Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism

Abstract

field of comparative studies in music and literature is still struggling to be born, or perhaps even to be conceived. recent interest that musicologists have so strikingly taken in literary criticism is largely methodological, which is perhaps as it should be: the literary field has developed over the past few decades into methodological gold mine, and the proper object of musical criticism is, after all, music.' Extended comparative studies of musical and literary works are still rare; good ones are downright scarce. Even when good study does appear, an adequate context for its reception may be lacking. Take the case of The Double Trajectory: Ambiguity in Brahms and Henry James, by Roland Jordan and Emma Kafalenos (this issue, pp. 129-144). authors make the intriguing argument that James's story, Owen Wingrave, and Brahms's Intermezzo, op. 119, no. 1, are alike in their use of systematic ambiguity. Each work is said to project two competing structural patterns throughout, and thus to form double trajecto y that allows a high degree of instability [and density] in form that still remains clos d (p. 143). What are we to make of this c mparison? However intriguing, resemblance between James and Brahms does not tally conveniently with our customary ways of understanding either man. Perhaps the resemblance is special case, or perhaps it represents no more than jeu d'esprit on the authors' part. These uncertainties offer prime opportunity to weigh the prospects of musical/literary criticism-something we might call melopoetics. What, if anything, can the tandem reading of musical and literary works have to offer the critical study of music? What methods must we use to carry out such readings credibly? And what standards must tandem reading meet in order to count as critically adequate? In what follows, I will try to answer these questions, last to first, using The Double Trajectory as test case.2