'Musicality and Modernist Form'

Editorial Introduction: Musicality and Modernist Form David James and Nathan Waddell Musico-literary questions have long informed modernist studies.1 Issues of form have been at the heart of such scholarship, which continues to explore intermedial connections between music and literature by examining, in David Michael Hertz’s words, ‘the ubiquitous dialectic between form and content, structure and meaning.’2 However, the cultural-historical ‘turn’ in modernist studies means that investigations of the problem of ‘musicalised’ literature, for instance, or of literary representations of musical themes and figures, now tend to be inflected by carefully historicised and theoretically informed accounts of modernism’s musico-literary implications. Thus, recent work on musico-literary modernism represents an important development of mid-twentieth-century reassessments (undertaken by such philosophers as Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch) of music’s place in modernity. Hence Ronald Schleifer’s recourse to philosophical aesthetics in his recent book Modernism and Popular Music (2011), and his claim that studying modernism from a musico-literary viewpoint requires attention to the material and socio-cultural determinants of twentieth-century subjectivity as well as ‘the continuities and discontinuities’ by which modernity itself is underpinned.3 This special issue of Modernist Cultures addresses all of these areas of debate by collecting essays which address the formal, contextual, and philosophical implications of musico-literary modernism. In doing so they expand our sense of modernism’s intermedial complexity (and disputed constitution) in work by a diverse range of figures, from Modernist Cultures 8.1 (2013): 1–8 DOI: 10.3366/mod.2013.0048 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/mod Modernist Cultures Richard Wagner and Rebecca West to the American composer Morton Feldman and the Ivorian writer Koffi Kwahulé. In emphasising the topic of ‘musicality’ and modernist form, rather than music and modernist form, we hope to foreground the complexity of modernist efforts to scrutinise and work through what the condition of ‘being musical’ entails. The term ‘musicality’ is sometimes used to denote sensitivity (on the parts of listeners and recitalists) to the nuances of musical performance. Here, however, we mean the term as having more expansive implications: as registering the various ways in which textual phenomena embody (or aim to embody) musical ‘form’, on the one hand; and as signalling how music and musical performance is culturally and rhetorically positioned in different historical periods, on the other. Modernism’s receptiveness to ‘musicality’ in both these senses underpins this issue’s exploration of the links between music and modernist literary structures, and informs its collective grasp of interactions between textual, acoustic, and harmonic modes. Furthermore, together our contributors provide a forum for pursuing some of the meta-critical questions raised when invoking the broader category of musicality within the study of modernist literature. The issue aims to account for the implications of addressing literature through, and with, musicological terms, in ways that show how music itself operates both as a point of direct influence, and as an analogical inscription, for modernist writers. The perspectives collected here travel from the mid-nineteenth-century to the post-war legacies of modernism, broadening the scope of inquiry into musico-literary relations by moving from pieces of music to the interactions between different stylistic formations and compositional ambitions. Just as we have encouraged contributors to use the category of musicality to speak about how the quality of ‘being musical’ variously operates in modernist writing, so we hope to have suggested a range of answers to the question of what, exactly, is understood by modernist form. Recent years have witnessed extensive debate as to the theoretical and methodological stakes of the so-called New Formalism, not least as it might affect the disciplinary evolution of the New Modernist Studies. For Isobel Armstrong, an artist’s ‘aspiration to form’ amounts to an activity of ‘perpetual remaking’, a performative process played out by the artwork rather than a stable, structural scaffold presenting itself to our immediate appreciation.4 If, on this model, form is always in process, so too for Angela Leighton form is precisely what escapes definition, ducking our stock assumptions and evading attempts at categorisation. In effect, ‘form’ is nothing, as Leighton puts it, because 2 Editorial Introduction it ‘is what remains when all the various somethings – matter, content, message – have been got out of the way’.5 While the contributors below don’t altogether conflate form with ‘nothingness’, they do re-open the methodological debate as to how we classify the interrelation of literary forms with musical media. They do