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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 so far escaped the novelist – the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on use of the shape of trees or the play of colour [ . . . ]. Every moment is the centre and meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed” (E4: 439).

The story’s early reception is one of success, with praise from Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and T. S. Eliot (D2: 109, 125). Yet the story’s musical references have also provoked a variety of divergent interpretations. The narrative is so deceptively simple that Avrom Fleishman argued that it has a circular A-B-C-B-A structure patterned on a Mozart quartet, concluding that it is simply “an exercise in imitative form” that could not be considered one of the most important tales (67). Peter Jacobs astutely pointed out that the clue that Mozart’s music is heard in the story is ironic (243), yet he also interprets the story as having a “straightforward bithematic A-B-A-B-A-B-A scheme” (244–455). Emilie Crapoulet, in turn, has argued that Schubert’s “Trout” Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667, is the musical composition that inspired the story, and not a Mozart quartet (“Beyond Boundaries” 208), basing her interpretation on Woolf’s diary entry of March 9, 1920 (D2: 24n13).¹⁵ However, the story’s title itself refers to a quartet, and in a short paragraph Woolf omitted from the published text, which is extant in the typescript (see CSF 140n2), the author mentioned Mozart for what would have been a second time in the story. Even allowing for the assumption that, if the story’s characters envision fish swimming in the Rhône while they hear a musical performance, it must mean they are listening to Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, by mentioning Mozart’s name, Woolf pointed to her characters’ failure to recognize the composer they have just heard – a criticism of musical performance as a purely social event in which attention focuses on everything but the music itself. More importantly, this also means the author intentionally provided ambiguous or inconclusive clues about exactly which composition should be associated with this short story. Had she wanted, Woolf could have easily singled out a particular composition – as she did with Beethoven’s Sonata, op. 111, in The Voyage Out. Beyond any imitation of musical structure or desire to capture and convey musical meaning, this discrepancy between the use and mention of music in “The String Quartet” points to a metafictional engagement with classical music, postmodern in its playfulness (see Manhire 147, this volume). In fact, the story’s narrator (or one of the story’s narrators) asks herself: “But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair – I mean hope. What do I mean? That’s the worst of music!” (CSF 139). Musical meaning is ineffable. If the first reaction to music invokes a “conglomeration of fish all in a pool,” later passages suggest a transcendence of the indoor concert experience – “‘these are the embraces of our souls.’ The lemons nod assent. The swan pushes from the bank and floats dreaming into midstream” (CSF 30) – while the very end of the story describes an entirely different, synesthetic and visionary experience reminiscent of Lucy Swithin and Isa Oliver’s musings in Between the Acts: “the green garden, moonlit pools, lemons, lovers, and fish” dissolved “in the opal sky across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches,” like the architecture that arises from Rachel’s playing, “firmly planted on marble pillars . . . Tramp and trumpeting. Glang and clangour. Firm establishment. Fast foundations. March of myriads. Confusion and chaos trod to earth” (CSF 141).

Woolf’s approach to exploring the relationship between music, language, and literature may therefore be situated against the background of a dispute that reflects two distinct perspectives on this relationship: an aesthetic one, valuing music as autonomous with a meaning detached from linguistic semantics or social value (an expression-based approach [Cross 27]); and an approach that assumes comparisons between music and language can be naturally drawn, linguistic and musical meaning often intersect, and “the relationship between a page of print and the poem it represents is analogous to that between a score and the music it represents” (Brown 7). Critiquing the latter approach,¹⁶ Suzanne Langer argued that reading a score is not equivalent to reading a text, because, while in music the passage of time is made audible by “purely sonorous elements,” which exist for the ear alone,¹⁷ the elements of literature are not sounds as such: “Instead of being pure sense objects that may become ‘natural’ symbolic forms, like shapes and tones, they are symbols already, namely ‘assigned’ symbols, and the artistic illusion created by means of them is not a fabric of tönend bewegte Formen, but a different illusion altogether” (Feeling 135).¹⁸

