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Soundscape in D.H. Lawrence’s Writings: Music and Dance from the Etruscans to Classical Music

Nick Ceramella

Résumé

In this article, I will discuss Lawrence’s passion for music and dance, which led him to combine sound, rhythm and movement as a new form of communication and which he shared also with the Futurists and avant-garde painters like Picasso and Matisse. Music and dance represent a leitmotiv throughout his lifelong career.
His interest was rooted in his childhood when his mother played the piano in the long, cold winter evenings (
cf. the poem “Piano”). While his father, as described by John Worthen in his biography, was a “graceful dancer” and used to sing cheerfully even following the rhythm of the hammer as he mended his boots (cf. Sons and Lovers and his sister’s memoirs, Ada Lawrence 23). Indeed, Ada reports that he seduced his wife by his graceful dancing.
In Italy, Lawrence had many opportunities to see people dancing and singing, such as is the case in
Sea and Sardinia where he is attracted by the rhythmic dances of the Mamuthones, scary carnival masques. I will focus on the essay “The Dance” in Twilight in Italy where we can admire two amazing local dancers, “Il Duro” and a wooden-legged man, who virtually hypnotise Frieda and another English lady “by the transport of repeated ecstasy.” (TI 169) The two men are seen as god-like figures who seem to have a strong Dyonisiac power which affects the two English women and brings them almost to a loss of control through the power of a polka played on a mandolin and a guitar.

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Texte intégral

“Music is so naturally united with us that we
cannot be free from it even if we so desired.”
(De institutione musica, Boethius c.510)

Introduction

1As human beings we enjoy singing and playing musical instruments, and are equally fascinated by the tone of a voice, that we may find sweet and warm to the ear, but at times also unpleasant. We also like the sounds that exist in Nature: the wind and breeze making vegetation stir, the waves splashing against the rocks, the water running in its bed, or the birds singing. Yet there is also a wide variety of unnatural sounds, as for example, the noise produced by the urban traffic and machinery in general, causing so much damage to both people and the environment, which has led to the necessity to invest in massive research to improve today’s disastrous overall pollution. Compare, for instance, the rattling and tumbling noise produced by old trains with today’s sibilant sound. Or the clinking of machinery in factories which today has been reduced to a minimum, especially as robots have replaced men in factory production lines. Thus, silence has become a vital asset. Silence is also part and parcel not only of any musical composition, but its rendering is also one of the challenges that writers, including Lawrence, tried to meet through literary devices like dots, blanks, loss of speech, and so on. Let’s also bear in mind how much Lawrence loved music and was concerned that the spreading of industrialisation was modifying people’s attitude to Nature, while the changing of the seasons no longer followed their original regular pattern.

2Music was very important in Lawrence’s early years. On reading his letters and works, one is struck by the indirect influence of folk songs which we know he was familiar with since his youth. Jessie Chambers recounts that “He liked the folk songs, particularly the ballad of ‘Henry Martin’ and ‘I sowed the seeds of love’” (80). It is not by chance that George Saxton in The White Peacock (1911) likes those songs. This brings to mind that Lawrence used to teach Jesssie’s family these songs, while they harvested the fields and milked the cows.

3However, before focusing on the idea of music in traditional terms, I will deal with the presence and value of sounds of all sorts in Lawrence’s writing texture. The short story Odour of Chrysanthemums, written in 1909, offers one of the earliest examples where a train plays an active role with its mechanical sounds:

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston, with seven full wagons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, […] Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.
The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines beside the colliery where rows of trucks stood in harbour. (OC 51)

4In the same story, while Walter’s wife and his mother are waiting for his body to be brought home, emotional, physical human noises mixed with metallic ones can be heard:

The old woman continued to muse aloud, a monotonous irritating sound, while Elizabeth thought concentratedly, startled once, when she heard the winding engine chuff quickly, and the brakes skirr with a shriek. Then she heard the engine more slowly, and the brakes made no sound. The old woman did not notice. Elizabeth waited in suspense. The mother-in-law talked, with lapses of silence. (OC 65-66)

5As Walter’s workmates arrive home, carrying the man’s body, silence is accompanied by his mother’s wailing and sobbing that—to keep within the musical metaphor—we might compare to some sort of basso continuo: “The old woman began to moan in a low voice of horror” (OC 68). On laying Walter’s body in the room, “one of the men knocked off a vase of chrysanthemums,” and “the three men waited in silence, while she [the wife] mopped up the water with a duster” (OC 68). Inevitably, one of the children woke up and asked her mother what was happening downstairs.

