The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music ed. by Delia Da Sousa Correa

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music ed. by Delia Da Sousa Correa Robert Lawson-Peebles The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music. Ed. by Delia Da Sousa Correa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. xvi+ 726 pp. £180. 978-0-7486-9312-2. The first sentence of this Edinburgh Companion gives a clear statement of purpose: 'This volume explores literature and music's alliances over the course of nine centuries' (p. 1). Its chronological structure is unusual for the Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities. After the editor's general Introduction and three theoretical essays, there are five parts, each with its own Introduction. Parts i–iii, containing thirty essays and occupying some 340 pages, cover the medieval period to the close of the eighteenth century. Part iv, with eleven essays, deals with the nineteenth century. Part v, with twenty-one essays, concerns the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This edition is, by a short margin, the longest in the series. The reader gets more wordage for the high price. Whether the volume punches at its heavy weight is another question. [End Page 121] It is clearly impossible in a review to assess the individual merits of six introductory and sixty-five topical essays. This Companion will therefore be judged collectively against some developments in musicology. In a 1987 essay, 'Music and Feminism', Edward Said lamented that 'musical discourse is probably less available to Western intellectuals than the obscurer realms of medieval, Chinese or Japanese culture' and linked the constructed aesthetic autonomy of music to the 'subaltern' role enforced on women in both its practice and its criticism (repr. in Said, Music at the Limits (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), pp. 43–44). Said's complaint was promptly answered by a book sometimes tagged with the term 'New Musicology': Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, edited by Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The best-remembered contribution to the collection, partly because of its strident title, was McClary's 'The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year' (pp. 13–62). (McClary would later cause a rumpus by identifying moments of violent misogyny in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.) By proposing 'the elimination of the precept of musical autonomy' (p. xiii) and subjecting music, from Vivaldi to contemporary electronic reproduction, to such socio-cultural analyses as feminism, semiotics, and deconstruction, Music and Society opened the way for The Edinburgh Companion. Progress since 1987 has been notable in two areas. The first is modernism. The cultural breadth of modernism has prompted a dynamic and diverse group of cross-disciplinary publications, discussed in a review essay by Nathan Waddell ('Modernism and Music: A Review of Recent Scholarship', Modernist Cultures, 12 (2017), 316–30). The second is the long-term project of Lawrence Kramer. Beginning with Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Kramer has been prolific in addressing problems of musical meaning. In moving away from detailed formalist study of music, Kramer's work provides an alternative to McClary, deploying broad cultural statements in order to scamper around the specifics of her analyses. In a nuanced 1994 review of the New Musicology, the pianist Charles Rosen praised McClary's precision (he was sympathetic to her attack on Beethoven), while depreciating Kramer, a little unkindly, as 'a valuable weathercock' (Rosen, Critical Entertainments (1994; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 261–64). In her general Introduction, Delia Da Sousa Correa identifies Kramer's work as 'foundational' (p. 2), and the collection contains two of his essays. In contrast, the work of other 'New Musicologists' is confined to a brief reference, and it is left to Stephen Benson's Introduction to Part v to acknowledge their impact and to include McClary's name in a footnote (pp. 2, 506–08, 514, n. 38). The sole reference to Said is a sentence about his 1993 Culture and Imperialism (p. 63 5). There is nothing about Said's work on music, and no reference to two of the critics, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, whom Said credits as demonstrating 'the way cultures operate' (Said, Musical Elaborations...