements in Parker’s solo. The subsequent stanzas continue in this mode. The rhythmic character of this passage is inconsistent and unpredictable due to a number of divergences from poetic norms as well as the patterns established by Creeley in earlier stanzas: The eyes 13 windows, the head roof form with stubbornly placed bricks of chimney. I can remember, I can. Then when she first touched me,

17

210  Steven Toussaint

21

matter we both lay quiet, where was it. I felt her flesh

25

when we were lying in that bed, was the feeling of falling into no

enclose mine. Cock, 29 they say, prick, dick, I put it in her, I lay there.17 Lines 13–17 open a brief “window” of concrete representation after the rhetorical abstraction of the beginning stanzas, though defamiliarized with the introduction of a metaphor: a house compared to the human body. In line 18, however, the repetition in “I can remember, I / can” might again seem merely rhetorical, but the poem is saved from redundancy by the expressive use of enjambment. This is the first of what will recur as a common device in the poem, what I would call “riffing” on a phrase, where the words are repeated and their ­sequence remains the same, but accentual displacement caused by shifts in punctuation or enjambment introduce a subtle discrepancy. In a similar fashion, the words “Then when” recall an earlier figure, the coupling of the words “He/I” and “is/was,” with the key difference that the phrase “Then when” transitions normally into the syntax of the next line (i.e. “she first touched me”), which is the first example in the poem of a single line containing a complete grammatical unit. Lines 19–27 follow the trajectory of a single sentence with a peculiar effect occurring in the lacuna between lines 24 and 25. The words “no // matter” serve as a fulcrum between two discrete subphrases, both the end of one clause and the beginning of another. This effect relies on the reader’s knowledge that the words “no matter” can signify both the literal absence of “matter” or an idiomatic expression designating insignificance. The correspondence between this figure and Parker’s solo relies on their mutual tendency to shape patterns of reader and listener expectation and then artfully deviate from them, using a select number of motifs and tropes. Parker, for example, invents two very similar musical ideas in bars 3–6 and 11–14 (Figures 13.5 and 13.6). The melodic line in bars 5 and 6 is identical to that in bars 13 and 14. What charges the melody with expressive power, however, is the striking discrepancy between

The Sudden Thing of Being No One  211

Figure 13.5  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 3–6.

Figure 13.6  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 11–14.

Figure 13.7  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 7–8.

Figure 13.8  Parker’s solo from “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 15–16.

where these two identical melodic lines lead and how he finishes the respective eight-measure sections. In bars 7 and 8 (Figure 13.7), Parker adds uncharacteristic triplet figures to end the first A section in a frenzy, whereas in bars 15 and 16 (Figure 13.8), Parker drops out early, resting

212  Steven Toussaint

Figure 13.9  Bridge section of “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 17–24.

for the entire final bar of the second A section, which accentuates even more his modulation into the subsequent eight-measure bridge. Again, the expressive power of these passages is predicated on Parker’s divergence from an expectation created by repeating melodic figures. The power of Creeley’s phrase “no // matter” is due to the strain it places on legibility. Our expectation to gather information from what we read is thwarted here by the ambiguity regarding how the phrase functions syntactically; the effect is highlighted further by the relatively conventional sentences that immediately precede and follow it. A central paradox of this poem is how conventional modes of ­communication—of expression, of representation, of grammar and syntax, of meter, etc.—can be perceived as singular oddities when discrepancy is the poem’s primary mode. Because “A Sight” engages from the outset in a kind of language-use estranged from ordinary speech, these intervals of prosaic language draw a lot of attention to themselves, functioning at once as an expressive divergence and as a respite from the poem’s intense form of lyricism. This sense of respite, of course, depends on our ability to recognize these conventions as such, to identify them with other modes of discourse like speech or prose. The flat or plain statement, in other words, constitutes a point of rest. A comparable phenomenon can be seen in the way that Parker constructs the bridge section of his solo on “Shaw ‘Nuff,” depicted in Figure 13.9. As Gridley notes, the bridge offers a contrasting harmonic color and a slower harmonic rhythm to the A sections. The chords pass more slowly with longer durations between changes.18 Beginning in bar 17, Parker drafts a smoothly ascending and descending phrase, consisting primarily of eighth notes, which lasts until the rest concluding bar 22. Harmonically, this phrase is rather adventurous, as he implies a number of harmonic substitutions and accommodates a significant amount

The Sudden Thing of Being No One  213

Figure 13.10  Final measures of bridge section, bars 23–24, and concluding A section of “Shaw ’Nuff”, bars 25–32.

of chromaticism,19 indicated in the notation by the chord symbols in parentheses above the staff. However, the length and fluidity of the phrase is a striking contrast to the shorter, more jagged phrases occupying the A sections. The bridge affords this relative stability, which is built into its structure, and Parker uses the relief it provides to highlight the opposition between two ways of constructing phrases. Parker transitions into the concluding A section seamlessly (Figure 13.10), 20 another striking difference to the previous two A sections, each of which closed with a substantial rest to announce the beginning of a new section. The final eight measures continue the adventurous chromaticism of the bridge, alternating between smoothly ascending and descending phrases (bars 27 and 28) and more playful, disjunctive melodic figures (bars 29 and 30). The concluding measures therefore eschew the repetition of motifs (bars 5–6, 13–14) for a more idiosyncratic finale. It is worth noting how the next three stanzas of “A Sight” recall and develop a number of motifs introduced in the poem’s first half, specifically what I earlier termed “riffing”: Come back, breasts, come. Back. The sudden thing of being no one. I

33

never felt guilty. I was confused but could not feel wrong, about it.

37

I wanted to kill her. I tried it, tentatively, just a little hurt. Hurt me. 21

41

214  Steven Toussaint The rhythmic character created by scaffolding repeated phrases over shifting punctuation (e.g. “I can remember, I / can”) finds an equivalent structure twice in these stanzas (e.g. “Come back, breasts, / come. Back” and “just a little / hurt. Hurt me”). Creeley’s use of the imperative, a new register in the poem, also creates a link between these phrases. In between these two points of recurrence, four consecutive sentences begin with the word “I” and retain a regular syntactical structure, again molding a pattern of expectation, bookended by a recurring motif. This interplay between the fulfillment and frustration of rhythmic expectation coincides with the interplay between heightened lyric language and demotic speech. There is a precedent for this kind of activity in Creeley’s earlier work. In his discussion of “I Know a Man,” ­Hartman situates Creeley’s rhythmic shaping principle in the poem—his “uncanny force”—to “his thrusting emphasis toward the beginning,” the tendency of his lines to “[reverse] the standard shape of the ­English line,” which traditionally “[subordinates] falling rhythms to rising ones.”22 He demonstrates how Creeley frequently suspends the last word of a phrase, using it to begin the next line. He connects this tendency in ­Creeley’s verse to regular patterns of speech, which he claims are rooted in ­trochaic-dactylic patterns. This is not to say that Creeley’s measure conforms to regular patterns of speech. To make such a claim, one would have to completely ignore the numerous syncopations, repetitions, stutters, and semantic twists and turns that diverge strongly from any imaginable standard of spoken English. Rather, the ghost of regular speech, the knowledge of even a flexible convention, undergirds the poem’s divergences from it. In “A Sight,” the divergences are even more radical, showing the maturation in Creeley’s use of these techniques in the nearly two decades between their respective publications. In stark contrast to the tendency in “I Know a Man” to end a phrase at the beginning of the line, in “A Sight,” Creeley situates greatest stress emphasis at the end of the line, which often constitutes the beginning of a phrase. He accomplishes this by placing terminal punctuation not at the end of a line, but immediately preceding the line’s final syllable or metric foot. This isolates and suspends the first word of the next sentence, frequently monosyllabic, lending it greater accentuation. The “thrusting emphasis toward the beginning” is still evident, but it is the beginning of the phrase, rather than the beginning of the line, that is emphasized. Examples of this in “A Sight” are numerous. Creeley’s “riffing” creates this emphasis as well by testing multiple ways of articulating the same phrase or the same syntactical construction, syncopating the rhythm through shifts in punctuation or grammatical mood—the imperative contrasting with the indicative mood, for example. Other stabilizing structures exist to counterpoise the divergences. Apart from the aforementioned respites, initiated by prosaic ­language-use

The Sudden Thing of Being No One  215 in an otherwise unconventional language-field, each stanza contains four lines. The number of syllables per line varies from one to nine; however, in all but a few cases, the line length is three to five syllables, and by far the most frequent syllable-count is four. Creeley defines this tendency as his penchant for a “foursquare circumstance,” a sense of underlying rhythmic constancy he discovered in Parker’s “intensive variation on ‘foursquare’ patterns.”23 Here he refers to the unchanging four-beat measure, plucked out by bassist Curly Russell, which underlies Parker’s playing, despite the rhythmic displacement and syncopation of his melody. Marjorie Perloff picks up on this idea, drawing attention to a haunting, if unattributed, sense of measure in Creeley’s poems from this time: “To call such poetry ‘free verse’ is not quite accurate, for something is certainly being counted in these little blocklike stanzas.”24 However, in line with the overall emphasis in her essay on contemporary poetries that call into question the organicism and conventional practices associated with dominant strains of American “free verse,” Perloff perhaps overemphasizes the “aphasic stutter” to be found in Creeley’s lineation: Sound becomes obtrusive…as does the creation of paragrams formed by cutting up complete sentences or clauses…[T]he consistent detachment of words from their larger phrasal or clausal environment—a practice that goes way beyond what is known as enjambment—creates a very different physical image. 25 It is important not to overlook the interplay between these “paragrams” and the poem’s “foursquare” backbone of stability, for it is this interplay that grants the former the status of significant events. Working within the confines of rhythm changes, Parker’s unique solo in “Shaw ’Nuff” mounts a similar give-and-take, push-and-pull with the form’s conventions. Charles Keil defines the techniques that account for this important element of jazz as “participatory discrepancies,” the “controlled imperfection, incessant split-second negotiation” of which privileges “engendered feeling” over “embodied meaning” in music, encouraging audience participation in the musical performance. 26 He ascribes jazz’s “groove” or “swing” feeling to such participatory discrepancies. They can exist as a kind of out-of-sync dialogue between members of the jazz ensemble, what Matthew Butterfield describes as “the little discrepancies within a jazz drummer’s beat, between rhythm section and soloists,”27 or they can exist between the solo improviser and the parameters of the tune itself, its time signature and chord structure, as I have identified in Parker, who plays the rhythm changes “out of time” and “out of tune.”28 Creeley echoes the importance of something similar to participatory discrepancies, framed as a personal revelation about how to negotiate

216  Steven Toussaint the discrepancies that arise within a poet’s field of attention against an otherwise continuous experience of time, one of the central lessons he takes from Parker: “If time is measure of change, our sense of it becomes what we can apprehend as significant condition of change—in poetry as well as in music.”29 Change becomes “significant,” in other words, in tension with background stability. Creeley radicalizes this dichotomy in “A Sight” by effecting divergence at the level of meter, line-length, and syntax, but he realizes these divergences only have expressive power against perceptible conventions. Improvisation, as an institution of bebop performance and recording, is an attractive analogy through which to view Creeley’s poetics for a number of reasons. First, the emphasis in bebop on improvisation as its primary generative strategy predisposes listeners and critics to take the activity, the unrepeatable process by which the music is made, as seriously as the resulting musical artifact, whether captured in a recording or transcription or apprehended in the ephemeral setting of a concert venue. The reorientation of emphasis from artifact to activity sits well with Creeley’s own poetics, and, as I have demonstrated, it sheds further light on the generative strategies and techniques he employs in “A Sight.” Second, the participatory discrepancies that give bebop improvisation its distinctive character account for the dynamic tension between divergence and stability at play in every line and phrase of “A Sight.” To read “A Sight” as “improvisatory” extends the analogies between Creeley and Parker’s technique to comparable approaches to invention. Ed Sarath opposes the predominant view in musicology that improvisation is an accelerated version of composition. Improvisation, Sarath argues, is cognitively distinct from composition because the two methods of invention conceive of time in fundamentally different ways. The composer’s art is defined by its “expanding temporality,”30 the ability of the composer to enter the temporal continuum of a work at any juncture, to project backward and forward in time, and to revise and reflect upon the work from a point outside its “timescape.”31 The improviser, by contrast, “experiences time in an inner-directed or ‘vertical’ manner, where the present is heightened and the past and future are perceptually subordinated.”32 The challenge of Creeley’s art, understood as an activity associated with improvisation, demands on the one hand the immediacy of his attention: his ability to, as William Carlos Williams frequently said, “think with the poem.”33 On the other hand, his ability to discern events of particular significance within his field of attention is demanded with equal force, and this requires access to an internal store of techniques, tropes, and conventions, both to avoid and utilize when needed. In this, Creeley confronts the same paradox that Parker as improviser faces: the repository of skills and knowledge of tradition that underlie artistic endeavor are both a necessity and a hindrance to the artist who measures

The Sudden Thing of Being No One  217 the success of his or her art by its ability to respond immediately to subtle, split-second shifts in apprehension. The musical improviser, Sarath argues, does not overcome this paradox by abandoning or repressing the influence of this internal store; rather, the improviser enters a cognitive state where “both freedom from and simultaneous access to such imagery are possible.”34 But how is this accomplished? The improviser must decontextualize the temporal, spatial, and logical associations linking those concepts and techniques in the internal store.35 Parker’s solos, as I have demonstrated, perform this decontextualization in a number of ways. First, the fresh solos he generates with each performance stem from his deep knowledge of the harmonic and rhythmic implications of standard tunes like “I Got Rhythm.” To conduct these solos in inventive ways, however, he must attempt to neutralize previous associations between chord, melody, meter, and rhythm. His melodic phrasing in bars 7 and 8, for instance, differs drastically from that in bars 15 and 16, despite the fact that the underlying chord structure and sustaining foursquare time are identical in the two bars. He therefore denies himself the opportunity to restate musical ideas in familiar contexts, but to do so he must simultaneously access these ideas, the knowledge of which comes from dedicated training. As noted above, Parker does have a number of characteristic devices, which recur in performances throughout his career, but part of the improviser’s art is exercising these devices in new and unfamiliar contexts. Sarath adds, “If an object’s meaning derives from the context of its surroundings, a new meaning will result when the object is perceived as no longer dependent upon these surroundings.”36 In “A Sight,” I have shown how this decontextualization occurs largely through varying degrees of silence—full stops, caesurae, and enjambment in unexpected places—but also through sharp turns in semantic direction. I have pointed, for example, to the logical breakdown that occurs in the expression “no // matter” and the lacuna between stanzas 6 and 7. Though this trope only occurs once in “A Sight,” Creeley uses this same technique in an earlier poem, “The Whip,” establishing a motif that links two poems published a decade apart: “there was another woman I // also loved, had / addressed myself to in // a fit she / returned.”37 The prepositional phrase “in // a fit,” like its motivic twin “no // matter,” is momentarily divested of signification in the shift between stanzas, for it is unclear whether the phrase describes the actions of the subject (“I”) or the woman “[‘I’] also loved.” Its referential capacity is neutralized, and the result in both cases is the collapse of subject and object distinctions. As Sarath notes, the goal of decontextualizing devices and patterns is “simultaneous access to two layers of localized present perception.”38 This allows for a methodology of invention based on attention and sensitivity to the aural conditions of the poem at every moment, which are the grounds for significant change.

218  Steven Toussaint Extrapolating from this heightened sensitivity to the present, a number of critics draw connections between improvisation and transcendental cognitive states. I have already referred to the way Sarath develops his concept of the improviser’s “aesthetics of spontaneity,”39 “where temporal sequences are subsumed within an overarching present,”40 initiating in the performer a transformation of consciousness that Sarath goes on to claim borders on the mystical: Subjective characteristics of such states include inner well-being, a sense of oneness with surroundings and universe, and transformed temporal perception…Self-reference, or the folding of awareness back toward itself, is commonly associated with transcendence and suggests a mechanism by which improvisers invoke such states.41 Keil similarly associates the participatory discrepancies vital to improvisation with “the ways we choose to live our lives; that is, each of us incorporating the wrights (the crafts or skills of grooving) that shape and are shaped by rites (the participatory healings of those alienations from body, labor, society and nature that permeate late capitalism) to recreate our selves, our communities, and our cosmologies.”42 Ingrid Monson echoes both Sarath and Keil in her affirmation of the inherently “dialogic” nature of ensemble improvisation in jazz.43 All of these critics identify in improvisational activity a decisive effort to posit a collective consciousness over and above the individual ego. It is also this final identification that appears to marshal both ­Hartman and McNeilly to draw the analogy between Creeley and improvisation in their respective essays. Hartman draws similar conclusions as ­Monson when he critiques Mikhail Bakhtin’s privileging of the novel over the lyric for its ability to accommodate dialogue or “heteroglossia,” the presence of multiple voices interacting.44 Despite Bakhtin’s claims, Hartman upholds Creeley as an inherently “heteroglossic” poet, his argument mediated through the analogy with jazz improvisation. In Hartman’s view, Creeley, like his major influence Williams, resists the tendency for poetic language “to harden into an ‘authoritative word’ that represses the poet’s true voice. Improvisation promises an escape into the internal persuasion of dialogue.”45 For McNeilly, drawing an analogy between Creeley’s poetics and bebop improvisation does not take the correspondence far enough: Creeley claims more than an analogy; he suggests that bop and poetry share a mode of cognition…a consciousness that pushes the personal, occasionally solipsistic limits of lyric text but refuses the easy claims of “social” meaning or an affected posture of relevance, preferring instead to engage in virtual rhythmic interchange in the give-and-take of participatory listening.46

The Sudden Thing of Being No One  219 But, as I have shown, closely scrutinizing this analogy reveals it to be just that, which is not to detract from its usefulness. Monson defines musical improvisation in simple but direct terms, calling it “the spontaneous creation of music in performance,” adding that this spontaneous creation posits itself as an elaboration on an assumed form: the ternary rhythm changes, for example.47 In this very literal sense, Creeley’s poems are not improvised, they do not constitute “automatic writing,” nor are they invented in the ephemeral context of a public reading. Nor, I would add, is this literal sense what is most interesting about the comparison. Instead of literally improvising his poems, Creeley tries to encode the participatory discrepancies and neutralization of temporal associations common to bebop improvisation into the formal structure of his poems, and into the strategies and techniques he employs within them. He creates a picture of improvisation—or, perhaps more accurately, attempts to translate the peculiar mode of consciousness associated with improvisation to the reader as an affective condition of the reading experience.

