Читать книгу Virginia Woolf and Music - Adriana L. Varga - Страница 10

In December 1940, Woolf wrote to her friend Ethel Smyth about her intention “to investigate the influence of music on literature.” She asked the composer to write her own “loves and hates for Bach Wagner etc out in plain English,” because none of the books on music that Woolf was reading could give her a hint of how she might investigate that influence (L6: 450).⁸ It is significant that she was planning to investigate the relationship between music and literature herself, unwilling to rely on existing criticism, finding “[Hubert] Parry all padding” and Donald Francis Tovey “too metaphysical” (450).

Questions concerning musical 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.