Partial to Opera: Sounding Willa Cather’s Empty Rooms

2017 ◽  
pp. 94-108
Author(s):  
John Plotz
Keyword(s):  
Willa Cather ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Recorded Music ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Song Of The Lark

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.

Sex and Evolution in Willa Cather'sO Pioneers!andThe Song of the Lark

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 565-591
Author(s):  
Bert Bender
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Thorstein Veblen ◽  
Professor's House ◽  
Song Of The Lark

Studies of Willa Cather refer to Charles Darwin so rarely that one might conclude she hardly knew of him. But at least one recent interpreter has begun to discuss the Darwinian shadow in her work, describing the “Darwinist cartography” in her novelThe Professor's House(1925) and noting the “striking parallels between Cather's mapping of America and that undertaken by her near contemporary, Thorstein Veblen.”

No Stone Unturned: Popular Versus Professional Evaluations of Willa Cather

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 167-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Stineback
Keyword(s):  
Willa Cather ◽  
White Hair ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Road ◽  
Divine Wisdom ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Prayer Meetings ◽  
The Way ◽  
Song Of The Lark

In The Song of the Lark (Willa Cather's third novel, published in 1915), Thea Kronberg goes to one of her father's regular prayer meetings in Moonstone, Colorado, and hears an old woman who “never missed a Wednesday night [and] came all the way up from the depot settlement.” Cather describes the woman this way:She always wore a black crocheted “fascinator” over her thin white hair, and she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad terminology. She had six sons in the service of different railroads, and she always prayed “for the boys on the road, who know not at what moment they may be cut off. When, in Thy divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may they, O our Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to Eternity.” She used to speak, too, of “the engines that race with death”; and though she looked so old and little when she was on her knees, and her voice was so shaky, her prayers had a thrill of speed and danger in them; they made one think of the deep black cañons, the slender trestles, the pounding trains. Thea liked to look at her sunken eyes that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves, much too long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over the other. Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks are worn by water. There are many ways of describing that colour of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or like any of the things it is said to be like. That brownness and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old human creatures, who have worked hard and who have always been poor.

scholarly journals F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather, via Edith Wharton

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Giorcelli
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Song Of The Lark

In The Beautiful and Damned several intertextual references to Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country occur: this essay explores those regarding the New Woman, the flapper. Harshly criticised by the two women writers, she is more nuanced in Fitzgerald’s second novel.

Organicism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun Kumar Pokhrel
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Lewis Mumford

Modernist organicism emphasizes the interrelationship between the natural world and society, and links sociocultural changes with nature, biology, and aesthetic forms in imagining the human being—and society—as organic structures. Modernist organicist aesthetics follow the modernist organic principle of art, "form follows function." Crucial to the theory of modernist organicism are theories of biology and life such as those of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Herbert Spencer. Importantly, modernist organicist aesthetics emphasizes a sense of place or region and ecological consciousness (e.g., the Garden City movement in Britain in the early 20th century and the cultural or anthropological turn of the 1930s). A list of modernist organicists might include D. H. Lawrence, and later Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Richard Llewellyn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Lewis Mumford, Willa Cather, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky, to name only a few. These artists viewed nature as a living force and showed the interdependence between nature and human beings.

Pound, Ford and ‘Prose’: The Making of a Modern Poet

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-292
Author(s):  
Eric Homberger
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgement ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Narrative Poems ◽  
Idylls Of The King ◽  
Problematic Aspect

‘I believe’, Swinburne wrote in 1875, ‘you know my theory that nothing which can possibly be as well said in prose ought ever to be said in verse’. The clarity of the distinction between prose and verse, though in practice a little wobbly, was felt to be actual in Victorian critical thought. It was not the long narrative poems (Maud, The Ring and the Book, Sordello, The Idylls of the King, The Prelude, Amours de Voyage) which undermined the distinction, but the exquisite poëmes en prose of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. To blur the lines between die different kinds of art one wrote poems titled ‘Symphony in Yellow’ (Wilde), ‘Pastel’ (Symons), ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’ (Mallarmé), titled paintings ‘Nocturne’ (Whistler), or created an art form designed to absorb and surpass all others (Wagner). In Marius the Epicurean Walter Pater proved that there was no viable distinction between the language of poetry and language of prose, and in so doing created a language which was richly and grotesquely unique. To talk of poetry in terms of dance, music and painting was to neutralize the pressure of moral judgement, but this did not efface the idea of the ‘poetic’ as something, in some sense, distinct from prose. Though the lines between the two were softened, they did not disappear, becoming, for the following generation, an increasingly problematic aspect of their own art.

Making Sense of Recordings

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mads Walther-Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Sound Perception ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Recorded Music ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Methodological Approaches

The book shows how metaphors are closely connected to sonic experience and make sense within a larger historical context of technological developments and changing discourses of recorded sound. The book traces written discourses of recorded sound, discussing how everyday listeners and audio professionals describe their experiences of sound in recorded music. Building on cognitive sciences and ideas of embodied cognition, the book provides new theoretical and methodological approaches to sound perception and conceptualization with particular relevance to recorded music. It expands on existing histories of studio music technologies from production to reproduction to reception, but it also provides analytical and practical tools—including an encyclopedia of selected sound terminology—to aid in the understanding and communication of sound.

Willa Cather and the New Woman’s “Un-Sentimental Sort of Success”

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-55
Author(s):  
Lisa Mendelman
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Song Of The Lark

Chapter 1 discusses a paradigmatic New Woman narrative, Willa Cather’s 1915 The Song of the Lark, in which Cather ostensibly reclaims sentiment for the New Woman, only to place her female opera singer in sentimental relation to art, not domesticity. The chapter analyzes the Künstlerroman’s unorthodox marriage plot as it stages the conflicts of New Woman sexuality. The chapter further explores Cather’s use of a New Woman artist to reconfigure the role of emotion in the aesthetic encounter, and links this representational paradigm to both the nascent neurophysiological concept of empathy and the modernist ideal articulated by T. S. Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility. Reiterating stereotypes of traditional sentimental reading as uncritical, overemotional, and unsophisticated, Lark develops and endorses a self-conscious and discerning alternative.

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