Reconnecting Music to Howards End: Forster's Aesthetics of Inclusion

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For an overview of the choral or “sight-singing” movement, see Scholes 11–17; for the board schools, see Cox 19–21, 116–20, 162, and also Board of Education 254–55. For the lower-middle- and working-class makeup of the Promenades' audiences, see Langley 44–45. After the Queen's Hall was destroyed in World War II the Promenades moved to the Royal Albert Hall where they still take place today. I find Stone's argument convincing: “[s]ince nearly all of Forster's writings on art appeared after his last published novel, they are inevitably a comment (at least in part) on his own practice” (104). Trilling, too, found Forster's literary criticism and his novels to be of a similar intellectual “temper” (2). The theory of musical fiction in itself is not new. André Gide in Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925) and Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point (1928) overtly theorized musical novels in their own work, while, more recently, critics such as Calvin Brown (1948 Brown , Calvin. Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts . Athens : The University of Georgia Press , 1948 . Print. [Google Scholar]) and Werner Wolf (1999 Weatherhead , Andrea K. “Howards End: Beethoven's Fifth.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 31.2–3 ( 1985 ): 247 – 64 . Print. [Google Scholar]) have explored musical fiction across a variety of literary genres. All of these writers, however, tend to de-emphasize the social implications of musical novels. Talking and moving during performances were prevalent, if often frowned upon, behaviors even until the late-nineteenth century, see Scholes 223–225. Though in 1910 individuals, such as Sir Henry Wood, were changing the elitist contexts of classical music through endeavors such as the Queen's Hall Promenades, most modernists continued to view classical music as part of what Thomas Burke once called a “luxury trade” intended for the rich (17). Cyril Ehrlich notes that though decent pianos could be rented by the late nineteenth century, “some hire purchased instruments were so shoddy that they became worthless before payment was completed” (98). I sympathize, for my playing has had similar effects. Rose discusses how many working-class individuals did engage with classical music and literature despite difficult living conditions, though he notes that many working-class parents associated education with effeminacy and indolence and discouraged their children from such pursuits, see Rose 179–80. For the formulation of the abstract power of absolute music in the nineteenth century, see Dahlhaus 6–7. See also W. A. Schlegel's interest in the interconnected nature of music and literature in his Lectures, translated and published in England in 1846, see W. A. Schlegel 43–44. Pater's Imaginary Portraits and Plato and Platonism actually examine the political and social benefits of music in the Platonic tradition. Critics, however, typically place Pater within the tradition of abstract “absolute” music due to his more famous comments in “The School of Giorgione” in The Renaissance, see, for instance, Herzog 125. See Brown 101, 211, 269–271 and Wolf 75–76, 83–85. On Howards End as a recreation of Beethoven's symphony see Foata and Weatherhead. Forster once observed that there was often an “awkward moment of transition” when moving “from the orchestral to the vocal” (“Word-Making and Sound-Taking” 104). Forster did not, in other contexts, abandon his interest in affordable classical music being provided for the masses, see his radio broadcast “New Year's Greeting” 218. See Hoffman and Ter Haar 46, 52–53. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid DeutschDavid Deutsch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Ohio State University, where he is working on his dissertation entitled “The Epitome of the Arts: Historicizing Classical Music and Literary Modernism.”