Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music: Listening as a Productive Mode of Social Interaction

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clements, Elicia

By the time of The Waves it is impossible to create the same sort of order for the whole as it is in The Voyage Out and Night and Day. A moment of productive social organization is still likened to the experience of listening to music, but the metaphor Woolf employs includes both concord and discord. Between the Acts is no different in this respect, with one exception: the crowd-or cacophonie symphony-becomes the focus of the narrative.

Several factors suggest Woolf understands music not only as an art form analogous to literature but, especially later in her life, as a medium with propitious methodological properties. After the Woolfs acquired an Algraphone in 1925 they listened to music in the evenings on a regular basis, in part because Leonard wrote record reviews for the Nation and Athenaeum between 1926 and 1929.14 Woolfs comments about listening to Beethoven's late string quartets and sonatas during her composition of The Waves suggest she was hearing in his music not just inspiration but alternative formal models for her new, radical novel. As she observes in June 1927 referring to "The Moths" (which eventually becomes The Waves), "I do a little work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas" (Bell 1980, 3:139). Woolf associates the novel's method more directly to the experience of listening to Beethoven in another entry in December 1930:

It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard's final speech, & end with the words O solitude: thus making him absorb all those scenes, & having no further break. This is also to show that the theme effort, effort,15 dominates: not the waves: & personality: & defiance: but I am not sure of the effect artistically; because the proportions may need the intervention of the waves finally so as to make a conclusion. (Bell 1980, 3:339)

The association between the Beethoven quartet and the form and content of the novel illuminates the crucial connection between language and music: listening to Beethoven provides her with a model for enacting simultaneity. Bernard, according to the entry, will "merge" and "absorb all these scenes" and voices. Music is also a means by which Woolf conceives of producing relational subjectivity in The Waves. All of the voices can be brought together like the melodies of counterpoint that simultaneously move in contrary motion or begin on different pitches yet function in harmony with one another.

In 1940, Elizabeth Trevelyan praises Woolf's biography, Roger Fry, for its musical properties. With great pleasure, Woolf replies that Trevelyan has

found out exactly what I was trying to do when you compare it [Roger Fry] to a piece of music. Its [sic] odd, for I'm not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them. And especially with the life of Roger,-there was such a mass of detail that the only way I could hold it together was by abstracting it into themes. I did try to state them in the first chapter, and then to bring in developments and variations, and then to make them all heard together and end by bringing back the first theme in the last chapter. (Nicolson 1980, 6:426)