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Silence and Absence in Literature and Music <UN> Word and Music Studies Series Editors Walter Bernhart Michael Halliwell Lawrence Kramer Steven Paul Scher† Werner Wolf VOLUME 15 The book series WORD AND MUSIC STUDIES (wms) is the central organ of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (wma), an associa- tion founded in 1997 to promote transdisciplinary scholarly inquiry devoted to the relations between literature/verbal texts/language and music. wma aims to provide an international forum for musicologists and literary scholars with an interest in intermediality studies and in crossing cultural as well as disci- plinary boundaries. WORD AND MUSIC STUDIES publishes, generally on an annual basis, theme- oriented volumes, documenting and critically assessing the scope, theory, methodology, and the disciplinary and institutional dimensions and prospects of the field on an international scale: conference proceedings, collections of scholarly essays, and, occasionally, monographs on pertinent individual topics. The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/wms <UN> Silence and Absence in Literature and Music Edited by Werner Wolf Walter Bernhart LEIDEN | BOSTON <UN> Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wolf, Werner, 1955- | Bernhart, Walter. Title: Silence and absence in literature and music / edited by Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2016] | Series: Word and music studies ; volume 15 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016000638 (print) | LCCN 2016007333 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004314856 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004314863 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Music and literature. | Silence in music. | Silence in literature. | Absence in music. | Absence in literature. Classification: LCC ML3849 .S5 2016 (print) | LCC ML3849 (ebook) | DDC 780/.08--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000638 Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1566-0958 isbn 978-90-04-31485-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-31486-3 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. <UN> Contents Preface vii Silence and Absence in Literature and Music Theoretical Aspects How Does Absence Become Significant in Literature and Music? 5 Werner Wolf Rosetta Tones: The Score as Hieroglyph 23 Lawrence Kramer Historical Studies The Spectacular Imagination and the Rhetoric of Absence in Armide 47 Blake Stevens ‘Ghost Writing’: An Exploration of Presence and Absence in Lucia di Lammermoor 63 Naomi Matsumoto How to Play the Music of Absence? The Romantic Aesthetics of Longing in Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Part 4 85 Laura Wahlfors Mute Performances: Ekphrasis of Music, and Performative Aesthetics in Eyvind Johnson’s Romantisk berättelse 102 Beate Schirrmacher Silence and Music in Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés 117 Mary Breatnach Silence and the Sawmill: Rainer Maria Rilke on the Nuisance of Sounding Music 133 Axel Englund <UN> vi CCoonntteennttss The Inaudible Music of Dada 152 Peter Dayan Absence, Presence and Potentiality: John Cage’s 4′33″ Revisited 166 Karl Katschthaler The Silence of an Elephant: Luigi Nono’s Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore (1975) 180 Bernhard Kuhn The Sound of Silence: A Tale of Two Operatic Tempests 196 Michael Halliwell Word and Music Studies: Surveying the Field The Film Musical as a Subject for Word and Music Studies 223 Emily Petermann Musical Form in the Novel: Beyond the Sonata Principle 237 Jeppe Klitgaard Stricker Notes on Contributors 249 <UN> Preface As in previous cases of the book series Word and Music Studies (wms) the present, fifteenth volume in the series presents a selection of revised papers originally given at one of the biannual conferences of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (wma). The event in question was the ninth conference held at the University of London in August 2013. In accor- dance with a long-standing tradition this conference was again dedicated to a topic of general interest for the study of both literature and music, namely ‘silence and absence’. The topic ‘silence and absence’ has a particularly wide relevance since we encounter these ‘negative’ phenomena not only in literature and music but – almost naturally – in a variety of fields in everyday experience, culture and the media. In fact, both silence and absence can be felt in real life as effects of actu- ally or seemingly ‘raw’ reality, for instance in the quiet of vast forests or the absolute lack of light in deep caves, but also as the felt loss of beloved ones. Both phenomena can also be part of more openly culturally mediated facets of every- day life, be it the silence of meditation in churches or private prayer, a minute of silence dedicated to a deceased person, or the surprising impression of absence when expected events do not occur. In addition, contemporary life is being shaped by the interplay of absence