6There was silence for a moment, then the men heard the frightened child again:

What was that noise? […]
The noise was the grandmother moaning. […] The manager put his hand on her arm and bade her “Sh—sh!” (OC 68-69)

7Silence helps to create a dramatic atmosphere as often is also the case with musical orchestration. Likewise, in Lawrence’s writings silence enhances the written texture, although one may object that whatever is written in words is silent by definition. See as a further example, the strong suspense effect created in Tickets, Please, when, towards the end of the story, Annie is ferociously beating up John Thomas:

Now, then, my fellow! gasped Annie at length. Now then—now—“
And there was a dead silence, in which the thud of heart-beating was to be heard. It was suspense of pure silence in every soul. […]
He made no sound nor sign, but lay with bright, averted eyes, and averted, bleeding face. (TP 228-229)

8Other interesting examples are to be found in Women in love (1921) which, according to Peter Preston, is characterised by many references to sounds in general, be it music, voices, or even silences. He writes:

Music also contributes to the novel’s soundtrack —brass band and dance band at the Criches’ water-party; the accompaniment to the Russian ballet at Breadalby; the thumping rhythms of a Tyrolean band at the hostel in the mountains. Above all, however, Women in Love, is a novel full of sound of the human voice, of cries and whispers, gossip, debate and argument. (Preston 58-59)

9Silences and pauses are a most relevant part of this novel and by pacing the rhythm of the many conversations that take place in it, they become part of the drama itself. They can express what would be impossible to say in words. A significant example of lack of speech is offered by the relationship between Birkin and Gerald which becomes meaningful when “There was a silence between them, and a strange tension of hostility” (WL 104). In chapter XIX, “Moony,” after Birkin argues with Ursula, his language is rendered through the following literary devices: alliteration (“flickering nearer, a little closer to the mark, the cluster growing mysteriously larger and brighter, as gleam after gleam”), synaesthesia (“The hollow night was rocking and crashing with noise,” “flashes of sound,” “ebbing flakes of light, a cluster dancing secretly in a round, twining and coming stealthily together”), and onomatopoeia (“Crashing with sound,” “dripping shadow”) (WL 248). It is evident that Lawrence, like many other writers of his time, like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, had to admit that language had failed and cannot convey what was usually transmitted through speech. Practically, if the first part of Women in Love is full of sounds, the second is marked by silence, when Gerald is overwhelmed by the “terrible silence” of nature (WL 401), namely the landscape. After Gerald’s death, there cannot be anything else but silence. So, when Gudrun, Birkin and Ursula travel back to England, “there was silence between the three of them, nothing to be said” (WL 476). Lawrence had stretched his idea of silence to the extreme in the chapter “The Cathedral” in The Rainbow (1915): “Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in silence, dark before germination, silenced after death” (187).

10Elsewhere, Lawrence says that contrary to silence, sounds evoking music can be naturally produced in a variety of situations like the following: “The little pleasure-launch was fussing out from the shore, twanging its music” (WL 157). Or, in the parallel between lovemaking and the natural environment in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “Then as she began to move in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames […]” (LCL 133). Here, the repetition of words is used to intensify the physicality and stress the continuity of the movements during the sexual intercourse. In brief, they produce a sort of “crescendo” leading to the climax of “the sudden orgasm” (LCL 81) which can be compared with the repetition of notes or musical phrases.