so in order to explore on various levels not only the way music influences or is emulated by specific textual features, but also how modernist novelists and poets perceived their own formal aims (metaphorically or literally) in musical terms, demonstrating yet another aspect of how form itself became modernism’s key subject of conscious artistry and reconfiguration. By virtue of this kind of comparative framework, the essays here consider the interface of musicality and literary technique in a way that contributes to on-going work on mapping new terrains for formal criticism in the New Modernist Studies. Our issue opens with the emergence of twentieth-century modernity, as Fredric Jameson offers an extended meditation on Wagner’s aesthetic in relation to the incipient modernisms of his age. Taking the Ring cycle as a central focus, Jameson situates Wagner’s ‘musical originality’ in the context of a mid-nineteenthcentury ‘development of affect’, a juncture ‘often characterised as the moment of nascent modernism’. In this reading, Wagner responds to what Jameson identifies as ‘a profound historical modification in which feelings’, in all their phenomenological immediacy and volatility, ‘begin to be registered in literature and art’. Hence, the ‘famous chromatisms’, contends Jameson, ‘the Tristan chord’, can here be seen as mediating the ‘emergence and expression of a new kind of content’, one that embodies ‘the opposition between affect and the older named emotions’, emotions that would be overtaken in the following century by modernism’s exploration of a new ‘affective sensorium’ of perceptual ‘mutability and variability’. As Jameson observes, this modernist fascination with the instability of affect is anticipated by the ‘extraordinary variability of the Wagnerian orchestra as it ceaselessly develops its musical language, like an endless Proustian or Faulknerian sentence’, marking an audacity and extensiveness that ‘stands in stark distinction from the closure of the aria, which wishes to express one thing powerfully and completely, and then stop’. Thus the apparent ‘architectonic and metaphysical excess’ one might perceive in Wagner is approached by Jameson as a genealogy, a thread that reaches historically forward to modernism’s iconic formal experiments in capturing the flux of subjective experience. If Jameson’s commentary showcases a method of approaching acoustic and textual intersections indirectly and diachronically – by 3 Modernist Cultures way of a moment of historical emergence, and by reference to the compositional virtuosity of a precursor to modernism as such – then William May also provides a case study in reading ‘musical-literary encounters’ in a fashion that facilitates a story drawing from ‘wider cultural narratives about the period’. Like Jameson, May’s concerns aren’t primarily or exclusively musicological, as he spotlights the contexts instead of performance reception. May’s premise is that although modernism lingers with a malevolent fascination on women’s hands, those of the concert pianist Harriet Cohen (1895–1967) trouble straightforward readings of the artistic objectification of women’s physiologies, transforming the female hand from an object of speculation to an active participant in its own cultural narratives. Cohen’s tactic was to make a virtue of her own famously small stretch, obtaining commissions from Bartók and Bax for which she retained sole performance rights. May draws on fictional and poetic depictions of Cohen by D. H. Lawrence and also by Rebecca West, whose 1929 novel Harriet Hume ‘asks us to rethink the role of the female pianist in modernist culture’. Considering ‘hands as agents, rather than subjects, of interpretation’, May considers fictional representations of pianists alongside contemporary debates about hands and the pianist’s touch. Examining how the female pianist’s hand repositions ideas about professionalism, autonomy, and gender, May also traces the implications of Cohen’s attraction to advanced recording technology – her ‘emphasis on the sonic rather than the bodily traces of her performances’ – for understanding the relations between individual agency and musical performance in the modernist period. The cultural conditions of musical reception are also central to Nathan Waddell’s reconsideration of Wyndham Lewis’s stance on the rise and legacy of jazz. Many commentators on the exploration of jazz in The Apes of God (1930) – as much as in the other parts of Lewis’s oeuvre – have tended to account for his views primarily in socio-political language. Waddell re-opens the discussion of this topic in order to move the scholarly conversation into new areas. Lewis may have regarded jazz in broadly hostile terms, but this hostility was, Waddell argues, the point of departure for Lewis’s commentaries rather than their final destination. What Lewis saw as jazz music and 1920s jazz ‘culture’ are indeed targeted in the novel as phenomena to be criticised. However, jazz also provides a platform upon