Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf, eds.
Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Pp. 352. $90.00
Werner Wolf
The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Pp. 272. $50.00
Reviewed by Caryl Flinn
A number of clues signal the intimate relationship between these two texts: the scholars in common (Wolf’s name most evidently, but other abundantly shared references), the same press and year of publication, even their very look and feel (wide, thick tomes, small margins, high-quality paper). The books represent an emerging field of musicology, “Word and Music Studies,” as it identifies itself, and whose 1997 conference proceedings appear as the anthology discussed here. Together they tackle the obvious question: what is Word and Music Studies? The quick answer is that it is an area devoted to exploring intersections and tensions between literature/verbal texts and music. The Èminence grise of the movement was Calvin Brown, writing over half a century ago; current influences include Lawrence Kramer and editors Scher and Wolf.
Like any emerging field, the documents of the “word-music studies” group involve a lot of self-referencing. This has both assets and liabilities. Each book demonstrates an impressive degree of thoroughness, detail, and depth. Essays are constantly refining terms, restaking boundaries. The downside is an occasional sense of “in-house”-ness generated by the anthology. Despite the intertextual nature of the field, one sometimes desires a wider array of questions to be posed and problems to be addressed. The anthology would benefit from more methodological diversity and more attention to works outside the North Atlantic, male canon of high art. Scholars—notably Scher and Wolf—spend copious amounts of energy trying to chart out (literally, with graphs) what constitutes musicality. While at times frustrating, it is an index not only of the group’s thoroughness, but its newness—that taxonomic bias is strongly reminiscent of early semiology, for instance.
The anthology is dominated by two types of essays: close readings of individual texts and those that establish parameters for the field of word-music studies. It nonetheless presents a variety of opinions and approaches. How to assess the “presence” of music in literature as a signified, as a signifier, as a metaphor? What of literary pieces that mimic musical structures such as fugues, for example, or the sonata form? How do meanings change when language and music appear together? Does music threaten meaning? What of music’s capacity to present rather than represent (the compelling essays by Michael Halliwell and Bernhardt).
As with any anthology, the quality and aim of contributions vary. Many refine established work within the word-music area. General readers will probably be more interested in the pieces that expand contexts somewhat and consider historical and cultural implications. Some that excel in this regard are John Neubauer’s interesting study of inter-ethnic folk impulses in Bartok; Albrecht Rietmueller’s brilliant insights into the relationship between music and a variety of different nationalistic traditions through Haydn’s well-known Kaiserhymn; and Kramer’s essay, which considers how sounds can supersede meaning. The power of the singing voice, he notes, can outstrip what the actual words might be “saying.” Theoretically sophisticated and up to date, he examines how the voice generates pleasures on its own in what he calls “songfulness.”
Wolf’s contribution, “Musicalized Fiction and Intermediality,” functions as a precis for his solo-authored book, The Musicalization of Fiction. He carefully distinguishes the term “intermediality” from related concepts such as intertextuality, self-referentiality, “meta-textual operations,” etc. He painstakingly produces criteria to determine a medium’s “dominant,” covert, overt status within another. However impressive, the first third of the book drags in his attempt to exhaust the different combinatory possibilities of music and literary works—the same quibble I have with the anthology.
The Musicalization of Fiction is well worth reading. It shows the impressive breadth of Wolf’s scholarship. He moves easily among modernist theory and literature, postmodernism, conventional musicology, the “new musicology,” philosophy, English literature, and semiotics. For him, a musicalized text is one where the “presence of music can indirectly be experienced while reading” (52). His criteria are rigid: Tristram Shandy, for instance, does not make it; de Quincey’s “Dream Fugue” (1849) does—and was a literary “first.” Wolf explains how romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism have positioned music vis-à-vis language and thus enabled different kinds of musicalized literature to emerge.
Among the generous samples of close readings, his analysis of Virginia Woolf’s short story “The String Quartet” is a tour de force. For him, its musicality promotes a sense of reassurance that the everyday can no longer provide its subjects; music is a cautious refuge in Woolf’s negative modernist ethos. Wolf returns to the point in the book’s conclusion when he notes that musicalization is especially useful “for the representation of a potentially chaotic material” in literary forms that depart from mimesis, rationalism, and conventional narrative structure (239). Not surprisingly, Wolf finds that the more “musicalized” a piece of literature is, the less narrative—or at least, the less conventionally narrativized—it will be (78). That claim sits well with the texts he subjects to scrutiny. At the same time, it would be interesting to see how less highbrow, more popular literary forms and genres can be “musicalized” or how that feature might be found in conventional narrative.
Together these books provide an extensive introduction to the realm of word and music studies. They have lengthy bibliographies, the entries of which reveal the productive boundary-crossing between “word and music studies” and new musicology more generally. Why word-music studies? As Wolf observes, musicality opens literature up to a “medial ‘other’ that seems particularly remote” (238). These books show how music is and is not really so remote, nor impervious to study and meaning.