Pater’s Musical Imagination: The Aural Architecture of ‘The School of Giorgione’ and Marius the Epicurean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Walter Pater’s well-known dictum that ‘ All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music ’ in ‘The School of Giorgione’ ( TR , p. 106) demonstrates an exceptionally aural understanding of the nature of aesthetic appreciation. If, as Douglas Kahn, a theorist of sound in the avant-garde argues, Western society ‘readily and pervasively privileges the eye over the ear’ (1992, p. 4), then Pater’s suggestion that music is the art to which all others aspire is an unexpected assessment of the aesthetic. Moreover, as Kahn states, ‘visually disposed language … favors thinking about sound as an object, but sound functions poorly in this regard: it dissipates, modulates, infiltrates other sounds, becomes absorbed and deflected by actual objects, and fills a space surrounding them’ (1992, p. 4). Why then, given that the ‘waves of wandering sound’ ( TR , p. 113) have such unwieldy, inconsistent, and malleable qualities, does Pater beckon to the sonorous art as a way to prevent the ‘false generalisation of all art into forms of poetry’ ( TR , p. 103)? What is it about music’s aural undecidability that satisfies Pater’s search for aesthetic pleasure rather than thwarts it? To explore some possible replies to such questions, I will focus on the aural dimensions of Pater’s employment of music and sound in two of his texts, one non-fictional and the other fictional (although both genres, as always with Pater, are less fixed than the labels imply): ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877) and Marius the Epicurean (1885). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".