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

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clements, Elicia

Notably, Woolf explicitly states that she conceptualizes her novels as music before she even writes a word. Moreover, the specific model she describes illustrates techniques one would find in the "Classical" tradition of Western music, themes stated and restated, developed and varied, and then recapitulated at the end, either in sonata allegro form or a fugue. From the time of The Waves onward, Woolf is listening extensively to Beethoven's musical patterns and experiments, using them to reconceptualize her novelistic methods.

Listening to Between the Acts

A loose contrapuntal structure is also Woolf 's inspiration for Between the Acts. As she suggests in her diary of 1937, "It came over me suddenly last night, ... I saw the form of a new novel. Its to be first the statement of the theme: then the restatement: & so on: repeating the same story: singling out this & then that: until the central idea is stated . . . but all the scenes must be controlled, and radiate to a center" (Bell 1984, 5:114-115). Woolf links the method of the statement and restatement of themes to music in her comments about The Waves and her letter to Trevelyan; the account surfaces again in this description of Between the Acts. Clearly, the notion of musical themes helps her to conceptualize her narrative method.

Moreover, Woolf's description of the novel in 1938 combines the issues I have outlined that mark the exchange of ideas with Smyth-subjectivity, difference, and community: "but T rejected: 'We' substituted: to whom at the end there shall be an invocation? 'We'... composed of many different things ... we all life, all art, all waifs & strays-a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole" (Bell 1984, 5:135; ellipses in original). One can hear three echoes of the correspondence with Smyth in this description. The first is Woolf's use of Smyth's textual "dodges": a style that Woolf identifies as ellipses and dashes that she herself will use extensively in Between theActs.The second is the shift to '"We,"' recalling Smyth's statement that she belongs to the crowd. Thirdly, the comment that "all art, all waifs & strays" will produce the somehow unified whole suggests Woolf's recognition of difference. As in The Voyage Out and Night and Day, the idea of contrapuntal music will be the analogy Woolf draws upon to signify the pluralistic model of social organization. But like The Waves, in which the symphony is as cacophonie as it is harmonious, Woolf's musical concept enables diversity, an unpredictable, dissonant, yet somehow inclusive whole.

As Lucy Swithin is keenly aware, "Sheep, cows, grass, trees, ourselvesall are one. If discordant, producing harmony-if not to us, to a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head [. . .]16 and so [. . .] we reach the conclusion that all is harmony, could we hear it" (Woolf 1998a, 157). Although Lucy Swithin is, along with every character in the text, a somewhat parodie figure and this mention of a giant head in the sky is playfully ludicrous, the notion of harmony articulated is integral to the novel. Heterogeneous and potentially discordant harmony is made up of disparate elements-animals, plants, and subjectivities-that dispel homogeneity. As Cuddy-Keane has explored, Woolf s inclusion of all sounds and noises as equal reflects her apprehension of technological and acoustical developments in New Music and her democratic pluralism.17