According to Walter Pater the absorbing qualities of music’s formal perfection mean that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’ In her remarkable not-quite-kunstlerroman, The Song of the Lark (1915), Willa Cather responds to the notion that opera might be an ‘absolute art form’ by formulating a notion of the omnipresence of partial (rather than utter) absorption. Wherever her characters turn, their experiences are always composites. In articulating that alternative way of understanding art’s teleology, Cather also rethought the virtues and dangers of opera as a platonic artform, and posed a series of fascinating questions about prose’s relationship to the formal claim lodged by both live and recorded music. Cather’s early novels are a significant site to explore the ways in which the complex modernist textual experiments of the 1910s are shaped by live opera’s afterglow—a European cultural telos Cather both reveres and distrusts. But the chapter also proposes that Cather is making sense of a new sonic universe in which recorded music, in grooves or over the airwaves, comes to demarcate a kind of reproduction that serves both as type and antitype of the novel’s own formal aspirations.
