Literary Music

Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction

Stephen Benson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351922128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

Music is commonly felt to offer a valued experience, yet to put that experience into words is no easy task. Rather than view verbal representations of music as somehow secondary to the music itself, Literary Music argues that it is in such representations that our understanding of music and its meanings is constituted and explored. Focusing on recent fictional and theoretical texts, Stephen Benson proposes literature, narrative fiction in particular, as a singular form of musical performance. Literary Music concentrates not only on song and opera, those forms in which words and music overtly confront one another, but also on a small number of recurring ideas around which the literary and the musical interact, including voice, narrative, performance, and silence. The book considers a wide range of literary and theoretical texts, including those of Blanchot and Bakhtin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Vikram Seth, David Malouf and J.M. Coetzee. The musical forms discussed range from opera to the string quartet, together with individual works by Elgar, Strauss and Michael Berkeley. As such, Literary Music offers an informed interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and music that participates in the lively theoretical debate on the status of meaning in music.

Chapter 1

‘Something familiar’: Reading Elgar

I lived the present like a memory.
Marcel Bénabou, Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books

The hermeneutic traffic in musico-literary studies tends to flow in one direction: from literature to music. This is variously true of the majority of cases in the present study. As a referential medium, language is granted the cognitive capacity to speak of music, whether under the generic rubric of analysis, history or, with less authority, fiction. The act of speaking of, or for, music is generally felt to involve some sort of falling short, a result of either the empirical difference between music and language – of the failures of translation – or of the perceived higher aesthetic status of music, the belief that music does speak, but in so doing says more than language could hope to. Language in literature frequently speaks about music – famously, in the case of Proust and Mann – but music is not felt to speak about literature. For example, programme music which takes its object from an extant literary text will rarely be cited as an interpretation of that text, whereas the Beethoven section in E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End is cited, by some at least, as a reading, in the critical sense of the word, of the musical work in question. Music based on literature is mood music, evocative of ambience but little more. The reason for this is not difficult to locate. For music to interpret literature we have first to translate it into something other than the perceptual knowledge of aesthetics, to fix it conceptually in language and so grant it the cognitive capacity to interpret rather than affect. Whereas language speaking of music remains language, music, to paraphrase Adorno, must become something else. Such a belief is in practice flawed on at least two counts: because language, and literature as language, is always and everywhere in need of translating and interpreting, in acts of the same category as the conceptualizing of music, and because our aesthetic contemplation of music is never anything other than textual, not least when we feel it flies above the messy world of language. Music must first be interpreted before we can experience it as music. It is an intentional object.

The putative inefficacy of music as a mode of cognition rather than sensuous feeling has led to its relative neglect as a resource in the reading of history. When music is cited within the broad context of literary history in particular, it tends to be in one of two modes: the sociological, whereby the texts of music are stacked up as so many self-evident facts and only very rarely discussed in any detail as music; or the supplemental, whereby music caps and corroborates the more explicitly textual and material presence of the word or visual image.¹ Consider the following two examples:

At the end of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, the jaunty rondo pauses for a vein of heart-breaking lyricism at the sadness of Elgar’s vision, and then the orchestra reasserts itself with a defiant but noble stoicism. And this is what Rider Haggard [in King Solomon’s Mines] admires in the face of unavoidable disaster. (Butts xx)

flamboyance is also noticeable in the central works of the greatest British composer to emerge since the days of Purcell, Edward Elgar. Elgar’s two symphonies of 1908 and 1911 have their moments of profound melancholy … but they exude also a confident sense of the fact that English music had at last come of age … His music has a spaciousness which can variously be seen as a complement both to the restless, grandiloquent energy and to the introspective insecurities of Edwardian England. (Sanders 485)

These are valid comments, certainly, but music is permitted to function as nothing more than adjectival icing. The idea of musical immediacy, of a distillation of contextual emotion in sound, is used tacitly and, we could say, tautologically to justify its appropriation as the corroborating sound of the previously identified reading or the established zeitgeist. Music serves rather passively as summative assessment, self-evidently proving the worth of the literary or historical reading it serves to cap.