Notes 1 Robert Creeley, “Notes Apropos ‘Free Verse’” in The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 493 (­Creeley’s emphasis). 2 Kevin McNeilly, “I Got Ryhtmethe: Robert Creeley’s Jazz Poetics,” Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature 2.2 (1998), 55. 3 Creeley, “Notes Apropos ‘Free Verse,’” 494. 4 See Robert Creeley, “To Define,” in The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 473. Creeley here interprets Pound’s concept as “usage coheres value,” a way of understanding the past and its cultural artifacts as a useable material in the present. 5 See Robert Creeley to Charles Olson, June 24, 1950 in The Complete Correspondence Vol. 1, ed. George F. Butterick (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), 156–57. 6 Charles O. Hartman, Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 39–45. 7 McNeilly, “I Got Ryhtmethe,” 63. 8 In order to rectify what I see as the lack of formal comparisons between Parker’s and Creeley’s respective works, I have confined my discussion to the relevant technical and structural correspondences, eschewing an in-depth interpretation of the poem’s subject matter. I see this selective focus as necessary but certainly not exhaustive of the poem’s thematic, linguistic, and social interest, which I leave to other critics to elucidate. 9 Charles Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music,” Cultural Anthropology 2.3 (1987): 275–83. 10 Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 187. 11 Dizzy Gillespie’s All-Star Quintette, with Charlie Parker (alto sax), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Al Haig (piano), Curly Russell (bass), and Sidney Catlett (drums), “Shaw ’Nuff,” on JAZZ: The Smithsonian Anthology, ­Smithsonian Folkways, 2011. All further references to and transcriptions of “Shaw ’Nuff” refer to this recording.

220  Steven Toussaint 12 See Robert Creeley, “A Sight,” mp3 recording, Reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, New York, NY, October 24, 1966, https:// writing.upenn.edu /pennsound/x/Creeley.php. 13 Scott D. Reeves, Creative Jazz Improvisation (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 2001), 158. 14 Thomas Owens, “Charlie Parker: Techniques of Improvisation (Volumes I and II),” (PhD diss., The University of California at Los Angeles, 1974), 10–11. 15 Robert Creeley, “A Sight,” in Selected Poems, 1945–2005, ed. Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 105. 16 Cf. Creeley, “A Sight,” mp3 recording, Reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y. My scansion is partly informed by Creeley’s peculiar vocal emphases in this performance. 17 Creeley, “A Sight,” 105–106. 18 Mark C. Gridley, Jazz Styles: History & Analysis (Englewood Cliffs: ­Prentice Hall, 1985), 156. 19 Reeves, Creative Jazz Improvisation, 158. 20 Gridley, Jazz Styles, 156. 21 Creeley, “A Sight,” 106. 22 Hartman, Jazz Text, 43. 23 Creeley, “Notes Apropos ‘Free Verse,’” 494. 24 Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 155. 25 Perloff, Poetry On & Off the Page, 156. 26 Charles Keil, “The Theory of Participatory Discrepancies: A Progress Report,” Ethnomusicology 39.1 (1995), 12. 27 Matthew Butterfield, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Perception of Beats in Jazz,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 27.3 (2010), 157. 28 Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music,” 275. 29 Creeley, “Notes Apropos ‘Free Verse,’” 494 (Creeley’s emphasis). 30 Ed Sarath, “A New Look at Improvisation,” Journal of Music Theory 40.1 (1996), 1. 31 Sarath, “New Look at Improvisation,” 3. 32 Sarath, “A New Look, at Improvisation,” 1. 33 Quoted in Robert Creeley, “The Release,” in The Collected Essays of ­Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 31. 34 Sarath, “New Look at Improvisation,” 7. 35 Sarath, “New Look at Improvisation,” 12. 36 Sarath, “New Look at Improvisation,” 15. 37 Robert Creeley, “The Whip,” in Selected Poems, 1945–2005, ed. Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 61. 38 Sarath, “New Look at Improvisation,” 15. 39 Sarath, “New Look at Improvisation,” 28. 40 Sarath, “New Look at Improvisation,” 15. 41 Sarath, “New Look at Improvisation,” 12. 42 Keil, “Theory of Participatory Discrepancies,” 2. 43 Ingrid Monson, “Jazz Improvisation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, eds. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 114. 4 4 Hartman, Jazz Text, 38. 45 Hartman, Jazz Text, 48. 46 McNeilly, “I Got Ryhtmethe,” 60. 47 Monson, “Jazz Improvisation,” 114.

14 “With all that Tutti and Continuo” Musicality and Temporality in Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon Caroline Knighton He who, for fear, denies the called response Denies the singing and damns the congregation. —Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon

Mythologized by turns as a difficult, misanthropic recluse living out the last decades of her life in her New York Patchin Place apartment and as one of the more glamorous figures of the 1920s and 30s Parisian Left Bank expatriate scene, Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) is perhaps best known for her 1936 novel Nightwood, that startling “soliloquy of a soul talking to itself in the heart of the night.”1 By the time of her death, Barnes had outlived many of her Greenwich Village companions and modernist contemporaries. Despite her own claims to being the “most famous unknown of the century!”2 her poetry and prose was regularly published across a variety of little magazines throughout her career, several of her early one-act plays had been performed to some recognition, and her 1928 novel Ryder had topped the bestseller list in the month of its release. From Greenwich Village to the rue St. Romain and back again, with brief sojourns in Berlin, Tangiers, and London, Djuna Barnes developed friendships with T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and James Joyce, was financially supported at various points by Peggy Guggenheim and ­Samuel Beckett, and was a favorite photographic subject of Man Ray and Berenice Abbot. However, despite being so firmly situated within a literary and visual culture of modernist and twentieth-century avant-garde production, Barnes’s relationship to modernism has been a fraught one. A peripheral figure in modernist studies for many years, Barnes is now receiving the critical attention that her work deserves, and recent studies demonstrate an enthusiastic engagement with the contradictions and paradoxes bound together by a writer who proudly claimed to one German translator, “I am not a ‘modern’ after all. Which sounds strange from one who is considered avant garde.”3 A diverse and sometimes “bewildering”4 body of work, the Barnes corpus resists rigid generic categorization in its combinations of journalism, poetry, prose, autobiography, drama, and

222  Caroline Knighton visual art, and it insists on disrupting notions of literary genealogy or artistic originality through incessant pastiche and irreverent intertextuality. Willfully anachronistic in its arrangements of Chaucerian pastiche, sentimental parody, and Jacobean tragedy alongside imitation woodcut illustrations and figures more familiar to the fin de siècle, the Baroque flourishes of the Barnes oeuvre set it in tension with central modernist narratives of purity, progress, and the novelty of the new, a tendency most fully realized in the late verse drama The Antiphon. Published in 1958 after a long and difficult gestation, early r­ eactions to The Antiphon were mixed. While a handful of sympathetic readers, including Edwin Muir and Mary Ponsot, defended the work, many more reflected an exasperation and mystification that has characterized the work’s critical legacy. Performed only once in the author’s lifetime,  the  verse tragedy is, by Barnes’s own apologetic admission, “possibly the most impossible cabinet drama of the century,” one that baffled her friend and editor at Faber & Faber, T.S. Eliot, and was lambasted as “Gobbledygook and Faustian” by one English review. 5 Set “during the war of 1939” and unfolding through an ornate approximation of Shakespearean verse, The Antiphon combines Jacobean tragedy and modern drama with Roman Catholic liturgy and high modernist poetics. It is widely regarded as Barnes’s most “difficult” text in the challenges it presents to reading, performance, and interpretation. Nevertheless, in its self-conscious anachronism, delight in language and intertextuality, and interest in the structures of memory and autobiography, The Antiphon might well be considered, as Julie Taylor has recently noted, the “most ‘Barnesian’ of the author’s texts.”6 Such a proximity between “difficulty” and “Barnesian” is perhaps unsurprising given that “evasion” and “elusion” have been central terms in the development of Barnes criticism, a vocabulary employed both generally, in discussions of Barnes’s somewhat peripheral or problematic relationship to modernism, and specifically, in treatments of the intersection of autobiographic material and fictive construction in her work. In its exposure of sexual trauma and the excavation of a family history marked by bigamy, victimization, and collusion, The Antiphon is frequently read alongside certain biographic details that were repeated and revised by Barnes throughout her life.7 As well as echoing aspects of the unconventional childhood documented across Barnes’s archived correspondence and manuscripts, the play brings into high relief the intertextual reverberations informing the “antiphonal” nature of the Barnes corpus itself, returning and revising much of the narrative material of her earlier experimental family chronicle, Ryder. However, rather than approaching the text’s difficulties as evidence of some encoded confession from which an autobiographical “truth” might be pressed, this chapter will develop the notion that the play is less concerned with the memory of one traumatic event than with the processes of memory and

“With all that Tutti and Continuo”  223 remembering itself, and will propose ways of reading its stylistic difficulties accordingly. In addressing the role of half-remembered songs, musical structures, and metrical patterns in staging the tragedy of a family “key-gone” and for whom “Everything is a little out of context,”8 I want to identify the employment of musical patterns, most notably antiphony—call and response—as central structural devices in the play. At work beneath the rich musical fabric of the play’s dialogue—with its frequent references to composers, songs, and instruments—are stylistic, thematic, and inherently musical patterns of return, refrain, and variation, woven throughout, and here framed as essential structural components of the poetics and politics of memory with which The Antiphon is engaged. Building on Julie Abraham’s influential study of the preoccupation with history as both framing device and recurrent trope across Barnes’s work, I contend that attention to employment of these musical devices illuminates the various ways in which Barnes uses music to both activate and enact memory. Attention to the intersection of the textured musical patterns at work in The Antiphon thus offers an illuminating point of connection “between events within the text and the construction of the text.”9 In his earlier introductory essay to Nightwood, T.S. Eliot made a ­distinction between “poetic prose” and the “musical patterns” at work in Barnes’s writing, highlighting the centrality of the patterns of this prose rhythm in raising “the matter to be communicated to the highest intensity.”10 Just as Eliot goes on to make an interesting distinction between “noise” and “communication,” suggesting that “most contemporary novels…obtain what reality they have from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication,”11 we might suggest that The Antiphon, rather than recording noise, generates and records feedback, distorting and disrupting these acoustic patterns through a recurring loop. The “matter to be communicated” here is not one story, but a reflection on the nature of storytelling and composition itself, the textured and patterned voices producing a complex commentary on the narrative and autobiographic impulse to repeat and revise. Drawing comparisons with compositional experimentation in ­music through the period, we might profitably read the disruptive effects of the play’s elaborate latticework of temporal and textual reverberation alongside a strain of modernist music invested in polytonality and ­polyscalarity—that is, models of multiplicity, simultaneity, and accumulation.12 However, while the harmonic disturbances generated through these experiments should be considered, in addressing the musicality of The Antiphon as a device enabling Barnes to explore repeated exchanges between past and present, official history, and personal memory, this discussion focuses primarily on the so-called modernist “dismantling

224  Caroline Knighton of regular metric subdivisions, and the use of frequent changes of pulse and meter.”13 The extent to which Barnes was herself familiar with such developments in musical experimentation can be inferred from her letters and her immersion in the cultural life of Paris in the 1920s. After her arrival in the French capital in 1921 on an assignment from McCall’s Magazine, Barnes continued to support herself through her journalism, reporting back to her avid New York readers on Parisian fashions, expatriate gossip, and cultural events. As Mary E. Davis has emphasized in her recent study of the wide-reaching connections between modernist music and other cultural phenomena in the early decades of the twentieth century, “the upscale fashion press played a […] significant role in defining and advocating musical modernism,”14 and Barnes’s contribution to these publications, as well as her social affiliations with musicians and composers of the period, firmly positions her within this cultural matrix. Furthermore, in retrospectively striking the tone of this period in the miscellaneous notes and drafts now collected as Collected Poems With Notes Toward the Memoirs, Barnes defined the 20s as “the period of the Cigale […] and the Russian Ballet [Ballet Russe], particularly Le Sacre du Printemps.”15 While the disruption of rhythmic and metrical structures and syntax became central principles of modernist compositional experimentation, brought to particular prominence in the early compositions of Igor Stravinsky, The Antiphon, in drawing on such experiments, also insists on returning to and revising earlier musical forms, techniques, and principles, disrupting notions of history as progression and change. Set within its own richly intertextual and transhistorical framework, the play opens as the far-flung members of the Burley-Hobbs family return to a decaying ancestral home in the township of Beewick at the request of the puckish and mysterious “Jack Blow, Coachman,” later revealed as the absent brother, Jeremy. A densely overwrought pattern of three generations of conflicted family history follows, producing counterpointed narratives and voices as mother, daughter, and brothers repeat, revise, and re-remember these histories. While these alternating narratives and voices are clearly arranged in an antagonistically antiphonal relationship to one another, the play also reverberates with the absent but not forgotten voices of the paternal grandmother Victoria, the “Free-soiler, free-thinker, nonconformist” (64), and the father Titus Hobbs, whose shared philosophy that “all love was truth and honor” (68) was finally realized in his serial adulteries and “monstrous practice of polygamy” (70). As the dialogue proceeds through a language of hunting and haunting, we learn of the infidelities and sexual philosophies of the deceased Titus, “That old Ram! Cock-pit Bully Boy!” (66), the bitterness of remembered pain and cruelty, and the “merchant” brothers’ murderous intentions towards their mother and sister, realized

“With all that Tutti and Continuo”  225 at the close of the play in an act of filicide when Titus’s widow Augusta bludgeons her daughter Miranda to death before collapsing dead herself. An examination of the internal structures of these interwoven voices and the resonance of their narratives across the family’s contested history clearly emphasizes the extent of Barnes’s experimentation with forms of polychoral and polyrhythmic composition. Central to the shaping of Barnes’s mature autobiographic poetics, these antiphonal arrangements are essential both in her articulation of a surface family pattern and in allowing her to develop a structural model through which to explore the workings of memory. Orchestrated by the disguised “Jack Blow,” the drama at the center of this sinister family reunion is the exposure of a series of physically, sexually, and emotionally violent abuses committed in the family’s past that must be confronted in the present. Most climatically, this involves the elaborate restaging of the rape of the daughter Miranda as a young girl “not yet seventeen” who was then “Thrown to a traveling Cockney thrice her age” (95), a traumatic and horrendous series of events in which both father and mother are either directly involved or silently complicit. In his ambiguous composite role as fool, malcontent, and witness, Jack/Jeremy recreates the sinister atmosphere and events of the childhood home with the aid of a structure he names “Hobbs Ark, beast-box, dolls house” (91), a crude doll’s house, complete with marionettes of the family and mistresses, which he presents to Augusta. While recognizing her part in allowing her husband to hold power and influence over the family, Jack also forces Augusta into a confrontation of her guilt, to “see” the rape as it is recast in the doll’s house and remember her collusion and complicity in the event. Insisting on her own victimization and refusing to accept her own part in the various violences woven throughout the family history, Augusta retreats into wild recreations of the imagined innocence of “that story-book Augusta / Feather-headed, fairy-tale Augusta” (75). Generating a confusion of real and imagined memories, past events are not only nostalgically reflected upon, but are narrated, restaged, and recreated anew in the present. Alongside attempts to play the roles of Empress Josephine, Lily Langtry, and Helen of Troy, Augusta also ­combines and conflates her own experience with fantasized versions of Miranda’s history. Appropriating Miranda’s shoes and hat and repeating the request to “Come play me, daughter,” Augusta attempts a final, fatal undoing of linear time and memory through an inversion of the roles of mother and daughter, re-imaging her child as “all Augusta laid up in Miranda / Born again to be my new account” (62). The circularity of this “signifying if dizzyingly complex construction” is established in the opening lines of the play.16 The middle-aged ­M iranda enters “wearing an elegant but rusty costume, obviously of the theatre” followed by Jack Blow, “holding his billycock straight up over his head, as though he expected applause from the gallery.” Overtly

226  Caroline Knighton presenting themselves as “players” come upon the scene, Miranda’s opening lines, the first of the play, introduce the themes of return and remembering as a form of rupture that drives and dominates the action of the play: Here’s a rip in nature; here’s gross quiet, Here’s cloistered waste; Here’s rudeness once was home (7) The insistence on immediacy in these opening lines with the throbbing anaphora of “here’s” (at once place, moment in time, and playful homonym of “hears”) is counterpointed with a comparison to what was, establishing a tension between “then” and “now” that ruptures the supposedly stable ordering frameworks of “nature” or time and history. The ancestral home bears the mark of the overlaying of multiple, conflicting histories as a “haunt of time.” Once a college of chantry priests and now, after the Burley family’s financial ruin at the hands of Titus and Victoria, given over to a shadowy group of “travelers,” the house is the site of original rupture in the Burley family chronicle. Stepping back into this world, Miranda strikes the key note for what follows: “the world is cracked—but in the breach my fathers mew” (9). The detailed stage directions at the beginning of the play not only point to the overt and self-conscious theatricality of the piece in which “wide shallow steps” on each side of the stage lead up to the gallery with a balustrade hung with “flags, gonfalons, bonnets, ribbons and all manner of stage costumes,” but also insist upon its musicality. ­A rranged alongside the theatrical props borrowed from vaudeville, the circus, and early modern pageantry that are scattered throughout Barnes’s early journalism and make up much of the fabric of Nightwood, Barnes also places “a dressmaker’s dummy, in regimentals, surrounded by music stands, horns, fiddles, guncases, bandboxes, masks, toys and broken statues, man and beast” (7). Just as the “props overtly signal theatricality both through their individual nature and their cumulative presence,”17 attention to this foregrounding of musical instruments allows us to consider alternative forms of “playing” at work in The Antiphon. Upon their entrance, Miranda and Jack’s dialogue initially seems to shape itself as an antiphonal call and response. Responding to Jack’s suggestion that “There’s no circulation in the theme… / The very fad of being’s stopped…” Miranda points to the objects that have been left silent and unused, a theme picked up and developed by Jack: MIRANDA The wall is chapped where once the altar stood The basin dry, the music-stands in dust.

