Forming Time

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, when some critics and composers increasingly conceptualized symphonic music as absolute and self-referential, the very concept of music began to seem synonymous with form. The musical work, established as a category since around 1800, was no longer necessarily instantiated in performance, but existed in the complex internal relations of its compositional structure—elements that might be grasped in a score. Thus when modernist writers sought to emulate music, they tended to adopt spatialized, abstracted, and synchronic views of musical form. But if music and literature-as-read both involve succession—notes come after notes, words after words—only music features simultaneities; literature produces spatialized or simultaneous effects. This chapter surveys perspectives on modern and literary form in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by examining form’s relationship to temporal and affective experience, considering examples from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Schwitters, Erik Satie, and John Cage.