‘After All the Years of Separation’: Musically Representing Author L.M. Montgomery’s Suspended Romances

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This article provides an innovative approach for analyzing the relationship between literature and popular music. The author addresses the novels of L.M. Montgomery, arguing that Montgomery uses the narrative structure of the suspended romance. According to the author, Montgomery appeased and evaded the publisher expectation that the young women who were heroines in her novels would be contained within a marriage plot as a resolution to the romance genre. Instead of quickly containing characters in the marriage plot, according to the author, Montgomery focused on the suspended romance and allowed the characters freedom in that phase.

 

The article’s author used inductive and deductive coding to analyze key themes in the novels and journals. Then, the author created musical compositions to represent those key themes, such as romance. The author argues that six musical devices in those compositions convey the suspended romance narrative structure that Montgomery uses in her novels. Having an article author create a musical composition to interpret a novel is an unusual methodological approach, and the author cites an arts-based research methodology for this approach.

 

To justify this approach, the author also cites intertextuality, arguing that as scholars have drawn in Montgomery’s journals and letters alongside novels and short stories to reflect on key themes intertextually, the author’s own use of musical interpretations as a form of intertextual response should also be valid. However, having someone else create a musical composition as an interpretation of Montgomery’s work is a different kind of intertextuality that goes beyond the novelist’s own work. While the author provides a generative discussion of intertextuality (page 3) in order to ground their use of that theory, including discussion of Julia Kristeva’s coinage of the term and the way she was drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, the author needs to do more to justify the inclusion of audience compositions as part of the intertextuality. For example, the author briefly mentions, citing one source, that the listener could be “included” as an “intertextual partner,” (line 119, page 3), but the author would need to expand on the audience point and provide more argumentation as support for that point. The end of that intertextuality section (page 4, line 171) is also abrupt and needs more expansion.

 

On page 2, the paragraph starting on line 92, the author goes through some justifications for this arts-based research methodology. The methodology is intriguing and could lead to some productive results. However, as the author notes, the unfamiliarity and newness of this methodology can lead to some skepticism about it. As a reader, I am willing to listen to the methodology, but I would also want to have some fuller justification and explanation for it. I would encourage the author to revise the article to expand on this section of the essay in order to provide fuller justification and explanation for the methodology. How is this methodology more illuminating than just textual analysis of Montgomery’s novels would be, for example?

 

Many of the transitions between sections are abrupt and need more fleshing out and links between the sections (for example, page 7, line 300). That abrupt shift is especially evident in jumps between the novel analysis and the musical composition explanations (example, page 10, line 434; page 15, line 510). We need more argumentation and justification for the jump into the musical compositions.

 

In the conclusion, the author has a brief paragraph about what the musical composition process adds to the interpretation here (page 15, line 510), but we need a fuller explanation and justification there. The author also has a paragraph about intertextuality in the conclusion (page 15, line 526), but again, we need much more justification for including the author’s own musical composition as part of that intertextuality. The idea of including audience compositions is an issue that needs more proof and support. Also, the issue is a larger methodological one for intertextuality, i.e. how to justify the inclusion of almost anything.

 

One way the author might revise is to consider more fully the ramifications of the author creating their own musical adaptation of Montgomery’s work and then providing textual analysis of their own musical adaptation. In the conclusion, the author mentions that that is essentially what they have done here, but it would help the article to have much more discussion of that dynamic and justification for it. The author could bring in adaptation theory.

 

Another example of an abrupt shift that needs addressing more is within a paragraph (page 8, line 350), where the author jumps between a discussion of Montgomery’s biography into a textual analysis of a novel, without providing a full explanation of what the biographical detail is meant to prove and why it should have the same status as a novel detail.

 

The references were generally reasonable, including some more recent references, but it would strengthen the article to include additional references that are more recent.

 

The author is bravely tackling an unusual methodology, and I do not wish to dissuade their own creativity, but they do need to do more to justify the methodology to readers who are willing to be sympathetic to them.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

REVIEW: ‘After all the years of separation’: Musically representing L.M. Montgomery’s suspended romances

 

This is a very interesting, richly illustrated and clearly written piece. It makes a strong case for arts-based research as a means of, in this case, discovering how themes of suspended romance from Montgomery’s novels can be represented in musical composition. Along the way, it goes into valuable discussions about meaning and representation in intertextual relations, and it presents and reflects on compositional results in detail, through score excerpts and a high-quality recording.