“With all that Tutti and Continuo”  227 Horn and fiddle… JACK Mute as Missae pro Defunctis. (8) While the musical qualities of this shared dialogue are in themselves interesting, in developing Miranda’s theme, Jack returns the abandoned instruments to their musical contexts, even endowing them with an extra musical function; despite being “mute,” the instruments still possess a performative dimension. It is worth pausing on the qualities of these instruments. While possibly “feminine” in appearance with its coiled tubes of brass and flared bell, the horn, in its capability of “sounding” like a human call, is an instrument traditionally associated with hunting and nobility, a heritage frequently invoked in Baroque symphonic or orchestral contexts and settings.18 The fiddle is a slightly more ambiguous instrument.19 Possessing a broad range like the horn, the fiddle has had a historically diverse usage over a range of genres and settings from classical music in courts and churches to traditional folk and dance music in taverns, streets, and homes. In this latter context, the fiddle is a lead instrument in both setting complex and changing rhythmical patterns and tempos and providing the lilting, lifting strains to folk songs, sea shanties, and ballads in traditional English folk music—all of which, to a greater or lesser extent, might be considered antiphonal in their arrangement. The specific reference to the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, the Missa pro Defunctis, is also worth noting here. Before the introduction of polyphonic settings by Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410–97) and Guillaume Dufay, the Mass of the Dead was sung exclusively in chant. Ockeghem is traditionally acclaimed as offering the “first surviving polyphonic setting of the Mass of the Dead”20 in his setting for the Requiem, which called for the interplay of “three voices, although an additional voice enters in several movements towards the end of the work.”21 Stylistically, the movements are distinct from one another, borrowing from and adapting elements of the original Gregorian chant and developing richly textured internal structures composed of multiple voices in counterpoint, building to a powerful climax and, in a manner paralleled to some extent in The Antiphon, “the cycle concludes not in the mood of other-wordly contemplation but in a self-consciously virtuosic display of compositional artifice.”22 Having noted Barnes’s own self-conscious anachronism and taking the setting, language and literary allusion employed in The Antiphon into account, we might productively look beyond the repeated references to Baroque composers including Monteverdi, Purcell, Tallis, and Couperin to a consideration of the stylistic influences informing Baroque musical practices, textures, and structures. Used to powerful effect in

228  Caroline Knighton Ockeghem’s Requiem, the development of polyphonic or polychoral settings proved to be a defining feature of early Baroque music. Although the prominence of these multiple, interwoven voices was displaced to a certain extent as Baroque music increasingly focused on the solo voice, in the consistent development of complex instrumentation and an experimental approach to notation, Baroque musical arrangements retained and developed essential elements of these earlier, multi-layered compositions. Certainly not restricted to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century musical histories, elements of this polychoral antiphony are returned to and developed in some instances of experimental twentieth-century composition. Indeed, in some “variations on a theme,” we might see the call and response style of antiphonal structures remodeled as a decisively modernist trait in the early years of the twentieth century, used to great effect by Stravinsky, and particularly apparent in the opening of The Rite of Spring. 23 Interestingly, The Rite of Spring establishes its own antiphonal ­reverberations across the period. A succès du scandale on its original premiere in 1913, the ballet was seen by relatively few until it was revived in 1920 with the financial backing of Coco Chanel and under the choreographic direction of Léonide Massine. Celebrated by reviewers as “the greatest musical achievement of the decade that produced it,” Mary Davis points out that in returning to the ballet in the 1920s, Stravinsky succeeded in recontextualizing the unchanged score. 24 Citing Richard Taruskin’s influential study of Stravinsky’s life and work, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Davis highlights the manner in which the ballet’s “primitivism” was reimagined as reflective of more contemporary tastes, emphasizing the score’s “simplification of texture, static vamping harmonies, and repetitive ostinato-driven forms” (180). This strategy was successful, and the revival was well received in the popular press. Considering The Rite alongside Stravinsky’s more recent compositions, including the significant Symphonies d’instruments à vent à la mémoire de Claude Debussy in a 1920 article for Musical America, Edwin Evans (who also wrote for Vogue) heralded Stravinsky as a “Contrapuntal Titan” who, having developed a new conception of counterpoint, could be lauded as “the Bach of today.”25 Expanding our definition of “antiphonal” to include not only sonorous patterns of voice or music, but also the manipulation of metrical and rhythmic structures and syntax alluded to here, productive connections can certainly be drawn between Renaissance and early Baroque developments and quintessentially modernist experiments in polytonality, polyrhythm, and contrapuntal motion. 26 Highlighting two seemingly antagonistic critical approaches to ­Stravinsky’s masterpiece of the 1920s, Davis offers a compelling line of inquiry for considering the interplay of radical experiment and traditional mourning ritual at work in the musical structures of both Stravinsky’s

“With all that Tutti and Continuo”  229 Symphonies and Barnes’s The Antiphon. Originally ­conceived as a choral score for piano in memory of Debussy, the Symphonies at once prefigures the radical experimentalism in musical time and structural continuity that came to prominence in the 1950s and returns to the formal musical structures familiar to traditional Slavic mourning rituals, notably the Russian Orthodox office for the dead, the panikhida. 27 Returning to Barnes’s play, a similar interplay of avant-garde experimentalism and the musical structures of traditional mourning ritual can be traced. As a prayer cycle, the Requiem Mass was employed for recently deceased souls or all souls in purgatory and structured so that the end of each recited passage was met by an antiphon made by the congregation. The phrase Placebo Domino in regione vivorum (I will please God in the land of the living) provided the name for the hired mourners who would appear at funerals to demonstrate and encourage extreme displays of grief to “please the dead in the land of the living”: so-called “placebos.” In one of several heavy-handed instances of meta-­ theatricality in The Antiphon, Jack makes a direct connection between this ritual and the parts that he, Miranda, and the rest of the family will play in it: “The scene is set but seems the actor gone. / No tither, weeper, wait or cicerone” (8). With no guide or watchman and without the musical accompaniments of either a hired funeral “weeper” or “wait” (a troupe of musicians traditionally deployed in street parades), Jack is not only audience and actor in this unfolding drama, but also conductor, arranging these various voices and their instrumental accompaniments in a polyphonic composition. 28 As an extended dramatic composition combining text, multiple parts, voices, instrumental accompaniment, and theatrical setting, opera also offers an interesting model for reading the musicality of The Antiphon. Barnes herself grew up in a musical home under the direction of a father who could “write operas with full orchestra score, carve a flute, play the piano well, other musical instruments a little, and give instruction to his children.”29 Speaking with James Scott in later years, Barnes detailed the significant role music played in her childhood and education. Evenings were devoted to reading aloud and to “playing in ensemble,” and Barnes, after the instruction of her father, “learned to read music… and to play the banjo, [guitar], the violin, the french horn” as instruments were frequently “rotated among family members.”30 It is unclear whether or not Barnes continued to play as extensively as this in later life, although the impact of this musical childhood is apparent throughout her work, reflected in the unpublished 1924 play The Biography of Julie von Bartumm and echoed here in a telling reference to Titus as a man who not only wrote his own pseudo-religious credo but “Blew his own horn, composed his own libretti” (69). Amongst the references to opera woven throughout the play, the inclusion of the Baroque composer Monteverdi, one of the earliest and most

230  Caroline Knighton significant innovators in developing opera, is particularly ­illuminating. ­ aroque Combining Renaissance polyphonic textures with the emerging B technique of basso continuo, the figuring of harmonic structures in relation to a bass note, Monteverdi developed operas within which “each voice or instrument was accompanied by its own continuo instrument.”31 In the early L’Orfeo (1607), “extraordinary because of the indications for instrumentation printed in the score, not just because of the way instruments are used,”32 Monteverdi manipulated these different continuo groups to identify the shifts between voices, instrumental groups, movements, and transitions between the land of the living and the underworld. The “horn and fiddle” sounded, Jack and Miranda begin, in contrapuntal dialogue, to explore this underworld, exposing the unhappy history of Augusta and the consequences of her marriage to Titus. In the first of a series of digressions and temporal shifts, Miranda interrupts these skirting reflections of her mother’s past (reported in the past tense) and returns her mind to the present, to the possible consequences of “this afternoon.” Interrupted and counterpointed by Jack’s sudden, short exclamations, the sense of “dislocated time” (11) at work across the play is introduced here in the abrupt shift between reported memory and an immediate, imagined future, a shift that is marked through a metrical modulation. Disrupting the metrical structure established at the opening, the broadly symmetrical metre shared between the two characters is altered by Jack’s introduction of an asymmetrical element. Setting Jack’s truncated responses against the pattern retained by Miranda’s lines, Barnes generates a “layered patterning of time spans” (Scachter: 82) achieved through the interplay of two levels of motion, a faster and a slower.33 Established, this polyrhythm continues to work throughout the play, gradually moving closer to the foreground as the layering of different rhythms (that is, different sequences in time repeated) articulates the shifts between past and present, or re-imagined past as present. Prompted by Jack, Miranda returns her mind to the past. However, rather than reporting these events, she re-imagines Augusta in girlhood “Boating the hedges with her open hand / Peering down the lanes for visitors,” graphically recreating Augusta’s submission to Titus in the present tense and recasting the moment she lay “Performing the tragic ballet on her back” as the origins of her unhappy marriage and this legacy of “truncated grief” (11–12). As Miranda delves further back into the family chronicle to recount the arrival of Titus in England, Jack responds by recreating a portrait of the patriarch and returning him to the scene: “In my mind’s gallery he sits entire / In tip-top belly leather, watch-swag swinging” his “pack of wives” arranged behind him, decked in tabby, key chains, and bugles and “Flanked by warming-pans, bassoons and bastards” (13). While the mistresses’ bugles repeat the call of the hunt that, even at this early stage, saturates the language of play, the sonorous bassoon sounds a long, slow note, replicating the male baritone voice

“With all that Tutti and Continuo”  231 that, while absent, still resonates as a basso continuo in the harmonic structure of this family history.34 Following dramatic convention, the first act proceeds as exposition, establishing the histories and motivations of the characters and setting the tone for what follows. The structural pattern for the first act is set, a motif or ostinato repeated and developed with different voices, as the stage is occupied in turns by Miranda and Jack, Jack and Burley, and the brothers Elisha and Dudley as the family narrative reveals itself through the counterpointed dialogues of each of the couples. Staging a variation on the opening sequence, Jack provides Burley with a confused account of Miranda’s expatriate years and their meeting in Paris where, having “Met back to back” on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, “My ash-plant, on its own, began to beat / Like a rod possessed, and barking into bloom / Went tapping in her footsteps, one on one” (26). This simple, metronomic beat marks the beginning of the goal-orientated rhythm that drives the action and structures the first act, emphasizing and foregrounding the metrical patterns at work in the play’s texture of remembering. Positioning himself as conductor, Jack introduces a series of musical terms in reconstructing Miranda’s time in Paris. After meeting “on the first drum’s rouse,” he manipulates temporal and metric structure, his narrative jumping from scene to scene, setting her tempo (“lento, lento, lady”) against his cries for ‘“Mass, mass, piano and piano!’” a cacophony directed with “One hand above the other grasping ‘Presto!’” (33), fast and slow, loud and soft meeting and blending in a manner suggestive not only of modernist dissonance but the central principles of contrast in Baroque composition. In this respect, Augusta’s approach at the end of Act I, signaled by the “faint approaching sound of the tapping of a ferule on the flagging” neatly repeats the beat of Jack’s walking stick and is suggestive of another metrical modulation signaling the opening of the second movement or act. Whereas the first act only allowed for two actors to be in dialogue at any one moment, the second opens with the entire family congregated on stage. While the dialogue is led predominantly by ­Augusta providing assessments of her children and developing the histories of Victoria, Titus, and his “rowdy pack of bitches” (46), the texture is richer, incorporating more voices, musical and literary allusions, and developing the fragments of remembered nursery rhymes and folk songs introduced in the first act. Returning to the motif of the absent orchestra, Augusta laments that on her return to Beewick she found: A perishing diameter, Where once a bandstand stood, and Kappellmeister Stack Remember Stack? - upon it, like a seal Pawing the air with consecrated mitten, In which, like a twig in snow, his baton rocked Thawing out a trumpet voluntary (52)

232  Caroline Knighton Asking her family to remember the conductor, the motif introduced by Jack is here developed through repetition, variation, and the incorporation of a dizzying cacophony of snatches of Purcell and English folk songs, imitations of instruments, and references to Morris dancers as the brothers attempt to recreate Augusta’s memory and re-experience it in the present. The structural role of musical devices in articulating this collapse of past and present time is increasingly foregrounded as Burley points to a development of the rhythmical patterns of recurrence established in the first act: “One two, one two—/ Compound motion” (54). While the metrical switches between fast and slow, past and present remain, Burley here suggests that in falling in with Augusta’s demands to have her memories remade for her, culminating in her desire to see herself “recalled” in and by her daughter, a perceptual and structural blurring occurs. The specific use of “compound motion,” the trick of the eye whereby two separate lines of motion, horizontal and vertical, are blurred and combined when followed simultaneously, is revealing in reading the stylistic difficulties of The Antiphon.35 This tension between the horizontal and the vertical, between linear time experienced as duration and the excavations of history and memory, is precisely the fault line that The Antiphon engages as a piece staging the truncated attempts of a family to explore, re-remember, and undo their individual and combined histories in a form that proceeds in time. This blurring of horizontal and vertical can also be traced in the relational tensions established between background structure and foreground elements. As the second act repeats, foregrounds, and develops the musical motifs presented in the first, surface elements of rhythmic syntax, tenses, and dialogue break down and become confused, obscuring and muddying interpretation and clarity. This is fully realized in the fatal crescendo of the final act as Miranda, reimagining her own conception and birth as the moment “time commenced” (102), is counterpointed by Augusta’s repeated attempts to recast her own history and recreate a fantastical present where she is not left “sharp, unsung and shrill” (108) but returned to girlhood, riding with her daughter to experience “The pleasure gardens, Vauxhall, Fountainbleau, / The Trianon, and fountains, and the music!” (105). Just as mother and daughter are presented as a tragic compound, present and past are collapsed and confused as the seemingly submerged, linear substructures of time and history are disrupted, rearranged, and foregrounded as these metrical and grammatical distortions move overworked patterns of return and refrain to the surface. While the employment of these musical patterns is central to the poetics and politics of autobiography explored through a play that is unraveled as a series of repetitions, revisions, and variations, the relational tensions established between foregrounded motif and

“With all that Tutti and Continuo”  233 background architecture also emerge as essential compositional tools in the production of an excessive and insistent intertextuality proceeding through self-styled anachronism and appropriation of archaic visual, musical, and literary sources. Dismantling and reorganizing literary genealogies, personal histories, prosodic structures, and temporal sequence, The Antiphon can certainly be read alongside compositional experimentation in modernist music; however, whereas certain strands of modernist music can be shown to be developing “motivic and thematic elements…at the expense of architectural ones,”36 Barnes here is not sacrificing architectural elements, but reworking them as foreground motif, and, in so doing, returning early modern musical structures to a play of high modernist complexity. Considering Erwin Panofsky’s definition of the “Baroque attitude” “as being based on an objective conflict between antagonistic forces,”37 we might look at Barnes’s telescoping between high modernist and Baroque reference points as a means not only of working the antiphonal structures of memory and narrative into the fabric of the play itself, but of addressing the reverberations of a modernity that, in stylistic terms, “begins with mannerism and the Baroque while its definitive crises arrive with twentieth-century modernism and the avant-garde, when the issues of individuation and personal conflict reach their peak.”38 Rather than insisting on chronological demarcations and divisions, Barnes plays with these antiphonal patterns to address modernity as a continuum. As Miranda’s lines towards the end of the play suggest: As the high plucked banks Of the viola rend out the unplucked strings below There is the antiphon (119) In returning to these musical patterns and employing them as structural devices in a play of high modernist complexity, Barnes is able to strike “the unplucked strings below,” to comment on both personal submerged histories and modernism’s own substructure. Rather than setting Barnes in opposition to certain dominant modernist traditions or limiting a discussion of her aesthetics to these principles, reading her work through these alternative musical models broadens discussions of the writer and artist’s relationship to modernist and avant-garde poetics and histories. Rereading Barnes in this way, we are asked to consider modernism itself not simply as an invective to “make it new,” but to look at the various ways in which by borrowing, restructuring, and displaying their sources, some modernisms might be “making it differently.”