which Lewisian narrative experiments are enacted. Waddell frames The Apes of God in relation to the emerging jazz culture of the 1920s, associating the novel with the painter John B. Souter – a key, if unfamiliar, interpreter 4 Editorial Introduction of the development of jazz music and of Western influence during the period. Claims that The Apes of God in any sense formally or linguistically ‘embodied’ the jazz music with which it so clearly takes issue are challenged by Waddell, as he notes that similar charges were levied against the modernist writings of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. But whereas the influence of jazz upon the writings of such figures has been questioned, Lewis’s work has yet to be critically evaluated in this way, a point of particular interest given that he was a persuasive doubter of the musico-literary equivalence that such an approach to modernist forms implies. By taking pains to probe the rationale for establishing such acoustic-textual homologies, including the dangers of generality and misrepresentation they entail, Waddell raises a meta-critical question about the analogical correspondences between musicality and literary innovation that is repeatedly posed throughout this issue. Remaining alert to this question of equivalence, Tanya Dalziell pursues the intersections between mourning and music in the works of Virginia Woolf. While building upon a recent interest in modernist mourning, Dalziell scrutinises the assumption that the apparent recourse to music marking much of Woolf’s work grapples with issues of how one should mourn. In mobilising this scrutiny, Dalziell sets in motion several key methodological points, asking what is actually meant by ‘music’ when we bear in mind the range of critical metaphors that Woolf’s stylistic and structural experiments often inspire. Ranging widely across Woolf’s fiction, Dalziell offers a particularising account of how the media of music and language (including the musicality of Woolf’s language) relate to the very affective substance of novels concerned so dramatically with mental processes. Thematically, in turn, Dalziell asks what kind of role music-writing might play in mourning, against the backdrop of Woolf’s novelistic estimations of music and the necessary failure of these approximations. In so doing, Dalziell moves away from the biographically inflected accounts that have characterised attention to aspects of grieving in Woolf’s works. Without devaluing the devastating impact of personal sorrow on Woolf’s creative endeavours, Dalziell suggests that it is the distrust of language’s capacity to console through lyricism – indeed, through its very musicality – which Woolf’s novels realise most strikingly. Moving into the ‘late modernist’ era, the following two articles illuminate more consciously choreographed and collaborative dialogues between music and textuality. Francis Hutton-Williams explores the freedom that Beckett allowed for musical collaborations, a consideration that often surprises scholars given the notorious degree 5 Modernist Cultures of control that he insisted upon exerting over the staging of his work. Specifically, Hutton-Williams reconsiders the concept of a ‘textmusic tandem’ in Morton Feldman’s 1987 composition for Beckett’s Words and Music (1961). The correlation between the verbal and the melodic in this play is as perplexing as that of any of Beckett’s better-known duos. But, as Hutton-Williams contends, less critical attention has been dedicated to their compassionate modes of alliance. Reconstructing the genesis of Words and Music from biographical sources, Hutton-Williams points to an important interim between the work’s composition and the creative stimulus it was intended to provide for the author’s musical cousin, who had spent five months in recovery after a car accident in Little Bray. Hutton-Williams develops this context as the backdrop to a reading of the effects of healing in the play’s reconstruction of operatic form. Shedding detailed light on Feldman’s contribution to the play, Hutton-Williams traces the new partnerships that his music provided, while complicating the belief – evinced by Philip Glass, for instance – that composers should assume that only musical simplicities will complement Beckett’s laconic style and direction. Turning to Feldman’s Three Voices (1982), Scott W. Klein offers a nuanced close reading of this piece for solo voice as a homage to Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poem ‘Wind’. While pursuing stylistic and tonal analyses of both works, Klein poses a series of broader questions about the extent to which musical works can reproduce in their own terms the register of elegiac art ‘in the absence of clearly defined textual or formal allusions to established genres of mourning or remembrance’. Klein thereby spotlights some of the larger metacritical problematics with which this special issue is concerned, namely, the question of whether later twentieth-century art