Music's Sentimental Role in Tristram Shandy

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2005 by Leslie, John C

the moderato s are five times better than the so-so's;-shew ten times more knowledge of the human heart;-have seventy times more wit and spirit in them;-(and, to rise properly in my climax)-discover a thousand times more genius;-and to crown all, are infinitely more entertaining than those tied up with them. (386)

Yorick is aware of the music in language and uses it to add feeling and vitality to his sermons-vitality to wake a sleepy congregation, feeling to wake an insensitive heart.

Like Yorick's congregation, other characters in the novel find themselves moved by the emotions conveyed in speech with musical coloring. In the case of Diego and Julia, Tristram feels the stirring of his heartstrings by the music inherent in whispering: "I could perceive an attempt towards a vibration in the strings, about the region of the heart" (246; vol. 4, ch. 1). Another instance of reverberation in characters occurs when Phutatorius gets a hot chestnut in his breeches. He screams "Zounds!" with more than one musical inflection, which proves confusing to discriminating members of the company:

One or two who had very nice ears, and could distinguish the expression and mixture of the two tones as plainly as a third or a fifth, or any other chord in musick-were the most puzzled and perplexed with it-the concord was good in itself-but then 'twas quite out of the key, and no way applicable to the subject started;-so that with all their knowledge, they could not tell what in the world to make of it. (286; vol. 4, ch. 27)

The listeners' confusion over incongruous notes in Phutatorius's yelp points to their expectation that the musical continuity of the contemporary "doctrine of affections" be preserved in speech as in music. The doctrine prescribed that the unity of affections be maintained by using only one musical figure (depicting only one emotion) per section of music (Bukofzer 389). Deborah M. Vlock describes the rigidity of the musical affections: "numerical (or chordal) combinations could be counted on to elicit certain listener responses, leaving little to the play of imagination" (517-18). If the table conversation surrounding Phutatorius can be seen as a musical movement in conversation, then his outburst becomes an extremely discordant event to conversants whose ears are tuned to the homogeneity of musical figures of the day. To refined concertgoers and salon attendees of the eighteenth century, Phutatorius's cry must have seemed like a symphony disrupted by the tuba accidentally playing during a quiet passage for strings; Vlock might call the interruption a "musical transgression" (533). Instead of showing compassion for a man in pain, the listeners in this scene evince only confusion for their violated sense of how refined conversation should sound. So music can describe emotional parts of a dialogue; it can be used to describe a change in tone of voice, and when used properly, it can have emotive effects on the auditors in spite of their commitment to abstract principles.