The argument is based on analyses Langer had made earlier in Philosophy in a New Key (1942), where she explained that the actual function of meaning calls for permanent contents. Music, as opposed to language, is an “unconsummated symbol” – it articulates without asserting (240). It is a point Virginia Woolf had made in her 1909 essay “Impressions at Bayreuth,” when she briefly tried to discuss the difference between musical and linguistic expression: “Apart from the difficulty of changing a musical impression into a literary one, and the tendency to appeal to the literary sense because of the associations of words, there is the further difficulty in the case of music that its scope is much less clearly defined than the scope of the other arts. [ . . . ] Perhaps music owes something of its astonishing power over us to this lack of definite articulation; its statements have all the majesty of a generalization, and yet contain our private emotions” (E1: 291).¹⁹

The similarities with Langer’s discussion of the difference between music and language are striking, yet they should not surprise: Langer’s aesthetic approach to musical meaning relies heavily on Clive Bell and Roger Fry’s “Significant Form,”²⁰ a concept Woolf was well acquainted with. While she did not seek to imitate musical structure, Woolf not only found inspiration in musical form when structuring her own writing, as she explained in her letter to Elizabeth Trevelyan, but she also understood and emphasized literary form in a way that brought it close to musical form as described by Langer: “Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression. The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made” (Philosophy 240). The “Impressions at Bayreuth” passage quoted above continues with a comment about Shakespeare that shows Woolf was thinking of authors who attempted to bring the quality of the English language close to that of music: “Something of the same effect is given by Shakespeare, when he makes an old nurse the type of all the old nurses in the world, while she keeps her identity as a particular old woman” (E1: 291). The debates with Arnold Bennett centered precisely on an emphasis, on Woolf’s part, on form and formal expressiveness rather than meaning and plot. While she was not interested in imitating musical form, the constant attention Woolf devoted to form in writing; her awareness that form can drive articulation/utterance in ways that are significantly different from assertion and explanation; and the importance she placed on rhythm, sound, and silence in her writing bring her textual praxis close to musical form in the sense Langer meant it, as exhibiting “pure form not as an embellishment but as its very essence” (Philosophy 209).

Woolf was certainly well aware of the pitfalls of indiscriminately comparing music and text. She stated quite early her belief that descriptions of music were “worthless” and “rather unpleasant” (D1: 33). She also affirmed, metafictionally, through the heroine of her first novel, that it would be better to write music instead of novels (VO 212). At the same time, as several contributors to this volume (Szegedy-Maszák; Manhire; Varga) point out, Woolf was fascinated by the ideal of ut musica poesis and was influenced by Walter Pater’s “School of Giorgione” maxim, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” As early as 1905, she recorded in her diary that she was passionately studying Pater’s works “not to copy [ . . . ] but to see how the trick’s done” (PA 251). In Woolf’s fiction and in her writings on music and literature there are tensions similar to those arising from debates about where the boundaries that separate the arts can be drawn. When discussing the “Laocoön problem” – the problem of “discovering how strongly the boundaries separating the various artistic media manage to repel transgression” (Albright 6–7) – Daniel Albright points out that alleging that all media are one paradoxically calls attention to their recalcitrance and, vice versa, that “artists who deliberately seek divergence among the constituent arts sometimes discover that the impression of realness, thereness, is heightened, not diminished” (7).²¹

Several scholars have written about the influence of music on Woolf’s works – most notably, Mark Hussey in The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (1986); Jane Marcus in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (1987); and Patricia Laurence in The Reading of Silence (1991) – and over the past fifteen years a few well-regarded essays treating aspects of the topic have appeared, some authored by scholars who are also contributors to this volume.²² Prior to 1980 one finds only very few essays that touch on the subject of Woolf and music, usually more oriented toward narrative method and isolated textual readings than researched considerations of the role music played in the intellectual and cultural milieu of the Bloomsbury Group in general and in Woolf’s development in particular. Surprisingly, until now no collection of essays has focused primarily on the relationship between music, language, and the other arts in Virginia Woolf’s writings. Virginia Woolf and Music fills this gap by focusing on how Woolf’s use of music led to her breaking with traditional forms of representation in her novels at various stages of her aesthetic development and by exploring the inter-arts and interdisciplinary aspects of her modernist fictional experimentation. The essays gathered here examine various aspects of Virginia Woolf’s musical culture as well as the rich and deeply musical nature of her works from several different perspectives:

