Virginia Woolf & Music () von Adriana Varga

';A truly comprehensive, multi-perspective, and up-to-date survey of the undeniable role of music in Woolf 's life and writings' (Music and Letters). Through Virginia Woolfs diaries, letters, fiction, and the testimony of her contemporaries, this fascinating volume explores the inspiration and influences of musicfrom classical through mid-twentieth centuryon the preeminent Modernist author of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, and other masterful compositions. In a letter to violinist Elizabeth Trevelyan, Woolf revealed: ';I always think of my books as music before I write them.' In a journal entry she compared herself to an ';improviser with [my] hands rambling over the piano.'; Approaching the author's career from a unique perspective, Virginia Woolf and Music examines her musical background; music in her fiction and her own critical writings on the subject; its importance in the Bloomsbury milieu; and its role within the larger framework of aesthetics, politics, gender studies, language, and Modernism. Illuminating the rich nature of Woolfs works, these essays from scores of literary and music scholars are ';a fascinating and important contribution to scholarship about Virginia Woolf, music, and interdisciplinary art' (Music Reference Services Quarterly).

Preface / Mihály Szegedy-Maszák
List of Abbreviations
Introduction / Adriana Varga
Part I: Music and Bloomsbury Culture
1. Bloomsbury and Music / Rosemary Lloyd
2. Virginia Woolf and Musical Culture / Miháy Szegedy-Maszák
Part II Ut Musica Poesis: Music and the Novel
3. Music, Language, and Moments of Being: From The Voyage Out to Between the Acts / Adriana Varga
4. The Birth of Rachel Vinrace from the Spirit of Music / Jim Stewart
5. "The Worst of Music": Listening and Narrative in Night and Day and "The String Quartet" / Vanessa Manhire
6. Flying Dutchmen, Wandering Jews: Romantic Opera, Anti-Semitism and Jewish Mourning in Mrs Dalloway / Emma Sutton
7. The Efficacy of Performance: Musical Events in The Years / Elicia Clements
8. Sounding the Past: The Music in Between the Acts / Trina Thompson
Part III Music, Art, Film and Virginia Woolf's Modernist Aesthetics
8. Broken Music, Broken History: Sounds and Silence in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts / Sanja Bahun
9. "Shivering Fragments": Music, Art, and Dance In Virginia Woolf's Writing / Evelyn Haller
10. Chiming the Hours: A Philip Glass Soundtrack / Roger Hillman and Deborah Crisp
Contributors
Index

These essays explore music and its relationship to language, aesthetics, and culture in the life and work of the preeminent Modernist writer Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, and other works). Approaching Woolf from musicology, literary criticism, and gender studies, the collection examines her musical background; music in her fiction and critical writings; and the importance of music in the Bloomsbury milieu and its role within the larger framework of Modernism. Making use of Woolf's diaries, letters, fiction, and the testimony of her contemporaries, these essays illuminate the rich and deeply musical nature of Woolf's works.

Adriana Varga teaches English and Global and Historical Studies at Butler University, Indianapolis.