Music, Sweet Music

Weeding through the second essay of Northrop Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism" I found myself becoming incredibly frustrated- frustration which began with me simply having to call my attention back to the words in front of me repeatedly as I started to zone out, unable to absorb the complex ideology, and eventually progressed into me having to control urges to just throw the book out of my sight. Call it critical overload. I'm taking 15 credits right now, and all 15 of them are reliant on criticism. I suppose that since there has been art there has been criticism; poetry, novels, films: these are highly influential genres and everybody has their opinion to voice. But Frye, Frye takes it- I've got to be honest- a little overboard sometimes. Truth be told i'm getting pretty annoyed here...But then again I'm probably just trying to compensate for or excuse not being able to understand him half the time...this feeble mind.....


But in the most recent reading of Frye, in between those "overboard" passages, I did happen upon some analogies that gave me some clarity. Fresh off of this newfound "understanding" of Frye (a vague understanding, but thats better than my previous state), I was very grateful for the "lightbulb" moments assignment we recieved in class today. In the last couple of days I've had a few to contribute!


It started for me in the description of the formal phase in the theory of symbols. (The formal phase which coincides with the New Critic's school of thought, which I'm to adopt for the final project), wherein Frye suggests the analogy of music as a way of understanding the roles of form and imagery in text. "The average audience at a symphony knows very little about sonata form, and misses practically all the subtleties detected by an analysis of the score; yet those subtleties are really there, and as the audience can hear everything that is being played, it gets them all as a part of a linear experience; the awareness is less concious, but not less real. The same is true of the response to the imagery of a highly poetic drama."

As with Walter Pater ("All the arts aspire to music") and Rilke ("Language where all language ends"), nothing proves more infallible an analogy than that of Music.