11To put it in the words of Anaïs Nin, this stylistic device allowed Lawrence to create a language which was closer to poetry which is musical in its own right:

The words almost cease to have a meaning; they have a cadence, a flow, and Lawrence gives in to the cadence. That is why there are so many “ands” and enchaînements, repetitions like choruses, words that are meant to suggest more than their own determinate, formal significance.
In language, too, Lawrence was prolific and varied. […]
He would give it the rhythm of movement, of dancing: thus, his wayward, formless, floating, wordshattering descriptions. He would give it the sound, musicality, cadence: thus, words sometimes used less for their sense than their sound. It was a daring thing to do. (Nin 61, 63)

12Actually, Lawrence created resounding effects by resorting to repetitions, distortions, onomatopoeia, paronomasia. But when he did not have a clear mind about a certain sound, he often used phrases such as “sounded as if,” or “sounded like.”

Music in Lawrence’s family background and youth

13After dealing with the idea of music in linguistic terms, let’s concentrate more closely on the role that music had in Lawrence’s life and works. In fact, we can distinguish two particular threads in relation to Lawrence’s literary career: the role played by music proper since his childhood, and the mesmerising effect that music and dance had on his artistic growth up to his posthumous book Etruscan Places (1932). Music was an integral part of his family background. His great-grand father, on his mother’s side, John Newton (1802-1886), was a choirmaster and an organist at the newly established Beeston Chapel, near Nottingham. It is not by mere accident that in 1908, when Lawrence began his teaching career in Croydon, he wrote a letter to his fiancée, Blanche Jennings, expressing his passion for music:

I love music. I have been to two or three fine orchestral concerts here. At one I heard Grieg’s Peer Gynt—it is very fascinating, if not profound. Surely you know Wagner’s operas—Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. (1 99)

14John Worthen in his biography says how Grieg and Wagner had an impact on Lawrence’s private life:

Wagner’s operas successfully brought her [Helen Corke] and Lawrence together. […] Croydon London had given him far more chance for hearing music and going to opera than Nottingham had. […]
She passed on her enthusiasm to Lawrence when they began to see each other during the autumn and winter of 1909; he certainly learned about Siegmund and Sieglinde from her. (Worthen 255)

15Helen Corke undoubtedly influenced Lawrence’s musical taste so much that Wagner will be a constant presence in The Trespasser (1912). The protagonist of this novel bears the Wagnerian name, Siegmund, he is a violin teacher who has an intricate affair with one of his pupils called after another Wagnerian character, Sieglinde (Helen herself). But this is not a one-off reference to Wagner, since Lawrence will refer to him again in his next two novels The Rainbow (1915) and in Women in Love (1920). Even if Lawrence was so attracted to music at that time, there are no explicit references to it in his first novel The White Peacock (1911). Yet this novel is clearly full of music springing from Nature itself as shown by Malcolm Gray and Alan Wilson, two former chairmen of the D.H. Lawrence Society of Great Britain who were inspired by it to create their Cantata “The Voice of Nethermere” (2022), the area around one of Lawrence’s favourite places, Moorgreen Reservoir, near Eastwood, where they sought to develop the idea that the tragedy of the failed relationship between the two protagonists—George and Lettie—and the sadness of their final years, was the consequence of their failure to hear a voice, the Voice of Nature” (Ceramella 47).

16Lawrence in his third novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), while tracing highly emotional conflicts within his family, also writes about his family background in relation to his innate sense of music. Jessie Chambers confirmed that, although he did not get on well with his father, he once said something complimentary about him: “Father says one ought to be able to dance on a threepenny bit” (Chambers 30). John Worthen too in his biography describes him as a “graceful dancer,” and so does his daughter Ada (23). In addition, we know that Arthur seduced his wife, Lydia Beardsall, through his dancing at a Christmas party in her aunt’s house in 1874. In the first chapter of Sons and Lovers, “The early married life of the Morels,” Lawrence describes his father as a charmer pressing Gertrude Coppard (i.e. Lydia) to dance with him, even if she says she “cannot dance.” In the same chapter, Morel is described as a “handy man,” who used to sing cheerfully while following the rhythm of the hammer as he mended his boots or sawed early in the morning (See SL 27). Since that was the kind of ambiance in which Lawrence grew up, it is no wonder then that he drafted the very first version of the poem “Piano” as early as 1905. He recalls in it that he used to lie under the home piano, near his mother’s feet (“in the boom of the tingling strings”) while she used to play and sing hymns along with the family during the long, cold winter evenings. But his thoughts swing from the past to the present when he, as an adult, is drawn by the irresistible rocking between that unforgettable memory and a woman singing with great intensity while accompanying herself on the piano. From a sociological viewpoint, having a piano in a modest home like the Lawrences’ was a class marker showing a big social leap forward. In Women in Love, Birkin says sarcastically to the industrial magnate, Gerald Crich, that a miner was prepared to work so hard “to have a pianoforte in his parlor” (WL 55); the latter retorted: “Don’t you think the collier’s pianoforte, as you call it, is a symbol for something very real, a real desire for something higher in the collier’s life?” (WL 55).

