‘Yet the music had promised us’: Musical biopolitics in Rebecca West’s Apocalyptic Imaginaries

Music is often thought of as universal, as an abstract art form detached from politics; musical sounds are perceived as non-referential but powerfully evocative, their expressivity reaching beyond the rationality of language. Yet, since the 1980s, musicology has gradually shifted from this perception of music to emphasizing music’s intersection with politics, resulting in the increasing attention to music as situated within and formative to a political milieu of regulatory mechanisms. 

This project offers a case study of music’s biopolitical significance in apocalyptic narratives in Europe in the 1930s. It focuses on the writing of Rebecca West, exploring the ways in which she used Western art music to represent what she saw as a collapse of European civilization while imagining a possible future for the region. Building on the recent work of musical-literary studies and global music history, the project will consider West’s musical references as informed by and evaluative of circulating political discourses about music, highlighting music’s role in contemporary debates about international conflicts, crisis, and a sense of Europe’s ‘ending’. The project will explore the problematics of West making creative capital out of music’s apocalyptic significance and analyze the connotations of cultural hierarchy and ethnocentrism in West’s apocalyptic constructions. The project also seeks to generate wider resonances for today. Through an examination of West’s writing, the project suggests a way to rethink how to write about music, aiming to change the narrative about the perceived ‘end’ of musicology as a discipline, broken’ by warring ideologies about what ‘music’ is.

THE SPEAKER: Tsung-Han Tsai is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. His work focuses on music and twentieth-century literature, particularly the contentious relationship between music and politics. He is the author of E. M. Forster and Music (Cambridge, 2021) and co-editor (with Emma Sutton) of Twenty-first-century Readings of E. M. Forster’s Maurice (Liverpool, 2020). He holds an MA in English from King's College London and a PhD in English from the University of St Andrews. He has served as a Residential Fellow at the Centro Incontri Umani Ascona in Switzerland and has received the Ta-You Wu Memorial Award (NSTC, Taiwan) in 2023.