234  Caroline Knighton

Notes 1 Cited in Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995), xvii. 2 Djuna Barnes to Natalie Clifford Barney, 31 May 1963. Djuna Barnes ­Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries, Series II, Box I, Folder 45. 3 Djuna Barnes to Christine Koschel, 15 April 1969, Djuna Barnes Papers, Series II, Box 10, Folder 47 4 Daniela Caselli, Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009). 5 After an initial, unsuccessful reading at Harvard University, The Antiphon opened (in translation) at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden on February 17th 1961. Barnes’s own comments here are taken from a letter to Janet Flanner (Djuna Barnes Papers, Series II, Box 6, Folder 9) and the unfavorable review by Robin Skelton published in the Manchester Guardian was kept by Barnes. See Caselli, Improper Modernism, 217 and 218. 6 Julie Taylor, “Revising The Antiphon, Restaging Trauma: or, Where Textual Politics Meets Sexual History,” Modernism/Modernity 18.1 (2011), 125. 7 While the polygamous household of Barnes’s own childhood is widely accepted as the model for the domestic dynamics of both Ryder and The Antiphon, across her letters and fictional reworkings of these childhood experiences, there are also repeated references to her father’s violence and a pointed sense of a dereliction of duty on the part of her mother (See Herring, Djuna, 50, 52, and 280). The question of a directly or indirectly incestuous sexual violation is also raised across Barnes’s correspondence and has certainly informed readings of the autobiographic nature of Ryder and The Antiphon. As Herring highlights in his biography, Barnes was generally consistent in her account of her first sexual encounter as a rape arranged by her father and an older neighbor, although in one account she does suggest that the rape was in fact performed by her father himself (53, 268). 8 Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 122, 21. Hereafter cited in text. 9 Julie L. Abrahams, “‘Woman Remember You’: Djuna Barnes and History,” in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 262. 10 Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (London: Faber and Faber, 1985 [1936]), 3. 11 Barnes, Nightwood, 2. 12 Radically displacing tonality as a governing principle in composition, ­A rnold Schoenberg’s manipulation of chromatic structures through the development of twelve-note composition, in postulating a system of repetition, return, and variation, would be of particular note here. 13 Simon Shaw-Miller, “Modernist Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of ­Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 610. This tension between official record and personal history is a central theme in Doctor O’Conner’s monologues throughout Nightwood. 14 Mary E. Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkley: University of California Press, 2006), 1. 15 Djuna Barnes, “Vantage Ground,” Collected Poems with Notes toward the Memoirs, eds. Phillip Herring and Osías Stutman (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 237.

“With all that Tutti and Continuo”  235 16 Richard Epsley, “Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon: ‘tedious … because they will not understand it,’” Women: A Cultural Review 17.2 (2006), 189. 17 Caselli, Improper Modernism, 228. 18 See Leopold Mozart Sinfonia da Caccia and Jean-Baptiste Morin’s influence on Joseph Hadyn’s Symphony no. 73, “La Chasse.” 19 As is the organ, introduced later in connection with Augusta’s brother Dudley. At once grandiose and capable of polyphonic arrangements, the pipe organ emerged as a central instrument in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. However, appearing later in concert halls and homes, the organ is also strongly associated with nineteenth-century forms of public entertainment, reaching its most problematic manifestation in the mobile structure employed by the itinerant organ grinders frequently reviled as vagabonds and a public nuisance and recognized by the repetitive refrain of their limited instruments. 20 Edward Wickham, “Recording for Posterity: Some Reflections on the Memorialising of Early Renaissance Music,” in Music as Social and Cultural Practice: Essays in Honour of Reinhard Strohm, eds. Melania Bucciarelli and Berta Joncus (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), 74. 21 William F. Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial in the Low Countries: Philip the Fair and the Order of the Golden Fleece,” in Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Music, ed. Iain Fenlon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 133. 22 Wickham, “Recording for Posterity,” 74. 23 See Peter Hill, Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Barnes was certainly aware of Stravinsky’s indisputable contribution to modernist music, and they were loosely connected through the world of the Parisian expatriate scene in the 1920s and 30s. It is unclear whether they knew each directly, although they certainly shared friendships with the likes of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot. 24 Davis, Classic Chic, 181. 25 Davis, Classic Chic, 182. 26 Displacing traditional notions of movement and phrasal continuity as proceeding through development and variation, Stravinsky’s disruption of rhythmic syntax and employment of “immediate and persistent motivic repetition” (Gretchen Horlacher. “The Rhythms of Reiteration: Formal Development in Stravinsky’s Ostinati.” Music Theory Spectrum 14.2. (Autumn 1992), 187) is of particular interest here, not least for the comparisons that could be drawn between this paradoxically static form of return and refrain and the Barnes oeuvre or the autobiographical or narrative compulsion to repeat and revise stories at work across it. 27 Davis, Classic Chic, 183. 28 The role of Jack / Jeremy as conductor in shaping and driving the tragic action of the play comes into high relief in the aftermath of the doll’s house scene. Having presented Augusta with her “contagion” (144), Elisha compliments Jack on having inflicted more damage than the conspiring brothers could have hoped for. 29 Herring, Djuna, 24. 30 Herring, Djuna, 38. 31 Giulia Nuti, The Performance of Italian Basso Continuo: Style in Keyboard Accompaniment in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hants: ­Ashgate, 2007), 44. 32 Nuti, Italian Basso Continuo, 46. 33 Carl Schachter, “Part I: Rhythm and Linear Analysis,” in Unfoldings: ­E ssays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis, ed. Joseph N. Straus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 82. See Schachter for a discussion of this aspect of

236  Caroline Knighton

34 35

36 37 38

musical meter, in particular Maury Yeston’s definition of “rhythms of recurrence,” and for a broader discussion of the attention to musical substructures (as the foregrounding of rhythmic elements in musical composition) developed by Heinrich Schenker. Augusta, in adding to the musical textures of the play, later introduces harps in her development of the mistresses’ narrative. Burley’s use of “compound motion” here could itself be a read as a compound: combining the perceptual experience of the blending of two separate lines of movement with the metrical measure of “compound time,” a time signature within which each beat is divided into uneven parts, a metrical pattern that generates the lilting qualities of folk music and is a common feature of Baroque dance. Shaw-Miller, “Modernist Music,” 610. Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 38. Ljubica Llic, Music and the Modern Condition: Investigating the Boundaries (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 6.

15 “The Blues Always Been Here” African American Music and Black Modernism in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Michael Borshuk Reviewing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom during its premiere run at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1984, Frank Rich lauded the play’s author, August Wilson, “as a major find for American theater.” In dramatizing the events of a single recording session in the 1920s by the titular famed black blues singer, Wilson, Rich argued, had not only “authored a footnote to cultural history,” but also “lighted a fuse that snakes and hisses through several anguished eras of American life.” The critic’s ­estimation proved prophetic. Ma Rainey, as Wilson’s first Broadway production, became a launching point for an eventual ten-play cycle that traced ­A frican American history across a series of representative narratives from each decade of the twentieth century. But what made Wilson a “major find” in Rich’s mind was not merely the playwright’s emerging grandness of historical scope. Instead, his greatness lay in a hybridized style that married a modernist theatrical tradition with the cultural specificity of black vernacular expression. “If this play owes something to ‘The Iceman Cometh’ and something else to the music of singers like its real-life title character,” Rich insisted, “the total mix is alarmingly fresh.”1 Rich’s appraisal tried to establish Wilson’s importance by noting how the playwright had inserted a black voice within the familiar, ­decades-old conversation of the modernist literary canon. However, an alternate critical perspective might have noted how Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom extended a discussion specific to an African American modernist tradition dating back to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. On a narrative level, the play dramatizes arguments about black identity consistent with Harlem’s lively intellectual exchanges after the First World War, in the cultural moment the African American philosopher Alain Locke named as the emergence of the New Negro. On the level of presentation, though, Wilson’s play reminds its audiences of the historical significance of vernacular music, performance, and theatricality to the shift in conceptions of blackness that from early on was regarded as key to the New Negro’s disposition.

238  Michael Borshuk While conservative estimations of the Harlem Renaissance and the rise of the New Negro limit the period’s definition to its literary production, Ma Rainey reminds us assertively of the onstage and in-studio energies that were always equally important to that era. 2 Recall, for instance, the triumphant close to Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which the famed poet commands: “Let the blare of the Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.”3 Consider how Hughes recalled as early as 1940, in his first autobiography, The Big Sea, that in his mind the Renaissance began with the opening of the African American musical stage revue Shuffle Along on Broadway.4 Or note the attention that James Weldon Johnson gives to African American stage performance in his early evocation of the Renaissance in his book Black Manhattan from 1930.5 In Johnson’s account, the inauguration of Black Manhattan as a cultural phenomenon was aided immensely by events that included Charles Gilpin’s premiere in John Drinkwater’s play Abraham Lincoln at New York’s Cort Theater in December 1919 or, again, the opening of Shuffle Along. As Johnson noted, while Shuffle Along was indebted to blackface minstrelsy in some of its dramatic elements, its music (composed by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake) was so contemporary as to register a break from the theatrical embodiments of African American identity that had come before. Thus, in these important firsthand reminiscences, the change in spirit that Locke so astutely summarizes turns often on the embodiment of something different, in a series of physical performances that tellingly marked the generation’s key departures. In this essay, I consider how Wilson’s play uses performance and black vernacular music practice to engage varying definitions of modernism across a series of cultural contexts. As I argue, Ma Rainey’s Black ­Bottom, written in 1982 and staged in 1984, absorbs many of the aesthetic and intellectual concerns we associate with modernism’s emergence in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The play does so, I suggest, not to assert its place in an existing expressive canon but to reconsider assertively that tradition and its critical commonplaces from a late-century perspective. Specifically, Wilson is most invested in contemplating African American modernism as its own distinct artistic tradition rooted in post-WWI history. At the heart of this tradition, as Wilson shows, are three concurrent impulses: to articulate questions of black subjectivity, to explore the expressive possibilities of the ­A frican American vernacular tradition, and to weigh self-consciously black modernism’s compatibility and incongruity with a canonical modernism defined primarily by white writers and artists. However, in revisiting the 1920s from the temporal remove of several decades, Wilson also resists a mere retelling of the familiar past. Instead, the playwright uses music

“The Blues Always Been Here”  239 as the means to investigate the black subject’s place in an ongoing historical present that begins in modernism’s earlier seismic shifts and continues through the equally profound transitions of the 1960s and later. Perhaps most importantly, it is that later context that informs Wilson’s black modernist agenda. In Ma Rainey, the playwright refracts earlier conceptualizations of black modernism through the key ideological and expressive changes of the Black Arts Movement, the moment of his own aesthetic coming-of-age. Ultimately, I propose, Ma Rainey’s Black ­Bottom is modernist not for any facile resemblance it bears with agreedupon texts in an existing canon, but for the broad ontological concerns it interrogates through theatrical presentation and aesthetic style. Most immediately, Wilson is discernibly modernist for articulating his faith—both inside and outside of the play’s text—in the power of art to give form to the otherwise chaotic context of modern life. Specifically, A ­ frican American music is the expressive tradition in which the playwright most assuredly places this sacred faith. In a representative statement from a 1990 interview, for example, he calls the blues “without question the wellspring of his [art],” and extols their importance as “the cultural response of black America to the world they found themselves in.”6 For Wilson, the significance of this response is the music’s function both as a repository of shared values and experiences and as a s­ tylization of collective adversity into the affirmation necessary for survival. In this way, black vernacular music does not constitute an unrefined folk form but instead makes good on canonical modernism’s loosely connected aesthetic goal. Houston Baker, for example, notes that our consensus about canonical modernism turns on the grouping together of early ­twentieth-century white artists who collectively envisioned art as an acknowledgement of and confrontation with “radical uncertainty”—or with the threat, as Tom Buchanan articulates pessimistically in The Great Gatsby, of civilization’s “going to pieces.”7 More succinctly, the critic Daniel ­Joseph Singal outlines “Modernist thought” as “an attempt to restore a sense of order to human experience under the often chaotic conditions of ­twentieth-century existence.”8 In both examples, we see the familiar summary of modernism as a restoration of form to the peril of form’s absence. Fittingly then, as Wilson introduces Ma Rainey’s narrative frame in the play’s opening stage directions, he invokes the chaos of exterior contexts to which modernist artists, as the conventional critical summary goes, felt so compelled to respond. Wilson writes: It is early March in Chicago, 1927. There is a bit of a chill in the air. Winter has broken but the wind coming off the lake does not carry the promise of spring…. Somewhere a man is wrestling with the taste of a woman in his cheek. Somewhere a dog is barking. Somewhere the moon has fallen through a window and broken into thirty pieces of silver.9

240  Michael Borshuk In this emotionally ambivalent vernal context, Wilson’s poetic stage directions echo canonical modernism’s broad ennui, recalling the alienating changes afoot, say, in T.S. Eliot’s cruelest month, or the “sluggish / dazed” season of William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All.” But while those writers might have positioned their confrontation with radical uncertainty as a universal one, ignoring the specificity of their own subject positions, Wilson is clear about the racially contingent perspective he offers. His opening stage directions continue: “It is with these Negroes that our concern lies most heavily: their values, their attitudes, and particularly their music” (4). And of the particular power of black music to give form to the particular chaos African Americans have faced historically, Wilson highlights the blues’s warmth and redress, its braggadocio and roughly poignant comments, its vision and prayer, which would instruct and allow them to reconnect, to reassemble and gird up for the next battle in which they would be both victim and the ten thousand slain. (5) The “concern” with black music that Wilson articulates here is not merely to state its importance by representing the blues and its practitioners in conventionally noble terms. That is, he eschews the critical imperatives that dominated the advent of a black modernism rooted in the ­Harlem Renaissance. Decades removed from the discourse of respectability promoted by black intellectuals like Locke or W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1920s, Wilson is not motivated by the idea—in Locke’s words—that the “immediate hope [for improving the conditions of African ­A mericans] rests in the revaluation of white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions.”10 Instead, Wilson’s evocation of black modernism through African American vernacular music falls in line with later appraisals of black modernism that allow for the vernacular’s “braggadocio and roughly poignant comments.” Houston Baker, for example, cites another literary evocation of Ma Rainey—­ Sterling Brown’s 1932 poetic tribute—as the arrival of the “indisputably modern moment in Afro-American discourse,” because the text fuses the New Negro’s self-consciously intellectual aspirations with an endorsement of black vernacular expression. “The blending,” Baker writes, “of class and mass—poetic mastery discovered as a function of deformative folk sound—constitutes the essence of black discursive modernism.”11 However, I would also suggest that Wilson’s version of black modernism, in its theatricality and the space it clears for staging black musical performance, pushes well beyond the discursive limits of Baker’s reappraisal. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom does more than just represent the blues—as Brown’s poem does—it presents it. Many times throughout the play, Wilson interrupts the narrative momentum to feature scenes

“The Blues Always Been Here”  241 of rehearsal or offer fragmented instances of singing and playing. While the production calls for much musical performance, Wilson carefully renders these performances as always active and unfinished. Performance, the gesture insists, is a process that inherently eludes easy concretization or orderly discursive understanding. In this, the play evokes Kimberly Benston’s alternate definition of black modernism. Benston locates black modernism not in the Harlem Renaissance but in the Black Arts ­Movement, conceptualizing black modernism less through the self-affirming aesthetics or recuperative ethos of the 1920s and 30s, and instead through the purposefully defiant “performative ethos” of the 1960s and 70s. “Black modernism,” in Benston’s formulation, designates that politico-aesthetic ferment arising with the black consciousness movement of the 1960s, a still-living moment in which a sustained effort to transform representation into presentation became the hallmark of a fresh chapter in the history of African-­ American cultural expression.12 In this definition, black modernism emerges when African American artists break from the imperative to construct a better fixed image of the black subject for white audiences and instead make the liberating turn to the much more fluid aesthetic that performance offers. While staging blues performance is central to the play’s aesthetic plan, Wilson also evokes black musical expression through language, intending the voice of each musician in the cast to vary in timbre and tone. The playwright explains this strategy explicitly in a 1987 interview with David Savran: DS:  In

Ma Rainey the instruments the characters play become metaphors. Toledo the pianist sounds a broad compass of experience and Levee the trumpet player expresses individual subjectivity more aggressively. AW:  With the trumpet you have to blow and force yourself out through the horn. Half-consciously, I tried to make Levee’s voice be a trumpet. I was conscious when I was writing the dialogue that this is the bass player talking, this is the trombone talking. Levee is a brassy voice.13 The importance of this tie between each character’s voice and the musical persona he or she evokes is to emphasize continually the relationship between black subjectivity and performance modes. Overall, then, Wilson stages a competition between varying conceptualizations of African American modernism, departing from a ­Harlem Renaissance-inspired attempt to transform folk materials into refined aesthetic terms that might compare with the “best” of canonical