1. Contextual – the importance of music in the Bloomsbury milieu and its role within the larger framework of modernism and early twentieth-century culture (Lloyd; Szegedy-Maszák; Haller; Bahun);

2. Biographical – Woolf’s involvement with music as a listener and concertgoer, her musical knowledge and aesthetics (Szegedy-Maszák; Varga; Manhire; Clements);

3. Comparative – Woolf’s own use of music as metaphor, motif, or trope in her writing as well as connections between classical, modernist, and contemporary music and Woolf’s fictional and critical writings (Stewart; Manhire; Sutton; Clements; Thompson; Bahun; Hillman and Crisp).

The introductory section of the volume examines the importance of music for Cambridge and Bloomsbury intellectuals from G. E. Moore to Roger Fry, thus offering a setting in which Virginia Woolf’s own musical culture can be discussed. In the opening essay Rosemary Lloyd explains that even though for many of Woolf’s contemporaries music may have taken a secondary place to the fine arts, especially under Fry’s influence, for some of them, most notably Woolf herself, music was a source of sensual delight and intellectual stimulation that informed their writing and aesthetic convictions.

Woolf’s interest in music was all the more enriched by her attendance of classical music concerts from an early age, by reading about music, and, later, by listening to music practically every day in her own home. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák’s essay focuses our attention on the important role music played in Woolf’s life and writings. Contrary to what critics have previously argued, Szegedy-Maszák sees continuity between Woolf’s early concert- and operagoing experiences, the interest she took in Wagner, and her later interest in the works of Beethoven, arguing that a major artist never forgets the inspiration of early, formative years.

The middle section of the volume includes essays that discuss aspects of the music-literature relationship in Virginia Woolf’s fiction, with a focus on the novel, showing that this can be done from a variety of angles and from sometimes diverging perspectives. In my own contribution, I trace transformations in the text-music relationship from The Voyage Out (1915) to The Waves (1931) and Between the Acts (1941) and discuss Woolf’s interest in exploring the interconnections of rhythm, sound, and language in these particular works. Woolf’s musical “voyage out” led to the highly experimental forms of her later fiction, in which she reconfigured the relationship between reader, text, and context; actor, audience, and performance.

Jim Stewart draws attention to Woolf’s early interest in drama, particularly to her keen awareness of singing Greek choruses, which she discussed in her essays, and which clearly influenced her first novel, The Voyage Out. Using Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as a cross-reference to Virginia Stephen’s intellectual practice, Stewart argues that between 1899 and 1905, Woolf’s musical sensibility and her insight of writing as a form of rhythm was influenced partly by the form of the Greek music-drama and partly by Wagnerian opera.

It is to the “worst of music” that Vanessa Manhire responds in her essay, in which she shows that Woolf does not attempt to reproduce musical form but, rather, to transpose indeterminacy of meaning into linguistic play. Looking at the novelist’s treatment of music in Night and Day (1919) and in the “The String Quartet,” Manhire explores Virginia Woolf’s use of music in order to problematize the relationship between the external world and the world of the mind. She explains that Woolf used music as a model for representing interiority, and suggests that Woolf’s development of stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques owes much to her thinking about the effects of playing and listening to music – a shared social experience, but one that simultaneously allows for the individual movement of imagination.

Emma Sutton also discusses Richard Wagner’s influence on Woolf, and explores the ways in which Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is informed by Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843). Sutton’s approach to the topic relies on the double perspective of discussing Mrs. Dalloway’s intertextuality with Wagner’s Romantic opera and of considering the role and representation of Jewish religious practice – particularly the Jewish mourning practice of shivah – amplifying, in this way, Woolf’s critique of the Wagnerian intertext. Sutton considers Woolf as expressing in her fiction both indebtedness and resistance to the Wagnerian operatic model of tragedy.