1. Piano at the Lawrences’ in Breach House, Eastwood (1887-1891). Personal photo.

1. Piano at the Lawrences’ in Breach House, Eastwood (1887-1891). Personal photo.

17Music knows no social limits and has always favoured going over them. Similarly, music has no geographical boundaries, being a truly international language. Indeed, the next novels by Lawrence that we are going to consider are initially set in England and continue in Italy. In The Lost Girl (1920) there is a very telling situation when, Ciccio, an Italian expatriate to England, serenades Alvina on “a lovely moonlight of September,” while she was nursing Mrs Tuke, who was “in travail.”

A mandolin was wailing its vibrations in the night outside, rapidly, delicately quivering. Alvina went pale. She knew it was Ciccio. She had seen him lurking in the streets of the town, but had never spoken to him.
“What’s this?” cried Mrs Tuke, cocking her head on one side.
“Music! A mandolin! How extraordinary!—Do you think it’s a serenade?—“ And she lifted her brows archly.
“I should think it is,” said Alvina. […]
“Quite.”
“There!” cried Mrs Tuke, into the moonlight. “Una canzone bella-bella—molto bella— […] They waited. And sure enough, came the fine tinkle of the mandolin, and after a few moments, the song. It was one of the well-known Neapolitan songs, and Ciccio sang it as it should be sung.

18He goes down in the street:

And from outside, once more, came the despairing howl of the Neapolitan song, animal and inhuman on the night.

“—E tu dic ’i parto, addio!
T’alluntane da stu core,
Nel paese dell’ammore
Tien’ o cor’ è nun turnà?
Ma nun me lassà
Nun darme stu turmiento
Torna a Surriento […]
That means don’t leave me! […]. It just does one in, and turns one into a sort of howling animal. (LG 275-278)

19But they will eventually leave for Naples where Ciccio originally came from. Alvina is utterly charmed (“melt into his power”) by his penetrating playing and singing Neapolitan songs. Similarly, in the next novel, Aaron’s Rod (1922), the protagonist, an English flautist who, encouraged by his friend Lilly, a musician himself, leaves his family and moves to Florence to join him in the hope that he will earn his living by playing.

The Hypnotic Power of Dance and Music

20Italy is the inspiring country where Lawrence had many opportunities to see people dancing and singing. In this regard, I have always found particularly fascinating the essay “The Dance” in Twilight in Italy (1916), based on a real event which occurred when Frieda and Lawrence, on leaving Gargnano, walked up the nearby mountain and stopped over at the Capellis’ unlicensed inn at San Gaudenzio, where they were drawn into a typical country gathering with the rural community. Lawrence was so charmed by the dancing and the music that, in my view, he wrote here one of his most lively and involving passages ever. He was impressed by two amazing dancers, Faustino Magri (“il Duro,” the “Tough”) and a wooden-legged man, who virtually hypnotise Frieda and another English lady “by the transport of repeated ecstasy” (TI 169). The two men are seen as god-like figures who evoke a strong Dionysian power affecting the two English women by bringing them to lose control through the sweeping drive of a mazurka played on a mandolin and a guitar:

  • 1 Lawrence, perhaps remembering what Nietzsche says, “I would believe only in a god who could dance” (...)

