Silence and Absence in Literature and Music

265 Pages·2016·3.89 MB·English

Silence and Absence in Literature and Music
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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
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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-
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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
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Silence and Absence
in Literature and Music
Edited by
Werner Wolf
Walter Bernhart
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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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
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issn 1566-0958
isbn 978-90-04-31485-6 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-31486-3 (e-book)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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’,
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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.
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