Elgar is apposite here in being particularly prone to such treatment. It is commonplace to find the music cited en masse as evidence of either the last trump of Empire or of a foreshadowing of war and decline. There are signs of a more critically detailed engagement, however, and it is with one instance of this shift that I want to begin. James Hamilton-Paterson’s Gerontius offers a fictional account of one of the more obscure and unlikely episodes in the composer’s life. In 1923, aged sixty-six, Elgar embarked on a six-week cruise to the Amazon aboard the Booth Line ship, Hildebrand. No autobiographical materials have survived, but the journey as imagined in the novel acts as the setting for an extended period of reminiscence and reflection on the part of the no-longer-productive composer. As indicated by the Author’s Note which prefaces the novel, Hamilton-Paterson takes the absence of documentary evidence as justification for his own voyage of invention (‘Such is a point of departure for a work of fiction’). The major fictional manoeuvres are acknowledged nevertheless. The paradoxical desire for historical veracity signalled in such confessions is further marked in the Epilogue, located somewhere between the overt frame of the authorial note and the novelized biography itself. Having disembarked, Hamilton-Paterson’s Elgar reverts to the Elgar of the biographers. Along with developments in Germany, the significant events of his final decade are summarized as involving recordings of his own music and ongoing work towards an ultimately unrealized third symphony.²

The year 1989 was a significant year in which to publish a novel about Elgar, for two reasons. Firstly, the record company EMI had begun work on ‘The Elgar Edition’, a large-scale project devoted to state-of-the-art remastering of a series of gramophone recordings of his own works made by the composer between 1926 and 1933. Unlike an earlier set of acoustic sessions, these electrical recordings were made using the new broadcasting microphone and so are available fifty years later for digital transfer. The reality sound effects of historical distance – the still relatively primitive balance, the crackles and hisses – are reduced in the transfer process, quietened in the interests of now having the music stand forth as if unimpeded. The results are of course variously anachronistic, as were the sounds made contemporaneously by two other attempts to rekindle Elgar: the first historically informed performances of his work, attempted by the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra,³ and Anthony Payne’s completion of sketches towards the aforementioned third symphony.⁴

At stake in each of these projects of remastering – transferred recording, period performance, elaborated sketches, and Gerontius – is a variously mediated authenticity, the securing in the present of a truth located in the past: the voice of Elgar, what we might even call the text of Elgar, given that the transfers and the period performances ostensibly allow us in the future to hear, and to hear repeatedly, what was previously lost or at least irrevocably distant. Where the doctored recordings and the worked-up sketches bring to modern life things which, in that form, never existed, the novel and the period performances strive to enliven historical musical voices, to make them present across time. The acknowledged deviations of the novelist are in the interests of an imaginative historical authenticity, just as the more elaborative interventions of the composer are always restorative, even when wholly original. The novel is alone in this company in using its comparatively primitive technology as a means to a more investigative act of overhearing.

The second reason for the contextual resonance of Gerontius, alongside issues of revenant sounds, is that it was in the 1980s that musicology began properly to turn its attention in on itself, in particular on its core activity of formal analysis. While my chosen musical remastering projects sought variously to sidestep the effects of time, history was precisely what musicology began to face up to. One by-product of this period of readjustment was that musicology came to sit closer to other disciplines, not only as a result of a newly shared set of interpretative tools, but also because music itself was wrested from the grasp of an abstracting positivist analysis and left sitting in the messier and far more ordinary language world where it had, of course, always been. Literary and theoretical (non-musicological) engagements with music thereby take on added significance, as themselves forms of musicology, in the course of which specific constructions of music are performed to various ends. Gerontius is not merely a piece of secondary evidence, supplemental to the proper study of Elgar’s music, but part of an ongoing record of how and why we hear that music, and so of what that music is.