and presence to a hitherto unknown degree through the digital revolution, which technically stems from the electronic exploitation of precisely this basic binary opposition in ‘bits’ (binary digits). Moreover, over the past century there has been a fascination with silence and absence in a specific cultural discourse, namely philosophy: from Wittgenstein’s attempted quieting of metaphysical speculation in his well-known dictum from his Tractatus logico-philosophicus (“[…] wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen”; 1921/1984: 85; cf. also 9) to Derrida absence looms large in recent thought. With regard to Derrida, one may, for instance, point out his critique of the “history of metaphysics” in which “Being” has been – allegedly in an erroneous way – always been equated with “presence in all senses of this word” (1966/1978: 279), an observation which has prompted Derrida and fellow- deconstructivists to emphasize the “absence of a centre” and moreover the absence “of a subject and […] of an author” (ibid.: 287), in short, the absence of stable meaning both in individual texts and culture at large. However, while these wider horizons are occasionally touched upon, the present volume is more modestly geared towards the exploration of silence and absence in literature and music (and its various combinations) as (pace decon- structivism) meaningful signifying practices. In fact, except for accidental cases <UN> viii Preface of silence and absence, whenever we encounter or assume the presence of a frame ‘communication’, these seemingly ‘negative’ phenomena can assume a positive communicative and meaning-transmitting function and in this follow Watzlawick’s observation according to which “One cannot not communicate” (Watzlawick/Beavin/Jackson 1967: 49). This is already true in everyday commu- nication and also applies to the arts such as literature and music. Here, too, absence and silence can become as meaningful as visual and aural presence. There are infinite forms of presence in both arts. In contrast to this, one may be tempted to think that this does not apply to the opposite of presence: in music, is this opposite not simply silence, while in literature it is merely absence of text or performance? Yet this assumption is false, as the contribu- tions to this volume convincingly show. Indeed, there is a remarkably rich vari- ety of forms of absence and silence, which, in semiotic terms, can operate on the level of the signifieds (and, where applicable, the referents) or on the level of the signifiers, or on both levels. Absence operating exclusively or predominantly on the level of the signi- fieds can, for instance, occur in the form of a yearning for silence, the reverse of noisy modernity, as discussed by Axel Englund with reference to the poetry and the aesthetics of Rilke (“Silence and the Sawmill: Rainer Maria Rilke on the Nuisance of Sounding Music”). Absence can also take on the form of something conspicuously missing in the signification of a given work of literature or musi- cal composition. This is what Laura Wahlfors presents in a case study of Schumann’s Kreisleriana, where, as she argues, Romantic longing for the Absolute (an absent referent) can be heard in fragmentary musical quotations of Beethoven. This forms a considerable challenge to the pianist, which she addresses in detail (“How to Play the Music of Absence? The Romantic Aesthetics of Longing in Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Part 4”). Another variety of absence in the signification structure of artefacts are cases of intermedial trans- position or ‘adaptation’ in which the target work, the adaptation, lacks ele- ments of the source work, a lack which nevertheless can cast a shadow of ghostly presence. Examples of this can be found in the contributions by Michael Halliwell, focussing on adaptations from Shakespeare (“The Sound of Silence: A Tale of Two Operatic Tempests”), and Naomi Matsumoto (“‘Ghost Writing’: An Exploration of Presence and Absence in Lucia di Lammermoor”). Yet another facet is addressed by Blake Stevens with reference to French baroque opera, namely the absence of important aspects of the performative representation of space and action which is shifted to a mere supplementation by means of ver- bal discourse (“The Spectacular Imagination and the Rhetoric of Absence in Armide”), while Beate Schirrmacher highlights a particularly unusual form of supplemented absence, namely the novelistic rendering of a Beethoven sonata <UN> Preface ix (the Appassionata) not by means of descriptive acoustic evocation in the form of what Steven Paul Scher termed ‘verbal music’ (see 1968; 1970), but by a shift to the pianist’s bodily performance, resulting in a “performative ‘mute’ ekphra- sis” (“Mute Performances: Ekphrasis of Music, and Performative Aesthetics in Eyvind Johnson’s Romantisk berättelse”; quotation see abstract below). Finally, Peter Dayan, while still locating his discussion in the field of absent signifieds, shifts his emphasis from literary or musical works to the aesthetic framing and