
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Music Ho! A study of music in decline.
Author: Lambert, Leonard Constant (1905-1951)
Date of first publication: 1934
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934
   (first US edition)
Date first posted: 25 January 2009
Date last updated: 25 January 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #245

This ebook was produced by:
Iona Vaughan, David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




MUSIC HO!

_A STUDY OF
MUSIC IN DECLINE_

_BY_

CONSTANT
LAMBERT


_NEW YORK_
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
_1934_



PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN



To

MY MOTHER




Preface


This book makes no attempt to be an ordnance survey of modern music or
a study of modern composers as individual artists. Many composers of
merit are not mentioned in it at all, and in the case of others
attention has unfortunately been focused upon their lesser works. The
task of docketing the outstanding figures of modern music has been
ably done by other writers, and as for the purely technical questions
raised by unusual combinations of sound I am of the opinion that
craft-analysis like craftsmanship itself is of interest mainly as a
preliminary. Avoiding both the pigeon-hole and the blackboard I have
tried to trace a connecting line between the apparently diverse and
contradictory manifestations of contemporary music.

The theme of the book is modern music in relation to the other arts
and in relation to the social and mechanical background of modern
life. It is a study of movements rather than musicians and individual
works are cited not so much on their own account as for being examples
of a particular tendency. When absolutely necessary technical
arguments are introduced, but there are few technical terms and no
music-type illustrations.

The book as a whole is meant to be a non-technical presentation of the
position the composer (and, for that matter, the listener) finds
himself in today, though in order to establish this position clearly
it is occasionally necessary to hark back a bit, as in the section
devoted to nationalism.

I hope that this brief study, though inevitably one-sided and
incomplete, may lead the way to a broader and more 'humane' critical
attitude towards an art which though the most instinctive and physical
of all the arts tends more and more to be treated as the intellectual
preserve of the specialist.

My thanks are due to Lord Berners, Mr. Cecil Gray and Messrs. J. and
W. Chester for the loan of music.
                                                        C. L.
_December 1933_




Contents


_PART I_: PRE-WAR PIONEERS

(a) The Revolutionary Situation                 page 19

(b) Impressionism and Disruption                     24

(c) Debussy as Key-figure                            38

(d) Music and the Naughty 'Nineties                  49


_PART II_: POST-WAR PASTICHEURS

(a) The Age of Pastiche                              63

(b) Diaghileff and Stravinsky as time travellers     69

(c) Surrealism and Neo-Classicism                    78

(d) 'Toute raction est vraie'                       87

(e) Synthetic Melody                                 97

(f) Abstraction in Music                            112

(g) Erik Satie and his Musique d'ameublement        123


_PART III_: NATIONALISM AND THE EXOTIC

(a) Nationalism and Democracy                       141

(b) The Russian Nationalists                        154

(c) The Conflict between Nationalism and Form       161

(d) Nationalism and the Modern Scene                170

(e) The Cult of the Exotic                          184

(f) Exoticism and 'Low Life'                        192

(g) The Spirit of Jazz                              201

(h) Symphonic Jazz                                  215


_PART IV:_ THE MECHANICAL STIMULUS

(a) The Appalling Popularity of Music               233

(b) Mechanical Romanticism                          239

(c) Craft for Craft's Sake                          246

(d) Mechanical Music and the Cinema                 256

(e) The Disappearing Middlebrow                     268


_PART V:_ ESCAPE OR SUBMISSION

(a) A Psychological Cul-de-sac                      277

(b) Schnberg and Official Revolution               287

(c) Sibelius and the Integration of Form            304

(d) The Symphonic Problem                           312

(e) Sibelius and the Music of the Future            326

    Index                                           333



_All:_       The music, ho!

             _Enter Mardian the Eunuch_

_Cleopatra:_ Let it alone; let's to billiards.

                             --WILLIAM SHAKESEARE


_Part I_

Pre-War Pioneers

(a) The Revolutionary Situation

(b) Impressionism and Disruption

(c) Debussy as Key-figure

(d) Music and the Naughty 'Nineties




Pre-War Pioneers

(a) The Revolutionary Situation


Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when,
through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become
conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very
nearly as slow in the uptake. To the public a red flag remains a red
rag even when so battered by wind and weather that it could almost be
used as a pink coat. Nothing is so common as to see a political
upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the
leaders and their parties remain the same. Similarly in the world of
music, the fact that some of the key-names in modern music, such as
Stravinsky and Schnberg, are the same as before the war has blinded
us to the real nature of the present-day musical revolution. We go on
using the words 'revolutionary composer' just as we go on using the
words 'Liberal' and 'Bolshevik'; but between the modern music of
pre-war days and that of today lies as much difference as that between
the jolly old Gilbertian 'Liberal or Conservat_ive_' situation and the
present mingled state of the parties, or that between the clear
anarchical issues of the October revolution and the present situation
in Russian politics with Stalin at the head of a frustrated Five Year
Plan and Trotsky fuming in exile.

To the seeker after the new, or the sensational, to those who expect a
sinister _frisson_ from modern music, it is my melancholy duty to
point out that all the bomb throwing and guillotining has already
taken place. If by the word 'advanced' we mean art that departs as far
as possible from the classical and conventional norm, then we must
admit that pre-war music was considerably more advanced (if that is
any recommendation) than the music of our own days. Schnberg's
_Erwartung_ for example, still the most sensational essay in modern
music from the point of view of pure strangeness of sound, was
actually finished in 1909. If your ear can assimilate and tolerate the
music written in 1913 and earlier, then there is nothing in post-war
music that can conceivably give you an aural shock, though the
illogicality of some of the present-day pastiches may give you 'a rare
turn' comparable to the sudden stopping of a lift in transit.

We are most of us sensationalists at heart, and there is something
rather sad about the modern composer's relapse into good behaviour.
There is a wistful look about the more elderly 'emancipated' critics
when they listen to a concert of contemporary music; they seem to
remember the barricades of the old Russian Ballet and sniff
plaintively for blood. The years that succeed a revolution have an
inevitable air of anticlimax, and it is noticeable that popular
interest in the Russian Soviet films has considerably waned since the
directors turned from the joys of destruction to the more sober
delights of construction. With the best will in the world we cannot
get as excited about _The General Line_ as we did about _Potemkin_,
and it is doubtful if any of the works written since the war will
become a popular date in musical history, like those old revolutionary
war-horses _Le Sacre du Printemps_ and _Pierrot Lunaire_.

But it is only the more elderly emancipated critics who have lived
through both campaigns, so to speak, and who realize the subtle
difference between the two. There is a large mass of the public that
has only become modern-music conscious since the war, and they are
hardly to be blamed if they lump the two periods together as 'all this
modern music'.

During the war people had sterner things to think of than Schnberg,
and a concert of his works would have been not only impracticable, but
unpatriotic. The general cessation of musical activities during the
war resulted in many pre-war works only becoming known a considerable
number of years after they were written. This may seem platitudinous,
but it should be remembered that it would not necessarily be true of
literature. If Joyce, for example, had written and published _Anna
Livia Plurabelle_ in 1913 there would have been nothing, theoretically
speaking, to prevent it from becoming familiar to every schoolboy by
about 1919; but the number of people who can read a modern score is
fewer even than the number who claim that they can, and the more
extreme examples of modern music cannot be grasped without several
actual hearings. Moreover, the printing of literature is not the same
as the playing of music. Any printer can print _Ulysses_ (if the law
lets him), but not every orchestra can play _Erwartung_. It is
regrettable, but hardly surprising, that this work had to wait sixteen
years for its first performance.

Purely practical and circumstantial difficulties of war, finance,
patriotism and musical inefficiency having kept back the actual
hearing of contemporary music, the wave of enthusiasm for this music
that carried away the intellectual world shortly after the war was,
though the intellectuals hardly realized it, mainly retrospective in
character. It could not be compared for example to the contemporary
interest in Brancusi's sculpture or Edith Sitwell's poetry. It was a
'hangover' from a previous period, and the famous series of concerts
given by Eugne Goossens in London in 1920 were historical in more
ways than one. They apparently announced the dawn of a new era, but
curiously enough their most potent arguments were drawn from the era
which we all imagined to be closed. The clou of the concerts was
Stravinsky's _Le Sacre du Printemps_--a work which was merely the
logical outcome of a barbaric outlook applied to the technique of
impressionism.

Impressionism is a loose and easily misapplied term, but one can think
of no other that sums up so conveniently the undeniable connecting
link between the various revolutionary composers of before the war.
The connecting link may not be obvious, but it is there nevertheless,
and it is something for which we may search in vain at the present
time.

To put the problem in its most nave form, a representative pre-war
concert of modern works would have struck the man in the street--if we
may conjure up a figure somewhere between Strube's 'Little Man' and
Ernest Newman's 'Plain Man'--as definitely queer. He would have found
great difficulty in relating it to his previous musical experiences
and, giving up all attempt to follow it as form, would probably have
relapsed into a purely passive state in which the strange colours and
rhythms were allowed to make a direct appeal to his nerves. His
experiences would be unusual, but would assume a certain uniformity
and logic through the very consistency of their strangeness.

