Between the last chapter and this, silence changes its sign. Compared to the ludicrous reading in of significance to the visual filler of screen text is the normal reading out of sound from visual signs. Clarified by audio theorist Michel Chion are the different time frames of cinematic montage and alphabetic signage on screen. Pursuing the theme of temporality and writing, a literary-critical debate between Michael Riffaterre and Paul de Man over a poem by Victor Hugo turns on the poem’s lack of book or page for its text/medium interface – with indirect consequences for its phonetic substrate as well. From there, discussion moves to a famous auditory passage in Virginia Woolf and to a debate in media and film theory that returns to Chion in explicating the difference between the filmic photogram and a linguistic “phonogram,” the latter on exhibit in such novelists as Tom McCarthy and Don DeLillo.

Much of the difficulty encountered by Mahler’s compositions during his lifetime can be attributed to their referential qualities: references, allusions, quotations, or borrowings from the widest varieties of music, from popular (“lowbrow”) military marches or ländlers to cultivated (“highbrow”) compositions such as Brahms’s, Tchaikovsky’s, or Wagner’s. That this propensity embodied modernist impulses has become increasingly clear in the intervening century, as the problematized nature of originality across the various arts ca. 1900 has received critical attention. A closer look at the history and evolving meaning of the term “intertextuality” here advances that process, by highlighting the differences between older formalist interpretive traditions and “translinguistic” practices, which recognize that (in the words of Julia Kristeva) “any text constitutes itself as a mosaic of quotations, any text is an absorption and transformation of another text.” Paradoxically, tactics for discovering new and relevant intertexts illuminate constructions of meaning that are unique to Mahler’s works.