Although trained at Yale as a literary critic, after the publication of his book Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg, he was invited by the University of Rochester to come teach there as a kind of liaison between the department of English and the Eastman School of Music.
While Albright's interests and writing subjects were wide-ranging, he received acclaim in three principal areas: as a scholarly commenter on poetry, in particular the poems of W. B. Yeats; as a musicologist; and as a theorist of multidisciplinary interpretation he termed "panaesthetics."
Albright wrote of Ellman: "A conversation about a poem of Yeats' with Richard Ellmann was like a stroll through a forest with an agreeable companion who not only knows the names of every bird, bush, lichen, and bug, but also hears sounds usually audible only to bats.
Rather than speaking through fictional characters such as Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, Yeats made himself a primary actor, with a somewhat rigid code of self-imposed rules designed to prevent "poetry where momentary emotions would over-bubble.
Disagreeing with some of the book's readings, Frank Kinahan's review in Modern Philology concludes with strong praise: "Albright is a close and sensitive reader of poetry, and there are exegeses here leaving you nodding Yes till your neck aches."
I doubt that any annotator on earth besides Professor Finneran would consider it irrelevant that "Upon a Dying Lady" (1912–1914), a poem rich in circumstantial detail, is about a real woman, Mabel Beardsley, the sister of the artist Aubrey; but her name is omitted from the gloss, which instead talks about Petronius Arbiter and a warrior mentioned in the Rubáiyát.
The Schoenberg chapter prompted an invitation to teach at the University of Rochester, with Albright acting as a kind of liaison between the department of English and the Eastman School of Music.
While he recognized the value of attempts by various artists and critics to separate the arts, Albright's preference for the panaesthetic was clear...[10]Untwisting relied on analysis of specific historical collaborations among artists (Cocteau, Picasso, and Satie in Parade; Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson in Four Saints in Three Acts; Antheil, Léger, and Murphy in Ballet Mécanique, and many others) to show how the respective media in those pieces clicked or clashed.
Discussing these components required stepping outside the usual province of the literary critic; that is, Albright needed to be just as adept and informed in making judgments about music and art as he was in evaluating writing.
As it turned out, his talent for close reading of poems extended to scores and timbres, sufficiently to impress music's critical community, despite a few complaints about his assumptions and definitions.
Nevertheless, she writes, "his inquiry into different types of artistic collaboration is extremely valuable to musicology, since what it offers that field, frequently insulated from other disciplines, is a new path by which to enter an interdisciplinary consideration of Modernist music dramas."
In Kurt Weill Newsletter,[12] David Drew wrote: "Albright well understands that 'paying attention to the text' is a discipline whose exactions are multiplied in proportion to the complexity of the interdisciplinary context.
Just as surrealist paintings often have a horizon line and a highly developed sense of perspective, in order that the falseness of the space and the errors of scale among the painted entities can register their various outrages to normal decorum, so surrealist music provides an intelligible context of familiar sounds in order to develop a system of meanings that can assault or discredit other systems of meanings.