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Unheard Melodies: The Force of Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marshall Brown
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Abstract

Music is the realm where meaning is not ruined by saying. With the phrase “unheard melodies,” Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” evokes the unspeakable in a passage whose logic has collapsed. Literally unheard melodies, along with related phenomena, appear in music by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Schönberg, and Beethoven; each hidden melody resonates with the expressive structure of the piece containing it—with the felt idea that performance must actuate. Unseen pictures in paintings function similarly. Thus in unheard melodies thought acts unmediated by utterance. They—and not the Imaginary—are the Platonic ideal Mallarmé sought. They show how form is power and life.

Type
1. Writing Performance: Harmony, Silence, Noise
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 3: Special Topic: On Poetry , May 1992 , pp. 465 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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