The Writer's Fugue book publication and Modern Soundscapes conference

Later this week, I am presenting a paper based on my forthcoming book, The Writer’s Fugue, at the Modern Soundscapes annual conference of the Australasian Association of Literature, 10-13 July 2013, at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney.

Below is the abstract of my paper. I will post details of The Writer’s Fugue, forthcoming ebook and book publication, soon.

Beyond ‘Querelle des Bouffons’: ‘Pre-modern melody’ and ‘new Western harmony’ in discourses of modern ‘subjects’ and literary subjectivity

By Ruth Skilbeck

In the mid-Eighteenth century in Paris a noisy dispute over the social significance of sound erupted between philosophers, Rousseau and Rameau.

The politicized aesthetic conflict emerged in 1752, following the arrival of an Italian opera company in Paris. It divided the city into support for Italian opera- based on melody, and French based on the principles of new western harmony, that is on rules and conventions. The Italian style, supported by Rousseau was seen as symbolizing free artistic expression- of emotion and affect. The French style was seen to symbolize appearance, and the following of rules and conventions. The loud argument reached such a pitch it became known as the Querelle des Bouffons. Yet the real significance of the philosophical argument on the brink of industrialised modernity was far wider than personal musical preference. Later philosophers such as Adorno have commented.  He suggests the sound of new western harmony epitomized in symphonic music – is the sound of many voices subsumed into one homogenous whole beneath the direction of a single conductor- and modern “subjects” are subjugated in this symbolical order. Yet at the same time, melody and its call to individual voices, freedom of expression and emotion, has endured in modernity and is articulated in modern literary subjectivity – in poetic writings that draw on deep pre- semiotic rhythms and sounds (Kristeva 1981). This paper will focus on how melody has endured in modern literary subjectivity, how it has been theorized by critics such as Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Said, and artistically expressed in literary practice with examples of modern poetic “fugue” writings by de Quincy, Proust, Joyce, Celan and Plath. Using examples of theory and practice, the paper will discuss how, in subliminal counterpoint to “new western harmony”, melody that is deep in our being as breathing and heart beats, has continued to resonate in poetic form and artistic expressions of subjectivity, throughout modernity.

Dr Ruth Skilbeck is an independent author, artist and scholar. She wrote her PhD, taken through the University of Technology Sydney, on The Writer’s Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity (2006)

Modern Soundscapes

Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Literature held in conjunction with the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia

University of New South Wales July 10 -13, 2013

What is a modern soundscape?

This conference aims to address this question by drawing together researchers engaged with the history and theory of sound and noise from the fields of literature, film, and media studies, as well as architecture, music and the visual arts to consider the multiple soundscapes that have shaped and continue to shape the history of modernity. Jonathan Sterne contends that dating from around 1725 ‘sound itself’ becomes ‘an object and a domain of thought and practice, where it had previously been conceptualized in terms of particular idealized instances like voice or music’. This historical claim challenges the assumption that modern culture is essentially a visual culture, substituting the ear for the eye, and creating a space for a new sonic history of modernity to be written, theorized and contested. Thinking through sound has long been a literary preoccupation. Reflecting on the potential of the “auditory imagination” T.S.Eliot wrote, it “is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and civilized mentality.”

Thinking through the resonant opening created by poetic form Eliot imagines potential creative fusions that cut across space, time, culture and forms. Taking inspiration from Eliot’s expansive vision, we invite papers that engage with sound as a catalyst for thought, critical and creative practice, and historical reconsiderations of modern soundscapes from the eighteenth century to the present.