D.H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism

Susan Reid

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030049997
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This first book-length study of D. H. Lawrence's lifelong engagement with music surveys his extensive musical interests and how these permeate his writing, while also situating Lawrence within a growing body of work on music and modernism. A twin focus considers the music that shaped Lawrence's novels and poetry, as well as contemporary developments in music that parallel his quest for new forms of expression. Comparisons are made with the music of Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Wagner, and British composers, including Bax, Holst and Vaughan Williams, and with the musical writings of Forster, Hardy, Hueffer (Ford), Nietzsche and Pound. Above all, by exploring Lawrence and music in historical context, this study aims to open up new areas for study and a place for Lawrence within the field of music and modernism.

© The Author(s) 2019

Susan ReidD.H. Lawrence, Music and ModernismPalgrave Studies in Music and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04999-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: “Words Writ to the Music”

Susan Reid¹

(1)

University of Northampton Northampton, Northamptonshire, UK

Susan Reid

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Absolute music is not intended to have any relation to ideas, I think. It has no more meaning than the wind round the house, or the cries of sea gulls over the low surf. Who knows what thought, or meaning, or ideas are behind a larkie’s singing – there ain’t any; ... and there isn’t thought behind music, but the music is behind the thought, music behind the idea, music the first wild natural thing, and thought is the words writ to the music, the narrow rows of words with little meanings. There is no meaning no verbal, ideational meaning to the Pastoral Symphony – or any other ... There ain’t no meaning, and if there is, there oughtn’t to be. All that is sayable, let it be said, and what isn’t, you may sing it, or paint it, or act it, or even put it in poetry. (1L 100–101)

An informed debate about music and its role in the arts runs through D.H. Lawrence’s earliest correspondence and focuses, in this letter of December 1908, on the central question of “absolute music”.¹ As the son of a coal-miner from Eastwood, with a teaching certificate from University College Nottingham, Lawrence approached writing from a different perspective than his more privileged contemporaries, but if his views about the relationship between words and music varied from theirs, this was not from a position of ignorance. He engaged with symphonies but found more meaning in song, he could read and write music, and he demonstrated a deep interest in sound and its physical properties. Music was—and remained—a profoundly formative influence on his art, shaped by a love of singing, diverse reading and listening, and an attentive ear.

This first book-length study of Lawrence’s lifelong engagement with music aims both to survey his extensive musical interests and how they permeate his writing, and to situate Lawrence within a growing body of work on music and modernism.² My twin focus is therefore on the music that Lawrence knew and how this influenced his writing, and on contemporary developments in music that parallel his quest for new forms of expression.³ To enhance these discussions, each chapter ends with recommendations of music that illustrates its main themes.

This introductory chapter begins by explaining the context which prompted Lawrence to write about “absolute music” and why this issue was fundamental to the formation of early modernism. Lawrence had already begun to work out his position in his first essay “Art and the Individual”, presented at the Eastwood Debating Society in March 1908, and to experiment with musical patterns in his early poems, notably “A Life History in Harmonies and Discords” (c. 1909). But his breakthrough to a mature style came through explorations of rhythm suggested by the Chladni patterns of sound waves made visible in sand (2L 184), illustrated in Fig. 1.1; since the specifically acoustic and musical implications of his oft-quoted analogy have never been fully considered, I set them out here as the basis for recurring discussion in subsequent chapters. Lawrence shared interests in music and sound with other contemporary writers and composers, but there were many ways to be a musical modernist: this book pursues his distinctive approach to writing words to music.

Fig. 1.1

Chladni patterns in sand: Thought -Forms (1901), by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbetter

Absolute Music

Following Beethoven (whose Sixth or Pastoral Symphony Lawrence discussed above), orchestral music emerged in the nineteenth century as the pre-eminent form of music and as a model for the other arts: James McNeill Whistler responded in paint with his Symphony in White, No. 1 (1861–1862) and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote of the need “to find a way of transposing the symphony to the Book” (qtd. Bucknell 2001: 25). Conversely, Richard Wagner, who coined “absolute music” as a pejorative term for music without words or extramusical programme, argued for the continuance of an older concept, largely unquestioned before the Romantic period, which combined the Platonic principles of harmonia, meaning “regular, rationally systematized relationships among tones; rhythmos, the system of musical time, which in ancient times included dance and organized motion; and logos, language as the expression of human reason” (Dahlhaus 1991: 8). A growing tension between these three principles had profound effects in shaping various forms of modernism and provides an important context for understanding Lawrence’s interest in music and his development as a writer who would come to prefer rhythm over harmony as an organising structure.⁴

Daniel Albright has argued that while there was “one stream of modernism” in which “the arts seem endlessly interpermeable, a set of fluid systems of construing and reinterpreting, in which the quest for meaning engages all our senses at once”, there were others that “insist[ed] strongly on the absolute separateness of the artistic media” (Albright 2000: 6–7). Around 1910, even as modernism began to emerge, according to Virginia Woolf’s well-known dictum (Woolf 2009: 38), conflicting methodologies became evident. A stream of inter-arts modernism was anticipated by Ezra Pound’s claims—in the “Introduction” to his 1910 translation of the Italian troubadour poet Guido Cavalcanti—that music and writing shared an affinity with rhythm (Bucknell 2001: 54). Pound’s view was soon echoed in John Middleton Murry’s editorial in the first number of Rhythm , an “Art, Music, Literature Quarterly”, which proclaimed that “the Life of art hang[s] upon seeking new chords to create new harmonies” (Murry 1911: 12). However, Irving Babbitt adopted an opposing stance in The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910), harking back to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s old Laocoön (1766), a landmark treatise on the separateness of art and poetry, which Babbitt now extended to insist on a domain of absolute music free from the extramusical “programmes” espoused by Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner.

Lawrence had already begun to formulate his views in “Art and the Individual”, a paper that upholds the Romantic concept of the artist, alienated from the everyday world and exempted from the need to be “intelligible”, and berates those who find the “music ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: “Words Writ to the Music”
• 2. “The Insidious Mastery of Song”: Cadence and Decadence in the Early Poems
• 3. Lawrence’s Case of Wagner: The White Peacock and The Trespasser
• 4. “Between Heaven and Earth”: Space, Music, and Religion in The Rainbow
• 5. “Beyond the Sound of Words”: Harmony and Polyphony in Women in Love
• 6. Music, Noise, and the First World War: “All of Us”, Bay and Aaron’s Rod
• 7. New World Musicals: The Plumed Serpent and David
• 8. Conclusion: Aspiring to the Condition of Song
• 9. Afterword: Anthony Burgess’s D.H. Lawrence Suite
• Back Matter