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Thomas McGeary, Novel music, Early Music, Volume 44, Issue 3, 1 August 2016, Pages 485–489, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caw070
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Extract
Music and poetry have traditionally been Sister Arts, and music in English poetry has been explored by John Hollander (Untuning of the sky (Princeton, 1961)) and James Winn (Unsuspected eloquence (New Haven, 1981)). The upstart realist novel has received little attention; for this reason, Pierre Dubois’s Music in the Georgian novel is welcome.
One way to write about music in the 18th-century novel would be to mine thousands of novels for the ways that performing, listening to, or responding to music are represented; to trace themes and long-term trends—from the early realist and epistolary novels, through the sentimental novel, and onto the Gothic romance and the novels of women writers—setting them against the history and sociology of music in Britain. Such a bottom-up approach might be tedious, perhaps, but truly informative.
Dubois, a literary scholar, takes a different, top-down approach. He is primarily interested in the functions, meanings and symbolism of music, as manifested in representations of music in novels (p.1). He focuses on ideology: the attitudes about music, opera, oratorio, the castrato, concepts of the sublime and beautiful, the ‘emancipation of instrumental music’, the symbolism of musical instruments, and the representation of gender roles. In pursuance of these, Dubois divides the era into four periods. Each, to some degree, reflects a theme, which is amplified using aesthetic, philosophic, literary, critical and theoretical texts to outline a background ideology.
