Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
Woolf: A Musical Life, and Emma Sutton, “Music.”
13. See Jennifer Doctor’s The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936.
14. Woolf heard Richard Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica in 1905 with Henry Wood conducting the Queen’s Hall Orchestra and, more importantly, after attending concernts in Bayreuth, in August 1909, Woolf traveled – with her friend Saxon Sydney-Turner and with her brother Adrian Stephen – to Dresden, where she heard Strauss’s Salome (1905) (E1: 292n2).
15. Woolf noted: “On Sunday I went up to Campden Hill to hear the S[c]hubert quintet – to see George Booth’s house – to take notes for my story – to rub shoulders with respectability – all these reasons took me there, & were cheaply gratified at 7/6” (D2: 24). It may be somewhat problematic to make the assumption that the Schubert quintet was the “Trout,” as neither Woolf nor George Booth refer in their diaries to this particular composition.
16. Brown responded to Langer’s criticism in several articles published in the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature in the 1980s.
17. “All the musical helps to our actual perception of time are eliminated and replaced by tonal experiences in the musical image of duration” (Langer, Feeling and Form 135).
18. In addition, the step between inward and actual hearing in music is occupied by another phase of artistic production, performance itself, which, for Langer, “is as creative an act as composition” (Feeling and Form 139). While silent reading may occur both when reading a score and reading a text, it has “different values in the two respective contexts” (135).
19. Mark Hussey is one of the earliest scholars to discuss the role of the arts, particularly that of music, in Woolf’s works in his 1986 monograph, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction. He discusses Susanne Langer’s concept of “significant form” in the same context (see particularly The Singing 67–68).
20. Music is significant form, Langer argued, “in the peculiar sense of ‘significant’ in which Mr. Bell and Mr. Fry maintain they can grasp or feel, but not define; such significance is implicit, but not conventionally fixed” (Philosophy 240–41).
21. Gotthold Ephrain Lessing, for instance, challenged Horace’s “Ut pictura poesis” (Ars poetica 333–65) and was himself challenged by some of his contemporaries. Herder in particular disapproved of the narrowness of Lessing’s taste and his “rigid segregation of temporal from spatial,” while Diderot, and later Wagner and others, devised “serious arguments concerning the unity of the arts” (Albright 10, 8).
22. Elicia Clements’s “Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music” and “Transforming Musical Sounds in Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves” appeared in separate journals: College Literature and, respectively, Narrative. Emma Sutton’s “‘Within a Space of Tears’: Music, Writing, and the Modern in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out” appeared in Music and Literary Modernism; her chapter, “Music,” in Virginia Woolf in Context; as well as “Shell Shock and Hysterical Fugue, or why Mrs Dalloway Likes Bach,” appeared in Literature and Music of the First World War. Joyce Kelley’s “Virginia Woolf and Music” is included in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Emilie Crapoulet’s “Beyond the Boundaries of Language: Music in Virginia Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet’” appeared in Journal of the Short Story in English, while her wonderful analysis Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life was published in the Bloomsbury Heritage Series by Cecil Woolf. Tracey Sherard published “‘Parcival in the forest of gender’: Wagner, Homosexuality, and The Waves,” and Joycelyn Slovak published “Mrs. Dalloway and Fugue: ‘Songs without Words, Always the Best . . .‘” at Unsaid (http://www.unsaidmag.com/display_lit.php?issue=2&file_url=slovak.html/). Three groundbreaking studies that began the shift in Woolf and music scholarship are Jane Marcus’s “Enchanted Organs, Magic Bells: Night and Day as Comic Opera,” in Virginia Woolf Revaluation and Continuity; Melba Cuddy-Keane’s “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality,” in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which discusses, among other things, the challenge of “listening” to a book and differences between the linguistic representation and conceptualization of sound; and Pamela Caughie’s “Virginia Woolf: Radio, Gramophone, Broadcasting,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Peter Jacobs’s “The Second Violin Tuning in the Ante-room: Virginia Woolf and Music” is an exceptionally brilliant piece dealing with music in an otherwise visual arts–oriented set of essays, The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, edited by Diane F. Gillespie. Two of the most fruitful earliest articles on the topic – Gerald Levin’s “The Musical Style of The Waves” (1983), and Harold Fromm’s “To the Lighthouse: Music and Sympathy” (1968) – are also well worth mentioning in this context.
WORKS CITED
Albright, Daniel. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print.
Bell, Clive. Art. Ed. J. B. Bullen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf. A Biography. Vol. 1. London: Hogarth, 1972. Print.
Brown, Calvin. “The Writing and Reading of Music: Thoughts in Some Parallels between Two Artistic Media.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 33 (1984): 7–18. Print.
Bullough, Edward. “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle.” British Journal of Psychology 5 (1912): 87–117. Print.
Caughie, Pamela L. “Virginia Woolf: Radio, Gramophone, Broadcasting.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Clements, Elicia. “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.” Narrative: The Journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature 13.2 (May 2005): 160–81. Print.
———. “Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music: Listening as a Productive Mode of Social Interaction.” College Literature 32.3 (July 2005): 51–71. Print.
Crapoulet, Emilie. “Beyond the Boundaries of Language: Music in Virginia Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet.’” Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 50 (Spring 2008): 201–15. Print.
———. Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life. Bloomsbury Heritage Series, no. 50. London: Cecil Woolf, 2009. Print.
Cross, Ian, and Elizabeth Tolbert. “Music and Meaning.” The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. Ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality.” Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Pamela L. Caughie. New York: Garland, 2000. Print.
Fleishman, Avrom. “Forms of the Wool-fian Short Story.” Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity. Ed. Ralph Freedman. Berkeley: University of California Press,