| Popis: |
John Ireland’s music divulges a more sophisticated relationship to literary influences than has traditionally been explored. Despite broad recognition of his literary interests, this thesis argues that Ireland’s enthusiasm for and engagement with the work of his professed favourite writer, Arthur Machen (1863-1947), is at best fractionally understood. This thesis submits that Ireland’s music is entwined preternaturally with a literary figure whose defining characteristic, ‘weirdness’, grants his music and life a comparable quality, thriving off a complex and ambiguous language of interdisciplinary systems and symbols, and contributing a singular body of work to the repertoire of early twentieth-century music. Providing contextual frames for works by both artists, this study takes as its point of departure the concept of ‘weirdness’ as it pertains to Machen’s post hoc classification by S.T. Joshi as a progenitor of ‘weird fiction’. Reconstructing the worldview that inspired and sustained Machen’s writings through literary criticism, socio-cultural movements, and aesthetic and philosophical systems, it is demonstrated that Ireland’s subsequent compositions and artist-persona emerged from an absorption of the defining principles of Machen’s work with an emphasis on schematizations of weirdness. As such, it is argued that Ireland’s life and work can only be properly perceived within the context of Machen’s own writings; they must be read in tandem. By placing Machen’s writings within concurrent aesthetic and cultural contexts animating notions of weirdness, this thesis establishes a discourse between these elements and representative compositions by Ireland that were composed after his discovery of Machen’s work in 1906. This analysis evinces that a sympathetic understanding of Ireland’s work and character benefits substantially from a dissection of the intricate interaction between his and Machen’s works; between assorted cultural and aesthetic elements of English music, literature, and landscape; between the reception of his works by contemporaneous and contemporary critics; and by contemplating further the aesthetic and philosophical implications of his music for English musicology, musical ontology, and notions of weirdness in art and artists. |
