Player Piano: poetry and sonic modernity

Tim Armstrong

(2007)

Tim Armstrong (2007) Player Piano: poetry and sonic modernity. Modernism-Modernity, 14 (1). pp. 1-19. ISSN 1071-6068

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Abstract

Information about this Version

This is a Draft version
This version's date is: 2007
This item is peer reviewed

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https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/b6b629c0-5192-939a-0ea8-17fb7be2c81f/1/

Item TypeJournal Article
TitlePlayer Piano: poetry and sonic modernity
Authors Armstrong, Tim
DepartmentsFaculty of Arts\Music

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doiNo DOI

Deposited by () on 30-Mar-2010 in Royal Holloway Research Online.Last modified on 04-Jan-2011

Notes

(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.

 

References

1 Douglas Kahn, ‘Concerning the Line’, From Energy to Information:
Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce
Clarke & Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), 180.
2 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey
Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999), 24. Examples of recent work inflected by this approach include Lisa
Giltelman, Scripts, Groooves, and Writing Machines: Representing
Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
and Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and
Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
3 Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael
Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1984), 126. The material on Hardy included
here reworks part of an essay included in Thomas Hardy and Contemporary
Literary 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 and
Joan 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-Player
Piano (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 reproduces
Godowsky in the first issue of the Ampico Magazine, 1920).
8 Cited in Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music: An Illustrated
History of Mechanical Musical Instruments from the Musical Box to the
Pianola (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 of
Ezra Pound, rev. edn., ed. Lea Baechler & A Walton Litz. (New York: New
Directions, 1990), 186; Ezra Pound Machine Art and Other Writings: The
Lost 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. Phillip
Herring (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996), 439.
13 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and
Modern 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. Subsequently
referred 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 Sound
as 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 on
Music, 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 the
record 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’s
relation to Schopenhauer has received little attention; a partial exception is
Bart 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’ in
the 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 Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 862.
35 Niklas Luhmann, ‘How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?’ in
Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Ludwig K.
Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 371-388.


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