The Years (1937), Elicia Clements argues, is Woolf’s most overtly political novel, and at the same time, it “turns up the volume” by foregrounding aurality in new and ubiquitous ways. In her essay Clements explains that the two foci – political and musical – converge in both the novel’s subject matter and methods. One of the reasons Woolf values music as an art form is that it is performative by its very nature. As with theater, it traverses a continuum between efficacy (or effective acts that produce change, as in ritual) and entertainment (symbolic gestures for an aesthetic purpose).

Opera is again a subject of discourse in Trina Thompson’s essay, this time in reference to Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts. Thompson argues that the structural poetics of Woolf’s novel and the emergence of opera share a parallel genetic evolution: in cinquecento Italy, musical entertainments were performed during the intermissions of the primary theatrical piece. Composers of these interludes believed that the social and moral power of the ancients was a function of musical drama – verbal utterance soldered to music’s dynamic force. Opera was created as a genre between the acts, and, likewise, the conflicted societal collective of Pointz Hall finds its voice between historical moments. Through this prism, Between the Acts can be interpreted as an “experiment with historically infused genres,” recapitulating Woolf’s engagement with the past and her explorations of alternatives to traditional historiography.

The last section of the volume is concerned with exploring inter-art connections between Virginia Woolf’s fiction and twentieth-century music, the visual arts, and film. Sanja Bahun begins this section with an appraisal of Woolf’s knowledge of and involvement with modernist music and explains how Woolf’s writing changed substantially in terms of expression and mood after reaching its most resonant pitches with The Waves and The Years – a shift in representation that parallels contemporary developments in modern classical music. By focusing on Woolf’s Between the Acts as a unique formal articulation of its moment of production, Bahun highlights the cross-sections between sociohistorical content, philosophic and artistic practice in compositions by Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and Woolf’s fiction. Woolf’s last novel becomes a study in the emancipation of sound similar to that carried out in “ultramodern” music.

Evelyn Haller begins her contribution to this volume by citing connections among aspects of art – specifically sound in music as well as language, sculpture and painting, and movement as further epitomized by dance. What have the rambunctious Italian Futurists or the shorter-lived English Vorticists to do with Virginia Woolf or Bloomsbury? Reviewing criticism that both affirms and denies Woolf’s associations with Vorticism, Haller explains that in her eagerness to collapse artistic conventions of time and space, Woolf was also interested in aspects of modern life and mechanization. Haller focuses on the aurality of Woolf’s novels: the sound of the skywriting airplane in her war-haunted Mrs. Dalloway; the sound of “the sea” she intended to be heard “all through” The Waves; street noises in The Years.

In the final essay, film studies scholar Roger Hillman and musicologist Deborah Crisp join forces for an analysis of the interplay between music, image, and text at work in all three stages of the adaptive process leading to Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours – the two previous stages being Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel, The Hours, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, from which Cunningham took his inspiration. Through musical examples, the authors show how Philip Glass’s music creates the underlying connection between the narrative strands of the film (with a screenplay by David Hare). But they also interweave comparative examples from Woolf’s fiction (Mrs. Dalloway), her biography, Cunningham’s novel, and Daldry’s film, showing how these works stem out of and influence each other in a mise-en-abîme-like effect that is connected and amplified through textual and aural musical references.

The essays gathered in the present volume have the advantage of reconsidering and opening up the question of how Virginia Woolf made music bear on her writing, by addressing it from several, differing perspectives rather than from a single, homogenous point of view. In biographical, historical, and conceptual terms, they advance the discussion about music in the Bloomsbury environment and the evolution of Woolf’s own musical knowledge and textual praxis, interweaving modernist poetics with classical and contemporary music. As well, they address esthetic, theoretical, and political issues about how comparisons between music, literature, the visual arts, and film prove (im)possible and what the musical intertexts add to the ethical dimensions of Woolf’s writing.