It is a strange dance, strange and lilting, and changing as the music changed. But it had always a kind of leisurely dignity, a trailing kind of polka-waltz, intimate, passionate, yet never hurried, never violent in its passion, always becoming more intense. The women’s faces changed to a kind of transported wonder, they were in the very rhythm of delight. From the soft bricks of the floor the red ochre rose in a thin cloud of dust, making hazy the shadowy dancers; the three musicians, in their black hats and their cloaks, sat obscurely in the corner, making a music that came quicker and quicker, making a dance that grew swifter and more intense, more subtle, the men seeming to fly and to implicate other strange inter-rhythmic dance into the women, the women drifting and palpitating as if their souls shook and resounded to a breeze that was subtly rushing upon them, through them; the men worked their feet, their thighs swifter, more vividly, the music came to an almost intolerable climax, there was a moment when the dance passed into a possession, the men caught up the women and swung them from the earth, leapt with them for a second, and then the next phase of the dance had begun, slower again, more subtly interwoven, taking perfect, ooooh, exquisite delight in every interrelated movement, a rhythm within a rhythm, a subtle approaching and drawing nearer to a climax, nearer, till, ooooh, there was the surpassing lift and swing of the women, when the woman’s body seemed like a boat lifted over the powerful, exquisite wave of the man’s body, perfect, for a moment, and then once more the slow, intense, nearer movement of the dance began, always nearer, nearer, always to a more perfect climax.1 (TI 167-169)

21While, I have always thought that, among the pieces that were most likely played when the Lawrences stayed at San Gaudenzio, there is one matching well, the mazurka “Tra veglia e sonno,” (“Between wakefulness and sleep,” 1913) by Luigi Canora, which offers a poetical synthesis of the brevity of time and life they are dancing to. It is a pity that it cannot be heard, but just imagined.

22There is a further point I wish to touch upon just to conclude this analysis of Lawrence’s description of the dance. To make it more vivid, he writes a long, run-on sentence, joining the fragmented various moments of the dance, with commas and semi-colons. That makes one wonder whether that writing style mimics the rhythm of the dance, and maybe of the sex act itself. In addition, this very scene brings back to memory the rain scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover where Connie cannot refrain from dancing while imagining she is making love to Mellors. She uses her stark-naked body to unleash her power through dance, thus enchanting Mellors in Sherwood Forest. That is what she had felt earlier in a conversation with Dukes: “Give me the resurrection of the body! The democracy of touch!” (LCL 75-76), which she achieves in this memorable scene from Lady Chatterley’s Lover:

She slipped on her rubber shoes again and ran out with a wild little laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms, and running blurred in the rain with the eurythmic dance-movements she had learned so long ago in Dresden. It was a strange pallid figure lifting and falling, bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches, swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance. (LCL 221)

23By way of comparison, Mark Kinkead-Weekes in “D.H. Lawrence and the Dance” (DR 5977) brings up what happens to Ursula in The Rainbow, where she, after dancing with Anton Skrebensky, cannot help but abandon him. By contrast, Gudrun too in Women in Love, instead of being attracted to Gerald, feels the urge to challenge her power over the cows she comes across. Actually, music in this novel appears as an aesthetic issue in some dialogues among the two pairs of protagonists. Lawrence’s passion for music and dance, which combines sound, rhythm and movement, led him to see the whole as a new form of communication. A relevant influence on Lawrence is Émile Jacques Dalcroze’s eurhythmics, a method aiming to teach and perceive music through movement. Again, a case in point is when, in Women in Love, Gudrun, like her sister, performs rhythmic gymnastics while in a frenzy she tries to impose her power on nature by “hypnotizing” through a sort of magic rite some cattle during the water party. Here the two sisters Gudrun and Ursula are sitting on the grass:

Then Ursula, who had a beautiful strong voice, began to sing to herself, softly: “Annchen von Tharau.” […] “Will you sing while I do Dalcroze?” said Gudrun, suffering at having to repeat herself. […] “What shall I sing?” cried Ursula.
“Sing anything you like, and I’ll take the rhythm from it.”
Then some Highland cattle appeared and Ursula, unlike her sister was frightened. To which Gudrun to reassure her said: “They are quite safe. … Sing something, you’ve only got to sing something.” […]
Ursula began to sing, in a false, quivering voice:
“Way down in Tennessee– – – ”
She sounded purely anxious. Nevertheless Gudrun, with her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went in a strange, palpitating dance towards the cattle, […] her throat exposed as in some voluptuous ecstasy towards them […] in the hypnotising convulsion of the dance.” (WL 165-168)

Ancient music and dance

24This approach to dance was in line with the style of the American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), a forerunner of “modern dance,” conceived as an innovative way to communicate with the living universe. Lawrence was going to find out about that during his stay in New Mexico first and then, in the paintings seen in the Etruscan tombs. This inspired him one of his paintings, Dance Sketch, where a man, a woman and a goat dance together and dissolve into the living universe, thus showing the real meaning of being connected to Nature.

