Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
form and meaning as well as the problematic literature-music relationship are extremely complex, and they have been debated ever since music itself became a subject of discourse, with disagreements over attempts to establish even basic analogies between musical score and literary text. Are music and language completely different and separate media, or do they share certain characteristics? Are there areas where they overlap? Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert point to diachronic, historical transformations in the ways music, language, and meaning have been understood and defined in the Western intellectual tradition. They trace these transformations from the classical Greek philosophical tradition, to the medieval world, to the early modern, Romantic, modernist, and postmodern periods.9 Along similar lines, several articles included in the present volume (Szegedy-Maszák; Stewart; Varga; Thompson; Manhire) analyze Woolf’s awareness of these historical developments as well as the various ways she employed them in her fiction and discussed them in her essays and diaries. Between the Acts, for instance, could be seen as an interweaving of melodic, fundamentally human musical activities with theories based, in the classical Greek philosophical tradition, on the natural laws of number “viewed as reflecting abstract and immanent aspects of the universe,” “the principles of natural order, or the workings of the divine” (Cross and Tolbert 26) – the celestial music (harmonies and dissonances) that Mrs. Swithin muses on during her circular tours of the imagination. While in novels such as The Voyage Out and The Waves, as well as in several short stories,10 Woolf explores the tension between music viewed in terms of human passion and affects and music viewed as an autonomous art, important for its own sake, not only different from language but also resisting linguistic description.11
Music theorists may ground their arguments in aesthetic considerations, in semantic theories, or in attempts to understand music and musical meaning within the social and cultural contexts in which they have developed. These differing perspectives have resulted in a wide variety of approaches to the process of exploring musical and linguistic meaning and their possible interconnections. In an article included in this volume, Trina Thompson summarizes these views and draws a particularly useful classification through three types of inquiry: (1) Is music like a language? (2) How do text and music relate within a work such as an art song or opera? (3) How can a work of art in one media be “translated” into another media? It is against this background that Woolf’s own approach to exploring relationships between music and literature can be situated. In her fictional and critical works, Woolf follows similar directions of inquiry into the dilemmas of musical meaning and the connections between music, language, literature, and community.
MUSIC AND MODERNISM
The paradigm shift in “Woolf and music” scholarship, signaled by the most recent studies on the topic,12 is paralleled by another shift: a reconsideration of the reception of modernist music in Great Britain in the early twentieth century. Even though the repertoire of British music before the 1960s is usually seen as having considerably lagged behind continental modernist developments in classical music, and even though British composers themselves were decrying the backward state of music in England during the first half of the twentieth century, critics have recently begun to point out that modernist continental music was known in London in the first decades of the twentieth century. Works by Arnold Schoenberg, Manuel de Falla, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and Maurice Ravel premiered in London, sometimes conducted by the composers themselves; works by the composers of the Second Viennese School were frequently broadcast by the BBC during the interwar period;13 and “modern music” was reviewed, debated, and seriously considered in the British press and music journals (Riley 2).
This latter point deserves attention in the context of this study because, as Deborah Heckert has shown, at the beginning of the twentieth century, debates about the performance and reception of modernist music in England were expressed through and connected to the theoretical language of visual modernism as developed and coined by Roger Fry and Clive Bell: “We can see resonances of Fry’s art criticism of 1910–13 in the positive critical reactions to Schoenberg and other performances of Continental avant-garde music in 1913–14, around the time of the second performance of the Five Orchestral Pieces [January 1914]” (Heckert 62). Although the first performance of this work was harshly criticized in London, after its second performance, conducted by the composer himself, British critics began to consider the possibility that the work was “a ‘next step’ in an evolving musical language” (62) and, in doing so, they made recourse to Fry’s aesthetic language. They were considering, among other things, “the importance of form and the structural characteristics of the artwork in creating an emotional and expressive impact,” and “they echoed Fry’s themes and adapted them to explain the new music, attempting to justify these works to the London public in terms that were increasingly familiar across the spectrum of emerging modernist styles in the visual arts, literature and music” (62). If the question Woolf began “Impressions at Bayreuth” with in 1909, concerning what she called the ambiguous state of musical criticism for both “new” and “old” music (E1: 288), could have received an answer at all, it would have received it by way of the aesthetics of Fry and Bell. While genetic criticism points to the conclusion that Woolf was much more familiar with and, therefore, influenced by the classical style (by the First rather than the Second Viennese School), her very early appreciation of Wagner’s music and exposure to Richard Strauss14 as well as her familiarity with the latest developments in visual-art criticism of the Bloomsbury Group bring her aesthetics in line with those of her contemporary modernist musicians and artists. This opens up new critical perspectives and comparative approaches, allowing scholars such as Sanja Bahun, Evelyn Haller, Roger Hillman, and Deborah Crisp to consider Woolf’s works in their interrelations with modernist and later twentieth-century music and art.
Such reconsiderations also raise the question of how we may interpret Woolf’s interest in the classical style in light of neoclassical developments in early twentieth-century classical music. Reflecting back in 1941 on Stravinsky’s Octet (1923), Aaron Copland observed that this work “was destined to influence composers all over the world in bringing the latent objectivity of modern music to full consciousness by frankly adopting the ideals, forms, and textures of the preromantic era” (Taruskin 447). Woolf’s interest in the classical style may be seen not as anachronistic but, rather, as resonating with modernist musical developments (see Lloyd 35, and Szegedy-Maszak 63, this volume). Richard Taruskin goes as far as to affirm that it is neoclassicism that marks the beginning of “the history of twentieth-century music as something esthetically distinct from that of the nineteenth century” (448). If twentieth-century musical and literary aesthetics may be interpreted as a recycling of both classicism and romanticism, the point remains that Octet ushered in neoclassicism as “a new creative period, not only for Stravinsky but for European and Euro-American ‘art music’ generally,” these “musical manifestations” being “symptoms in turn of a pronounced general swerve in the arts that reflected a yet greater one in the wider world of expressive culture” (448).
SIGNIFICANT FORM: MUSICAL STRUCTURE IN WOOLF’S SHORT FICTION
Returning to the question of how Woolf approached text-music comparisons, one of the short stories that has received intense critical attention, “The String Quartet,” shows Woolf’s reluctance to draw imitative analogies between music and literature. It also illustrates how she used the short-story genre as a space in which she could explore various topics – in this case the text-music relationship – in a smaller, restrained space, which she would then develop on a larger scale in her novels. Included in the collection Monday or Tuesday (1921), this story marks the beginning of a period of searching, experimentation, and fervent creativity, in which Woolf even compared herself to “an improviser with his hands rambling over the piano” (D3: 37–38), and which produced Jacob’s Room (1922), Freshwater (1923), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). “The String Quartet” is a distillation of these experiments, a perfect example of what Woolf would describe in “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927, reprinted by Leonard Woolf as “The Narrow Bridge of Art”) as the need to “dramatize some of those influences which play so large a part in life, yet have