This essay considers the interaction between music and noise in Joyce’s narrative texts, arguing that Joyce’s increasing fascination with noise reflects a burgeoning skepticism about music’s formal autonomy and an ear for music’s ideological mystifications. Building on recent works in “sound studies,” which examine sound as a site of anxiety about urbanization and mechanical reproduction, the essay explores Joyce’s abandoned collaboration with the noise-music composer George Antheil on a staging of “Cyclops,” using megaphones and “phoneygraphs.” While “A Painful Case” reflects on the symbiotic relationship between solipsistic music and public noise, A Portrait struggles to detach musical rhythms from their symbolic associations. In unmooring sounds from their referents, however, Stephen leaves music open to the sort of musical misreadings found throughout Ulysses . The admixture of music and noise in Ulysses deflates the bombastic idealism of Wagnerian opera and defamiliarizes music as a “phoneygraph”—a medium and a form of false writing.

The dear earth everywhere Blossoms in spring and grows green again! Everywhere and forever the distance shines bright and blue! Forever...forever... [Ewig...Ewig...]-Gustav Mahler, ending of "Der Abschied" [Farewell], from Das Lied von der Erde (1909), trans. Deryck Cooke. 1 When we sit down to make work, we are made of all the things we have consumed.-Teju Cole, interview with Khalid Warsame Teju Cole's Open City (2011)-a novel determined to unravel its protagonist-is bookended by the late music of Gustav Mahler, a composer equally determined to disintegrate. A roundabout bildungsroman that counterpoints the memories of a Nigerian psychiatrist, Julius, with his present-day movement through Manhattan, Open City is haunted by Mahler's presence as an infirm Bohemian-Austrian composer in New York, who sought solace both in long walks and in the philosophical Weltschmerz of Goethe and Schopenhauer. If Cole's elusive narrator finds an intellectual mirrorimage in Mahler, that alienated image reflects a gaping ellipsis at Julius's core. Julius's narrative is initiated by a recording of Mahler's song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) (1909), which he hears playing in a Tower Records store, before spiraling back, at the end of the novel, to a live performance of Mahler's last finished work, the Ninth Symphony (1909). Having been alerted to a series of Mahler concerts under the baton of Simon Rattle, the cosmopolitan British conductor, Julius is disappointed to find that Das Lied von der Erde is sold out, but attends a performance of the Ninth instead. Before narrating his experience of the piece, Julius slips into a 412

Mr. Brooke himself has already been described by the narrator as having a “neutral physiognomy,” and that neutrality itself identified as one of few “striking points in his appearance” (503). Part of the effigy's menace, clearly, is its uncanny similarity to the original. As described, however, the effigy is unlikely to be a piece of skilled imitative craftsmanship; indeed, it is the very shoddiness of the thing that makes it eerie. Unlike the banality and apparent harmlessness of this vaguely empty caricature, a rag-doll in waistcoat and monocle, the “parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of [Mr. Brooke's] words” threatens because it offers no legible meaning, instead forcing interpretive agency onto the reader. Indeed, the “neutral physiognomy” must foreground interpretive agency, otherwise it would be impossible for a non-trait such as neutrality, either in Brooke or in his effigy, to be a “striking point” at all.

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This essay examines Dylan Thomas’s 1954 play Under Milk Wood in the context of the BBC Third Programme, the “high culture” station founded in the hopes that difficult art might improve public sentiment and intellectual health. Through the artworks themselves and through its flexible scheduling and strategic use of dead air, the Third Programme promoted “alert and perceptive listening,” a niche for aesthetic reflection independent of the marketplace, building on the cultural evangelism of the BBC’s founding Director General, John Reith. Thomas’s play ironizes these aims, using the sonic textures of language, the temporal structures of ritual, and a deconstructed anthropological gaze to supplant the Third Programme’s Arnoldian ideal of rational disinterestedness. Depicting an isolated Welsh village, Under Milk Wood implicitly critiques the horrors of war while declining to endorse the BBC’s sanctimonious promises of cultural uplift; rather, it produces an ironic, negative image of fascism’s self-defeating obsessions with civic uniformity and public health. Though Under Milk Wood promotes aesthetic reflection and aural empathy – akin to what Kate Lacey has referred to as “listening out” – Thomas reimagines these public values, not in the sense promoted by Matthew Arnold or Reith but in relation to the erotic, embodied rhythms of language and ritual. Under Milk Wood “remakes” time, in an ironic reflection of the Third Programme’s flexible scheduling, unsettling the condescension implicit in the play’s own radiophonic framing voices and demonstrating how broadcast media participate in the ritual construction of time’s passage.