Let us suppose the same admittedly nave character at a representative
concert of contemporary music. What conceivable connecting link would
he find between, for example, Von Webern and Sauguet, between a cold
and mathematical reversal of previous tradition and a deliberate
return to its most sentimental and least valuable elements? He would
find less difficulty in relating this music to his previous
experiences, for so much of it would be but a pale reflection of the
spirit of former ages; but the only connecting link he would find
would be that of indecision and lack of logic.

Experiments may take many forms, but only one general direction,
whereas the spirit of pastiche has no guiding impulse. Once invoked it
becomes like the magic broom of the sorcerer's apprentice, to whom
indeed the average modern composer, with his fluent technique, but
lack of co-ordinative sense, may well be compared. It is the element
of deliberate pastiche in modern music that chiefly distinguishes it
from the experimental period of before the war. The landmarks of
pre-war music, such as _Le Sacre du Printemps_, _Pierrot Lunaire_ and
Debussy's _Iberia_, are all definitely anti-traditional; but they are
curiously linked to tradition by the continuous curve of their
break-away, comparable to the parabola traced in the air by a shell.
But this shell has reached no objective, like a rocket in mid air it
has exploded into a thousand multicoloured stars, scattering in as
many different directions, and sharing only a common brilliance and
evanescence.

It may be said in defence of the present age that the elements of
decay are already to be found in the period that immediately preceded
it, that the experiments of the pre-war period were of a type to lead
inevitably to the present cul-de-sac. Whether this be so or not, it is
impossible clearly to grasp the difference between post-war and
pre-war modern music, or fully to understand the present situation
without a brief review of the impressionist, or disruptive period
which may conveniently be placed in time as stretching from the
beginning of the century until 1914.


(b) Impressionism and Disruption


The development of music has not shown the same logical growth that we
find in painting. Impressionism in music came later than in painting,
and music has made up for loss of time by leaving out the
post-impressionist period. There has been no Czanne in music--it is
as though one went straight from Monet to Picabia.

Impressionism, as I have said, is a term easily misused, and one may
doubt the logic of its use as a musical term at all; but its
association with the work of Debussy and his followers is so
widespread that one may conveniently use it as a generic label for
that period of disruption in music of which Debussy was the dominating
figure. The word impressionism is used illogically enough to cover a
picture of a cathedral by Monet that bears remarkably little
resemblance to the original, and a piece by Debussy that stretches the
musical medium to the utmost, in order to conjure up as strong a
visual image as possible. The contradiction is nevertheless more
apparent than real. The academic picture being realistic, and the
academic piece of music being abstract and formal, any departure from
the norm results in their losing their respective conventional
qualities until eventually they meet in a sort of _terrain vague_ of
the arts.

Roughly speaking, impressionist music provides a parallel to
impressionist painting in its emphasis on atmosphere and colour, and
its comparative neglect of construction and formal balance. More
technically speaking, the methods of the pointillist painters have
something in common with the use of the orchestra as displayed in
Debussy's works. While from the general and literary point of view
both impressionist painters and composers display a liking for a sort
of Nordic vagueness, which is sharply at variance with the clear-cut
logicality of the French tradition to which they are for some reason
supposed to belong. Monet, in search of suitable material, went to the
fogs of London, and Debussy went to the poetic prose of Maeterlinck.

Although in his abandonment of linear continuity and symmetrical
design Debussy is linked to the impressionist painters, the famous
'harmonic revolution', for which he was supposed to be responsible,
has more in common with the Symbolist movement in poetry. The
Symbolist poets did not invent new words, nor did Debussy--contrary to
general belief--invent new chords. There are very few actual harmonic
combinations in Debussy that cannot be found in Liszt; the novelty of
Debussy's harmonic method consists in his using a chord as such, and
not as a unit in a form of emotional and musical argument.

The ninths and elevenths and whole-tone chords that form the
stock-in-trade of Debussy's early mannered style are also to be found
in Liszt's _Annes de Plerinage_, but in Liszt they form a definite
point of stress in a continuous line of thought, a point of stress
that demands a resolution. For that reason we are apt to pass over
their actual quality as pure sound. But Debussy takes a certain chord
and, by leaving it unresolved, or by putting it under every note of a
phrase (in a manner that dates back to Hucbald in the eleventh
century), he draws our attention to this harmony as an entity in
itself, with its own powers of evocation. We do not take it in our
stride as we do any word in a sentence like 'the ultimate interests
of the electors' or a figure in a photographic group, 'reading from
left to right'. We examine it separately as we might an Egyptian
hieroglyphic or Chinese ideograph.

It is not my intention in a non-technical study such as this to trace
back the origins of Debussy's harmonic vocabulary to Mussorgsky,
Liszt, Chabrier or Satie, to the exotic influences of the gipsy music
he heard in Russia or of the Indo-Chinese music he heard at the Paris
Colonial Exhibition. I merely wish to point out that Debussy's real
revolution in harmony consists far more in the way he uses chords,
than in the chords he uses. It is a development in harmony more far
reaching than any of Liszt's or Wagner's developments of harmonic
vocabulary.

By suspending a chord in space, as it were, Debussy recalls the
methods of the literary Symbolists. There is nothing particularly
Symbolist about a greenhouse attached to a vegetable garden with a
gardener working near it; but when this greenhouse occurs, deserted
and unexpected, in the middle of a forest (as in Maeterlinck's poems)
it immediately arouses a different and more instinctive set of
feelings, even though we might be hard put to it to analyse their
precise nature.

The difficulty many people experienced on first hearing Debussy's work
was not due so much as they thought to any strangeness in the sound.
It was created far more by the lack of rhetorical and emotional
reasoning in his music. His use of successions of the same chord, of
the pentatonic and whole-tone scales and the harmonies based on them,
is entirely lacking in the thrust and counterthrust methods of the
German Romantics. By his overthrow of the old principles of contrasted
discord and concord, of suspension and resolution, by his destruction
of the key-system, Debussy puts an end to the somewhat mechanical
eloquence into which the German Romantics had degenerated and which is
based on these premises. The old principles of logic no longer obtain,
and we are forced to listen less with our minds and more with our
nerves.

The essential difference between Debussy and Wagner is summed up in
the contrast between the sailors' chorus at the end of the first act
of _Tristan_ and the sailors' chorus in the third scene of _Pellas
and Mlisande_. We cannot listen to the chorus in _Tristan_ with our
ears alone. We do not allow its effect to sink in as pure sound. We
realize all its emotional and intellectual implications, we take it in
relation to the emotional climax we have just experienced and we
recognize that it announces the setting of the next phase in the
tragedy. The sailors' chorus in _Pellas and Mlisande_ has no such
force as an emotional argument. The departure of this shadowy boat has
no direct bearing on the emotional situation and there is strictly
speaking no reason why it should come into the opera at all. The sound
does not provoke an intellectual reaction like a bell calling us to
church or a hooter calling us to work. It impinges on our sense like
an image in a dream or some half-recognized sound in nature and evokes
a vague nostalgia like a perfume whose previous associations we
cannot quite recall.

The emotional reaction we get from Wagner may be compared to the
direct and almost cinematic emotional appeal of a ship with the hero's
sweetheart on board leaving the quay, or the departure of a troop
train in time of war. The emotional reaction we get from Debussy is of
the less personal and more subtle order that we get from the mere
sight of an unknown ship in sail.

The complete contrast of both method and aim between Debussy's work
and that of the German Romantics may be seen again if we compare the
maddening repetitions in Wagner's operas with the equally maddening
repetitions in _Pellas and Mlisande_. The Wagnerian repetitions are
a mounting and rhetorical series reminiscent of a lawyer's speech--an
oratorical device whose aim is to emphasize the meaning of the
argument until not even the dullest member of the jury remains
unconvinced. Debussy's static repetitions do not quicken the
pulse--they slacken it. Like the repetitions of an oriental priest
their aim is to destroy the superficial connotations of the phrase
until it appeals to the deeper instincts rather than to the reason.

I have drawn my examples from _Pellas_, not because I consider it
Debussy at his best--it is on the contrary one of his weakest and most
mannered works--but because it is a convenient textbook of his
technical reactions. _Pellas_ represents a phase which it was
necessary for Debussy to go through before he could completely rid
himself of the oppressive weight of the Teutonic romantic tradition;
and it is to the force of this tradition that the excessively stylized
manner of _Pellas_ is negatively due.

It is legitimate to suppose that Debussy's technical experiments were
a means--not an end. That is to say, it is more probable that the
static style and harmonic mannerisms of _Pellas_ are due to his
attempt to create a world of half-lights and dimly realized emotions,
than that he chose this subject because he felt himself unable to
achieve music in another style. At the same time we can see that by
his treatment of harmony as an entity in itself Debussy prepares the
way for the latter-day unmotivated experiments that have been
described by a sympathetic critic as 'objective investigation of aural
phenomena', while in his rejection of emotional rhetoric he
unconsciously prepares the way for those who would reject emotion
itself and throw out the baby with the bath water.