There is a drawback, however, in that the culturalist approach to music, with all its attendant by-ways, can run the risk of silencing the very object that gave rise to the engagement in the first place: the sound of music, even its very musicality. The singularity of musical sound (a phrase I use advisedly) can come to serve merely as a conventional supplement to the newly verbalized reading – ironically so, given the sidelining of music already evident in much literary history.⁵ Gerontius certainly engages with and contributes to constructions of Elgar and his music, but as with several of the novels I will be discussing, it might in itself be said to aspire to the condition of the audiobook, or at least to a multimedia form in which the music that is in part its object would be sounded. As Hamilton-Paterson says, having dutifully acknowledged his textual sources, ‘My greatest debt … is to the music’. The aspiration to music figures on the local and the conceptual level, as is the case with a number of musically interested novels; clearly, you have to value music highly to make it the goal of your narrative. In order to engage with this aspiration, and to attempt a reading of Elgar in which music is more than ambient corroboration, I want to propose an imaginary audiobook of Gerontius in which the text is interspersed with, or read against a backdrop of, a melody composed by Elgar; a Cageian audiobook, in which the different sounds interpret one another. A melody is particularly appropriate here because of the sheer affective power of a good tune, whether or not heard by a listener capable of unpacking the musical dimension of the affect. Melody can at times sound and feel like music in its essential form, an inexplicably singular and direct experience of some sort of presence, akin to a placeless ‘something familiar’ such as Vaughan Williams detected in the music of Elgar (Vaughan Williams 16).⁶ It is of course an effect: the immediacy effect. Tunes, like listeners, have a history – we might say they offer an unparalleled experience of structures of feeling – but they do their level best to efface it. Elgar was a composer never less than self-conscious about his susceptibility to the crafting of a good tune and the subsequent effects thereof. In the words of one biographer, Jerrold Northrop Moore, ‘it was melody and its allies that provided the readiest vehicle for Edward to carry his self-expression in music to great lengths. And it was melody that was to be the truest expression of Edward’s individuality in music’ (Edward Elgar: A Creative Life 273). The specific melody I want to offer as accompaniment to Gerontius comes from a work ostensibly absent from the novel: Elgar’s First Symphony, premiered to much acclaim on a foggy Manchester night in December 1908. The Symphony famously opens with a broad melody, a swelling of musical sound, one of several such passages in Elgar’s orchestral writing marked Nobilmente; here, it is Noblimente e semplice. According to the composer, ‘the opening theme is intended to be simple and, in intention, noble and elevating … the sort of ideal call (in the sense of persuasion, not coercion or command) and something above the everyday and sordid things’ (Moore, Edward Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime 200). On first appearance it constitutes a three-minute introductory andante, audibly book-ended by two held pianissimo soundings of the key note.

Example 1.1 Elgar, Symphony No. 1 Op. 55, i, bars 1–25

I want to leave these sounds unattended for now and, as the Symphony itself does, come back to them.

As suggested by the debate surrounding period performance, the presenting of the past always arises out of the detail of the here and now, not least in terms of an ideology of authenticity itself: the valuation of authorial intent and contextual particulars as the standard and goal of interpretation. Issues of historicism and authenticity were at the heart of a marked renaissance of investigative historical fiction in the 1980s, a literary context within which Gerontius quietly fits. As the synchronicity of recent events around Elgar suggests, the Edwardian years, together with the attendant topics of the war and the state of the Empire, exerted a particular attraction. Impending change, or a perception of decline, served as a fruitful historical source for the heuristic practice of retrospection, whether as a means of locating an origin for millennial conditions or as the material of a national archive ripe for demythologization. The standard reading of historical fiction of the 1980s and 1990s is to set it alongside, on the one hand, the practice of metahistory advocated among others by Hayden White, and on the other, the incredulous attitude towards metanarratives proposed by Jean-François Lyotard.⁷ The resultant novels are still best characterized along the lines proposed by Linda Hutcheon, as ‘historiographic metafictions’, in which the writing of history, as act and record, is explored in terms of conflictingly valued fictions.⁸ What emerges is a common ground of history and fiction, a shared deployment of the linguistic and rhetorical shapings of plot, viewpoint and retrospection. Gerontius certainly lays claim to the solid referents of history, although via the not uncommon legitimation of a gap in the archive. Yet the Author’s Note distances it somewhat from the more polemically flagrant fabulations of the likes of Salman Rushdie and Peter Ackroyd (or, in America, E.L. Doctorow and Robert Coover). As paratext, it serves to authenticate fictional interventions precisely by admitting them in the interests of an avowed imaginative truth, a deference that also involves the due acknowledgement of non-fictional sources. Again, having allowed the influence on Gerontius of the major works of Elgarian scholarship, Hamilton-Paterson states that the greatest debt of the novel is to the music, suggesting thereby that music itself provides a privileged means of conjuring the narratorial object.

Gerontius is much preoccupied with lateness, concerning as it does a composer whose preoccupation with tradition, both musical and social, gave rise to a sometimes fraught awareness of anachronism. Hamilton-Paterson stages this self-awareness via the imagination of a late period of reflection and self-assessment on the part of the composer. Set as it is in 1923, the structure invokes the Modernist revision of the Bildungsroman. The narrative passage of time which serves to express the essential identity of the subject in the nineteenth-century novel of formation is here undermined and expanded, leading to multiple discontinuous selves far from happy to play their designated part in the foregone conclusion of the tale. Yet just as Elgar’s motto is, as we’ll see, conceptually some distance from the fractured and fleeting subjects of Proust or Woolf, so Hamilton-Paterson sidesteps the potentially post-Freudian contextual resonance of his period.⁹ Instead, in recognition of the historical tension in Elgar and his music between populism and art, the high art and hyperrealism of fictional introspection is imposed on the more populist yarn of the romance. History is far from disavowed, however, but rather encoded...