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1. In the same memoir, Woolf also describes the thrill of her first childhood writing success: “How excited I used to be when the ‘Hide Park Gate News’ was laid on her [Julia Stephen’s] plate on Monday morning, and she liked something I had written! Never shall I forget my extremity of pleasure – it was like being a violin and being played upon – when I found that she had sent a story of mine to Madge Symonds” (“Sketch” 95). Jane Marcus comments on this moment in her excellent analysis in “Virginia Woolf and Her Violin: Mothering, Madness, and Music” (Languages of Patriarchy 96).

2. In her notes for the Memoir Club after Virginia’s death, Vanessa Bell wrote that music “naturally, since we were girls, had to be drummed into us, and the piano mistress succeeded in reducing us to complete boredom.”

3. Woolf “was embroidering a cross-stitch chair cover from a design by Vanessa Bell” (D3: 42n8).

4. On February 13, 1915, for example, she described hearing a “divine” concert at Queen’s Hall (also attended by Oliver Strachey, Bernard Shaw, and Walter Lamb), where “they played Haydn, Mozart no 8, Brandenburg Concerto, & the Unfinished” (D1: 33), but expressed her annoyance at the neighbors’ behavior: “a young man & woman next me who took advantage of the music to press each other’s hands; & read ‘A Shropshire Lad’ & look at some vile illustrations. And other people eat chocolates, & crumbled the silver paper into balls” (34). She often remarked sarcastically on the show of toilettes and furs during such occasions, and years later she wrote to Ethel Smyth: “I couldnt go to Londonderry House to hear Nadia [Boulanger], as invited; but I heard her on the wireless. Cant bear music mixed with peerage” (L6: 301, Nov. 9, 1938).

5. The Leonard Woolf Records Collection at Charleston contains forty-five HMV, Columbia Gramophone, and Decca “Polydor Series” records: Béla Bartók Quartet in A minor, op. 7; Ludwig van Beethoven Trio no. 3 in C minor, Quartet in F minor, op. 95, Quartet in F major, op. 135; Johannes Brahms Quintet in G major, op. 111, Quartet in A major, op. 26, Quartet in C minor, op. 51, Trio no. 2 in C major, op. 87; W. A. Mozart Quartet in E flat major, Quartet in C major, Quartet in D minor, Quartet in D major, Oboe Quartet in F major part 2 and 4, Quartet in G major no. 19; Franz Schubert Trio no. 1 in B flat, op. 99; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Quartet in D, op. 11.

6. In his introduction to A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917–1946, J. Howard Woolmer explains that between 1927 and 1930, the Woolfs’ only assistant at the press was young Richard Kennedy. Judging by the record of his impressions, A Boy at the Hogarth Press (1972), Kennedy was not the kind of assistant who was able to help with making decisions about accepting or rejecting manuscripts, so during this time it is safe to assume that Virginia and Leonard were entirely responsible for reading, selecting, and editing the manuscripts submitted to them. Virginia herself was involved directly with the printing of the books: George (Dadie) Rylands, who was their assistant during the summer of 1924, recalls working in the basement of the Woolfs’ Tavistock Square residence, where he “had many happy hours setting up type with Virginia and helping Leonard with the hand press” (Woolmer xxvii–xxviii; Letter to author June 29, 1965).

7. In 1908, for example, János (Hans) Richter conducted an English-language production of Wagner’s The Ring at London’s Covent Garden.

8. At the time, she was reading Hubert Parry’s Art of Music (1894) and Donald Francis Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis (1935–1939).

9. Cross and Tolbert suggest diachronic, historical transformations in the concept of musical meaning in the Western intellectual tradition. They trace them from the classical Greek philosophical tradition – in which one aspect of music was a melodic, fundamentally human activity, while another aspect involved theories based 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” (26) – to the medieval world, in which this dichotomous view of music gained complexity “as it was refracted through the multiple prisms of early Christian thought” (27). In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the meanings of music “had come to be largely theorized in terms of human passion or affects,” music aligning itself with rhetoric and its forms mirroring “those of the linguistic prosody, though the structures that music could articulate also became more important for their own sake” (27). By the eighteenth century, “music’s forms became more and more intelligible in terms of theories of harmony, related to either, and sometimes to both the findings of physical acoustics, and abstract principles or architectonic structure” (27). As a consequence, musical meaning no longer required reference to words it would have accompanied, or to “prosody” – “the ways in which it conveyed those words” – and thus “instrumental music came to be conceived of as equally capable of bearing meaning in its own right” (27). Downing A. Thomas further explains, in the same Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, that most mid- to late eighteenth-century philosophers who wrote about music assumed it was a kind of language (5), an assumption that would be overturned at the end of the eighteenth century by the notion of music as autonomous, as having value in its own right (Cross and Tolbert 27).

10. Stories such as “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” “The String Quartet,” “A Simple Melody,” and “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points.’”

11. In such expression-based theories, “music’s capacity to engender aesthetic experience does not rely on, and is not expressible in the same terms as the capacity that language possesses of bearing meaning by expressing complex propositions that have determinable sense and reference” (Cross and Tolbert 28).

12. See Emilie Crapoulet, Virginia 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.