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.
NOTES
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