It need hardly be said that the coldness of much of Debussy's earlier
music has nothing to do with the abstraction aimed at by certain
present-day composers; it is a coldness of the natural world, not of
the mechanical. This coldness is the most remarkable feature of the
orchestral nocturnes, a transitional work halfway between the static
and symbolist manner of _Pellas_ and the more fully developed
impressionism of _La Mer_. These nocturnes, as Mr. Edwin Evans has
rightly pointed out, recall Whistler rather than Chopin. They are like
an exquisitely wrought Mohammedan decoration in which no human form is
allowed to appear. The majestic procession of clouds in _Nuages_ is a
procession of clouds--not a symbol of evanescence; the wild
exhilaration of _Ftes_ is the exhilarating bustle of wind and rain,
with nothing in it of human gaiety. The icy waves that lap the sirens'
rock are disturbed by no Ulysses and his seamen.

This detached and objective attitude towards nature is even more
marked in the symphonic sketches _La Mer_. Whereas in most works of
art inspired by the sea, Vaughan Williams' _Sea Symphony_ for example,
we are given the sea as a highly picturesque background to human
endeavour and human emotion, a suitable setting for introspective
skippers, heroic herring fishers and intrepid explorers, _La Mer_ is
actually a picture of the sea itself, a landscape without figures, or
rather a seascape without ships. There was little of Walt Whitman
about Debussy, and it is significant that he chose for the cover
design of this work Hokusai's famous print of the Great Wave.

This cold and detached pictorialism is by now so familiar to us as an
element in music that it is worth while recalling its novelty at the
time these works were written. There is no trace of it in Wagner, to
whom natural phenomena were, in the main, useful adjuncts to his own
emotions as expressed in his characters. The sun rises to greet
Brnnhilde, the forest murmurs to soothe Siegfried, and the wind rises
to bring Waltraute in its wake. A tempestuous sky merely reflects the
cruder melodrama of the composer's soul.

In _Pellas_ Debussy overthrew, as far as possible, the old romantic
rhetoric, but even so the human element was at times too strong for
him, and he was forced back into the traditional methods of expression
by the operatic quality of some of the situations. In _La Mer_ even
this half-human element has disappeared and from the purist's point of
view it is the most finished and typical of Debussy's works--though,
as I have pointed out, this lack of rhetorical emotion is by no means
the same thing as abstraction. A picture does not become an abstract
design because it has banished all purely literary interest. In its
abandonment of formal principles, its lack of continuous melodic line,
counterpoint, or development, in the accepted sense of the word, and
in the pointillism of its scoring, _La Mer_ represents the apex of
Debussy's impressionist manner. Colour and atmosphere have taken the
place of design and eloquence, and sounds succeed each other neither
in definite continuity, nor in deliberate contrast, but with the
arbitrary caprice of nature itself. There is no further development
possible purely on these lines, and Debussy's many short impressionist
piano pieces--notably the two books of preludes--are a splitting up of
the pictorialism of _La Mer_ into its various facets. They are
charming exploitations of an already established formula.

Had Debussy died after writing _La Mer_ he would have remained a great
historical figure, who had revolutionized the technique of music in a
way that no one man had ever done before; but he would hardly have
been remembered as an intrinsically great composer. Many of the works
written after the _Nocturnes_ and _La Mer_ are definitely inferior in
quality, and there is no doubt that the somewhat precious enthusiasm
of the 'Debussyistes' and the unaccustomed demand for his work caused
him to publish in his later years certain pieces that his acute
critical sense would previously have rejected; but it is the best
works of his later period--notably the orchestral _Images_--that show
Debussy's real strength as an artist.

A lesser man, having reached the technical apex represented by _La
Mer_, would either have gone on contentedly exploiting this vein, or
would have completely changed his external style. Debussy was far too
sincere and too intelligent an artist to recklessly change his style,
for to him musical style was not a matter of good taste and objective
selection but part of his very being. He had revolted against academic
technique not in a wilful and deliberate search for novelty but in an
attempt to find a sincere and personal expression. The comparatively
conventional lyricism of the 'juicy' middle section in the _Prlude 
l'Aprs-midi d'un Faune_ disappears in the _Nocturnes_ and _La Mer_,
not because Debussy despised lyricism but because he preferred not to
be lyrical at all rather than to express anything at second hand. By
throwing over the whole paraphernalia of traditional musical
romanticism he undoubtedly handicapped himself for a number of years
and confined himself to a somewhat narrow range of expression, but his
rigid self-control was rewarded by the eventual freedom and richness
of style that he achieved in the orchestral _Images_.

In these works, and notably in _Iberia_, the most extended of the
three, Debussy enters into a new emotional world. It is neither the
old emotional world of the artist as hero that we find in the
nineteenth-century Romantics, nor is it the aesthetic and purely
decorative world of Debussy's earlier works. The personality of the
artist is there, but is part of its surroundings, and intrudes no more
than in a work of Mozart. It is an emotional world so peculiar to
music that it is difficult in any way to define it in words, though
Aldous Huxley perhaps hinted at it when he wrote: 'Occasionally in
certain states which may vaguely be described as mystical we have an
immediate perception of an external unity embracing and embraced by
our own internal unity. We feel the whole universe as a single
individual mysteriously fused with ourselves.'

Such a revelation is not necessarily encouraging, and there is a
curious note of nostalgia and melancholy in these three pieces, though
of a completely unsentimental nature. The original title of _Gigues_
was _Gigue Triste_, and _Rondes de Printemps_ belies the lighthearted
quotation that heads the score, much as _Iberia_ belies its apparently
superficial atmosphere of southern gaiety. Through his capacity for
investing an apparently insignificant and lighthearted tune with an
almost tragic significance, Debussy stands very close to Mozart. We
find the same quality in, for example, the Siciliana that forms the
finale of the D Minor quartet--a simple dance tune into which and its
variations Mozart seems to have compressed the emotional experience of
a lifetime.

The scraps of popular melody that occur in all three _Images_ are not
merely evocative and picturesque, they have a more profound
significance. They recall the often quoted lines from Sir Thomas
Browne: 'For even that vulgar and tavern musick which makes one man
merry another mad strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound
contemplation of the First Composer. There is something in it of
Divinity more than the ear discovers; it is a hieroglyphical and
shadowed lesson of the whole world.' This passage, I feel, gives a
clue to the significance of Debussy's best works. The world they
conjure up is not a Barriesque dream world, a soothing and comforting
escape from reality. It is the world around us, but seen with an
intense and unique vision, and the melancholy that pervades this music
is no personal complaining but the underlying melancholy of human life
itself.

Technically speaking these _Images_ display a far greater liveliness
and variety of texture than the early works of Debussy. His harmonic
gift has lost none of its richness but here it is subordinated to the
main scheme and not developed merely for its own sake. There is
nothing approaching counterpoint in the academic sense of the word,
but the skilful weaving together of innumerable threads of sound
represents Debussy's own solution of the contrapuntal problem, and is
far removed from the mainly static and vertical quality of the
_Nocturnes_. Similarly, in the melodic line we find that Debussy has
achieved at first hand the lyricism which in his early works appears
only at second hand; and although his melodies may be a little
shortwinded, improvisatory, and lacking in the _grande envergure_ of
the nineteenth-century composers, they have a flexibility and force
that is not to be found in the plaintive wisps of melody that float
dimly through the overshadowing trees of _Pellas and Mlisande_.

The orchestral _Images_ represent, in fact, a synthesis of the various
elements in music that Debussy had, in his earlier days, examined and
developed separately in the interests of technical experiment. They
show conclusively that Debussy's technical experiments were not the
detached and empirical jugglings with sounds that they were at one
time held to be, but a logical development towards complete
self-realization. Though more advanced in the true sense of the word
than his earlier works, they are less disruptive and revolutionary
from the technical point of view. Just as Debussy ruthlessly rejected
the clichs of the romantic school, so he rid himself of his own
marked mannerisms when they had served his purpose (I am referring now
to the major works of his later period and not to his lesser piano
pieces.) The mechanical use of the whole-tone scale, and the many
other devices which must have been considered so modern at the
beginning of the century, find little or no place in these later
orchestral works. In the best of the later piano _tudes_, in the
pieces for two pianos _En Blanc et Noir_, the ballet _Jeux_ and the
_Trio_ for flute, viola and harp, Debussy maintained the high standard
of the orchestral _Images_; but he never surpassed it, and we may take
these works then as the culmination of Debussy's style and the most
important contribution of impressionism towards music.

