Important recent work has demonstrated how Virginia Woolf found in music and sound a fascinating means to engage the political violence and nationalism that preoccupied Europe during the 1930s. Michele Pridmore-Brown, for instance, has proposed that in Between the Acts (begun in 1938, published posthumously in 1941) Woolf depicts how music can serve as a violently “controlling” force symbolic of “fascism's emphasis on acoustic communion,” while “noise” or “static” can lead to the disruption of coercive musical meanings (411–12). Emma Sutton has suggested that in Between the Acts and elsewhere Woolf used “musical allusions [to] critique the nationalism characteristic of much contemporary British music and discourses about music” (122). While not discounting these persuasive claims, I want to argue that Woolf likewise drew on popular British discourses that promoted the peaceful connotations of classical music and that she even anticipated the British public's widespread reassertions of these peaceful connotations during World War II.

I want to emphasize, in other words, how Woolf's depictions of music promoted and even predicted the continuation of what I will call Britain's popular musical cosmopolitanism, a widely acknowledged, shared European heritage developed specifically and uniquely in Britain through the music of Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, and even Wagner. Consequently, my analysis draws on Melba Cuddy-Keane's suggestion that in Woolf's work an “objet sonore ” can provide a “bridge between the individual and the world” and can convey “a wholeness, a comprehensiveness, that embraces the communal life of the universe” (90). The “objet sonore ” on which I wish to focus is classical music with a German provenance, which with its “comprehensiveness” actually reinforces conceptions of a “communal” European culture. A significant portion of Britain's early twentieth-century public was intensely invested in classical music, much of it associated with Germany. Individual amateurs listened to and performed Bach, Beethoven, and Handel; Sir Henry Wood off ered weekly “Wagner Night[s]” at the Queen's Hall; and the BBC dispersed a plethora of nominally German compositions from 1922 onward, interweaving German music into British everyday life. This was part of the democratizing force of radio technology, which, as Pamela Caughie has noted, from its inception fostered an “emerging mass culture” the “aesthetic implications” of which Woolf consistently, if cautiously, engaged (333).