Musical performativity in the early twentieth-century piano novels by E.M. Forster, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf

This thesis concerns the depiction of female piano performance in the novels at the dawn of the twentieth century, focusing on Thomas Mann's "Tristan" (1903), E.M. Forster's "A Room with a View" (1908) and Virginia Woolf's "The Voyage Out" (1915). To better understand this chosen topic, this thesis puts together the theoretical approaches of performativity and word and music studies to examine the manifestation of female pianism in a performative tradition. This thesis argues that the three piano novels enact the liveness of musical performance as a textual construction, enabling musicality to be remediated through its dialectical relationship with words. In the selected corpus, piano performance is depicted as both discursive and corporeal acts to puncture the binary practices within Western classical music, disrupting the schism between composers and performers, virtuosos and amateurs, vocal and instrumental genres, and masculine and feminine traditions. The transgressive musical acts by the female pianists propose new modes of perception and understanding, to the extent that their relationships with the listener, musical text and performance context can be genuinely changed. This peculiar status of pianism can be conceived of as the pianists' musical performativity-its full meaning cannot be enclosed within the imaginary museum of monumental artwork, but can only be unfolded in a contingent real-time performance process.