Although the present study is primarily an examination of post-war
musical problems, this brief sketch of Debussy's outstanding works has
been necessary not only because he was intrinsically the most
important artist of the pre-war period but because he is undeniably
the guiding principle and unifying link behind its apparently
disparate experiments. It is easy enough to recognize the influence of
Debussy's impressionism on his own countrymen, whose response to his
music takes the form of a fairly direct imitation of its superficial
characteristics, but Debussy's real influence is infinitely more far
reaching than that. Once we realize that his impressionism was not
only a manner, but a method, we can see the workings of this method in
music that at first sight might seem totally opposed in general
atmosphere. The direct, or indirect, influence of Debussy is to be
found in such outwardly differentiated works as the ballets of
Stravinsky and the operas of Schnberg, the _London Symphony_ of
Vaughan Williams and the _Chinese Symphony_ of Van Dieren, the
mystical poems of Scriabin and the vivid picture postcards of Albeniz,
the _Bluebeard_ of Bla Bartk and the _Bluebeard_ of Paul Dukas, the
_North Country Sketches_ of Delius and _The Oceanides_ of Sibelius.

Unfortunately the influence has been not so much that of Debussy the
artist as of Debussy the experimenter. Viewing his work in retrospect
we can see that his experiments were a necessary and integral part of
his own artistic development, an example to be followed, but not a
method to be imitated. To his contemporaries, however, Debussy's
experiments assumed an almost political quality as a revolt against
the tradition of German romanticism, and became a convenient handbook
of revolution. The scaffolding which Debussy had used in the course of
building his solitary tower was admired for its own sake, seized on,
broken up, and made to serve as principal prop in many a jerry-built
house.


(c) Debussy as Key-figure


When we consider the stuffy and faded academicism of Stravinsky's and
Schnberg's first works, it is impossible not to draw the conclusion
that the disruptive element in Debussy's impressionism provided the
liberating force that led these composers to their own revolutionary
style.

It is strange to think that Stravinsky's ballets were at one time
considered to be a healthy and vigorous reaction against the
impressionism of Debussy, comparable in force to the reaction of
Czanne against Monet. Novelty of colour alone can be held to explain
this confusion of thought. The garish and overloaded orchestration,
barbaric rhythms and savagely applied discords of Stravinsky's ballets
temporarily numb the critical faculties, and prevent one from
realizing that however different the texture may be Stravinsky is
using sound in the same way as Debussy. Barbaric impressionism has
taken the place of super-civilized impressionism--that is all.

The difficulty of estimating Debussy's influence on Stravinsky is
complicated by their common derivation from the Russian nationalists.
A famous instance of this derivation is to be found in the similarity
between the opening of Debussy's _Nuages_ and the opening of
Stravinsky's _Le Rossignol_. Both passages bear an extraordinary
resemblance to one of the songs in Mussorgsky's _Without Sunlight_
cycle. It is almost impossible to decide whether Stravinsky, the last
of the three, is reacting to Russian nationalism, or to that side of
Debussy that reacted to Russian nationalism; and we are faced with the
same difficulty when we try to decide whether the oriental arabesques
that occur from time to time in Stravinsky's melodic writing are a
latter-day continuation of the oriental tradition started by Glinka in
_Russlan and Ludmilla_, or whether they are a reflection of the
undoubtedly oriental quality in many of Debussy's themes.

We must remember that Russian nationalism is by no means a continuous
tradition. The death of Borodin was succeeded by a period of
conservatism and academic reaction, in comparison with which the works
of Brahms take on an almost Offenbachian quality. It is not too much
to say that the vividly picturesque tradition of the Russian
nationalists emigrated to France somewhere in the early 'nineties to
return home dressed in the latest Paris models, just in time to join
in the Diaghileff ballet. In _L'Oiseau de Feu_ Stravinsky applied the
rejuvenating influence of Debussy's impressionism to the by now
somewhat faded Russian fairytale tradition in much the way that one
pours a glass of port into a Stilton, thereby hastening the already
present element of decomposition. The resultant effect is rich and
_faisand_, but a little overripe, with a suggestion of maggots in the
offing. The exhilarating and wintry gaiety of the fair in _Petrushka_
with its buxom nurses, dancing bears, drunkards, gipsies and
barrel-organs, seems at first sight far removed from the ruined
temples in the moonlight, the reflections in the water, of Debussy's
pictorial world, but the difference between _Petrushka_ and the fair
scenes in the early Russian operas lies precisely in the application
of Debussy's pictorial methods to a cruder and more vivid tradition.

In _Le Sacre du Printemps_, considered at one time as the outstanding
reaction against the invertebrate qualities of the Impressionist
school, the influence of Debussy's technical methods is even more
marked, though the self-consciously barbaric colour of the ballet may
make this influence a little hard to recognize at first sight. The two
finest sections in the work, the preludes to either part, are in the
direct Impressionist tradition, although one may notice in passing
that Stravinsky manages his orchestral texture less skilfully than
Debussy; the various threads of _La Nuit Paenne_ are less clearly
presented than those of _Les Parfums de la Nuit_; the whole effect, in
its lack of definition and its reliance on colour alone, being more
impressionist than Debussy--_plus royaliste que le roi_, in fact.

It is true that the outstanding feature in _Le Sacre_ is its rhythmic
experiment, an element which on the whole is lacking in the French
school, mainly for national reasons. The French folk song has almost
as little rhythmic interest and variety as the German, and the
rhythmic tradition of French music lies more in the popular music of a
later day, squarecut marches, can-cans, and gallops, material that is
obviously unsuited to the fin-de-sicle aestheticism of Debussy's more
mannered works. The French as a race have a remarkably poor sense of
rhythm as compared with the Russians, and it is only to be expected
that the rhythmic element should play a greater part in Stravinsky's
make-up than in Debussy's.

I shall discuss in another place the barbaric and exotic elements in
Stravinsky's rhythm. All that concerns us at the moment is the fact
that, unlike earlier experiments in changing and varied rhythm, such
as those of Borodin or Ladmirault, Stravinsky's rhythmic experiments
are concerned not with the rhythm of melody, but with rhythm alone.
They are rhythms suspended in space, arbitrary patterns in time,
forming a parallel to Debussy's impressionist use of harmonies
detached from melodic reasoning. Stravinsky carries one stage further
the process of disruption and the dissection of the different elements
in music that was started by Debussy. Debussy gives us harmony for its
own sake, and Stravinsky gives us rhythm for its own sake, but by
divorcing these functions of the musical mind from their normal
surroundings they actually restrict the development of the specific
element on which they are concentrating. Debussy's _Danse Sacre et
Danse Profane_ cannot be compared for variety of harmony with a motet
by Vittoria any more than Stravinsky's ballets can be compared for
genuine rhythmic interest with the pavans and galliards of John
Dowland.

Stravinsky's rhythm is not rhythm in the true sense of the term, but
rather 'metre' or 'measure'. In many sections of _Le Sacre du
Printemps_ the notes are merely pegs on which to hang the rhythm, and
the orchestration and harmony are designed as far as possible to
convert melodic instruments into the equivalent of percussion
instruments. The essential effect of _augures printanires_--a passage
in which the regular pulse of an unchanging chord is accented with
irregular beats--could be obtained equally well on a single drum, and,
in a more elaborate passage such as the _glorification de l'lue_, we
feel that an upwards skirl or flam on the flute is merely a more
elaborate notation for a high percussive instrument like the
tambourine, that an arbitrary discord in the bass is merely a more
emphatic kettledrum. The essential thought could be expressed on a
large number of varied percussive instruments, though admittedly
without the heightening of the nervous effect obtained by Stravinsky's
pointillist scoring.

Whether rhythm or metre divorced from the other elements in music can
be said to have any musical value is a problem older than the present
century. It is discussed with great good sense by Roger North in his
_Musicall Gramarian_ (Circa 1728) and his passage on the subject is
so much to the point--even more so in our own days than when it was
written--that it is worth quoting in full:

      'Therefore in order to find a criterium of Good musick
      wee must (as I sayd) look into nature it Self, and ye
      truth of things. Musick hath 2 ends, first to pleas
      the sence, & that is done by the pure Dulcor of
      Harmony, which is found chiefly in ye elder musick, of
      wch much hath bin sayd, & more is to come, & secondly
      to move ye affections or excite passion. And that is
      done by measures of time joyned with the former. And
      it must be granted that pure Impuls artificially
      acted, and continued, hath Great power to excite men
      to act, but not to think. And this distinction
      resolves the enigma of Vossius de viribus Rithmi; wch
      pretends that the efficacy of musick is derived wholly
      from the measure. Sounds may have effect as symptomes
      of passion; but wch way he can by any possibility make
      out, that any pure measure Inclines to thinking, and
      without thinking there is no passion or affection, I
      cannot fathom, he instances In ye beats of a Drum, and
      also the Cooper at work as In the rediculer with his
      phrigian or Lydian dubbs. Nay condiscends to make a
      man comb'd Into a passion by ye barbers Lyricks upon
      his nodle. And it is true enough that the force of
      such violent Impulses, may excite actions, If any may
      be conformable. As in ye musick of dances the time is
      chiefly materiall, and who doth not keep active time
      to a jigg? The melody is only to add to the diversion,
      but (as hath bin noted) is not necessary to ye
      porpose, for many nations dannce onely to a tambour.
      Therefore I must sever the vertue of time in musick,
      from the musick itself, as having another scope and
      effect. And may be sayd to stir up comformable actions
      but not to excite thinking or pleas the sense.'