242  Michael Borshuk modernism and moving ultimately toward a Black Arts-inspired validation of expression that is simultaneously performative, conditional, and collective. Ultimately, Wilson filters the 1920s through the ideological arguments he privileges from the 1960s, redressing the failures of the Harlem Renaissance and the overbearing influence of white standards on black modernism that dominated that period. As Wilson articulates in his famous address to the Theatre Communications Group in 1996, the Black Power movement of the 1960s was “the kiln in which he was fired,” and he was particularly indebted to the black playwrights of that period for “alter[ing] the American theatre, its meaning, its craft and its history.”14 But Wilson merges the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts not merely to assert his ideological preference for the latter period’s worldview. Instead, as he insists in a 1990 interview, the two eras are intimately related already, as both promised new black expressivities only to see that aesthetic flowering undone ultimately by African Americans’ own failure to appraise their own work outside of white supremacy’s influence. “We sold our culture during the Harlem Renaissance,” Wilson argues. “And again during the sixties. So, I don’t know why we still don’t know the value of it.”15 The statement’s juxtaposition of historical periods and its assertion of lasting problems finds its aesthetic correlation in Wilson’s dramatic evocation of time and history as continuous phenomena. In another interview, posed with the accusation that Ma Rainey merely dramatized “incidents and attitudes from the past that people already knew existed,” Wilson defends his historical method’s emphasis on filtering the “real” past through a changed lens. “I would hope,” he explains, “that the play as a whole provides a different view—which is what art and literature are about—to present the familiar with a freshness and in a manner never quite seen before.”16 Part of the “freshness” of Wilson’s approach to black modernism lies in a later, even more assertive validation of the previously underappreciated materials Baker celebrates in Brown’s Ma Rainey poem. Like Brown, Wilson restores popular and vernacular materials to the modernist sphere without any of the transitional or ironic distancing gestures many critics identify within canonical modernism as authored by white writers. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, African American music is important for being both a signal expression of the assertive racial identity that emerged within the New Negro Renaissance and for constituting an expressive tradition, the success of which is judged by its own aesthetic criteria, as the imperatives of the Black Arts Movement insisted.17 Ma Rainey and company’s ribald blues performances confidently assert black difference on par with the most self-assured literary products of 1920s Harlem, but without sacrificing any appeal to a broad African American audience. In this, the music that Wilson brings to the stage exemplifies “distinguishing features” Geoffrey Jacques defines as central

“The Blues Always Been Here”  243 to black modernism—namely, an “attention to the question of identity” and the use of “elements from popular culture.”18 Indeed, the play’s temporal setting affords Wilson an opportunity to consider various currents in modernist expression that even at the time of Ma Rainey’s composition and initial performances in the mid-1980s were still often seen as ostensibly unrelated. Recall 1927, when the narrative occurs, is the year Virginia Woolf published To the Lighthouse, A’Lelia Walker inaugurated her famed Harlem literary salon, and Louis Armstrong and his Hot Sevens recorded “Potato Head Blues.” More broadly, given that each play in Wilson’s ten-play century cycle evokes a different decade in the twentieth century, Ma Rainey’s narrative year might also be read as a metonymic reference point for a wider range of historical markers, observing all at once the epoch of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Locke’s The New Negro, and Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo.” Wilson quietly reminds us of these moments’ simultaneity to argue for their consonance. Looking back on the 1920s through the perspective of the Black Arts Movement, the playwright restores the “unruly” blackness of Ma Rainey and her Black Bottom to a broader conversation that includes Harlem’s aspirational intellectual currents and the artistic provocations of white modernist experimentation. But while all of the above works engage in diverse ways with the modern problem of “radical uncertainty,” Wilson also clearly foregrounds the distinctiveness of black vernacular music’s confrontation with that chaos. That is, unlike the more conservative examples of modernist form in this range, the blues as a metonymic model for vernacular standards offers more space for indeterminacy and exerts less effort toward maintaining absolute control. The modernist aesthetic Wilson enacts is not dominated by the individual artist’s attempt to impose his formal will on outside forces and reorder history through his own imagination. Rather, as Ma Rainey herself says in the play, referring to her nickname “The Mother of the Blues,” “I ain’t started the blues way of singing. The blues always been here” (66). Thus, part of Wilson’s intervention, even in representing the material reality of historical context, is to privilege a more continuous sensibility and celebrate the “still-living” ethos B ­ enston identifies as characteristic of performance. Performance, remember, evokes the historical with immediacy—not as a distant referent but as a proximate interest. Wilson reminds us that this is one of the key ways that black vernacular performance has always maintained contiguity between different temporal moments. It is a way, in other words, that black expression has always been “modern,” by reordering a collective ­A frican American past always imperiled by white supremacy’s pernicious erasures. Consider, as an example, Lawrence Levine’s suggestion that black slaves’ oral narration and theatrical delivery when telling of their shared history “allowed slave tales to evoke the past and make it part of the living present.”19

244  Michael Borshuk On a narrative level, Wilson dramatizes this tension between antagonistic forms of historical narration through one of the play’s centerpiece monologues, when the pianist Toledo argues that black people are the “leftovers” of modern history. The speech begins with Toledo’s metaphorical assertion that black diasporic people in all their variety might be compared with the range of ingredients in a stew, a culinary mix that he evokes to constitute history’s miscellaneous intersections. As he c­ ontinues, though, Toledo warns that black people are merely the exploited global remnants in a long unequal trajectory that has left only white people sated: See, we’s the leftovers. The colored man is the leftovers. Now, what’s the colored man gonna do with himself? That’s what we waiting to find out. But first we gotta know we the leftovers. Now, who knows that? You find me a nigger that knows that and I’ll turn any whichaway you want me to…. The problem ain’t with the white man. The white man knows you just a leftover. ’Cause he the one who done the eating and he know what he done ate. But we don’t know that we been took and made history out of. Done went and filled the white man’s belly and now he’s full and tired and wants you to get out the way and let him be by himself. (44–45) Thus, the problem facing the modern black subject is not just confronting the legacy of historical violence and racist inequality, but even accessing a historical narrative—like the one Toledo offers in figurative terms here—that encourages awareness of that condition. As Toledo elucidates to his fellow black musicians later, “the stew they [i.e. white people] eat, and the stew your grandpappy made, and all the stew that you and me eat, and the stew Mr. Irvin eats…ain’t in no way the same stew” (45). Toledo, as the group’s resident philosopher, consistently proposes a way out of this epistemological frustration by emphasizing an alternate perspective he calls “African.” An African culture, as the pianist articulates it, is aware of its ancestral past and sympathetic to collective interests. This is not the Africa of physical geography or political historicity but the Africa of radical reinvention and cultural possibility. 20 Unfortunately, though, as Toledo surmises, We done sold Africa for the price of tomatoes. We done sold ourselves to the white man in order to be like him…. We trying to be just like him. We done sold who we are in order to become someone else. We’s imitation white men. (76–77)21 In this admonitory statement, Wilson voices his own regret that too often black Americans miss the aliveness of a distinct and cultural Africanness. “The way that blacks participate in the world,” he says in one interview,

“The Blues Always Been Here”  245 is fueled by their African sensibilities, so that is alive and vibrant and growing. The culture is organic. We’re constantly debating the character of our culture. So it’s alive—it didn’t disappear, it didn’t die. 22 Certain of this sensibility’s vitality, Wilson works to ensure its life in Ma Rainey through the aesthetic means of his theatrical practice. Stylistically, Wilson enacts this historical continuity by bringing the blues to the stage, presenting black musical performance less as refined product (a thing reified by Western standards and open to commodification) and more as open-ended process: a communal expression that is “African,” a form always in rehearsal, defiantly unfixed. As I noted earlier, despite Ma Rainey’s frequent calls for onstage musical performance, Wilson leaves these moments perennially unfinished. His is not the aesthetic of the conventional Broadway musical, in which characters break story to offer the performance of full musical texts from opening verse to end chorus. Instead, the play presents music in starts and stops: as rehearsal attempts that give way to debate between the musicians, as elliptical sounds that fade away between scene changes, as unfinished takes in the recording process, or as individual snippets of song played or voiced by individual characters in passing. At times, Wilson even turns to comedy to emphasize black vernacular music’s inherent resistance to a deterministic historical sense or the fixity of conventional documentation. One of the recurring jokes of the play is Ma Rainey’s insistence that her stuttering nephew, Sylvester, do the spoken word introduction to the band’s new record. Predictably, the severity of his speech impediment leads repeatedly to the breakdown of the performance. Ironically, even when we do hear the band pull off a complete performance of the song, a technical glitch with the recording equipment precludes the music from finding its way to some fixed form. Later, on an even more meta-level, Wilson dramatizes this same dynamic in the play’s closing scene, by not staging the “clean” take of the music that makes it onto the final record. Instead, the characters merely speak about a dramatic moment that has been neatly excised. Wilson’s instructions for the play’s staging help restate this open-­ endedness in spatial terms. On one level, the physical setting presents the appearance of bifurcation, separating between the “band room,” where the black musicians practice and converse, and the “studio,” where the music is ultimately confined to the fixity of the finished record. Superficially, this division of areas might impel a whole host of easy oppositions—­between, say, the black space of the musicians’ private rehearsal and the white space of economic exploitation by producers ­I rvin and Stuyvesant, or the space of unfettered improvisation and “true” artistic exploration versus the space where that expression is corrupted into a lowly form for popular consumption. I would argue, on the other hand, that Wilson’s fluid view of history and his ongoing critique of the stable precepts of Western thought urge us to read this space and its

246  Michael Borshuk juxtapositions for its simultaneity and not its discreteness. Black modernism emerges, the play reminds us, in the space of performance as process, both within and against the contexts of white voyeurism, economic exploitation, and individual aspiration. Indeed, the broader effect of Wilson’s musical presentation across all of these components is to liberate any understanding of black modernism itself from absolute definitions and from presumed temporal boundaries. In this, Wilson anticipates Houston Baker’s conceptualization of “renaissancism” as an alternate name for modernism, marking a tradition that began in the Harlem Renaissance but continued in more fluid terms ever after. As Baker writes, “renaissancism” connotes something quite removed from a single, exotic set of “failed” high jinks confined to less than a decade. It signals in fact a resonantly and continuously productive set of tactics, strategies, and syllables that takes form at the turn of the century and extends to our own day. 23 On a broader level, Wilson’s liberated sense of time and his appeals to cultural Africanness also anticipate modernism’s critical reformulation as articulated provocatively by Susan Stanford Friedman. “Like the modernity of which it is a part,” Friedman writes, modernism is also multiple, polycentric, relational, and recurrent. Modernism… is not a single aesthetic period, a movement, or a style. Instead, the creative expressivities in all media constitute the modernisms of given modernities—on a planetary scale, across time, in the longue durée.24 Wilson’s black modernist art is not teleological, ever progressing to some later, refined end, but communal and synchronous across clock and calendar time. Or, as Benston suggests, the importance of the vernacular is the vernacular itself: “a vibrant element of black modernist practice, not merely a funding source of tales, tropes, and tricks from which ‘real art’ draws its inspiration.”25 In many ways, the restless trumpeter Levee—described in his first entrance as a figure of “intelligent buffoonery, clearly calculated to shift control of the situation to where he can grasp it”—embodies Wilson’s competitive modernist impulses (15). Younger than the other musicians who have toured with Ma Rainey for some time, Levee brings together in one volatile whole many of the disparate historical contexts and aesthetic imperatives bearing on black modernism’s self-definition in the 1920s. For one, he is a jazz-leaning improviser, intent on separating out his own voice from the rest of the group’s folk collective sound, a style he dismisses early on in the play as “old jug-band music” (17). In this, the

“The Blues Always Been Here”  247 trumpeter evokes a significant transition already underway in African American music by this point in the decade, when Louis Armstrong’s virtuosic contributions to the improviser’s lexicon heralded, in historian Ted Gioia’s words, “the new Age of the Soloist.”26 As Gioia explains of Armstrong’s work with his Hot Fives and Sevens groups, all recorded between 1925 and 1928: “It was a rare, felicitous instance of an artist facing a defining moment in a career, and in the process of self-­discovery also crystallizing a turning point for an entire art form.”27 Gioia’s amplified praise reflects a critical consensus to which music historians arrived in the closing decades of the twentieth century. 28 For my purposes, these late-century panegyrics are especially important for the rhetorical pivot they ultimately provided to close the gap in academic discourse between canonical modernism and black musical practice of the 1920s and beyond. That is, Armstrong’s ushering in a soloist’s age made the improviser’s ability to collate vernacular materials within a stylized, individualistic expressive practice a recurring standard for judging the success of black musical performance. In turn then, this practice, defined by Armstrong’s identifiable rhythmic vocabulary and prodigious capacity with musical idioms, offered a bridge to the “remarkably high degree of self-signature” that critics Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane place at the center of modernist expression. 29 Think how tidily the restlessness of jazz improvisation might fit within Daniel Albright’s recent summary of a collective modernist style: Is there a definition of Modernism that might be adequate to all the contradictions and fault lines in this vast artistic movement, or heap of artistic movements? One possibility is this: Modernism is a testing of the limits of aesthetic construction. According to this perspective, the Modernists tried to find the ultimate bounds of certain artistic possibilities. 30 Armstrong and his myriad musical descendants who sought their own signature voices—like the fictional trumpeter Levee in Wilson’s play— implicitly made good on Pound’s famous imperative to “make it new.” Or, as Alfred Appel suggests, “to call Armstrong, [Fats] Waller, et al., ‘modernists’ is to appreciate their procedures as alchemists of the vernacular who have ‘jazzed’ the ordinary and given it new life.”31 Just as the play articulates implicitly, the newness of an emerging jazz vocabulary was consistent with the changing standards for black self-definition central to the New Negro Renaissance. As Sturdyvant asserts in one scene, the day’s session needs to feature music that “jazz[es] it up” and “put[s] in something different,” especially if the record is to have any appeal to the customers up in Harlem (11). Furthermore, Levee voices the intersection of these various modernist contexts when he articulates the stakes of his musical ambitions. Separating himself from the mercenary

248  Michael Borshuk mindset and subordinate identity of his fellow bandmates, Levee exclaims at one point: “That ain’t what I’m talking about, nigger. [i.e. playing merely for money] I’m talking about art!” (17). But as Wilson’s play reminds us, black musicians’ movement from the vernacular margins to the modernist center did not come without controversy, and their search for validation from white and black evaluators alike was not immediately successful. Instead, the narrative offers several moments of conflict in which Levee campaigns for affirmation: to have his arrangement of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” be the version of the song the group commits to record, to have his own compositions recorded under his own name by the white record producers, or to be recognized as a singular musical talent by the veteran artists among whom he works. When the young trumpeter, out of frustration, tries to impose his improvisatory will on the older musical arrangement Ma Rainey chooses for the session, she calls him out for it. Levee may see himself as a forward-thinking “alchemist of the vernacular” (to use ­Appel’s words), but Ma excoriates him for “play[ing] ten notes for every one [he] supposed to play” (83). Whereas the individualistic aesthetic ­L evee favors will later become the nexus between various strands of modernist expression, the historical moment of this confrontation as Wilson dramatizes it is much less agreeable. This is especially so since Levee’s aesthetic violates the vernacular ethos and its preservation of a communal past to which the others (and Wilson himself presumably) assent. As the trombonist and guitarist Cutler scolds, “it ain’t about your music. It’s about Ma’s music” (84, original emphasis). And yet, lest Levee come across as a misunderstood hero whose views we are meant to endorse, Wilson also shows how the trumpeter confuses superficial aspects of modern urban life with the transformational rhetoric central to the Great Migration and the New Negro Renaissance. In “The New Negro,” Locke describes the seismic demographic shift from rural Southern to urban Northern among African Americans in the early twentieth century as evidencing a host of assertive changes in black subjectivity and possibility, all imagined from within. Locke writes: “The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize… a chance for the improvement of conditions.”32 Ultimately, this shift, which Locke aligns in his text with evolutionary changes in African American culture and the awakening of a new black identity, constitutes a collective movement from “medieval America to modern.”33 However, in Wilson’s play, Levee sees only the surfaces of these profound changes. The freedom to which he aspires is mostly material, and the validation he seeks is largely the passing praise of celebrity. He is relentlessly (and often misguidedly) ego-driven. As Wilson tells us in Levee’s opening description: “He plays wrong notes frequently. He often gets his skill and talent confused with

“The Blues Always Been Here”  249 each other” (15). When Cutler undermines Levee’s talk of art, the trumpeter responds with a dig at the other musician’s anonymity: “What is you? I don’t see your name in lights” (17). Throughout the play, ­L evee measures his self-worth through the empty symbol of the expensive shoes he purchased the morning of the recording session.34 In fact, Levee’s shoes become the unlikely impetus for the cataclysmic bloodshed of the play’s finale, when Wilson pushes his varied definitions of black modernism to an explosion of real violence. As the plot winds down, Levee confronts the failure of his own ambition when Sturdyvant reneges on an earlier promise to let the trumpeter record his own material in a session under his name. Instead, the producer—insisting there’s no great market for Levee’s work—buys the rights to the compositions on the cheap. In the moment that follows this defeat, Toledo accidentally steps on Levee’s shoe, spurring the young trumpeter to a murderous rage that sees him stab the other musician as the play draws to a tumultuous close. This instance of climactic violence—a recurring trope in Wilson’s plays over the course of his eventual century cycle—underscores which version of black modernism the playwright ultimately endorses. That is, Wilson warns against privileging the dominant ethos of the period (individualistic, material, totalizing) through the cautionary example of the play’s tragic end, when the “imitation white man” is so compelled by his insecurity that he destroys his “African” counterpart. In this bloody resolution to the problem of radical uncertainty, Wilson argues that the most dangerous uncertainty for the modern black subject is that which lies within. Levee’s primary failure is his inability to learn from the music that he has too hastily tried to subsume to his own mastery and ownership in purely callous terms. Imagining himself as a black representative for modern culture, Levee leans too heavily on the shallow markings of his own movement forward into contemporary life. The young trumpeter seems unable to understand, as Ma tells us earlier, that the “blues always been here” and that that black music—as “white folks don’t understand”—is “a way of understanding life.” Instead, ­Levee has lost his way in the swirling currents around him, falling victim to the varied chaos that he might otherwise confront through the aesthetic means offered by a musical tradition.