25This brief digression leads straight to the next aspect of Lawrence’s interest in music: primitivism. In Lawrence’s second travel book, Sea and Sardinia (1921), he is intrigued by the rhythmic dances of the “Mamuthones,” ancestral spirits linked to the rural world and ancient pagan rituals. Lawrence and Frieda were scared by these carnival masques, owing to their demonic appearance. Here folklore and archaic rites intermix in a sexual game where young men parade in the streets of Cagliari dressed like women.

26It is self-evident that the Sardinian event, apart from adding an important layer to the Italian musical experience, leads us straight to Lawrence’s interest in primitivism as well as in a completely different musical culture in the short story “The Woman Who Rode Away” set in the Chihuahua State, Mexico. It tells the amazing adventure of an unnamed young rich American who escapes from her husband’s silver mine in Sierra Nevada and dares to ride into the territory of the Chilchuis, described by Lawrence as “the sacred tribe of all the Indians. The descendants of Montezuma and the old Aztec or Totomac kings still offered human sacrifices—so it was said” (WA 42). The Chilchuis stop her and ride with her through a territory where “All was silent, mountain silent, cold deathly” (WA 49). Silence, actually, is a recurring term used to create suspense and a mysterious atmosphere: “They talked in low, muttering tones, with long intervals of silence” (WA 48), “profound silence,” (WA 51) “tense silence,” (WA 52) “everything was silent” (WA 53), “they passed silently” (WA 53), “there was a pause” (WA 54), “There was a silence like eternity” (WA 58). At the end we realise that she is going to be sacrificed, while the drumming, singing, and dancing go on incessantly and contribute, together with the word “silence,” to create a deep sense of agony and chilling anxiety:

A big drum was beating slowly and regularly, in the dense, Indian silence.
The crowd below waited—
Then a drum started on a high beat, and there came the deep, powerful burst of men singing a heavy, savage music, like a wind roaring in some timeless forest, many mature men singing in one breath, like the wind; and long lines of dancers walked out from under the big house. […] And after each man, a woman with a strange elaborate headdress of feathers and seashells, and wearing a short black tunic, moving erect, holding up tufts of feathers in each hand, swaying her wrists rhythmically, and subtly beating the earth with bare feet. […]
For hours and hours, she [the victim] watched, spell bound, and as if drugged. And in all the terrible persistence of the drumming and the primeval, rushing deep singing, and the endless stamping of the dance of fox-tailed men, the tread of heavy, bird-erect women in their black tunics, she seemed at last to feel her own death, her own obliteration. (WA 59, 60)

27Regarding the music and dance features, we can say that The Plumed Serpent (1926), set in Mexico and resulting from a visit there in 1923, is even more important. I dare say there are certain parts in this novel that could be written in musical notation because they have tonalities, the progression of notes. Music, then, being rhythm and melody, is a vital part of the texture of the text. A case in point is represented by those passages in which Lawrence recreated the dance throughout his narrative. Kate watches tribal dances, featuring men and women singing and dancing, but in two separate circles: “a beautiful slow wheel of dance, two great streams streaming in contact, in opposite directions” (PS 131). Meanwhile, they are accompanied by the strong presence of musical instruments like the continuous sound of drums, heightening and enhancing the sensuality and the physicality which turn the dance into a ritual full of religious meaning and transcendence. This happens the first time that Kate, accompanied by Juana, goes to a feast and approaches that mysterious ancient world.