Stravinsky certainly succeeds in stirring up comformable action on the
stage--and even, as some will remember, in the audience--but the
melody is only to add to the diversion and his main object is to
excite passion by rhythm or 'measure'. _Le Sacre du Printemps_
foreshadows that modern craving--essentially a product of
oversophistication--for the dark and instinctive that we find in D. H.
Lawrence, and whose psychological bases have been so well summed up in
Wyndham Lewis' _Paleface_. The immense prestige that this work enjoys
with a certain type of intellectual is due to the fact that it is
barbaric music for the super-civilized, an aphrodisiac for the jaded
and surfeited. Whether we like Stravinsky's use of rhythm in _Le
Sacre_ or not, we must realize that unlike his later rhythmic
experiments it is far from being purely detached and objective. It is
experiment directed towards a more intense form of expression and a
greater heightening of the nervous effect.

The music of Schnberg, the other great revolutionary figure in
pre-war music, does not lend itself so easily to analysis as does that
of Stravinsky. In rejecting the Teutonic romantic tradition Debussy
and Stravinsky were rejecting something essentially alien; the issue
was a clear one and though the struggle may have been hard there was
no element in it of civil war. Schnberg is that anomalous figure, an
anarchist with blue blood in his veins. He is historically and
racially attached to those whom he seeks to destroy, and the spiritual
conflict in his works is obvious, even though he may cry _'A la
lanterne'_ with more fervour than the most bloodthirsty of
sansculottes. Like a priest of Diana he is forced to take up the role
of the predecessor whom he has slain, and behind his most
revolutionary passages lurks the highly respectable shade of
Mendelssohn.

Schnberg's music as a whole will be discussed elsewhere in this
volume, and for the moment we are concerned with him not so much as an
individual figure as in relation to the Impressionist movement. There
is little direct influence of Debussy in Schnberg's works, and his
overthrowal of the Romantic tradition takes the form of a reversal or
distortion of previously established formulae. But though there may be
no direct influence there is a certain parallelism between the results
they achieve by apparently opposed means.

There are two ways of destroying the significance of the House of
Lords--you can either abolish it or you can make everyone a member. We
have no sense of modulation in Debussy's music for the simple reason
that he doesn't modulate, and we have no sense of modulation in
Schnberg's music because the work itself has become one vast
modulation. Debussy destroys the old diatonic scale, with its class
distinctions between tones and semitones, by restricting it to whole
tones and pentatonic intervals; Schnberg by extending equal
importance to all twelve semitones. Debussy destroys one's sense of
harmonic progression by eliminating all contrapuntal feeling;
Schnberg by the sheer multiplicity and mechanical application of his
contrapuntal devices. The method of approach may be different, but the
disruptive effect is the same. Schnberg dissects counterpoint in the
way that Debussy dissected harmony and Stravinsky dissected rhythm;
and devices such as the _canon cankrisans_, whose somewhat shaky
raison d'tre rests entirely on the meticulous observance of academic
harmonic rules, are introduced without restriction and for their own
sake. Unlike his harmonic and melodic experiments, which are there to
give expression to his peculiar vein of tortured romanticism, these
contrapuntal devices foreshadow the abstract investigations of the
post-war period.

The one element in Schnberg's music which relates him directly to
Debussy is the elaborate pointillism of his scoring, a pointillism
that obscures the theoretical formalism of his works just as an
efficient camouflage destroys the outline of a boat. This pointillist
orchestration gives to many of Schnberg's works an impressionist
effect in performance that an inspection of the score with the eye
alone would hardly lead one to expect, but after all it is the ear
that is the final judge. It is no use claiming formal unity for a work
on the theoretical grounds of its contrapuntal construction when this
construction cannot possibly be observed by a listener who has not
been primed, or supplied by the composer with a crib. The element in
Schnberg's pre-war music--as for example the _Five Orchestral
Pieces_, _Erwartung_, and _Pierrot Lunaire_--that most strikes the
listener is their impressionist use of colour and their appeal to the
musical nerves rather than to the musical reason. It is this that
justifies our linking them with the impressionism of Debussy and
Stravinsky in spite of the many technical and national differences
between the three composers.

The present study being concerned with musical movements more than
with individual composers and separate works, I need hardly detail the
many minor writers who group themselves round the three key-figures we
have been examining. Debussy, if only through sheer precedence of date
is the main influence of the period, and the general trend of
development is therefore more harmonic than rhythmic, while both
melody and form--the two elements that might have bound the disruptive
experiments of the period together--are sacrificed in the interests of
orchestral colour and atmosphere. Although he had an exquisite feeling
for the turn of some half-improvisatory phrase, Debussy as a melodist
was shortwinded and unforceful and, in spite of the subtle and
impersonal form of his best works, his worst--which, as I have pointed
out, had a regrettably stronger influence--are formless to a degree.

These invertebrate qualities are to be observed in a heightened form
in the innumerable works of his followers, and are indeed the
outstanding weaknesses of the Impressionist school as a whole. That
they are part of a general trend and not only the result of one man's
influence is shown I think by the common lack of formal and melodic
interests to be found in the work of two such widely differentiated
writers as Stravinsky and Delius. His greatest admirer could hardly
describe Delius as a master of form and even Mr. Cecil Gray, in the
course of a highly laudatory essay, has admitted that many passages in
Delius' music would retain the major element of their charm if all
trace of melodic line were removed.

Stravinsky's ballets depend almost entirely on traditional themes or
close imitations of the folk-song style for what melodic interest they
possess, and they can hardly be considered as possessing any formal
qualities that are not dictated by their dramatic interest. _L'Oiseau
de Feu_ is a pleasant pantomime, but its harmonic _ide fixe_--to
which Mr. Edwin Evans has drawn attention in an interesting
pamphlet--gives it no more formal continuity than we find in the
Rimsky-Korsakoff operas which are similarly obsessed with a particular
progression.

In _Petrushka_ we find the composer playing--albeit with consummate
brilliance--the role of effects man in music, and a concert
performance of the work is intolerable to those unacquainted with
every detail of stage action. A few years ago it might have been
necessary to discuss the statement made by some of Stravinsky's
followers that _Le Sacre du Printemps_ was an abstract symphony in all
but name; fortunately there are a few things that Time spares the
critic, and we can see now that this work is merely a string of ballet
movements lacking even in the formal cohesion of an opera ballet like
the Polovtsian dances in Borodin's _Prince Igor_. We need not
consider Stravinsky as a formalist or melodist until we come to the
post-war period of pastiche.

Quite apart however from any technical similarity in the methods of
the pre-war revolutionaries, there is a common spiritual quality that
can be recognized by any listener susceptible to the literary and
evocative elements in music, whether he is interested in the
historical and technical side or not. I refer to the aesthetic and
neurasthenic qualities of the Impressionist period in music which,
spiritually speaking, is a parallel to the naughty 'nineties in
literature.


(d) Music and the Naughty 'Nineties


Modern music, as I have said, has not developed logically, as did the
other arts. Technically speaking, the Impressionist period in music
anticipates the most daring experiments in _Transition_, but the
spirit it expresses is that of _The Yellow Book_, while the whole is
set against the incongruous background of Edwardian prosperity,
progress, and Utopianism.

The 'nineties themselves had no music properly speaking, and the
writers of that period were consequently driven to desperate similes
when trying to add appropriate musical touches. Poor Wilde in his
search for the "curiously coloured, scarlet music" that his soul
desired could find nothing better than the piano pieces of Dvork, and
Beardsley was forced to read his own subtle perversity into the
ponderous arguments and Victorian scenepainting of _Das Rheingold_.
The comparative lack of neurasthenia in the music of the nineteenth
century is strikingly illustrated by the essentially heroic, 'hearty',
and normal atmosphere of _The Ring_; the somewhat peculiar sexual
relationships of the characters are in no way reflected in the score
and it is not until we reach _Parsifal_ with its erotic religiosity,
its Oedipus and other complexes, that we get a foretaste of the
suddenly released nerves of twentieth-century music. But the literary
'nineties did not know their _Parsifal_ and so were forced to fall
back on their fecund imagination for music of a sufficiently decadent
type. Enoch Soames' famous lines:

    Pale tunes irresolute,
    And traceries of old sounds
    Blown from a rotted flute,
    Mingle with noise of cymbals rouged with rust,

are really a very good description of Debussy at his worst--though the
wretched author was not destined to be consoled by this sympathetic
world of sound. However much one admires Debussy there is no denying
the vaguely aesthetic and 'arty' quality of much of his music--a
quality that has even more in common with the English than with the
French decadents. The note first struck in his early setting of
Rossetti's 'Blessed Damozel' permeates his work to a greater or less
degree to the end of his career.