Notes 1 Frank Rich, “Theater: ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,’” The New York Times 11 April 1984. Wilson developed the play at the (Eugene) O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, and it was there that Rich first encountered it, as he recalls in his foreword to a recent edition of the text (vii–viii). While his comparison of Wilson’s work to O’Neill’s is vaguely apt in that context, it is otherwise ironic given how much Wilson has tried to distance himself from the theatrical canon. As he says in one interview, when I started writing plays in earnest in 1979, I had not read the body of western theatre that is Ibsen and Chekhov and Shaw and Shakespeare

250  Michael Borshuk and O’Neill and Williams. I had read Ed Bullins and Baraka and the black playwrights of the sixties, but I thought, I do not want to go back and read all of the ones I have not read because I will just do it my way—I will just say this is my idea of a play. See Frank Rich, “Foreword,” in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson (New York: Theater Communications Group, 2007), vii–viii, and Wilson quoted in Vera Sheppard, “August Wilson: An Interview,” in Conversations with August Wilson, eds. Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 103. 2 For example, Cary D. Wintz labels the Harlem Renaissance “primarily a literary and intellectual movement,” and “basically a psychology—a state of mind or an attitude—shared by a number of black writers and intellectuals who centered their activities around Harlem in the late 1920s and early 1930s.” Similarly, Stephen Watson calls the Renaissance “the first self–­conscious black literary constellation in American history.” See Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988), 1–2, and Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of ­African-American Culture 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 9. 3 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” [1926], in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 59. 4 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill, 1993), 223. 5 James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Da Capo, 1991). 6 Quoted in Sheppard, “August Wilson,” 110. 7 Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2–5. 8 Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly 39.1 (1987), 8. 9 August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007), 4. Hereafter cited in text. 10 Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 15. 11 Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 93 (original emphasis). 12 Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-­ American Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 2. 13 David Savran, “August Wilson,” in Conversations, ed. Bryer and Hartig, 25. 14 August Wilson, The Ground on Which I Stand (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 12–13 and 20–21. 15 Quoted in Abiolo Sinclair, “Black Aesthetic: A Conversation with Playwright August Wilson,” in Conversations, eds. Bryer and Hartig, 94. 16 Quoted in Kim Powers, “An Interview with August Wilson,” in Conversations, eds. Bryer and Hartig, 5. 17 Two statements from Larry Neal, key theorist of the Black Arts Movement, help elucidate my concise summary of the movement’s emphasis on breaking from white supremacist aesthetic standards and moving toward the self-­ validating criteria of black performance. In the 1968 essay “The Black Arts Movement,” Neal announces forcefully, “the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology.” See Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 184. In

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18 19 20

21

the afterword to Black Fire, published that same year, Neal asserts: “the poet must become a performer, the way James Brown is a performer—loud, gaudy and racy.” See Larry Neal, “And Shine Swam On,” in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, eds. Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal (New York: Harper, 1968), 655. Geoffrey Jacques, A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, ­African American Imaginary (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 120. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-­ American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 90. To elaborate on these points, for example, consider the dramatic moment when Toledo overhears Slow Drag appeal to Cutler to share his marijuana, based on the argument that both men have “done laughed together, fought together, slept in the same bed together, [and] done sucked on the same titty.” Of the last remark, Toledo opines that it is an “African conceptualization” to “name the gods or call on the ancestors to achieve whatever your desires are.” Levee, completely misunderstanding Toledo’s cultural or philosophical uses of “African,” quips “I know he ain’t talking about me. You don’t see me running around in no jungle with no bone between my nose” (22). Toledo implicitly echoes Wilson’s own emphasis on the relationship between Africanness and historical narrative in many remarks outside of his dramatic works. For example:

[t]he history of blacks in America has not been written by blacks. And whites, of course, have a different attitude, a different relationship to the history. Writing our own history has been a very valuable tool, because if we’re going to be pointed toward a future, we must know our past. This is so basic and simple; yet it’s a thing that Africans in America disregard. Or: The whole [African] philosophical system is different. For instance, ­Europeans look at man as apart from the world. In African sensibility, man is a part of the world. That’s a very basic philosophical difference which influences how you think, how you live, how you respond to the world around you. Quoted in, respectively, Savran, “August Wilson,” 27, and Dinah ­Livingston, “Cool August: Mr. Wilson’s Red-Hot Blues,” in Conversations, eds. Breyer and Hartig, 57. 22 Quoted in Bill Moyers, “August Wilson: Playwright,” in Conversations, eds. Bryer and Hartig, 71. 23 Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 91–92. 24 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 4. 25 Benston, Performing Blackness, 18. 26 Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 53. 27 Gioia, The History of Jazz, 57. 28 Consider, for example, Gary Giddins’s suggestion that if Armstrong’s career had ceased after these records, “he would still be regarded as the single most creative and innovative force in jazz history,” (61); or James Lincoln Collier’s declaration that “by the time he was twenty-eight [­A rmstrong] had made a series of records that not only changed the course of jazz history, and therefore the history of Western music as well, but remains one of the greatest achievements in jazz.” See, respectively, Gary Giddins,

252  Michael Borshuk

29 30 31 32 33 34

Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong (New York: Da Capo, 2011), 61, and James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (New York: Dell, 1979), 141. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, eds. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (New York: Penguin, 1991), 29. Daniel Albright, Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872–1927 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 5 (emphasis in original). Alfred Appel, Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New York: Knopf, 2002), 13. Locke, “The New Negro,” 6. Ibid. Levee’s focus on these shoes emphasizes the distance he marks between himself as representative New Negro and the older, backwards-looking images of black identity. This is evident, for instance, when he mocks Toledo’s footwear: “Nigger got them clodhoppers. Old brogans! He ain’t nothing but a sharecropper!” (29).

16 The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett Thomas Mansell

“Only now, after so much has been written about Beckett, has a book on the significance of music in his work been prepared by Mary Bryden,”1 wrote James Knowlson in his authorized biography of 1996. Both that work, Samuel Beckett and Music (1998), 2 and Samuel Beckett and the Arts (1999), edited by Lois Oppenheim, 3 were part of the “interdisciplinary expansion of Beckett studies”4 since his death in 1989, and also of a wider “interdisciplinary turn”5 in cultural studies more generally. The pages that follow will explore the extent to which Beckett-and-­music criticism has been shaped by a particular notion of music as a formal ideal, before addressing a subject little acknowledged even now: the role of music in the construction of our very idea of “Beckett.” Knowlson’s own summary of the significance of music for Beckett, and for his writing, runs as follows: Music was a constant and important ingredient in Beckett’s life. His early writing contained many witty allusions to music or musical form […]. But, later in his career, he was to use music directly in a number of his plays. Indirectly, he was to draw on his knowledge of musical techniques and terminology, reshaping musical structures and working with repetition and repetition with variation, counterpoint, changes of key, rhythm, tempo and pitch. The debt is a subtle one and the affinities and transpositions made are hardly ever self-evident.6 The allusions cited by Knowlson come from Beckett’s earliest works, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) and More Pricks Than Kicks (1934).7 Of Beckett’s direct use of music in his plays, Knowlson mentions the songs and tunes in Waiting for Godot (1953) and Happy Days (1961), the snatches of Schubert in All That Fall (1957) and Nacht und Träume (1982), and of Beethoven in Ghost Trio (1975).8 In studies of Beckett’s prose, too, critics at first focused on the more explicit instances of music in Watt (1953) and in Murphy (1938).9

254  Thomas Mansell As both Knowlson and Kevin Branigan implicitly warn, the “indirect” field is virtually (and dangerously) limitless: […] while this musical approach to [Beckett’s] works has been emphasised, less attention has been paid to exactly what this means. The term musical is simply too vague a description of Beckett’s ­artistic approach. After all, diverse playwrights such as Racine, Beaumarchais and Shaw have been also noted for the musicality of their works, yet their musical attunement bears little similarity to that of Beckett.10 Beckett has been compared with composers as diverse as Bach,11 Schubert,12 Wagner,13 Webern,14 Hindemith,15 Messaien and Shostakovich,16 John Cage,17 Morton Feldman,18 Hans Holliger,19 Steve Reich, 20 Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen, 21 and György Kurtág 22 —an exhausting but inexhaustive list—and the collections edited by Bryden and Oppenheim were notable for their considerations of and contributions from contemporary composers, including (in addition to Cage, Feldman, Holliger, and Kurtág) Clarence Barlow, ­Luciano ­Berio, Jean-Yves Bosseur, Melanie Daiken, Wolfgang Fortner, Philip Glass, Earl Kim, Giacomo Manzoni, Marcel Mihalovici, Roger ­Reynolds, and Humphrey Searle. 23 Even allowing for the diversity within Beckett’s multi-media oeuvre created over several decades, one wonders what function such musical comparisons serve. What does music offer ­Beckett—and Beckett scholars—that cannot be found elsewhere? If anything, the risks of “the musical approach” are only exacerbated when critics seek to be more precise. Following Hannah Case Copeland’s suggestion that Beckett’s “ideal [is] exemplified by musical form,”24 scholars have found structural parallels between, among others, Molloy (1951) and “the developing variation,”25 Endgame (1957) and both ­sonata form 26 and serialism, 27 How It Is (1961) and sonata form, 28 and “Ping” (1967) and Sprechgesang 29 and serialism.30 In The Musicalization of Fiction, Werner Wolf develops his point. If music, or an aspect of music, is a plausible correlative of Beckett’s text with its clear predominance of form over content, it is music as a “pure form”. In fact, among the possible functions of the musical quality of “Ping”, to support an a-mimetic, self-referential formalism is perhaps the most important one. 31 Although Wolf admits that “Beckett had probably never intended actually to write a piece of musicalized prose” and that “‘Ping’ may not [even] be an unquestionable example of musicalization,”32 there is little sense of what a limit-case “Ping” is, both for Beckett and beyond, and it plays a significant part in Wolf’s larger argument about postmodernism.

The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett  255 If Beckett’s ideal be exemplified by musical form, then, it seems, Beckett himself becomes an ideal of this kind of formal artistry. Some critics are more aware than others of the subtle nature of the ­“affinities and transpositions” between Beckett’s work and music— but, despite significant chapters in works by Eric Prieto33 and ­Daniel Albright34 and consistently excellent contributions to the field by ­Catherine Laws, 35 to date only one full-length monograph on Beckett and music has been published, by Franz Michael Maier. 36 Its three-part, broadly chronological structure—on Proust, on Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and on everything else (novels, radio plays, stage plays, and works for television)—reveals the extent to which it exists quite comfortably within the terms outlined by Knowlson a decade earlier. As Maier states, Beckett’s familiarity with the world of music “stems from his childhood, when he received music lessons and learned how to play the piano”37; and, as Mary Bryden emphasized, “[p]laying the piano was for Beckett not a schoolboy occupation later abandoned, but a lifelong enthusiasm.”38 Beckett was considered by those who knew him to be “a competent pianist,”39 “quite a good pianist,”40 and even “a very brilliant musician”41; in a somewhat backhanded compliment, John Calder wrote that “[t]hose who have seen him at the piano know that he was as consummate a musician as someone who never practised could be.”42 “Musically talented himself and coming from a family background including several professional musicians,”43 Beckett also married a musician: ­Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil studied at the École Normale de musique, did some piano teaching during the Second World War,44 and published a book on piano tuition.45 To the question “what did he know about music anyway?”46 Knowlson’s biography provides ample evidence47—hence his mild surprise that it was “only” in what would have been Beckett’s nineteenth year that scholars got around to addressing the subject of “Beckett and music” in any kind of concerted way. However, as we shall see, the significance of music to Beckett had long been something of a truism. One might also note the latent contradiction in the Critique of Beckett Criticism’s assessment in 1994 that “‘Beckett and music’ is an untilled field, although it is generally recognised that Beckett’s later works are composed almost like musical works.”48 How is it that something could be both unduly neglected and widely acknowledged? Answering this involves a consideration of the crucial role that music played in Beckett’s critical reception. Beckett’s elevation to literary superstardom—thanks to En attendant Godot, which premiered in 195349 —was belated and sudden, and it soon became apparent that one was dealing with a body of work (and an author) seemingly determined to resist traditional modes of interpretation. In the decade that followed, this soon-to-be famously reclusive man could not have constructed a more perfect public profile had he tried, 50 his rare interviews and reluctantly published letters acquiring instant

256  Thomas Mansell canonical status. As Israel Shenker found, interviewing Beckett for the New York Times in 1956, Beckett is in no mood to offer explanations. He insists he has never been interviewed, and refers those who want his views to the works he has published.51 Beckett would give similar non-answers in subsequent influential interviews, 52 and, as Steven Connor has commented, [Beckett’s] very silence on interpretative matters has become a c­ rucial term in the system of critical values which mediates his work, and Beckett’s withdrawals from interpretation are reproduced, circulated and interpreted as feverishly as anything else in his writing. 53 These withdrawals had the paradoxical effect of at once establishing the superfluity of all such comment and of instilling the notion that such autonomy was something it shared with music. Perhaps the most memorable instance of what I mean is the way that Beckett’s statement “[m]y work is a matter of fundamental sounds,”54 from a letter to Alan Schneider, soon became something of a critical touchstone—never mind the fact that the separation it seeks to impose between “fundamental sounds” and “overtones” is impossible in all but the most artificial of settings.55 Another example comes from Roger Blin’s memories of working with Beckett on his next play Fin de partie, in 1957. At first, he looked on his play as a kind of musical score. When a word occurred or was repeated, when Hamm called Clov, Clov should always come in the same way every time, like a musical phrase coming from the same instrument with the same volume. 56 Although Blin was “one of the few directors who have balanced an admiration for the author’s musical intentions with an independence of mind concerning the interpretation of the text,”57 here he seems to play along with a couple of (dubious) assumptions: first, that the notational system of music is more precise than that of language and the translation from text/score to performance consequently less problematic and, second, that invariable repetition is the rule in music, rather than the exception.58 With each retelling, what began as a questionable analogy edges towards incontestable truth: Jonathan Kalb introduces the same quotation with the gloss “Beckett also sees his plays musically, and Roger Blin says this was true from the start of his practical work in the theatre.”59 What Blin described as Beckett’s initial, idiosyncratic, and possibly temporary perspective on a particular play has informed to a disproportionate degree our notions of both Beckett and of music.

The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett  257 Having “refer[red] those who want his views to the works he has ­ ublished”60 in his first interview, Beckett and his representatives p duly increased their number by reprinting long-neglected works, such as Proust (1930, published 1931) in 1965.61 The American composer ­Morton Feldman (for whom Beckett wrote neither [1976]) claimed to have “learned a lot about Beckett by reading his very early study on Proust,”62 and it just so happened to contain in its closing pages ­B eckett’s “only extended assessment of what music might mean.”63 There, Beckett had written that the […] essential quality of music is distorted by the listener who, being an impure subject, insists on giving a figure to that which is ideal and invisible, on incarnating the Idea in what he conceives to be an appropriate paradigm […]64 and that “the beautiful convention of the ‘da capo’” is […] testimony to the intimate and ineffable nature of an art that is perfectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable.65 Critics explain that this passage is strongly influenced by Beckett’s reading of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, and Eric Prieto states that “[a]ny study of music in Beckett must begin where Beckett does, with Schopenhauer.”66 However, as Prieto himself has commented, Beckett’s précis is either “an intentional divergence from Schopenhauer or a slip.”67 Perhaps also, now that Beckett’s letters have been published, more weight will be given to the somewhat less “flashy” and “philosophical”68 verdict Beckett volunteered to his friend Thomas MacGreevy at the time: “[Schopenhauer’s] chapter in Will + Representation on music is amusing […].”69 Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote that “[n] o one has ever harbored loftier notions of autonomous musical reality than Schopenhauer”70; any attribution to Beckett of even higherfalutin ideals must be tempered with his awareness of some of the absurdities of such a position. Another early work that has arguably had a disproportionate impact on Beckett’s critical reception (particularly in reinforcing the increasingly important metaphor of music) is Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932). Selected scholars were alerted to the existence of a first, unpublished novel in the 1960s: John Fletcher was given what he only later realized was the sole manuscript,71 and Lawrence Harvey made extensive use of it in Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (1970).72 In 1983, Beckett allowed eight passages from the novel to be included in Ruby Cohn’s edition of his Disjecta 73: all concerned the aesthetic aspirations and disappointments of either the hero, Belacqua, or the unnamed narrator, and six of them gave a prominent role to music. While some scholars