comments on the remarkable absence of music in the reflections of early twentieth-century Dadaists (“The Inaudible Music of Dada”). Of particular interest are forms of absence and silence which do not princi- pally occur on the level of the signifieds but more or less exclusively affect chains of signifiers. The most extreme case in this respect which, of course, comes to mind is the classic ‘anti-composition’ by John Cage, 4'33", which Karl Katschthaler explores in his contribution under the auspices of ‘potentiality’ (“Absence, Presence and Potentiality: John Cage’s 4'33" Revisited”). While Cage’s ‘work’ appears to stage a totality of absence (there is no music in the conventional sense in the entire ‘composition’), it nevertheless permits the experience of some forms of presence: on the one hand these are the accidental extra-musical sounds which may occur in the respective performance situations and aurally supplement the absent music, and on the other hand the body of the pianist and his or her gestures also form visual supplements to the performative absence of organized musical sound. The interplay between presence and absence may regularly be expected in plurimedial forms such as music theatre, in which silence and absence can operate on the level of one or two partial media (music, image, text) while other partial media are made to operate in the mode of pres- ence. Various forms of such absence, together with their (metareferential) func- tions, are being discussed by Bernhard Kuhn with reference to Luigi Nono (“The Silence of an Elephant: Luigi Nono’s Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore (1975)”). Absence may assume yet different forms if one concentrates on one medium only – be it music (where the general rest comes foremost into mind) or be it literature, where blanks or a white page can become meaningful. Absence of this kind is explored by Mary Breatnach in her reading of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, a work in which, as Breatnach shows, (silent) music also plays a role on the level of the implied aesthetics (“Silence and Music in Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés”). As already said, absence can also affect the transition between different media involved in a performance: in a musical score the music is absent (or present as a potentiality only), while in the musical performance the shape of the score may be absent. Lawrence Kramer addresses this relationship for special cases in which the shape of the score, which he likens to ‘hieroglyphs’, <UN> x Preface can assume notably iconic meaning and produce an added value which may also influence the performance – or the reception – of the music in question (“Rosetta Tones: The Score as Hieroglyph”). In all of the forms of silence and absence discussed in the present volume it is assumed that this kind of negativity can, and in fact does, yield positive effects of meaning. In principle, this may be regarded as an unwarranted assumption begging the question under what conditions we are allowed to assume such a meaningfulness of what is actually not ‘full’ but empty. My own contribution is an attempt at answering this general question (“How Does Absence Become Significant in Literature and Music?”). The book series Word and Music Studies, since its inception in 1999, has repeatedly not only offered to its readers essays systematically focused on one leading topic per volume but has also presented, under the heading ‘Surveying the Field’, a forum for the discussion of individual issues of interest for both arts. In this volume, two essays can be signalled in this context: Emily Petermann addresses a hitherto largely neglected form of the interplay between word, music and image, namely “The Film Musical as a Subject for Word and Music Studies”, while Jeppe Klitgaard Stricker contributes a facet to the larger issue of formal analogies to music in literature in his essay “Musical Form in the Novel: Beyond the Sonata Principle”. This volume is the result of the cooperation of various persons all of whom I would like to thank for their efforts. First and foremost there is the co-editor Walter Bernhart, who was kind enough to take on the brunt of the editorial matters. Then there are, of course, the contributors, without whose willing cooperation the present volume would not have come into being. The same applies to the organizers of the London conference, Robert Samuels and Delia da Sousa Correa from the Open University, who, as it were, laid the foundation to this book. I would also like to thank Masja Horn for her support in smooth- ing the transition from Rodopi to Brill | Rodopi as the new publishing house of Word and Music Studies. We all hope that the book series will continue to thrive under the auspices of the new publisher. Werner Wolf Graz, summer 2015 References Derrida, Jacques (1966/1978). “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference. Transl. with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan. 278–293; 339. <UN>

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