_Pellas_ is the ne plus ultra of the relaxed vitality and dimly
realized emotions of the aesthetic movement. The _Nocturnes_ recall
Whistler, and the innumerable pictorial pieces such as _Poissons
d'Or_, _Des Pas sur la Neige_, _Jardins sous la Pluie_, etc. are the
musical equivalent of the Japanese prints whose vogue in England owed
much to Whistler's guidance. The Greek evocations of some of the
preludes and of the _Epigraphes Antiques_ belong, not to the masculine
world of the Greek philosophers and tragedians, but to the feminine
world of the antique-fanciers like Pierre Louys and Maurice de Gurin.
_Le Martyre de Saint Sbastien_ is the swan song of the 'nineties,
recalling _La Demoiselle Elue_ in much the way that Beardsley recalls
Rossetti. The later ballet _Jeux_ may seem a foretaste of the
slap-you-on-the-back, hiking spirit of the post-war composers and of
their obsession with topicality, but the dim tennis players who flit
inconsequently through the garden are no more genuinely _sportifs_
than croquet players in a fan by Conder, and it is clear that
Debussy's real interest is in the atmospheric background where 'Les
sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir'. Debussy harps back
to Baudelaire, not forward to Borotra.[1]

The magnificent orchestral _Images_ are free from any superficial
'artiness', but we do not require to be told that Debussy was an ill
man when he wrote them to realize that they represent not the
extrovert's enjoyment of present activity, but the introvert's
half-recollected, half-imagined fantasia round action. Chabrier's
valses are like Chabrier himself valsing with the utmost gusto, but
Debussy's _Gigues_ is like a Proustian synthesis of the emotion drawn
from some jig danced on the Breton coast, a jig in which he himself
could never genuinely take part.

[Footnote 1: We must remember, too, the years that Debussy spent on
the unfinished _La Chute de la maison Usher_ and the profound
admiration he had for Poe, the patron saint of French decadence.]

The crude force of the Russian peasant tradition gives to Stravinsky's
ballets a superfical vigour that seems at first sight far removed from
the nervous sensibility of Debussy's stage works. But the Russian
ballet itself, exquisite entertainment though it was, belonged
essentially to the 'nineties. Its most fanatical adherents were
usually those who, though priding themselves on their modishness, were
actually fin-de-sicle characters born out of their time. The change
in style observable between the pre-war and post-war Diaghileff
ballets reflects the purely fashionable change in the tastes of the
concentration camp of intellectuals to whom Diaghileff played up, and
whom the plain or comparatively plain man meekly followed. The sailor
replaced the sex appeal of the oriental slave; factories, dungarees
and talc provided the glamour once sought for in fairy palaces and
fastuous costumes; but the essential channel of attraction remained
the same. The knowing and Firbankian _Les Biches_ was only a natural
successor to the lavish and Wildian _Scheherazade_.

Stravinsky's ballets, then, belong as much to the aesthetic movement
as do Debussy's piano pieces. _L'Oiseau de Feu_ and _Petrushka_ are
more entertaining to see than Wilde's fairytales are to read because
they make that direct physical appeal that Wilde could only get at
second hand in his particular medium, but they cannot be said to
carry us any further spiritually than _The Fisherman and his Soul_ or
_The Birthday of the Infanta_, _Le Sacre du Printemps_ with its
sophisticated and deliberate brutality has more in common, perhaps,
with post-war fashions in literature, but its sadism is the natural
counterpart of the masochism of _Le Martyre de Saint Sbastien_. The
opera _Le Rossignol_, an overloaded piece of chinoiserie and
preciosity, plunges us back again into the aesthetic and decadent
world of art which found its strongest expression in the music of a
later generation. There is nothing of Andersen left under the rich
arabesques of the chinoiserie any more than there is any Malory left
in Beardsley's illustrations to _La Morte d'Arthur_. Mr. Cecil Gray
has rightly described this work as a monstrous Beardsleyesque
after-birth of the 'nineties, and together with _Le Martyre de Saint
Sbastien_ of Debussy and the _Pierrot Lunaire_ of Schnberg it forms
the culmination of the neurasthenia and preciosity of the
impressionist or disruptive period.

The apparently coldblooded and mathematical music of Schnberg
provides an even stronger and more avowed link with the 'nineties than
any we get in Debussy, for while Debussy's choice of texts can be
explained by the fact that they are not merely 'ninetyish in feeling,
but also among the finest poems in his own language, Schnberg's
choice of the watered-down decadence of Albert Giraud's verses can
only be attributed to the fact that he found this Dowsonish atmosphere
essentially sympathetic.

In _Pierrot Lunaire_ the ghost of the German _Lied_ meets the ghost
of French decadence. The old faded characters from Bergamo take on new
meanings in a sinister half-light:

    Till Pierrot moon steals slyly in,
    His face more white than sin,
    Black-masked, and with cool touch lays bare
    Each cherry, plum, and pear.

    Then underneath the veild eyes
    Of houses, darkness lies----
    Tall houses; like a hopeless prayer
    They cleave the sly dumb air.

    Blind are those houses, paper-thin;
    Old shadows hid therein,
    With sly and crazy movements creep
    Like marionettes, and weep.

The quotation is not from a poet of the 'nineties, but from a poem of
Edith Sitwell's which, taking up the 'nineties where they left off, so
to speak, expresses perfectly the nervous appeal of the last work in
which those stock figures of the fancy-dress ball have for us any
meaning.

_Pierrot Lunaire_, moreover, cannot be considered an isolated example
of the fin-de-sicle quality in Schnberg's music. _Die Glckliche
Hand_, with its great black cat crouching like an incubus or succubus
on the hero, and its green-faced chorus peering through dark violet
hangings is in the purest Edgar Allan Poe tradition, while
_Erwartung_, with its vague hints of necrophily, brings in the
Krafft-Ebbing touch (Jung at the prow and Freud at the helm) which is
the twentieth century's only gift to the 'nineties. I am not
suggesting for a moment that Schnberg rises no higher than the weak
decadence of Giraud. There is in his music a fierce despair, an almost
flamelike disgust which recalls the mood of Baudelaire's _La Charogne_
and places it far above the watercolour morbidities of his chosen
text. But at the moment I am not trying to determine the purely
musical value of Schnberg's various works--I merely wish to indicate
the undoubted neurasthenic strain that is symptomatic of his period,
and which can be found in works like Strauss' _Salome_ and _Elektra_
which, musically speaking, are widely differentiated from Schnberg's
in technique.

I realize that nothing fades so quickly as the average musical
'thriller', and it may seem that in accusing the Impressionist
composers of neurasthenia and decadence I am taking a shortsighted
view based mainly on present-day insensibility to the efforts of
nineteenth-century composers to horrify and startle; but we have only
to consider nineteenth-century music as a whole to realize that the
occasional diabolism of Berlioz and Liszt is a comparatively isolated
phenomenon. A certain ghoulishness is a natural part of the German
Romantic tradition, and Liszt's Mephistophelean studies, though
brilliantly convincing, are more than counterbalanced by his
sentimental feelings for Gretchen. Berlioz had more of the authentic
Messe Noire feeling, but the finale of the _Symphonie Fantastique_ is,
after all, in the nature of a genre piece, and although it has lost
none of its uncanny power it is by no means so typical of Berlioz's
work as might be supposed.

One is in no way straining facts, or distorting history to suit one's
own ends by placing the musical 'nineties in the rather incongruous
background of the opening years of the present century. The only
problem is why this neurasthenic period should so suddenly appear in
this particular art at this particular time. Some may put it down to
the 'time-lag' which, until the present period, music has always shown
(as for example in the seventeenth century in England, when the
Elizabethan tradition extended into the Caroline period): others, wise
after the event, may see in the disintegrating brutality of _Elektra_,
_Le Sacre du Printemps_, and other works, a Dunne-like reflection of
the brutality of the succeeding war years, similar to the moral
laxity, failure to keep up appearances before the servants, and
general disintegration of behaviour that invariably precedes
revolutions.

There is something to be said for both these points of view, but the
fundamental reason I believe to be both more simple and more
technical. Horror and neurasthenia are absent from pre-Impressionist
music for the simple reason that composers lacked the technical means
to give as much expression to this side of their nature as was
accomplished by the poets and novelists. Horror and neurasthenia in
literature can be expressed without resorting to extremes of
technique. They can be expressed not by style, but by statement, and
even, as in Defoe, by a sort of cool ironic understatement. Poe can
chill our nerves by a mere description of a situation without
resorting to any eccentricity of vocabulary or distortion of language.
He can convince us for example that Roderick Usher's personal
variations on Weber's last waltz were strange and morbid by merely
telling us so. But a composer treating the same subject could only
convince us by making the waltz actually sound strange and morbid, an
effect which would demand a greater break with musical tradition than
was possible in Poe's day.