258  Thomas Mansell set to work identifying sources,74 others seized on what they took to be “Beckettian ideals.”75 Even after readers were furnished with the full context (by the novel’s posthumous publication in 1992), it was tempting to ignore the ironic notes: […] Beckett hardly wavered from what Belacqua said to the ­ andarin, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, about Rimbaud M and Beethoven […] Belacqua then muses about writing the book that Beckett wrote over and over […]76 True, there are similarities between Belacqua’s mode of expression and Beckett’s in his letter of July 9, 1937 to Axel Kaun—also included among his Disjecta 77—but Belacqua’s “rhapsodic digression[s]” are “gently ­deflated by the narrator’s worldly irony,”78 and Belacqua himself “mocks his own intentions.”79 Oppenheim is surely right to caution that comparable passages in Dream were written “tongue in cheek”;80 and while Maier writes that “music plays the role of a paradigm for (1) the narrator, (2) Belacqua, and (3) the voices,”81 he does not include Beckett himself in that number. Music was already a popular metaphor among Beckett’s critics, but by the end of the 1960s, it had become virtually indispensable. Reporting from the American premiere of Happy Days in 1961, Howard Taubman of the New York Times wrote that “Samuel Beckett has composed a song of rue that will haunt the inner ear long after you have heard it […] Mr Beckett’s threnody is grim, but in its muted, tremulous way it shimmers with beauty.”82 And although Harold Hobson did not mention music in his original review of the London premiere of Waiting For Godot (1955),83 when contributing a piece to the Festschrift marking Beckett’s sixtieth birthday (1966), he wrote that it showed “that the drama approximates, or can approximate, to the condition of music,84 touching chords deeper than can be reached by reason, and saying things beyond the grasp of logic.”85 Such abstract praise culminated in Beckett’s being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, where his writing was described as “ris[ing] […] like a miserere from all mankind, its muffled minor key sounding liberation to the oppressed, and comfort to those in need.”86 That same year, Beckett remarked (in another rare interview), I think perhaps I have freed myself from certain formal concepts. Perhaps, like the composer Schönberg or the painter Kandinsky, I have turned toward an abstract language. Unlike them, however, I have tried not to concretise the abstraction—not to give it yet ­another formal context.87 Daniel Albright, however, has professed himself “not sure […] that ­B eckett appreciated the full complexity of his, and Schoenberg’s, difficulties in these matters”88: beyond modesty, Beckett’s double “perhaps” may

The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett  259 indicate an uneasy awareness that both Schoenberg and Kandinsky had also tried to avoid precisely that.89 Indeed, one could argue that, for both Beckett and Beckettians, the abstraction has been concretised and given another formal context in the ubiquitous metaphor of music— that music itself has become, in Beckett studies and perhaps beyond, the ­“figure [of] that which is ideal and invisible.” The titles of Beckett’s post-famous works frequently allude more-­ or-less explicitly to music—which is perhaps surprising, given that “Beckett had no doubt seen such metaphors around”90 in his youth, and that (as Dougald McMillan suggested) the practice was possibly mocked in Finnegans Wake.91 Though the first of what were to become known as the Textes pour rien was begun in 1951,92 the subtle (and sometimes misunderstood93) musical allusion of their collective title was settled on after the succès de scandale of Godot. The Act[s] Without Words (I [1955] and II [1959]) were obviously intended to make one think of Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Wörte (1829–45)—but then so were Paul Verlaine’s Romances sans Paroles (1874), to which ­B eckett’s mimes presumably also allude. In any case, why should alluding to music automatically be interpreted as a step towards abstraction? Richard Leppert describes the Songs Without Words as “solo piano pieces ‘about’ night, dreams, memory, regret, lost happiness, leaving, returning, spring, spinning, and death,”94 the inverted commas indicating how Mendelssohn’s pieces in fact hover indeterminately between the supposedly distinct realms of abstract and programme music.95 Ghost Trio (1975) offers a similar example, its purported abstraction achieved with reference to (and use of) a piece of absolute music, the impressionistic suggestions of which were strong enough to earn it that programmatic nickname in the first place. Beethoven scholar Barry Cooper writes that “[t]here is evidence that Beethoven sometimes when composing had in mind an extramusical idea not expressed in the final score,” but that (fortunately for the ideal of absolute music) “in many cases the extramusical idea probably provided no more than an initial stimulus for one musical idea, rather than a definite programme for a whole work.”96 In certain works, Beckett’s extraliterary idea (music) is all too clearly expressed in the text, providing a paradoxically abstract programme. In Beckett’s Dantes, Daniela Caselli observes that “Dante’s love of music is part of the nobility of soul that necessarily characterizes any auctor.”97 One could argue that music has played a similar role in the construction of Beckettian authority. Beckett loved music, so anyone who truly loves Beckett must also (so the necessarily unspoken argument presumably runs) love music too. The appeal to music does not guarantee a favorable reaction, however: take Jonathan Kalb’s discussion of JoAnne Akalaitis’s infamous 1984 production of Endgame: Just as one need not be an exceptionally profound or experienced observer to see that Serban’s Happy Days (or Asmus’ Godot, or

260  Thomas Mansell Schneider’s Ohio Impromptu, etc.) functions as music, one need not look very deeply into Akalaitis’ Endgame (or Palitzsch’s, or Kiefer’s, or Gregory’s, or Ciulli’s Glückliche Tage, etc.) to see that it does not, despite her use of actual music and her assertion that “a good handle into Beckett is the rhythm.”98 The claim to a truly musical appreciation of Beckett’s music is unchallengeable, but by the same token unverifiable. Another instance of the same hermetic metaphor was director and writer Neil Jordan’s appearance on the radio program “Private Passions” in 2005.99 Having commented “I don’t know anybody who claims not to relate to music in some way,” Jordan said that personally, “it’s the abstraction that I love about it”: […] the great lesson is the abstract pleasure that a piece of music can give you, you know, because… It seems like a condition that what you’re doing should aspire to, really, I know I’m quoting somebody there, but it does seem like that sometimes… It is possible to wear one’s learning a little too lightly—or have Walter Pater’s words become simply too well known to merit attribution?100 ­Jordan’s first musical selection was Schubert’s song “Nacht und Träume” (D.827), a choice vindicated by his host’s description of it as “one of the greatest songs ever written,” “an absolutely perfect creation.” After the song (as recorded by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore), ­Jordan commented, “I think Samuel Beckett was obsessed with Schubert, wasn’t he; this was one of his particular obsessions, wasn’t it,” thus exposing the curiously circular logic at play. Any skepticism about Beckett’s musical tastes and opinions is usually overridden by the knowledge that, as we have seen, and unlike some of the other authors featured in this volume, Beckett was himself a practicing musician. However, far from confirming his notions of music, this fact should encourage us to question them. A musician’s experience of music is often quite different to a non-musician’s idea of it; indeed, I would argue that it is in precisely this awareness of the inevitable gap between ideal and realization that being a musician consists. During rehearsals of Footfalls in 1976, Beckett confided to “the equally musical Rose Hill” that “[w]e are not doing this play realistically or psychologically; we are doing it musically”101—but on some level, both knew that music, psychology, and realism are not mutually exclusive realms. If, as Beckett told Katharine Worth after hearing her production of Words and Music,102 “Music always wins,”103 then why? Why is that interesting? And what game is being played anyway? If at times of frustration Beckett “would retire to the piano, and play, I think for solace and for relief,”104 then were there not also times when piano-playing caused or exacerbated his frustration rather than relieved it? Music

The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett  261 might well have “always been for him the art form that came closest to pure spirit”105 —a phrase that Beckett himself used106 —but why, as Mary Bryden glossed, is “‘pure spirit’ […] pure praise,”107 especially coming from a writer who, perhaps more than any other, is notable for “the persistence with which [he] grounds subjectivity firmly within a material context”?108 Music has often been played as a kind of trump card, prohibiting a­ nalysis for “intimate and ineffable” reasons—for me, however, such moments indicate precisely the areas worthy of further investigation. There have been occasional moments of dissent from the ideal music prevailing in Beckett studies: Nicholas Zurbrugg notes how in Proust and in Dream, Beckett “characteriz[ed] music as a source of irritation rather than as a source of revelation”109 (though attributing this to a willful kind of “incredulity” on Beckett’s part), and Daniel Albright writes that although “Beckett occasionally indulged in slight sentimentalization of music, […] at other times he knew that music is just as fallen as any other form of art.”110 However, in general, music, no less than Dante, […] is a strange object in Beckett studies; it stands out and stands for Beckett’s greatness and isolation. This single object breaks the disquieting impersonality of the setting; it evokes a nostalgia for times gone by, and it confirms the intellectual rigour of the author.111 Musico-literary criticism might be in a relatively early stage of its development, and to have come surprisingly late to Beckett—but Beckett himself is an archetypically late-comer to modernism, who self-consciously steered himself in certain directions as a result of what was already in train. Without wishing to claim that Beckett was deliberately using music to evade critical questions or to enhance his own literary reputation, that has often been the effect of music in the reception of his works. Too narrow a conception of “music,” too craven an adoration of its supposed ideal abstraction, risks a “musicalization” of Beckett that is also a ­marginalization. Andrew Bowie has written that “[o]nce we understand music as part of our being in the world its connections to other aspects of that being cease to be so mysterious;”112 similarly, the time has come for Beckett-and-­music studies to be reintegrated into the whole of which it is part.

Notes 1 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 740 n132. 2 Mary Bryden, ed., Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 3 Lois Oppenheim, ed., Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media (London and New York: Garland Publishing, 1999).

262  Thomas Mansell 4 Russell Smith, “‘Someone’ (The Other Beckett),” Journal of Beckett Studies, 10.1/2 (2000), 12. 5 Gerry Smyth, Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the Novel (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 4. 6 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 193 (my emphases). 7 See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 193 and 740 n130. 8 See Knowlson, Damned, to Fame, 740 n131. H. Porter Abbott notes, ­f urther, how “[m]usic is figured into the scripts of All That Fall, Embers, Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Träume and itself becomes one of the dramatis personae in the radio plays Words and Music and Cascando.” See H. Porter Abbott, “Samuel Beckett and the Arts of Time: Painting, Music, Narrative” in Samuel Beckett and the Arts, 8. 9 See Sidney Warhaft, “Threne and Theme in Watt,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 4 (1963); Susan Field Senneff, “Song and Music in Samuel Beckett’s Watt,” Modern Fiction Studies10 (1964); Eric Park, “Fundamental Sounds: Music in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Watt,” Modern Fiction Studies 21.2 (1975); Heath Lees, “‘Watt’: Music, Tuning and Tonality,” Journal of Beckett Studies 9 (1983), reprinted in S. E. ­Gontarski, ed., The Beckett Studies Reader (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993). 10 Kevin Branigan, Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 218. 11 See Hugh Kenner, The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1974 [1962]), 98; and ­A nthony Minghella in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 280. 12 See Billie Whitelaw in Mel Gussow, Conversations with (and about) ­Beckett (London: Nick Hern Books, 1996), 87; Peter Szendy, “End Games,” in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Bryden, 119; Branigan, Radio Beckett, 71 and 83–107. 13 See John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder, 2001), 87, 88, 91, 148. 14 See Harry White, “‘Something is Taking its Course’: Dramatic Exactitude and the Paradigm of Serialism in Samuel Beckett,” in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Bryden, 166. 15 J. E. Dearlove, “Composing in the Face of Chaos: Paul Hindemith and Samuel Beckett,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 15.3 (1982). 16 See Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, 75. 17 See Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (London: Calder, 1962 [1961]), 86; Paul Sheehan, “‘Nothing Is More Real’: Experiencing Theory in the Texts for Nothing,” in Other Becketts, eds. Caselli et al. ­(Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2002), 91; Deborah Weagel, ­“Silence in John Cage and Samuel Beckett: 4’ 33” and Waiting for Godot,” in Pastiches, Parodies & Other Imitations, eds. Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts, and Sjef Houppermans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002); Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 144; and Branigan, Radio Beckett, 68. 18 See several essays by Catherine Laws, including “Morton Feldman’s Neither: A Musical Translation of Beckett’s Text”, in Bryden, Samuel Beckett and Music; “Music in Words and Music: Feldman’s Response to ­B eckett’s Play,” in Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000, eds. Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002); and “Beckett—­ Feldman—John,s” in Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, eds. Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett  263 19 Anne Rey, “Holliger dans les Silences de Beckett,” Le Monde, 30 October 1991, 18. 20 Eric Prieto, “Caves: Technology and the Total Artwork in Reich’s The Cave and Beckett’s Ghost Trio,” Mosaic 35.1 (2002). 21 Mary Catanzaro, “Musical Form and Beckett’s Lessness,” Notes on Modern Irish Literature 4 (1992); see also her “Song and Improvisation in Lessness,” in Beckett in the 1990s: Selected papers from the Second International ­Beckett Symposium held in The Hague, 8–12 April, 1992, eds. Marius ­Buning and Lois Oppenheim (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993). ­Catherine Laws subsequently criticized the essay’s “sweeping over-simplification of musical ideas.” See Catherine Laws, “The Music of Beckett’s Theatre,” in Three ­Dialogues Revisited, eds. Marius Buning et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 124. 22 Catherine Laws, “Beckett and Kurtág,” in Historicising Beckett/Issues of Performance, eds. Marius Buning et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). Of the other composers who have been inspired by Beckett, Laws mentions Barry Guy, Earl Kim, Roger Marsh, Bernard Rands, Roger ­Reynolds, and Mark Anthony Turnage. See Catherine Laws, “Richard Barrett’s ne songe plus a fuir: Beckett in Musical Translation?” in Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines, eds. Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts, and Sjef Houppermans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); and “Morton Feldman’s ­Neither,” 57. 23 Daniel Albright argues that such composers “have not only created fascinating musical analogues to Beckett’s compositional strategies, but have […] made possible certain understandings of Beckett’s aesthetic that would never have come to pass without their sonorous realizations”; see Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27; however, Eric Griffiths worried that Samuel Beckett and Music “is more concerned with what Beckett has meant to some recent musicians than with what music meant to Beckett” (see Eric Griffiths, “All That Fond Trash: German Romantic Music and the Acoustics of Beckett’s Writing,” Times Literary Supplement 15 May 1998, 3). 24 See Hannah Case Copeland, Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel Beckett (The Hague: Moulton & Co., 1975), 41. 25 William E. Grim, “The Developing Variation in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy,” Romance Studies 11 (winter 1987), 49–50. 26 See Emmanuel Jacquart, “Beckett et la Forme Sonate,” in Poetry and Other Prose, eds. Matthijs Engelberts, Marius Buning, and Sjef Houppermans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). 27 See Harry White, “‘Something is Taking its Course,’” 162. 28 See Eugene Webb, Samuel Beckett: A Study of His Novels (London: Peter Owen, 1970), 163–66. 29 Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 191. 30 See Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction, 191, and Mary Catanzaro, ­“Samuel Beckett’s Ping and Serialist Music Technique,” in Literature and Music, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). 31 Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction, 194. 32 Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction, 196. 33 See Eric Prieto, Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 155–52. 34 See Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics, 138–56. 35 Catherine Laws, Headaches Among The Overtones: Music in Beckett/ Beckett in Music (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2013). See also notes 18, 21, and 22 above; “The Double Image of Music in Beckett’s Early Fiction,” in Beckett

264  Thomas Mansell and Religion: Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics, eds. Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts, and Onno Kosters (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000); and “­B eckett and Unheard Sound,” in ­Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett, ed. Daniela Caselli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 36 See Franz Michael Maier, Becketts Melodien: Die Musik und die Idee des Zusammenhangs bei Schopenhauer, Proust und Beckett (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006). English readers are directed to his “Two Versions of Nacht und Träume: What Franz Schubert Tells Us About A Favourite Song Of Beckett, in “All Sturm and No Drang”: ­Beckett and Romanticism: Beckett at Reading 2006, eds. Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), and to his “Models of Musical Communication in Proust and Beckett,” in Beckett’s Proust/ Deleuze’s Proust, eds. Mary Bryden and Margaret Topping (New York,: Palgrave ­M acmillan, 2009). 37 Maier, Becketts Melodien, 10 (my translation). 38 Mary Bryden, “Beckett and the Sound of Silence,” in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Bryden, 42. See also Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 191, 546, and 655. Some of the information that follows was also summarized in my “Sam’s Shambles: Beckett’s Piano-Pedalling Technique,” Performance Research 12.1 (2007), 124. 39 Walter Beckett, “Music in the Works of Samuel Beckett”, in Samuel ­Beckett and Music, ed. Bryden, 182. 40 Geoffrey Thompson, speaking on RTÉ in April 1976, as quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 65 (717 n93). 41 Jack MacGowran, as quoted in Gordon, p. 223 n. 8 (in turn q ­ uoting ­Kathleen McGrory and John Unterecker, “Interview with Jack ­MacGowran,” in Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett: New Light on Three Modern Irish ­Writers, ed. Kathleen McGrory and John Unterecker [Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1976], 175). 42 Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, 75. 43 Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 245. 44 See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 296, 325–26, and 366. Anthony Cronin states that Beckett himself “occasionally g[a]ve instruction in the piano to advanced pupils.” See Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 186. 45 Suzanne Dumesnil, Musique Jeux: Pädagogie Moderne: Premiers Contacts de l’Enfant et de la Musique (Paris: H. Lemoine, c. 1935). 46 Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women [1932], eds. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (London: Calder, 1996), 12. 47 See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 24–25, 65, 77, 94–95, and 109. See also Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990 [1978]), 20–21; Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett 1906–1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 10, 11, 27, 34, 64–65, and 223 n8; James and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds., Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett: Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett and Memories of Those Who Knew Him (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 7n, 15, 17–18, 22, 28, 37–39, 41, and 46–47. 48 Rolf Breuer and Werner Huber, in Critique of Beckett Criticism: A Guide to Research in English, French, and German, eds. P. J. Murphy et al. ­(Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), 108 (my emphasis). 49 En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) premiered at the Théâtre de ­Babylone, Paris, on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin.

