Music, Noise, and the First World War in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

Parade's End registers the potential and necessity for a transition in conceptions of music informed by new sounds experienced during the First World War. In the trenches, Tietjens interprets a bombardment as a Wagnerian orchestra, encouraging contemplation of where and why demarcation lines between music and noise are drawn, as well as reflection on the utopian project of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art-Work). Ford's tetralogy has a significant contribution to make towards understanding how writers were navigating the impact of noise on music in the early twentieth century.