Review: Britten's Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction, by Heather Wiebe

Abstract

Britten's Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction , by Heather Wiebe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. x, 239 pp. In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1944 film A Canterbury Tale the wartime “Land Girl” Allison, on her day off from agricultural duties, gazes down from a Kent hill at the glittering spires of the medieval cathedral. The view is glorious, but with the arrival of strange sounds on the breeze—high angelic voices, and those of invisible pilgrims nearing the city—the scene suddenly departs from the everyday. To the magistrate Culpepper, Allison confides, “Just now I heard sounds : horses' hooves, voices, and a lute—or an instrument like a lute.” For Blitz-weary British audiences of the 1940s the cinematic conjuring of a Chaucerian past offered sentimental escape from the grim reality of ancient city buildings reduced to rubble by Luftwaffe bombs. The film's disembodied music, as Heather Wiebe notes, “magically collapses past and present in the enchanted landscape of modern Canterbury” (p. 39), drawing on common mid-century tropes of sound's sensuous immediacy in a desolate modernity. Mapping an “English discourse of sound's connection to the past,” Wiebe invokes a middlebrow entertainment such as A Canterbury Tale alongside the more experimental aesthetic of Humphrey Jennings's documentary Listen to England (1942) and the highbrow literary romance of Iris Murdoch's novel The Bell (1958). Among the many strengths of Britten's Unquiet Pasts is the sheer range of evidence Wiebe has assembled—not only movies and books, but also …