A Sound Mind by Paul Morley

Author:Paul Morley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

3. THIRD MOVEMENT: MINUET AND TRIO, IN THE TONIC KEY

Once I had made the decision that I was going to compose a string quartet, I returned to a story written by Virginia Woolf. Her extraordinary experimental short fiction, ‘The String Quartet’ (1921), explores the pleasures and frustrations of ‘capturing’ music in language.

In the early 1920s, at the beginning of the recorded-music era, with the newly invented gramophone and the arrival of the wireless, she was a knowledgeable, almost daily, listener to ‘classical’ music, writing while music was playing in the background, which would encourage the appearance of a certain momentum in what she was writing, the prose mirroring or matching the energy and structure of what she was listening to. Woolf once gave some details of her daily routine: ‘We’ll play bowls; then I shall read Sévigné; then have grilled ham and cheese for dinner; then Mozart.’

She considered that ‘music is nearest to truth’, certainly considered that it diagnosed, reflected and described modern changes first – then art, then words – and was constantly fascinated by the cultural practice of music and by the relationships between music and writing. This was particularly seen in the rhythmic sound of the sea she wanted to communicate throughout her novel The Waves. Many of her most striking stylistic innovations were often inspired by music, and she considered that music was a more direct method of communication than language. She once imagined a colony where marrying was not allowed – unless you happened to fall in love with a Beethoven symphony. Before her death in 1941 she was planning a book on the influence of music on literature.

This connection was always of interest to me, the idea of how you wrote about music, and transformed a piece of music into words about that piece of music when particularly a great piece of music was its own best description and explanation. Woolf once wrote that all descriptions of music are worthless, actually ‘rather unpleasant’, and her way of reporting on a piece of music was to come to the music as it is filtered through consciousness, connected to how Debussy’s impressions of reality were from inside experience rather than some literal copy – reacting to music in another state, at another stage, one more accurate in terms of a listener absorbing a piece of music into their own life, where it becomes totally unique and personal. Consciousness as impacted by music is what she responds to. Music as a catalyst for thought, and how different sorts of music provoke different levels of thinking. What is your state of mind after you have heard some music? How does music actually make meaning? How does the listener make meaning out of music, and will that be the same meaning for everyone?

She is concerned with how, as a listener, music makes you think other things, and how those things are the ones worth writing about and bring you into the soul of the music. It’s a better truth

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