The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett  265 50 Indeed, the historian Roy Foster “cites Samuel Beckett as an example of how some literary figures can contribute to their own myth-making.” See Brian O’Connell, “What the Dickens? Why biographers don’t always tell the whole story,” The Irish Times, 10 December 2011, 7. 51 Israel Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters: A Portrait of Samuel Beckett, ­Author of the Puzzling Waiting for Godot,” originally published in The New York Times, 5 May 1956, reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, eds. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge, 1979), 146. 52 See, for example, Gabriel d’Aubarède, “En attendant… Beckett,” originally published in Nouvelles Littéraires 16 (1961), and Tom F. Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” originally published in Columbia University Forum 4 (961); both reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, eds. Graver and Federman. 53 Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 189. Paul Sheehan also notes “that such utterances as are available tend to assume an almost oracular significance.” See Sheehan, “Nothing Is More Real,” 95. 54 Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 29 December 1957, in No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 24. The remark originally appeared in Alan Schneider, “Beckett’s Letters on Endgame”, Village Voice, 19 March 1958, reprinted in The Village Voice Reader, eds. Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher (New York: Grove Press, 1963), and again in “Letter to Alan Schneider on Endgame, December 29, 1957” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 2001), 109. 55 See “Fundamental Sounds,” part II of my Ph.D. thesis, Beckett and Music: Incarnating the Idea (University of London, 2012). 56 Tom Bishop, “Blin on Beckett” [interview], in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 233. See also Roger Blin and Tom Bishop, “Dialogue,” in Samuel Beckett, eds. Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1976), 145 (“comme un truc musical par le même instrument, avec la même force”). 57 Branigan, Radio Beckett, 216. 58 The potential for misunderstanding can increase in other retellings: [t]he form was very important to [Beckett] and we took great pains with it: for example, he asked that a certain phrase which occurs throughout the text be spoken in exactly the same way each time with the same tone, like a note of music played in an invariable way by the same instrument. Roger Blin, as quoted in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, Vol. 1: From Waiting for Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape (London: John Calder, 1988), 171. See also Joan Stevens, “Interview with Roger Blin,” in Directing Beckett ed. Lois Oppenheim (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 308. 59 Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 254 n36. 60 Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters,” 146. 61 See Samuel Beckett, Proust [1930] and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit [1949] (London: John Calder, 1999). 62 As quoted in Everett Frost, “The Note Man and the Word Man: Morton  Feldman on Composing the Music for Samuel Beckett’s Words and Music in The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays,” in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Bryden, 51.

266  Thomas Mansell 63 John Pilling, “Proust and Schopenhauer: Music and Shadows,” in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Bryden, 173. 64 Beckett, Proust, 92. 65 Ibid. Beckett used the same phrase to describe music in his spoof lecture on “Le Concentrisme” (given to the Modern Language Society of Trinity College, Dublin in November 1930)—see Disjecta, 42. 66 Prieto, Listening In, 166. 67 Prieto, Listening In, 168–69. See also James Acheson, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama, and Early Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 7. John Pilling had earlier proved that “there is much in the coda to Proust that finds no echo in Schopenhauer, or at best only a muffled one.” See Pilling, “Proust and Schopenhauer,” 173. 68 A copy of Proust was found in Dublin, on the title-page of which Beckett had commented, “I have written my book in a cheap flashy philosophical jargon,” See Bair, Samuel Beckett, 115. 69 Samuel Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 25 August [1930?], in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 43 (my emphasis). For more on Beckett’s complicated inheritance from ­nineteenth-century aesthetics, see part I of my Ph.D. thesis, Beckett and Music: Incarnating the Idea (University of ­London, 2012). 70 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable [1961], trans. Carolyn ­Abbaté (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 16. 71 See John Fletcher, About Beckett: The Playwright and the Work (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 53. 72 See Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press), especially chapter 8. 73 See “Excerpts from Dream of Fair to Middling Women,” in Disjecta, 43–50. The complete novel was not published until after Beckett’s death. See Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women [1932], eds. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (London: Calder, 1996), pp. 10–12 (a.), 16–17 (b.), 112–13 (c.), 117 (d.), 118–20 (e.), 47–48 (f.), 101–102 (g.), and 138–40 (h.). 74 See Sean Lawlor, “Louis Laloy’s La musique chinoise,” The Beckett Circle 20.1 (1998), 10–11, and Beckett’s Dream Notebook ed. John Pilling (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999). 75 Nicholas Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), 153. See also, for example, S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 124; Susan D. Brienza, Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds: Style in Metafiction (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1987), 176; and Enoch Brater, The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 34. 76 Herbert Blau, “In Short: The Right Aggregate, the Grand Apnoea, and the Accusative of Inexistence” [1998], in Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 186. For another example see Anthony Uhlmann, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31. 77 See Samuel Beckett, “German Letter” [1937], in Disjecta, 51–54 and 170–73. 78 Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust, 175. 79 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001), 38–39. 80 Lois Oppenheim, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 51.

The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett  267 81 Maier, Becketts Melodien, 151 (my translation). 82 As quoted in No Author Better Served, ed. Harmon, 112 n6. 83 See Harold Hobson, Sunday Times, 7 August 1955, 11; reprinted in S­ amuel Beckett, eds. Graver and Federman, 93–95. 84 Cf. “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” [1877], in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Collins/Fontana, 1971), 129. 85 Harold Hobson, “The First Night of Waiting for Godot,” in Beckett at 60: A Festschrift, ed. W. J. McCormack (London: Calder & Boyars, 1967), 25. 86 Karl Ragnar Gierow’s Nobel Prize presentation speech of 1969; see http:// nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1969/press.html. 87 John Gruen, “Samuel Beckett Talks about Beckett,” Vogue, 154 (­December 1969), 210; as quoted in Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics, 169 n16. 88 Daniel Albright, Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 6. 89 For example, in his letter to Schoenberg of February 6, 1911, Kandinsky commented that “[the] human tendency toward the fossilizing of form is shocking, even tragic.” See Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch, trans. John C. ­Crawford. (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 27. 90 Prieto, Listening In, 180. The examples Prieto mentions are Proust, Gide, Huxley, Mann, and Joyce. 91 “The parenthetical aside ‘I’m keepsoaking them to cover my concerts’; is perhaps an allusion to [Eliot] Paul’s habit of giving musical names like ‘Rondo’, ‘The Concert’, and ‘Enharmonics’ to his stories [in transition]. The implication is that Paul is somehow duping (‘soakin’) the public.” ­Dougald McMillan, transition: The History of a Literary Era 1927–1938 (London: Calder & Boyars, 1975), 218. 92 See Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon. 93 Susan D. Brienza, Enoch Brater, and Paul Sheehan all define “mesure pour rien” as “a bar’s rest” (see Brienza, Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds, 21; Enoch Brater, Why Beckett [London: Thames and Hudson, 1989], 55; and Sheehan, “Nothing Is More Real,” 93), whereas in fact it is the very particular “bar’s rest” given by a conductor before the start of a piece. 94 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 213. 95 See also Mendelssohn’s letter of October 15, 1842 to Marc-André Souchay, as quoted in Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind (London: Harper­Collins, 1993), 65: “[p]eople usually complain that music is so ambiguous, that it leaves them in such doubt as to what they are supposed to think, whereas words can be understood by everyone. But to me it seems exactly the opposite.” 96 Barry Cooper, Beethoven and the Creative Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 43. See also Anthony Uhlmann, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1. 97 Daniela Caselli, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 41. 98 Kalb, Beckett in Performance, 93. Akalaitis is later quoted using musical metaphors to describe both Beckett’s work and her direction of it; see Kalb, 166–67 and 169. 99 “Private Passions,” presented by Michael Berkeley, BBC Radio 3, 4 September 2005. 100 See above, n. 84. Incidentally, Werner Wolf points out that both Goethe and Schopenhauer said something similar: in 1805, Goethe described

268  Thomas Mansell

01 1 102 103 104 05 1 106

07 1 108 109 110 111 112

“‘Tonkunst’ [the art of sound]” as “‘dem wahren Element, woher alle Dichtungen entspringen und wohin sie zurückkehren’ [the true source of all poetry, and the element to which all poetry returns]”; and Schopenhauer’s unpublished manuscripts contained the observation that “‘[w]ie die Musik zu werden ist das Ziel jeder Kunst’ [[a]ll arts aim to become like music].” See Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction, 100 n167 and n168. Fletcher, About Beckett, 107. Produced in 1973, with music by Humphrey Searle (Beckett having denied permission to reuse John Beckett’s original music). As quoted in Katharine Worth, “Words for Music Perhaps,” in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Bryden, 16. Edward Beckett, 15 December 1995, in Mel Gussow, Conversations with (and about) Beckett (London: Nick Hern Books, 1996), 126. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 654. “I think that the opening of Schubert’s String Quartet in A minor (Deutsch 804) is more nearly pure spirit than any other music.” Samuel Beckett to John Beckett, as reported by Mary Bryden, in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Bryden, 42. Bryden, Samuel Beckett and Music, 42. Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 48. Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust, 125–26. Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics, 148. Caselli, Beckett’s Dantes, 1. Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: C ­ ambridge University Press, 2007), 31.

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Index

À la recherche du temps perdu: and the erotic 112–116; and homosexuality 119 abstraction 259 Adorno, Theodor: and musical modernism 198–199; and Musik-Roman 97–98; and Thomas Mann 101–102 Antheil, George: influence on Ezra Pound 129–130, 149, 176; influence on James Joyce 33; influence on W. B. Yeats 129–130, 149–151; influence on Williams Carlos Williams 192–194 The Antiphon: and Baroque music 227–228, 231; and memory 224–225, 232; stage directions 226 antiphony 223, 227–228, 233 Aronson, Alex 96–97 atonality 63, 75 autobiography 232 avant-garde: and Djuna Barnes 222, 228–229, 232–233; and Ezra Pound 128, 159; and George Antheil 149; and James Joyce 32; and W. B. Yeats 151 Bach, Johann Sebastian 128, 175–176 Barnes, Djuna: and antiphony 221; musical background 229; and Parisian culture 224 Beckett, Samuel: Endgame 259–260; Happy Days 258; musical background 255; musician 260–261; Waiting for Godot 255 Beethoven, Ludwig van: abstraction 259; influence on Marcel Proust 114, 118, 123; influence on Williams Carlos Williams 190; Kreutzer Sonata, the 123; and Thomas Mann 100–104; and Virginia Woolf 28

Benjamin, Walter 5, 189 Besant, Annie 129 Biely, Andrei 1, 7 Black Arts Movement, the 241–243 Blin, Roger 256 Bowen, Elizabeth 6 Busoni, Ferruccio 34–36 cacophony 6, 63, 76–77 chaunting 13, 160 Creeley, Robert: and improvisation 216–217; and play on regular speech 214; and the writing process 204 Curie, Marie 198 Debussy, Claude 42–43; and emphasis on sound 178; and pattern music 176 Dujardin, Edouard 2 Eliot, T.S. 173, 189, 223 eroticism 112–115, 118–124 Finnegans Wake 2, 15, 51, 54–59 Ford, Ford Madox: musical background 62 formenlehre 180 free verse 160, 162, 164, 185, 206, 215 Harlem Renaissance, the 237–242, 246 Imagism: and idea of reality 177–178; and Impressionism 177–178 Impressionism see Imagism improvisation: and jazz 204–206, 216–219, 247; and poetry 191; and staging 245 interiority: and the modern novel 65, 76; and modern poetry 169

294 Index Irish music: and European transcription 36–38; and Irish nationalism 39–43 Janáček, Leoš 128, 131 Joyce, James: and Busoni 34–36; and European music 32–34; and Irish nationalism 40–41; musical aesthetic 41–44 Kandinsky, Wassily 165, 258–259 Lazarus, Neil 135 leitmotif see motif Leonard, Tom 189–191, 200 local cosmopolitanism see rooted cosmopolitanism Lowell, Amy: and idea of the image 174; and emphasis on the senses 180; and the lyric 184; and musical interests 174–175; and nature themes 182–183; “Red Slippers” 184; “Thompson’s Lunch Room— Grand Central Station” 179–180 lyric 130, 133, 134, 146, 150, 179, 181, 184, 214, 218 lyrical writing see polyphony Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: and vernacular black music 238–240, 242–243, 245, 247–248; staging 245–246 Maier, Franz Michael 255, 258 Mann, Thomas: and Adorno 98, 101–102; and Beethoven 100–101; Buddenbrooks 95; and music-novel 98; Tristan 95; use of echo 104–105 McCarthy, Maud 129 melody: and Lowell 181–182; and Parker 207, 210, 215, 217; and Pound 160; and Tagore 132–134; and Wagner 68; and Woolf 22; and Yeats 128, 151 melopoeia 159 memory 222–225, 230, 232–233 modernism: African American modernism 238; and listening technology 111; musical modernism 224; planetary modernism 5 Moore, Olive: dissociation 83–86; and natural law 80–81; and Virginia Woolf 80, 89–90

motif 3, 19, 49–50, 53–54, 57–59, 63–64, 71, 99, 104–105, 120, 188, 213–214, 217, 231–233 musical forms: ballad 33, 40, 144, 149, 152, 227; fugue 76, 83–86, 91, 152, 160–161, 166, 169, 175; opera 17–19, 22–23, 33, 35, 55, 58, 62–63, 65, 68–69, 95, 103, 111, 128–129, 142, 184, 194, 229–230; sonata 96, 100–103, 111–113, 117–118, 123, 160–161, 169 musical genres: bebop 13–14, 205, 216, 218–219; blues 238, 239, 240, 241, 243, 245; Carnatic 127–128, 131, 134; folk 41, 127, 131, 134, 153, 159, 227, 231–232, 239–242, 246–247; Hindustani 130–132; jazz 190, 205–208, 215, 218, 238, 246–247 musical literature 1, 13, 86, 98, 128, 155, 162 musical transcription 34–40, 127, 160, 164, 206, 216 Musik-Roman 9 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 111 Ockeghem, Johannes 227 Oppenheim, Lois 116, 253, 254, 258 Parade’s End: and alliteration 64; and satire 75; and stichomythia 73–74; and the subconscious 70–71 Parker, Charlie: “Shaw ’Nuff” 206–207; and “straight eighth” notes 207; and timing 204–205, 216 pastiche 222 Pater, Walter 1, 97, 142, 260 Pisan Cantos, the: and scansion 159 pitch 20, 129, 133, 150, 162–164, 169, 176, 208 poetry: enjambment 208, 210, 215, 217; pitch 150, 162–164, 169, 176; rhythm 141, 145, 150–151, 160, 162–163, 167–169, 175–176, 190, 191–192, 197, 205–207, 209, 212, 214–215, 217; scansion 164, 167, 206–207 polyphony 4, 5, 10, 12, 22, 43, 58, 74, 75, 102, 103, 159, 162, 212, 223, 243, 246

Index  295 polytonality 223, 228 postcoloniality 10, 135 Pound, Ezra: and critique of the English metrical schemata 162–163; and World War II 159 Proust, Marcel: and Gabriel Fauré 117–118; and listening technology 111 Rabindra-sangīt 126, 129 rāga 132, 133 Rameau, Jean-Phillipe 103 Ray, Satyajit 134 Reich, Steve 13, 189, 194, 196–200, 254 refrain 144, 148, 152–154, 223 rhythm 21, 36, 49, 100–101, 128, 132, 141, 145, 150–151, 160, 162–163, 167–169, 175–176, 190, 191–192, 197, 205–207, 209, 212, 214–215, 217, 223–224, 227–228, 230–232, 247, 260; see also poetry riffing 210, 214 The Ring: cyclical form 49 rooted cosmopolitanism 126, 135 Russell, Bertrand 198 Saddlemyer, Ann 127 Scher, Steven 94 Schneider, Alan 256, 260 Schoenberg, Arnold 35, 129, 201, 258, 267, 269 Schopenhauer, Arthur 112 Schubert, Franz 254, 260 semitone 34, 145 Shakespear, Olivia 140, 142 simultaneity see polyphony Sitwell, Edith 146 sound 3, 22, 32, 34, 44, 49, 64, 128, 133, 148, 162, 167, 176–178, 192, 204, 215 soundscape 3, 6–7, 34, 62 Stravinsky, Igor 95, 150, 159, 224, 228 Swift, Jonathan 142 symphony 34, 62–63, 75

Tagore, Rabindranath: and Bengali literary culture 135; and Ezra Pound 127; Rabindrasangīt 126; and W. B. Yeats 129 tappā 131 temporality 4–5, 22, 55, 111, 122, 204–205, 215, 218, 223, 230, 243, 246 timescape 205, 216 Tolstoy, Leo 113, 124; The Kreutzer Sonata 113 tone 7, 12, 21, 34, 58, 63–64, 75, 99, 102–103, 145 unconscious, the 2, 50 Valéry, Paul 111 Wagner, Richard 3, 48, 62–63, 95, 98, 112, 142, 147; and origin narratives 22–23; sexual politics 27 The Waves: cyclical form 50; identification 53–54; and the natural world 19–20; and origin narratives 22–23; sexuality 25 Wilson, August: and black modernism 237–239, 241–242, 246, 249; fluid view of history 245–246; and vernacular black music 242–243 Wolf, Werner 254 Woolf, Virginia: critique of patriarchy 80, 83; influence on Olive Moore 89–90; and live performances of Wagner’s opera 17–18 Words for Music Perhaps: background 140 Yeats, W. B.: the Censorship of Publications Bill 143–144; poetic persona 146; relationship with George Antheil 129, 149–150; use of refrains 144–145