The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel by Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg, and: Music in the Georgian Novel by Pierre Dubois (review)

The post-structuralist rereading of Marshall McLuhan put forward by Friedrich A. Kittler in the 1980s held that, hand in hand with the new media that developed at the turn of the twentieth century, came a new epistemology. A key feature in this was the technology of sound recording that, Kittler argues, had the effect of hollowing out the ‘reality’ of experience from the written word and establishing it instead within the experience of the newer technology. A new emphasis on listening came about, where the actual grain of sound—rather than its Platonic representation in notation (or its linguistic description in print)—was opened to inspection and consideration. Evading issues of causality between technology and zeitgeist, Kittler sees, for instance, the opening horn passage in Wagner’s Das Rheingold as significant: the horn follows the harmonic series, making the pedal E flat not so much a basis for functional harmony but rather a fundamental tone whose overtones are then made explicit. In terms of music, one could argue that this new listening-centred interest finds Wagner giving linear expression to synchronic sound and led towards, for instance, both the nuances of twentieth-century orchestration and George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953). In terms of literature—and writing more generally—the fact of recording interposed itself between the music and the words, and descriptions of music took on aspects of, in Kittler’s phrase, a ‘media transcription’. More generally, ‘the real’ (whatever that is taken to mean) no longer resided in the word but in recorded sound.

The central scene in which the protagonist of Sartre’s Nausea listens to a jazz record, or the role of the phonograph in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (see also Joyce, Kafka, and Beckett) testify to the centrality of sound recording to the modernist decentring of both the nineteenth-century individual and the written word (a twinned decentring that, as in the work of Derrida and Lacan, sees the relationship to the written word as the defining characteristic of the sense of self that had developed during the Romantic era). Since the Bildungsroman was one of the foundational constituents of what Kittler terms ‘the discourse network of 1800’ (which is then supplanted by ‘the discourse network of 1900’ as modernism begins), it makes sense that twentieth-century novelists should engage with this new subject matter directly, giving recording a structural role in their works.

Analogue recording technology has a significant part to play in modernity—but what of the player piano? Stravinsky wrote for it, and Duke Ellington learned to play from one (slowing down the roll and placing his fingers on the depressed keys). Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg, in The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel, wishes to place the player piano on the cusp of Kittler’s transition to modernity, and states in addition that ‘the player piano brought about a radical change for the interpretation of musical narrative’ (p. 4), concluding that ‘the author storing music in fiction and the operator of the machine unpacking stored music are both generated by the virtuoso machine [the player piano and its discourse]’ (p. 184).

Kittler’s work, Björkén-Nyberg makes clear, provides the theoretical framework for her study (p. 3), although he does not seem to have mentioned the player piano in his examinations of the new technologies. Nor do player pianos appear to feature directly in the Edwardian novels Björkén-Nyberg analyses: with the exception of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, the novels she examines instead feature traditional pianists. Björkén-Nyberg reasons that, although these novels appear ‘to be inscribed in and continuing the...