Tim Armstrong (2007) Player Piano: poetry and sonic modernity. Modernism-Modernity, 14 (1). pp. 1-19. ISSN 1071-6068
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This is a Draft version This version's date is: 2007 This item is peer reviewed
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Deposited by () on 30-Mar-2010 in Royal Holloway Research Online.Last modified on 04-Jan-2011
(C) 2007 Johns Hopkins University Press, whose permission to mount this version for private study and research is acknowledged. The repository version is the author's final draft.
1 Douglas Kahn, ‘Concerning the Line’, From Energy to Information:Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. BruceClarke & Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2002), 180.2 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. GeoffreyWinthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1999), 24. Examples of recent work inflected by this approach include LisaGiltelman, Scripts, Groooves, and Writing Machines: RepresentingTechnology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)and Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception andAesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).3 Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. MichaelMillgate (London: Macmillan, 1984), 126. The material on Hardy includedhere reworks part of an essay included in Thomas Hardy and ContemporaryLiterary Studies, ed. Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson (Basingstoke:Palgrave, 2004).4 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, ed. John Lyon (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2004), 46-50, 226-7.5 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Plays, eds. Frank Kermode andJoan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 334, 242.Hereafter referred to as CP.6 See Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Pianola: The History of the Self-PlayerPiano (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), esp. pp.27-31; and Kent A.Holliday, Reproducing Pianos Past and Present (Lampeter: Mellen, 1989).7 Holliday, Reproducing Pianos, 2, 11 (the latter page reproducesGodowsky in the first issue of the Ampico Magazine, 1920).8 Cited in Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music: An IllustratedHistory of Mechanical Musical Instruments from the Musical Box to thePianola (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 272.9 William Gaddis, Agapē Agape (London: Atlantic Books, 2002).10 Ezra Pound, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, Personae: The Shorter Poems ofEzra Pound, rev. edn., ed. Lea Baechler & A Walton Litz. (New York: NewDirections, 1990), 186; Ezra Pound Machine Art and Other Writings: TheLost Thought of the Italian Years. Ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Durham:Duke University Press, 1996), 74.11 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 210-1.12 Djuna Barnes, ‘The Perfect Murder’, Collected Stories, ed. PhillipHerring (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996), 439.13 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle andModern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 56.14 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 3 vols., trans R. B.Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Trübner, 1883), 1:333. Subsequentlyreferred to in text as WWI (vol. 1 unless indicated).15 Hermann Helmholtz, ‘The Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music’(1857), in Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed.David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 46-75; cf. On the Sensations of Tone, rev. ed., trans. Alexander J. Ellis (London:Longmans, Green, 1897).16 ‘The Physiological Causes’, 61.17 This illustration appears both in ‘The Physiological Causes’, 67 (fig.8),and On the Sensations of Tone, 210 (fig.51); in the latter cf. also 209(fig.50) and 218.18 See e.g. John Broadhouse, Musical Acoustics, or the Phenomena of Soundas Connected with Music (London: Reeves, 1892).19 ‘The Physiological Causes’, 75.20 Helmholtz, ‘On the Conservation of Force’ (1862), Science and Culture,97.21 Thomas Hardy, Collected Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan,1978), 430. Herafter referred to as CP, in text.22 Ernst Bloch, ‘Magic Rattle and Human Harp’, Literary Essays, trans.Andrew Joron et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 291.23 On Hardy, Schopenhauer and music, see Mark Asquith, Thomas Hardy,Metaphysics and Music (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).24 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Form of the Phonograph Record’ [1934], trans.Thomas Y. Levin, October 55 (1990), 56-61 (59 cited). Also in Essays onMusic, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie et al. (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2002), 277-82.25 This is clearer in his later essay on Opera, in which he argues that therecord allows a kitsch and stylised form to be objectified and re-interpreted:see Essays on Music, 283-87.26 Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts, ed. Harold Orel (London: Macmillan,1978), Part Second, IV viii, 345-6.27 Since Frank Doggett’s Stevens’ Poetry of Thought (1966), Stevens’srelation to Schopenhauer has received little attention; a partial exception isBart Eeckout, Wallace Sevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing(Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 81-86.28 On Mach’s influence on Modernism generally, see Michael H.Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor and Modernist Literature(Oxford: Oxford University Press).29 Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1996),494.30 See Alan Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1991), 155-60.31 Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1977), 285.32 Collected Poems (1954 and subsequent printings) has ‘gramophone’ inthe opening line; Collected Poetry and Prose ‘corrects’ this to‘gramaphone’ without editorial explanation.33 Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2000).34 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans Howard Eiland and KevinMcLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 862.35 Niklas Luhmann, ‘How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?’ inMaterialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Ludwig K.Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 371-388.