David Deutsch's British Literature and Classical Music contributes valuably to a burgeoning conversation about the relationship between literature and music in the early twentieth century. Like other recent critics, Deutsch defines this relationship not only formally but also as a vehicle for proliferating cultural discourses about education, class, sexuality, and nation. Deutsch is driven by cultural history, not theory, leaving significant room for further exploration of his archive and framing concepts. More historically than conceptually rigorous, his book is an important resource, built on an often-surprising archive.
The archive is the book's major strength. Aspiring to a “thickly layered breadth” (12, 229), Deutsch plunges into a rich cultural-historical pool of canonical and lesser-known writers, as well as a stream of ephemera: concert programs, little magazines, and educational guides. From this body of material, Deutsch outlines attitudes both ironic and valedictory toward music's role in consolidating British national culture. Instead of offering sustained close readings of a few writers (though some constellating points of reference emerge, among them Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, E. M. Forster's Howards End, the novels of D. H. Lawrence), Deutsch maps a cultural field in which the contours of class, education, taste, and sexuality play out in debates over “classical music.” In a chapter on “musical rhetoric,” Deutsch produces intertextual dialogues between T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, dotted with references to Max Beerbohm, Henry James, George Gissing, George Bernard Shaw, and Arnold Bennett. Deutsch notes that, for all its problems, the category of “classical music” generates a field of meaning, not merely referring to a specific body of musical works (such as chamber works, operas) but signifying differently “within certain social factions” (3). The aesthetic condition of this music has served as a “litmus test” for cultural capital (13).
Starting in the nineteenth century, with Walter Pater and other figures for whom high aestheticism butted heads with art's social functions, Deutsch argues, Pater grounded music in a harmonious platonic “musical idealism,” only to liberalize that order by emphasizing music's propensity to enlarge empathy (18). For Pater, music could liberalize the reach of British education and its moral code: a “musical education” requiring intellectual development and a “sensual appreciation of … the moral pains and pleasures of the body” (49). Reading “classical music” as commodified cultural capital, Deutsch is quick to note how paternalistic rhetoric often served not to uplift the working- and lower-middle classes but to alienate them further. After outlining efforts to educate “society's margins,” manifested in accounts of working-class music-hall amateurs (chapter 3), Deutsch discusses the broadening homoeroticism associated with music and the cosmopolitan interwar embrace of German music.
Deutsch's arguments are unlikely to ruffle feathers—readers familiar with the work of Barry Faulk, David Chinitz, or T. Austin Graham will be unsurprised by the complex relationship between classical music and the music hall—but his arrangements of the material are fresh. His rapid movement from writer to writer can be dizzying, in the best sense. However, it can also produce somewhat reductive categories. Formulations such as “society's margins,” “oppressive socio-economic structure,” “social hierarchy” and “society's elite” abound. These phenomena are not so self-explanatory, and by erring on the side of breadth, Deutsch risks shortchanging the medium specificity of music, flattening out the texts themselves (a risk Deutsch acknowledges), and thereby reifying the supple categories at stake. For example, Leonard Bast in Howards End is made analogous to Huxley's Frank Illidge, two figures for whom music figures the futile ambitions of class mobility. Yet if these novels accede to “social hierarchy,” surely their formal textures render that concept less transparent. Deutsch insightfully speculates that modernist efforts to “translat[e] musical forms into literature” (132), aspiring both to social mobility and to a higher aesthetic condition, might ultimately exclude novice readers by virtue of the texts' “formal complexity” (132). Such an intricate claim signals a need for more elaborate analysis of the relationship between language and music in “contrapuntal” texts. The question is raised anew in Deutsch's analysis of Thomas Burke's Night in London (an inclusion certain to appear on my future syllabi), noting that a working-class girl's “aesthetic epiphany” is short-circuited by her inability to articulate what this music accomplishes (68). So, too, are Bast's failures figured as linguistic shortcomings (how to pronounce Tannhäuser or explain the pleasures of walking). Such contrasts might interrogate what happens when ineffable music is transmuted into language, a problem that Deutsch often raises but too quickly abandons.
Deutsch's occasionally reductive categories often reemerge in new contexts—and to a resonant effect. At his best, Deutsch produces a true “contrapuntal reading” of culture. If in early chapters he seems to slight questions of cultural labor, in later chapters he develops knotty ties between musical literacy and education, in Board of Education handbooks and in philanthropic organizations such as Wincham Hall, a boardinghouse that supplemented vocational training with music appreciation courses. Deutsch fugally reads these discourses back into Lawrence and Eliot, and Pater's homoerotic discourses into Forster, Auden, Isherwood, and Carpenter, in a chapter that might have benefited from closer engagement with queer musicology (and queer music) but profitably connects queer musicality to anxieties of education and class. Such anxieties moved beyond national borders as British institutions engaged with the classical favorites and the modernist experiments of their continental interlocutors, a cosmopolitan sensibility traced through Auden, Isherwood, Huxley, and Storm Jameson; Osbert Sitwell's Those Were the Days and Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End (which Deutsch, in a nice lagniappe, reads as a Gesamtkunstwerk); the BBC's “For the Schools” broadcasts; Woolf's Between the Acts, and Myra Hess's Blitz-era piano performances (brilliantly rendered in Humphrey Jennings's documentary Listen to Britain). In a fitting bookend to his Pater chapter, Deutsch sees British writers sponsoring music as, if not a universal language, a liberally international one. Deutsch lays important tracks—archivally, if not methodologically—for the study of British Literature and Classical Music, revealing that the borders of the latter category attenuate those of the former.
