Among other things, and besides extracting and tabulating the various data and their individual sources, I worked through all the documents accepted as valid, to the number of over one hundred and twenty, and wrote out for my own use a sort of analytico-synthetic description of each Answerer from the musical and emotional point of view, and without consciously availing myself of any knowledge derived from other sources. Thus I have at last come to possess a gallery of dramatis personae with whom I often feel very intimate, and whose personalities have sometimes awakened feelings of friendship or the reverse. Moreover, in making these analyses, I found myself involved in silent discussions with my Answerers and even more frequently with myself
Vernon Lee, Music and its Lovers (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1933), 16–17.
Vernon Lee’s last book, a massive study in what we might today call “music perception” or “psychology of music” focused largely on the musical experiences of Lee, her direct collaborators, and her broader social network, might seem a strange work to consider in terms of either “imagining” or “musical pasts,” focused as it is on collecting contemporary accounts of musical emotions, tastes, and other responses. But as my pullquote from the introduction makes clear, imagination was clear to Lee’s self-reflection and analytical process, especially when it came to those Answerers whose musical preferences differed markedly from Lee’s own.
In Imagining Musical Pasts, I talk quite a bit about Lee’s methods and questions of how sexuality, gender, and the case study genre might have informed the book’s construction and various Answerers’ participation. I also consider how what particular participants knew (or thought that they knew) about certain works and composers appears to have informed how they talked about listening. Direct references to particular composers–as Lee herself observes–are frequently tinged with biographical readings of their works, with “Margery” remarking that “I have intense sympathy with the composer (Tchaikovsky) at the time [of listening to the Pathétique]; later a touch of contempt for his lack of reserve and I feel also that he has been smashed through his inability to get outside himself (Lee 1933, 316).
In one of my favorite responses, an Answerer identified only as “the rebellious young Suffragette” describes her musical preferences in both gendered and political terms:
A certain Brahms always represents the lust of life; not brute. But I don’t geel it, have no sympathy, and the piece couldn’t touch me in consequence, chiefly because it isn’t my mode of pride of life. I wouldn’t be like that for worlds; it’s rather body-conceit. It couldn’t possibly be a woman’s conceit. Some pieces strike one as a woman’s or a man’s soul, according to player. I think I can distinguish in music secondary sex attributes.
Lee, “Some Preferences Classified,” Music and its Lovers, 531.
I can recognize that music REPRESENTS varieties of human emotion and (i.e. but) the music wouldn’t touch me in consequence. This abstract recognition without participation doesn’t often happen. It’s (i.e., it happens) when music represents an ATTITUDE I HAVE NO SYMPATHY WITH, alien to my nature and sex. The music that appeals most to me is the rebellious sort. It’s because I’m a Socialist! I recognize in music some definite emotions pertaining to a crowd, the uproar, the surge, the growl I have heard in crowds at suffrage meetings.
Lee (quoting the same Answerer), “Recognition or Participation,” Music and its Lovers, 211
In her analysis, Lee describes the Suffragette as “one of the least musical of my ‘Hearers’ (those who did not recognize music as referring to unique and innate emotions separate from extramusical associations),” yet it is clear that she nonetheless finds much to ponder in terms of gendered readings of specific works, performances, and genres. I am especially interested in the ways the Suffragette talks about music as being gendered according to player, not according to composer, especially since much of the contemporary discourses about instrumental music and gender (including figures like Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Smyth) revolved around perceptions of the composer’s perceived gender expression through both sound and biography.
From the perspective of a twenty-first-century researcher, the methods Lee used to gather her data might seem limited. Her questionnaire, which is reproduced in full in an appendix to Imagining Musical Pasts, includes standard questions about musical training, but also contains a number of longer questions about musical meaning, ideas of music and (im)morality, and emotional experiences that may have led some Answerers to respond in certain ways. Lee’s personal feelings about Wagner’s music are particularly on display here, with one question about “how…your preferences stand with regard to” particular composers adding additional material about whether Wagner’s music “seem[s] to you to stand in any way apart, appealing to and producing emotional effects different from those of other musicians” (Lee 1933, 565). The question about musical morality and immorality ends with “Can you understand these questions particularly with regard to Wagner?” Yet, for all of its potential scientific failings, Lee’s analysis represents to me an attempt to bring together historical, theoretical, and scientific knowledge about music and personal experiences in a way that reads as a complement to her much earlier works of music history (as in Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy) or fiction (as in “A Wicked Voice”), where historical knowledge and deeply felt emotions frequently mix and respond to one another.
If you’d like to read more of Lee’s Answerers (or her accounts of her personal listening experiments) or try your hand at taking her questionnaire for yourself, Music and its Lovers can be read in full via the Internet Archive. I’ve linked to the English version of the Questionnaire for the curious.