ABSTRACT
Ford Madox Ford had the good fortune to be born into one of the most artistically networked and musically literate families of the nineteenth century. Of all the arts available to Ford as a creative stimulus, music has received the least attention in critical scholarship. Ford may not have made it to the concert platform, but between 1894 and 1905 he did manage to compose over a dozen songs; to begin but not finish several others; scribble musical sketches and fragments; and to write a ‘song drama’ for two voices and piano. Joseph Conrad’s work was in Ford’s view also at least partly indicative of the ‘secret ambition’ of artists to find creative registers amounting to ‘abstract Form’ or ‘abstract Sound’, in the manner that ‘Father Bach expressed himself in Fugue’. Ford’s recollections of Saint-Saens, another grand figure in Francis Hueffer’s extended circle, focus on his technical competence rather than on the feelings he inspired in his listeners.