And one by one, voices in the crowd broke free, like birds launching and coming from a distance, caught by the spell. The words did not matter. […] And Juana was singing in spite of herself, in a crooning feminine voice, making up the words unconsciously. The song rose and fell, then died away. Rose, and died. The drum ebbed on, faintly, touching the dark membrane of the night. Then ebbed away. In the absolute silence could be heard the soundless stillness of the dark lake. (PS 127-128)

28Finally, as shown in Etruscan Places, another travel book set in Italy, Lawrence was fascinated by the music and dancing at the centre of the Etruscans’ civilisation in public and private activities. Music set the rhythm of daily life, including food preparation, working and the whipping of slaves. It could not be missing from weddings and funerals or processions and orgiastic rituals. So, even after death, when they reached the underworld, the Etruscans continued to show through music their love of life because music continued to put them in contact with the gods. Sadly, as is the case with all ancient civilisations, there are no scores available to learn more about this fundamental aspect of their world. In the two civilizations we have taken into consideration, it is only thanks to the paintings found in the tombs that we can deduce what musical instruments they used to play and under what circumstances. However, unlike the Aztecs, the Etruscans rarely used drums. Instead, they occasionally played castanets and bracelets which can often be seen in the hands of dancers. Concerning wind instruments, we know they played single or double reed aulos, (made of wood or silver); the tyrrhenean, a long straight trumpet, that was invented by the Etruscans, and appeared under different names, among the Greeks and the Romans. It seems that equally popular were the shell, conca pertusa, used for hunting or warfare, and the pan flute, made with reeds, that was developed into the transverse flute. Among the string instruments suffice to mention the citara (plucked with a plectrum), and the lyra, that had a sound box connected to a tortoise shell with four to seven strings. It is simply extraordinary that the paintings, through their vivid colours, reveal how important music and dance were to the Etruscans, while reflecting their love for feasting. Lawrence was so impressed by such a vibrating “joie de vivre” that he wrote “there is a certain dance and glamour in all movements, even in those of the naked slave-men” (EP 46).

29Below is a wonderful painting which exemplifies the joy of living through the nakedness and the harmonious movements of the bodies:

The dancers on the right wall move with a strange, powerful alertness onwards. […] The subulo plays the double-flute the Etruscans loved so much, touching the stops with big, exaggerated hands, the man behind him touches the seven-stringed lyre, the man in front turns round and signals with his left hand, holding a big wine-bowl on his right.
And so they move on, on their long sandalled feet, past the little berried olive trees, swiftly going with their limbs full of life, full of life to the tips. (EP 48)

Conclusion

30I cannot imagine anybody else but Lawrence himself could draw the conclusion to what he described so beautifully and naturally, almost as if he had taken part in person in those feasts. Indeed, he caught the essence of how the Etruscans enjoyed their lives and gave vent to their energy through music and dancing, true symbols of a religion of life:

Behind all the dancing was a vision and even a science of life, a conception of the universe and man’s place in the universe which made men live to the depth of their capacity. (EP 56)

31Indeed, as we have seen, music and dance permeated Lawrence’s life and many of his writings.

32On drawing this conclusion, it occurs to me that what Harold Pinter revealed in an interview about the role that music played in his writing style may well apply to Lawrence’s: “I don’t know how music can influence writing, but it has been very important for me, both jazz and classical music. I feel a sense of music continually in writing […]” (Pinter) At this point, I am aware that my attempt to deal with such a vast and complex topic in a short article is obviously far from being a final piece of work. After all, to this day, there is not much documentation extant about the Etruscan and the Aztec music cultures in particular. In fact, Lawrence himself could only use what was available, the archeological evidence, from which we can imagine those populations had rather elaborate musical practices and styles, that were a vital component of the protocols regulating the events and ceremonies described by Lawrence, including stage techniques as silence, pause and dialogue. Consequently, due to the lack of original material, we no doubt need to acknowledge once more Lawrence’s ingenuity and brilliant imagination for bringing to the general reader’s attention even such a fascinating and mysterious world as that of the Etruscans and the Aztecs.

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Bibliographie

Chambers, Jessie. D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Ceramella, Nick. “The Voice of Nethermere, [A Cantata],” “Piano,” “Swinging between Past and Present.” In The Marriage between Literature and Music. Ed. Nick Ceramella. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022.

