Intermedial Modernism: Music, Dance, and Sound
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Intermedial Modernism: Music, Dance, and Sound Patrick Milian A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2019 Reading Committee: Leroy Searle, Chair Sydney Kaplan Brian Reed Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2019 Patrick Milian University of Washington Abstract Intermedial Modernism: Music, Dance, and Sound Patrick Milian Chair of Supervisory Committee: Leroy Searle English Intermedial Modernism: Music, Dance, and Sound examines how twentieth-century combinations of literature with sound-based arts like music, dance, and radio emerged from aesthetic negotiations with new media technologies. Such technologies—specifically phonography, electric amplification, modern stagecraft, and radiophonic broadcast—practically and conceptually integrated multiple artistic mediums and their meaning-making potentialities. I use the framework of intermediality, especially as utilized in word and music studies, to describe such integrations. Intermediality is a centuries-old practice of “making it new,” but what sets its twentieth-century iterations apart from those of Aeschylus or Monteverdi, I argue, is that they interpolate the acoustic effects, cultural practices, and expanded perceptual vocabularies affiliated with new media. By fully contextualizing case studies of opera, musicalized literature, expressive dance, and radio programs within a broader media ecology and by understanding the role of stipulated sense modalities and listening practices, we can develop a new set of interpretive approaches that account for meaning-events occurring between and across semiotic operations and sensory registers. Drawing from recent work in sound studies and media studies, the dissertation situates various musico-poetic texts within the “first media age.” The dissertation’s four chapters each present representative texts belonging to different intermedial configurations, ranging from 1891 to 1991, to illustrate the interdisciplinary combinations both technically and imaginatively enabled by new media. These texts include collaborations between William Walton and Edith Sitwell as well as Nicolas Nabokov and Stephen Spender, John Cage’s final opera, volumes by Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes, choreographic arts from Loïe Fuller and Florine Stettheimer, and radio works by Orson Welles and Dylan Thomas. In selecting texts and performances that center modernity’s ubiquitous mechanisms and materials, I have also selected ones by writers, composers, and artists typically considered marginal. Reorienting modernist studies according to things as mundane as the radio or cellophane has the energizing result of pressing against the canonical and historical boundaries of the period. Table of Contents Introduction: Co-Operations and Co-Evolutions ................................................................... 1 1. Defining Intermediality ......................................................................................... 2 2. Signs and Signals ................................................................................................... 11 Chapter One: Phonographic Opera: The Total (Re)Work of Art .......................................... 26 1. Writing Music, Recording Words ......................................................................... 29 2. The Strange Séance of Façade .............................................................................. 38 3. Remembering the Record in Rasputin’s End ........................................................ 53 4. Cage’s Victrola and Your Opera ........................................................................... 68 Chapter Two: Technosonic Musicalization: From Swam Songs to Stereophonics .............. 77 1. Going Electric ........................................................................................................ 81 2. The Amplified Soundscapes of Cane .................................................................... 89 3. Reclamation and Declamation of Montage of a Dream Deferred ......................... 106 4. Quarters Ringing in and out of Ask Your Mama ................................................... 117 Chapter Three: Mediated Kinaesthesis: Less a Thing Than the Trace of a Movement ........ 131 1. Kinaesthetic Modernism ........................................................................................ 133 2. Loïe Fuller’s Mere Mechanical Movements ......................................................... 140 3. Florine Stettheimer’s Four Saints and Four Arts ................................................... 156 Chapter Four: Radiophonic Sound: Listening In, Listening In Between .............................. 179 1. “The Radiobody Cannot Give a Straight Answer” ................................................ 182 2. Uncertainty and Silence in War of the Worlds ...................................................... 193 3. The Multisensory and Mad Utopia of Under Milk Wood ...................................... 211 Conclusion: An Intermedial Literacy .................................................................................... 230 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 235 i Acknowledgements I am grateful to the members of the dissertation committee: Leroy Searle, Sydney Kaplan, and Brian Reed. Without their encouragement, I never would have begun this project. Without their insight and generosity, I never would have finished it. I am thankful for the teachers who first enabled me to pursue literature and music—Colleen Donnelly, Robert Abrams, Jessica Burstein, and Gary Handwerk—and especially for Andrew Feld and Pimone Triplett for their guidance in the MFA program. At the University of Washington, the support of the English Department and the Simpson Center for the Humanities have been integral to my growth as a teacher, scholar, and writer. The timely completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the assistance of the David A. Robertson Dissertation Fellowship and the Joff Hanauer Fellowship. Many thanks to the friends who have been readers, listeners, companions, and inspirations: Vassili Makavos, Abi Pollokoff, Rachel Edelman, Ainsley Kelly, Alex Streim, Kevin, and— from the very beginning to the very end—Catherine Bresner. My parents, Sally and Ramon Milian, provided me with unconditional love and support and showed me that I can’t do it alone. Finally, I owe this dissertation and much more to Jeff Neil and Leo Pitts. ii 1 Introduction Co-Operations and Co-Evolutions Intermediality is the phenomenon by which one medium takes on or is integrated with the qualities of another, thus situating the text between sense modalities and semiotic operations. Such an integration can take the shape of one art striving toward the conditions of another— recalling Walter Pater’s famous dictum that all arts aspire toward the condition of music (140)— or multiple arts deployed in a shared phenomenal space—as in opera, film, or graphic narrative—or a combination of these two. However, such aspirations or combinations do not by their very nature indicate the presence of an intermedial relationship between the arts. Meaning is an event of comprehension, and intermediality occurs when the artwork as a meaning-event draws from the representational and expressive capabilities of multiple mediums. It is in this sense a complex of compositional strategies and communicative registers—something a text does rather than something a text is or has. The question at the center of this dissertation is how can the intermedial configurations found in Anglo-American modernism—especially as related to sound-based performances like opera, jazz, expressive dance, and radio broadcast—help us to understand the relationships between interdisciplinary modernism and the social and technological features of modernity. With the proliferation of new media like sound reproduction and amplification, electrical and synthetic stage technologies, and the radio came new considerations of how sound-based art and performance intersect with other means of representation. The phonograph record transformed an inscribed “writing” system into an audible phenomena; amplification and 2 electrification expanded and enforced the boundaries of spaces delineated by sound; electric lighting and synthetic materials extended the body’s semantic worth in dance performance; and wireless radio transmission turned electromagnetism into a soundscape of intermixed speech, music, effects, interference, and silence. At the same time as these changes in the media ecology, intermediality proliferated in the lexical experiments of modernist opera libretti, the musicalization of Jazz Age literature, the choreography and stagecraft of expressive dance, and the emergent genre of the radio feature. New media are not wholly autonomous, fully formed mechanisms, but rather sites of entanglement between technological novelty, developing cultural practices, and protean popular ontologies. Such alterations to the perceptual vocabulary that new media helped precipitate became mutually imbricated in the aesthetic experimentation that recruited and interpolated the effects and operations of such technology. Intermedial Modernism argues that a significant number of twentieth-century combinations of literature with music, dance, and broadcast emerged from negotiations with technologies that themselves integrated