I would be very happy to see the paper published, although there is one larger suggestion I think ought to be addressed and several smaller things that I think could be improvements.

The major comment concerns the passages under the heading ‘Suspended Romance and “after all the years of separation”’ (line 300), lasting until line 314. What is explained here, the compositional choices meant to help represent in the music the themes of interest from the novels, seems really like it ought to be the crux of the whole article. These choices are listed without any real discussion and there is a risk of this important part getting lost in the much longer passages elsewhere containing literary and musical descriptions. But, in my reading at least, the compositional choices seem to be essentially what the theoretical insight into ‘cross-modal correspondence’ (or ‘intertextual representation’, or ‘planting an idea into the listener’s mind’) hinges on. I would like to know more about what kind of correspondence mechanisms the author/composer is intending to harness through these choices. And, ideally, this might be a springboard onto a discussion about how they engaged with existing theory and/or creative practices in making these decisions.

Certainly, it would help if these decisions were connected explicitly to the theoretical discussions earlier about representation (line 140-70). Indeed, I found it a little surprising that the field of semiotics did not get a small or larger mention at this point. Foundational work from Charles Sanders Peirce, taken up in musicology by the likes of Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Philip Tagg, would seem to offer a ready-made language for some of the things that you explain in other words at these places.

Drawing these links might also help make slightly bolder statements about the work’s theoretical contributions in the conclusion. At this point, there is a convincing case that the composition is entering intertextual relationships. But, as the author points out in the theoretical discussions, people have already argued that intertextuality is a thing, so perhaps there could be more done to emphasise that this research adds something new to that. What precisely is the nature of the meanings and the representation going on in this compositional work, as it relates to existing theoretical approaches to such questions (such as semiotics)?

 

Smaller comments:

§  The explanation and justification of the arts-based methodology, and what it can afford in this case, is particularly strong. But at line 107-9, what comes to my mind is that the author makes an important omission: discussion of the fact that the project is written up in words in the present manuscript. Obviously, the author thinks that doing this adds something to the project (or even is necessary to activate or ‘translate’ the findings of the compositional part). Does the eventual journal article join in with the picture of intertextuality discussed below this point? Or perhaps the author would rather not have to write things up in a journal but is responding to institutional or other pressures? It would be very good if these questions were answered explicitly.

§  The methodology section feels like it might be a bit out of place in the structure. I’d suggest considering whether it might be best appearing directly before the first time the compositional results are presented in detail (from line 300, I think). As it is, it feels a little like the manuscript jumps back to building up more background after the methodology ends. If the author feels this change would make the methodology come too late, it might be worth considering signposting forward to it at any earlier point, so the reader has some sense of the research method before the full explanation.

§  Also, it doesn’t feel like the section Romance, Montgomery Style (line 172) ought to be a sub-section of the methodology; it seems to be doing quite a different job and might fit better in the subsequent section (tweaking the heading of the latter, perhaps).

§  And when the compositional results are first addressed in detail from line 300, I found it easy to miss that this is what this section is doing. Part of the problem, I think, is the passive voice at line 302: “and the piece ‘after all the years of separation’ was written to represent this.” I think it would work much better to say more boldly that “I wrote the piece ‘after all the years of separation’ to achieve xyz” – not only to reinforce that the composer and article author are the same person, but as part of underlining this key structural moment a bit more clearly, to emphasise that this is the manifestation of the arts-based research methodology already presented.

§  One explanation that I thought worked especially well in both the arts-based research methodological discussion (line 106-7) and again in the conclusion (line 511-12) is the phrasing “the prime methodology for this project as the question is not can Montgomery’s theme of romance be musically represented, but how.” I found this way of putting really transported me to the heart of the matter and went a long way to justifying the methods. I wonder if it is worth considering putting it into the abstract as well – it captures a key contribution so straightforwardly and compellingly.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author has revised this manuscript appropriately. The study provides an original approach to analyzing these novels. The revisions effectively expand on the author's discussion of their methodology. The added material on hermeneutics and intertextuality is especially important to the article's argument. 

Throughout, the author also provides more links between the musical composition material and the novel discussion. There are clearer transitions in the essay, and the conclusion is more fully realized.

Congratulations to the author on a successful revision and an original piece of scholarship.