Ceramella, Nick. Lake Garda: Gateway to D.H. Lawrence’s Voyage to the Sun. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

Ceramella, Nick. “Lawrence’s polyphonic web of words.” In The Power of Language. Shkodra (Albania): University of Florentia, 2021.

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “D.H. Lawrence and the Dance.” In The Journal of the Society in Dance Research 10 (1), 1992.

Lawrence, Ada. Young Lorenzo. Florence: Pino Orioli, 1932.

Lawrence, D.H. Aaron’s Rod. Ed. Mara Kalnins, Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Lawrence, D.H. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence (Vol. I). Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Lawrence, D.H. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence (Vol. V). Ed. James T. Boulton & Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Lawrence, D.H. The Lost Girl. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Lawrence, D.H. “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” In Sun, Selected Short Stories. Ed. Peter Preston & Nick Ceramella. Napoli: Loffredo Editore, 1995.

Lawrence, D.H. The Plumed Serpent. Ed. L.D. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Lawrence, D.H. Sea and Sardinia. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Lawrence, D.H. Twilight in Italy. Ed. Paul Eggert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Lawrence, D.H. The Woman who Rode Away. Ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Nietzsche, Friederik. Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common. New York: Dover Publications,1999.

Nin, Anaïs. An Unprofessional Study. Introduction by Harry T. Moore. London: Black Spring Press, 1985.

Pinter, Harold. “The Art of Theatre N. 3, Harold Pinter interviewed by Larry Bensky.” In The Paris Review, N. 39, Fall 1966.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4351/the-art-of-theatre-n-39

Preston, Peter. “Beyond the sound of words: Speech and silence in Women in Love.” In Working with Lawrence: Texts, Places, Contexts. Ed. Andrew Harrison. Nottingham: D.H. Lawrence Research Centre, University of Nottingham, 2011.

Stevenson, Robert. Music in Mexico. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1952, pp. 14-19.

Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence, The Early Years, 1885-1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Zytaruk, George J. “The Collected Letters of Jessie Chambers.” In D.H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 12, Numbers 1-2 (Spring 1979).

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Notes

1 Lawrence, perhaps remembering what Nietzsche says, “I would believe only in a god who could dance” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 24), uses a language more appropriate to describe a Dyonisian frantic sexual game meant to liberate those two Nordic women from their puritanical inhibitions.

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Table des illustrations

Titre 1. Piano at the Lawrences’ in Breach House, Eastwood (1887-1891). Personal photo.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/docannexe/image/4318/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 17k
Titre 2. Tarquinia: Leopard’s Tomb. https://it.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Tomba_dei_Leopardi (Common domain).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/docannexe/image/4318/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 642k
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Référence électronique

Nick Ceramella, « Soundscape in D.H. Lawrence’s Writings: Music and Dance from the Etruscans to Classical Music »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 57 | 2025, mis en ligne le 28 novembre 2025, consulté le 09 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/4318 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/158nb

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Auteur

Nick Ceramella

Nick Ceramella has been Vice-President of the D.H. Lawrence Society of Great Britain since 2019. He is a professor of English Literature and Language, and Translation Studies. He taught at the following Italian universities: La Sapienza Rome, SISS Roma Tre, University for Foreigners, Perugia, l’Orientale Naples, SICSI Federico II Naples, University of L’Aquila, and lately, the University of Trento. Nick has also served as Visiting Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities of Moscow (Russia), and at the Federal University of Maçeió, Alagoas (Brazil), University of Tirana (Albania). He lectured in most European countries, in the USA (Brook University, NY), Canada (Ottawa University), Kyoto (Japan), Lahore (Pakistan).
Nick’s eclectic publishing and teaching are reflected in his wide variety of books and articles on English literature, ESP, Italian American literature, theory and practice of translation, and History of the English language.
His latest publications include: The Marriage between Literature and Music (CSP, 2023), Insights into D.H. Lawrence’s Sardinia (CSP, 2023), Domenico’s New Year by Francis Thomas Galwey (Nick Ceramella: translation, introduction and notes, now adapted into a play, Meligrana editions, 2023), and “World Coffee Culture: Coffee Houses and Cafés Littéraires – Focus on Italy,” in Folia Linguistica and Literaria 49 (Dec 2024), pp. 129-154.

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