Classical music has little sense of horror about it, not because
classical composers despised such an appeal to the nerves, but because
they were unable to achieve it. Dido's lament remains as deeply moving
today as when it was written--we have to make no mental adjustments to
the period in order to appreciate its emotional appeal; but _The Echo
Dance of Furies_ in the same opera can only be appreciated as a
hieroglyphic of the sinister--it makes no direct nervous physical
appeal as does the other music in the opera. On certain occasions
Purcell, the most picturesque of the pre-Romantic composers, could
obtain an effect of strangeness and awe as in the amazing passage
which accompanies the words: 'From your sleepy mansion rise' in _The
Indian Queen_; but for the most part his flexible technique enabled
him to express anything but the outr. The same may be said of Mozart,
whose music for the statue in _Don Giovanni_ owes its effect more to
dramatic situation and contrast of colour than to anything essentially
strange in the music itself.

The early nineteenth century, to which we naturally look for technical
advance in this respect, presents a curious contrast between the
romantic and magical subjects chosen by composers and the musical
material employed in their illustration. The dawn of the Tale of
Terror in literature coincides with the growth of the musical style
least suited to the expression of the strange, the unearthly, and the
sinister. In spite of the romantic orchestration introduced by Weber,
the solid hymn-tune harmonies, the _Landler_ rhythms, the firm basis
of tonic and dominant that lie at the root of the German
nineteenth-century tradition are, on the face of it, a little
difficult to invest with macabre qualities. Composers like Marschner
were forced to resort to a monotonous and despairing use of the chord
of the diminished seventh in a vain effort to provide a suitable
musical background for their dastardly English lords.

The Russian school, unhampered by the essential normality of Teutonic
technique, were more successful in their depiction of the magical,
though it is noticeable that both Glinka and Dargomizhky, the one in
portraying the wizard Chernomor in _Russlan_, the other in portraying
the commendador in the _Stone Guest_, make use of the whole-tone
scale, a device which must at the time have seemed the most extreme in
the vocabulary of music. It was only by such an overthrowal of
traditional practice that they were able to convey an impression of
strangeness and horror. Their experiments however were isolated and
without successors,[2] and it was not until the coming of the harmonic
and orchestral revolution that centres round Debussy that the composer
found himself with a vocabulary capable of expressing the
fin-de-sicle spirit that was already a commonplace in literature.

[Footnote 2: Liszt's tentative experiments with the whole-tone scale
can hardly be said to supply a link between Glinka and Debussy.]

The complete break up of the traditional Teutonic technique released a
new world of sound and a new world of sensation. Like a repressed
character who, having at last lost his inhibitions flings himself into
a debauch with a hardihood and gusto that would astonish the
accustomed pagan, so the composer, suddenly conscious of his nerves,
almost lost consciousness of any other faculties and concentrated in
one single generation the neurasthenia of fifty years of literature.
It is a little difficult, perhaps, to decide whether the impressionist
composers turned to neurasthenic expression because at last a suitable
technique was at hand, or whether they forged this suitable technique
in an effort to express this side of their nature--ultimately it does
not matter. One can say to a man: 'That egg is only cooked because the
water round it was boiling', or one can say: 'You are only boiling
that water in order to cook the egg', without altering the fact that a
boiled egg is eventually put before you.

There is no doubt that revolutionary technique and neurasthenic
expression acted as a mutual stimulus, and that the composer, led by
his newly won technical freedom to the expression of the less
commonplace and recognized emotions, was led thence to even more
esoteric subjects requiring an even greater departure from academic
uses. Moreover, the composer was drawn on at increasing speed by the
fact that nothing dates so quickly as musical sensationalism. The
whole-tone scale, which must have caused such a fluttering of breasts
when first exploited by Debussy, is by now the merest stock-in-trade
of the hack composer of the cinema. Once embarked on a course of
sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin
from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time.

This extraordinary speeding up in technical experiment gives a
pleasantly vertiginous quality to the Impressionist period, which
distinguishes it from all other experimental periods in music; and in
spite of the fact that much of their experiment leads us to a blind
alley there is an exhilaration of the barricades about the
Impressionist composers that imposes a certain gratitude. 'Pioneers, O
Pioneers!' we feel as we listen to _Iberia_, _Pierrot Lunaire_, and
_Le Sacre du Printemps_. To be a pioneer is not necessarily the
proudest of boasts for a composer--but it is at least something to
boast about. We cannot turn to the present generation and sing:
'Pasticheurs, O Pasticheurs!' with the same grateful enthusiasm.




_Part II_


Post-War Pasticheurs


(a) The Age of Pastiche
(b) Diaghileff and Stravinsky as time travellers
(c) Surrealism and Neo-Classicism
(d) 'Toute raction est vraie'
(e) Synthetic Melody
(f) Abstraction in Music
(g) Erik Satie and his Musique d'ameublement




Post-War Pasticheurs

(a) The Age of Pastiche


To describe the present age in music as one of pastiche may seem a
sweeping generalization but, like the description of the Impressionist
period as one of disruption, it is a generalization with a strong
basis in fact. There are many contemporary composers of note who stand
to some extent outside this classification, just as there were many
composers who stood outside the Impressionism of the pre-war period,
but the dominant characteristic of post-war music is either pastiche
or an attempted consolidation that achieves only pastiche.

Pastiche has existed in music for many years, but it is only since the
war that it has taken the place of development and experiment. In the
nineteenth century a number of minor composers turned out their suites
in the olden style, but these mild pices d'occasion no more affected
the main course of music than an Olde Worlde Bunne Shoppe affects the
architectural experiments of Corbusier and Mallet-Stevens. Apart from
these studio pieces, pastiche has always existed in the form of stage
decoration as, for example, the Mozartean divertissement in
Tchaikovsky's _Queen of Spades_, or the music off-stage in the second
act of Puccini's _Tosca_. It need hardly be pointed out, though, that
these touches of dramatic colour indicated no change of heart on the
part of the composer. Tchaikovsky did not write symphonies modelled on
Haydn any more than Puccini set out to imitate Rossini or Mercadante.

The deliberate and serious use of pastiche, not as a curiosity or as a
pice d'occasion but as a chosen medium for self-expression, is the
property of the post-war period alone.

The idea that music of an earlier age can be better than the music of
one's own is an essentially modern attitude. The Elizabethans did not
tire of their conceits and go back to the sweet simplicity of Hucbald,
any more than the late Caroline composers deserted the new and airy
Italian style for the grave fantasias of Dowland. Burney's _History of
Music_ is an astonishing example of the complete satisfaction with its
own period so typical of the eighteenth century. To him the earlier
composers were only of interest as stepping stones to the glorious and
unassailable music of his own day. Passages in the earlier music which
do not display the smoothness of texture that the eighteenth century
looked on as technical perfection were dismissed as crudities due to
lack of taste and skill.

The nineteenth century was to carry this smug attitude one stage
further. The eighteenth-century masters were admired not so much for
their own sake as for being precursors of the romantic school which
through its sheer position in time was naturally an improvement. Once
Beethoven's Symphonies were accepted they were considered as being
superior to Mozart's in the way that a six-cylinder car is preferred
to a four-cylinder car, or a talking to a silent film. Schumann, it is
true, admired Scarlatti, but with a touch of the patronage displayed
by a Lady Bountiful visiting the village, and Clara Schumann simply
could not understand how Brahms could take any interest in composers
earlier than Bach. Wagner's followers did not look upon _The Ring_ as
a way of writing operas that was different from Bellini's, but as a
way that clearly was a much better one.

Even in the early twentieth century, when the attitude towards music
of a past age was broader and more cultured, showing at times a
certain humility, the direction taken, not only by composers but by
the public and the critics, was progressive in the mechanical sense of
the word. Those who were swept off their feet by Strauss and, later,
by Scriabin--and they included some of our most levelheaded
critics--thought nothing of referring to Mozart as a snuffbox composer
in comparison with these cosmic masters; and it is clear that the more
fervent admirers of Debussy and Stravinsky regarded their music as not
only a reaction against Wagner, but as the death of Wagner.

That is not to say that music until the present has proceeded in a
mechanical series of reactions. It is not until Stravinsky that a new
movement in music is held to have automatically wiped out all traces
of the preceding one (of which the wretched followers, like Babylonian
courtiers, are forcibly immolated on the tomb of their master). The
new music from Italy undoubtedly changed the course of Purcell's
musical thought, but the Elizabethan spirit and technique displayed in
his early string fantasias is not entirely banished from his later
work, which, though experimental to a degree, and in no way
reactionary yet has a distinct connection with the work of previous
generations.

