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Examining Terence Davies’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, this article identifies ways in which the creative interpretation of the filmmaker may serve to open up new insights into both the original text and the language of cinema itself. It considers, in particular, aspects such as music, painting, and visual metaphor in its presentation of cinema as an essentially multilayered and complex medium which requires of the spectator an imaginative and creative engagement, just as the novel requires of the reader.

“Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased,” writes Beckett in his Texts for Nothing. Or does he sing it? If words were the only sounds, then a sentence would be the only melody. We might never understand which came first—the words or the melody. Perhaps the first humans knew how to sing long before they knew how to talk. In this Dionysian vision of antiquity, all mortals were originally musicians. Music was the only thing that mattered. People understood each other by inventing mimetic melodies and singing together in tune. They appeared, loved, suffered, worshipped the gods and died like opera singers on stage.

That sound you hear, as though coming off the lonely Scottish hills, through the fine Highland air, passing across straths and glens, along rivers and to the sea... Is the sound of the piobaireachd, the classical music of the great Highland bagpipe, a music made for Gatherings, Salutes and Laments, a grand and grave and complicated music - Ceol Mor it is in Gaelic - The Big Music. The Big Music, too, is the title of my latest work of fiction - not a novel, but an elegy, as Virginia Woolf described all her work - a story that sounds as much as it says... An experience of words, of a story of people and a landscape, of a love story played across generations, that nevertheless sounds in the mind...

Our relationship with sound is an intimate one – arguably the most intimate with any of our five senses. We live in a visual society. Many people would say that sight is our primary sense. We hear before we see. In the womb, the fetus begins to develop an auditory system between seventeen and nineteen weeks. Already we are in a world of sound, of breath and heartbeat, of rhythm and vibration. Already, we are feeling the sound with our bodies.

"To comfortably acquire, so to speak, as many fingers as needed," said one of Bach’s sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, in his Essay on the True Art of Playing the Keyboard (1753). And these words are remarkable, as long as we are prepared to take them literally, and not hastily consider them as one of the metaphors that adorn discourse about music and on the bodies that it evokes.

La vie des Britanniques il y a un siècle était souvent très dure. Comme à toute époque, le divertissement, et spécialement la musique, était essentiel pour toutes les classes sociales. Les couches privilégiées organisaient des concerts chez elles, aidées par leurs domestiques, ou allaient dans les salons de danse. La classe ouvrière rejoignait des fanfares ou des chorales, mais surtout allait au music-hall. Dans cet article nous avons choisi 10 chansons à succès des années de guerre qui peuvent illustrer les priorités de leur public. Pour chacune, nous fournissons un extrait des paroles, un enregistrement de l’époque, et une image.

As an element in Shostakovich's music, the shame is perhaps not as audible as the dread, but it is everpresent nonetheless. One cannot point to a precise place in the music where you can hear it, but it underlies and supports most of the other painful emotions, and if it were removed from the mix, you would certainly notice the difference. The shame is apparent in the harshness with which Shostakovich treats himself and his own feelings; it saves the saddest quartets (like the Eighth) from self-pity, and it saves the more cheerful ones (like the Sixth) from any tincture of smugness or self-assurance...

Les « tables d'affinités » établies par les chimistes ont souvent servi de modèle aux rencontres sentimentales. Or, la concordance et la discordance qui résultent des affinités sont plus proches des phénomènes musicaux, où les associations redistribuent infiniment les correspondances harmoniques. Pierre Bayard, auteur de Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus, abordera cette question avec Wendy Lesser, auteur de Music for Silenced Voices : Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, et François Noudelmann, qui explore, dans Le Toucher les philosophes (en cours de traduction) la relation que Barthes, Sartre et Nietzsche avaient avec leur propre pratique du piano.

Literally playing with the notion of "affinities" with its vast resonances, Jay Gottlieb has constructed a program not only of works by composers with whom he feels a particular bond, but also incorporating the diverse relationships of the chosen composers with their sonic material. He created for instance a vast sound sculpture that incorporates moments from all of Malher's ten symphonies. He will also play pieces by Donatoni, who shows how affinities can be volatile, Berio, who brilliantly manipulates free time versus measured time, Crumb, the modern American transcendentalist, who demonstrates the unity in diversity, Ohana, whose free counterpoints unfold organically and amalgamate as they will, and Mantovani, who, like Mahler, fuses the most exigent concert music with moments of carefree ebullience.

Wayne Koestenbaum (États-Unis), poète, romancier et essayiste, est l'auteur d'une œuvre protéiforme et subversive qui explore les multiples facettes de l'identité américaine à travers de nombreux thèmes (les arts, la célébrité, les gender studies...) et où se mêlent les cultures littéraire, artistique, musicale et populaire. Dans Hotel Theory, il met en regard une enquête philosophique sur les hôtels et le récit d'une rencontre improbable entre deux icônes de la culture américaine : l'actrice mythique Lana Turner et la star du music-hall Liberace.