{"id":12259,"date":"2022-07-06T02:17:06","date_gmt":"2022-07-06T02:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/id\/?post_type=product&p=12259"},"modified":"2022-07-06T02:22:05","modified_gmt":"2022-07-06T02:22:05","slug":"simple-songs-virginia-woolf-and-music","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/id\/simple-songs-virginia-woolf-and-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Simple Songs: Virginia Woolf and Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year saw the works of Virginia Woolf<\/a> enter the public domain in many countries around the world. To celebrate Emma Sutton looks at Woolf’s short story “A Simple Melody” and the influence which music had upon the writer who once wrote that music was “nearest to truth”.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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As Virginia Woolf\u2019s letters and diaries amply record, music was a central part of her social life as it was for many of her contemporaries and she was at her best as a humorist writing about these occasions. She records with glee the various mishaps that befall musicians and audiences \u2013 a prima donna throwing down her music in a rage; a button popping off the plump Clive Bell\u2019s<\/a> waistcoat during the slow movement of a piano sonata; an elderly man crashing loudly but astonishingly unhurt down the stairs at Covent Garden. The social conventions, artifice and pretensions governing these performances intrigue her and allow her to sharpen her wit, but music wasn\u2019t only an occasion for slapstick humour or social satire. It played a central part in the political vision of Woolf\u2019s writing, shaping her understanding and representations of feminism and sexuality, pacifism and cosmopolitanism, social class and anti-Semitism. And it informed, too, the formal experiments of her prose. Woolf learned many of her astonishing literary innovations from music \u2013 adopting from Wagner\u2019s operas, for example, the technique of shifting from one narrative perspective to another in order to represent the unspoken thoughts and feelings of her characters.<\/p>\n

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The short story \u2018A Simple Melody\u2019 (c.1925) encapsulates her acute interest in music and its resonant but discreet place in her work. In it, the principal character masks his discomfort at a formal party by studying a landscape painting hanging on the wall:<\/p>\n

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Mr Carslake, at least, thought it very beautiful because, as he stood in the corner where he could see it, it had the power to compose and tranquillize his mind. It seemed to him to bring the rest of his emotions \u2013 and how scattered and jumbled they were at a party like this! \u2013 into proportion. It was as if a fiddler were playing a perfectly quiet old English song while people gambled and tumbled and swore, picked pockets, rescued the drowning, and did astonishing \u2013 but quite unnecessary \u2013 feats of skill. He was unable to perform himself.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The difficulties of communication and the importance of the unspoken are central themes of Woolf\u2019s brief sketch. This is a story about language, about communication. The inhibitions restricting the conversation among the party\u2019s guests, and the difficulty of finding \u2018pure new words\u2019 in which to express his feelings, frustrate Mr Carslake. As he looks at the painting of a heath Mr Carslake imagines walking on it with a variety of companions, longing for the intimacy and social equality that he sees as characteristic of al fresco conversation in contrast to polite small talk:<\/p>\n

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Why, very likely they would talk about their own habits for a whole hour; and all in the freest, easiest way, so that suppose he, or Mabel Waring, or Stuart [\u2026] wanted to explain Einstein, or make a statement \u2013 something quite private perhaps \u2013 (he had known it happen) \u2013 it would come quite natural.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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His association of the landscape with song suggests that music, like these imagined outdoor exchanges, represents a more direct or ideal form of communication than language, an idea that Woolf\u2019s writing repeatedly explores. She was fascinated by, but wary of, the idea that music was a form of total expression, a model that writing could aspire to or imitate. Here, Mr Carslake\u2019s comparison of the painting to an \u2018old English song\u2019 celebrates music\u2019s expressivity and capacity to confer order on its listeners, but also evokes the extensive contemporary nationalist writing about English folk song, landscape and early music by the composers and teachers of the English Musical Renaissance. Mr Carslake remarks that he has recently attended the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, at which English folk songs and military marches were performed: he found it \u2018very tiring\u2019 and \u2018believed it was not being a success\u2019. These bathetic details undercut nationalist and military music, suggesting that he, like Woolf herself, was repelled by it. Yet Mr Carslake’s belief that music confers \u2018proportion\u2019 on the listener echoes the catchphrase used by the unfeeling doctors treating shell-shocked war veterans in her contemporary novel\u00a0Mrs Dalloway<\/em>, using music to suggest a more troubling aspect to his fantasies about communication: his \u2018desire [\u2026] to be sure that all people were the same\u2019 and \u2018very simple underneath\u2019 is both crudely reductive, as he partly recognises, and indicative of empathy and a wish for real connection with others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"