forms, emerging ‘from aesthetic precedents in both poetry and music that emphasise both the quest for personality and for impersonality, can ever be free of the historical frameworks of interpretation that are typical of literary study’. Without seeking simply to resolve this matter of vocabulary, Klein nonetheless shows how to chart affinities between poetic and musicological treatments of voice without losing their respective particularities and mutual incompatibilities. As such, ‘Feldman’s use of O’Hara’s language’, asserts Klein, ‘needs to be understood within a complex matrix that includes Feldman’s sense of musical form and representation, O’Hara’s treatment of poetic form and voice, and ultimately the ways in which Three Voices brings these varied concerns into collaborative focus’. 6 Editorial Introduction Eric Prieto’s essay on Koffi Kwahulé’s theatre closes this volume by attempting this same methodical synthesis. It focuses upon that writerly-musicological ‘matrix’ where artists’ respective concerns are addressed as both potentially resonant in effect if ultimately distinct in technique. Engaging with Kwahulé’s language and thematics, Prieto approaches a postcolonial writer with a modernist sensibility, one who often refers to the avant-garde improvisational experiments of John Coltrane to explain the significance of, and inspiration for, his theatrical structures. As Prieto observes, Kwahulé’s work often resists straightforward assimilation to most explanatory frameworks, by virtue of his ‘central stylistic hallmark’ as it focuses ‘on a small number of verbal motifs, which are repeated, varied, and developed in ways meant to lead to cathartic breakthrough’. With this cumulative method, Kwahulé’s goal has been ‘not only to create powerfully emotional moments of cathartic release, but also to draw his audience into a deeper understanding of what he calls la conscience diasporique [diasporic consciousness] while suggesting strategies of resistance against oppression that are derived directly from the jazz tradition’. Through the broader implications of his commentary, Prieto explores the extent to which improvised jazz in this context compels us to rethink modernist assumptions about the relationship between musical and literary form. Taken collectively, our contributors thus consider ‘music’ as an international, multi-cultural, and poly-sensuous experience. In light of the alternative critical viewpoints explored in this issue, music and modernist aesthetics may be seen under new lights and in new contexts – in short, as mutually implicating phenomena that have developed historically in conversation with each other. A key consideration developed here is that musico-literary form is never only form qua form; it is always form that emerges from specific historical particulars. The essays collected in this special issue jettison an earlier – although still detectable – tendency within musico-literary scholarship to consider formal equivalences between music and literature ahistorically. Instead, our contributors read the links between musicality and modernist form as shaped in advance by temporal and situational emphases. Our contributors’ sensitivity to the historical and, indeed, geographical situatedness of form allows them to develop what Robert McParland in Music and Literary Modernism (2006) calls ‘that conversation with an international dialogue that moves between music, literary history, and theory.’6 Modernist musico-literary form is thus re-addressed here in markedly interdisciplinary terms, a gesture 7 Modernist Cultures which simply reaffirms in procedural outline the textual borrowings from music, and musical intersections with literature, evident in modernism from its earliest manifestations onwards. Notes 1. For some impressive recent work in this area see, among others, Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000); Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Robert P. McParland (ed.), Music and Literary Modernism: Critical Essays and Comparative Studies (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006); Harry White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Matthew Riley (ed.), British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Charlotte de Mille (ed.), Music and Modernism, c. 1849–1950 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); and Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also all of the volumes in the ‘Word and Music’ series (http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?SerieId=WMS), published by Rodopi. 2. David Michael Hertz, The Tuning of the Word: The Musico-Literary Poetics of the Symbolist Movement (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. xii. 3. Schleifer, Modernism and Popular Music, pp. xv–xvi. 4. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 165. 5. Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 262. 6. Robert P. McParland, ‘Introduction’, in McParland (ed.), Music and Literary Modernism, pp. [1]-2, p. 1. 8