Revolutionary, in fact, is an unsuitable word with which to describe
the experimental periods of past ages. The revolutionaries of the
seventeenth century were hardy pioneers who struck out boldly across
undiscovered plains and cultivated the virgin soil. The
revolutionaries of today are no more hardy than the man who takes a
ticket on the Inner Circle, and is at liberty to travel in either
direction, knowing that eventually he will arrive at the station which
the fashion of the day has decreed to be the centre of the town. The
modern musical revolutions are revolutions in the meanest sense of the
word--the mere turning of a stationary wheel.

A great deal of pre-war music may have sounded, to use a dear old
phrase, 'like nothing on earth', but that at least is a negative merit
from the revolutionaries' point of view. Most music of today sounds
only too reminiscent of something that has previously been in
existence.

Comparison to an earlier composer, at one time a well-known form of
musician-baiting, is now come to be a delicate compliment. If you had
told Wagner that you admired his operas because they were 'like'
Cimarosa he would probably have kicked you out of the house, and I
doubt if Liszt would have been best pleased if you had said that his
_tudes transcendentales_ were charming because they were 'like'
Couperin.

But today every composer's overcoat has its corresponding hook in the
cloakroom of the past. Stravinsky's concertos (we have it on the
composer's own authority) are 'like' Bach and Mozart; Sauguet's music
is admired because 'c'est dans le vrai tradition de Gounod'; another
composer's score is praised because in it 'se retrouvent les graces
tincellantes de Scarlatti'. The composer can no longer pride himself
on being true to himself--he can only receive the pale reflected glory
of being true to whichever past composer is credited at the moment
with having possessed the Elixir of Life.

It would be a mistake, I think, to put this attitude down to a
spiritual humility comparable to the quite natural inferiority complex
a modern sculptor might feel in the presence of some early Chinese
carving. It is more in the nature of a last refuge, comparable to the
maudlin religiosity of a satiated rake. After the debauches of the
Impressionist period nothing is left to the modern composer in the way
of a new _frisson_ save a fashionable repentance.

Unlike the experimental period of the seventeenth century the pre-war
period has led to a psychological cul-de-sac. There are many
explanations of this, of which the most convincing is a simple and
practical one. By 1913 music had already reached the absolute limit of
complication allowed by the capacity of composers, players, listeners
and instrument makers. With very few exceptions in detail--such as
the piano writing of Sorabji, the polytonal choral writing of Milhaud
and the quarter-tone writing of Aloys Haba--there is nothing in
present-day music more complicated from any point of view than what we
find in the music of twenty years ago. The composer is now faced, not
with further experiment but with the more difficult task of
consolidating the experiments of this vertiginous period. He is like a
man in a high-powered motor car that has got out of control. He must
either steer it away from the cliff's edge back to the road, or leap
out of it altogether. Most modern composers have chosen the latter
plan, remarking as they dexterously save their precious lives, 'I
think motor cars are a little _vieux jeu_--don't you?'

There is an obvious end to the amount of purely physical experiment in
music, just as there is an obvious end to geographical exploration.
Wyndham Lewis has pointed out that when speed and familiarity have
reduced travelling in space to the level of the humdrum those in
search of the exotic will have to travel in time, and this is what has
already happened in music. The Impressionist composers vastly speeded
up the facilities for space travel in music, exploring the remotest
jungles and treating uncharted sea as though they were the Serpentine.
Stravinsky, at one time the globe trotter par excellence can no longer
thrill us with his traveller's tales of the primitive steppe and has,
quite logically, taken to time travelling instead. He reminds one of
the character in a play by Evreinoff who lives half in the eighteenth
century, half in the present.

The advantages of time travelling are obvious. The pioneer work has
been done for you already and, owing to the increased facilities for
moving from one century or decade to another, you can always be in the
right decade at the right time, whereas in space travelling you may be
delayed by a month or two, or even find that the intellectual world
has gone on to the next port.


(b) Diaghileff and Stravinsky as Time Travellers


The most successful time traveller of our days was undoubtedly Serge
Diaghileff, though it might be more accurate to describe him as a
ubiquitous and highly efficient Cook's man to the time travellers,
rather than a bona fide voyager. Though he had to the end a
congenital, but carefully disguised, dislike of time travelling, he
was the first to realize the artistic and commercial possibilities of
the new device. In his palmy days before the war he was, of course, a
space traveller, bringing to the Western world a picturesque oriental
caravan laden with the rich tapestries and carpets so suited to the
taste of an age that was able to combine material prosperity and
spiritual preciosity in such nice proportions. He was not only giving
the intellectual public what it wanted, he was giving them what he
liked himself. In music his genuine taste was for the luscious, and in
dcor for the opulent. In spite of all his very successful and
convincing toying with post-war intellectuality, his favourite ballet
was probably _Scheherazade_.

But an impresario however gifted cannot remain fixed in any particular
world of taste whether he find it sympathetic or no. He depends on
surprise and novelty for his _rclame_ and Diaghileff, by appealing to
a more intelligent audience than that sought by the ordinary
commercial impresario, was, like the composers of the Impressionist
period, forced into a policy of novelty and sensationalism that
gathered speed as it went. By the time the audience had just caught up
with his last creation he must be ready with the cards of the next
trick up his sleeve. He thus found himself in something of a dilemma
after the war, for although the audiences were fully prepared to go on
applauding the old ballets, and to find all the old glamour in an
entertainment that now had the added glamour of being 'White Russian',
he himself knew that this enthusiasm was in the nature of a 'hangover'
from the pre-war period, and that unless he could find a new avenue of
taste for exploration he would be as dated as the older dancers whom
he had ruthlessly left by the way. But he could never again achieve
his earlier triumphs of the exotic period. He could not bring to the
delighted eyes of Western Europe the then unrealized glories of
Eastern Europe. He was now part of Western Europe himself--a little
dracin and a little old. He was no longer one of a group of young
enthusiastic artists imposing on the world their particular dernier
cri, for the dernier cri was now in the hands of the Paris
intellectuals.

A lesser man than Diaghileff might have found the situation beyond
him, but Diaghileff, with that genius for production that was in many
ways so much more impressive than the talent of those he produced,
executed a series of rapid and perplexing manoeuvres with a view to
establishing a mastery over a patch of intellectual ground, which, it
must be remembered, was not his by racial heredity or by right of
youth. Still a little uncertain of his ground he relied to some extent
on typical Parisians, like Jean Cocteau, who occupied much the same
place in the Paris intellectual world of their day as he himself had
at one time occupied in the Petrograd movement.

_Parade_,[3] the firstfruits of this influence, was, in spite of its
novelty, a logical enough development of his pre-war activities. In
choosing Picasso, Satie and Massine as collaborators Diaghileff showed
the same type of choice as he had displayed in choosing Bakst, Ravel
and Fokine for _Daphnis and Chloe_. The times had changed and
Diaghileff had wisely changed with them, without actually altering his
angle of approach. He did not, however, follow up the logically
modernist path opened out by _Parade_ for a number of reasons--not
least among which may be mentioned the curious ill luck and disaster
that usually accompanied any performance of this ballet. Diaghileff
had not only the oriental love of luxury but the oriental love of
power. _Parade_ displayed only too clearly the guiding hand of Jean
Cocteau and a development along those lines would have meant a
surrender of his power to the group that Jean Cocteau represented. As
a space traveller, in fact, Cocteau was a little too quick for him.
Diaghileff consequently evolved the most typical artistic device of
the present age, that is to say, time travelling in more than one
century or period at once. It is a device that is peculiarly well
adapted to musical expression and in particular to ballet.

[Footnote 3: Although actually produced in 1917, _Parade_ may
legitimately be considered the first 'post-war' ballet, using the word
in its social rather than purely temporal significance.]

The various elements in painting being less easy to separate from each
other than the various elements in music, it is obviously a little
difficult to evoke deliberately more than one period at once, or to
combine two periods of style, in any given painting. Picasso may
change his style every five years, but during that five years each
picture is strictly within its limited 'epoch'. Even in literature it
is difficult to evoke more than one period in a given paragraph. James
Joyce in the medical-student section of Ulysses gives us a brilliant
pastiche of successive epochs in English literature, but it is a
separate tour de force and does not represent the general texture of
the book. As a pastiche it has a symbolic purpose and, moreover, the
epochs succeed each other in logical and historical order. It can in
no way be compared to the random and scrapbook methods of Diaghileff.

In music, though, the various elements, such as melody, rhythm,
harmony, and counterpoint, all taking place in practically the same
moment of time can--though it is highly undesirable that they
should--be so dissected and separated from each other, that a composer
with no sense of style and no creative urge can take medieval words,
set them in the style of Bellini, add twentieth-century harmony,
develop both in the sequential and formal manner of the eighteenth
century, and finally score the whole thing for jazz band. Similarly,
in ballet it is possible to have dcor, choreography and music in
different periods and tastes, to throw abstract films on the back
cloth while the orchestra turns out a laborious pastiche of Gluck and
the dancers revive the glories of the nineteenth-century _Excelsior_.

It will be seen, then, that by his adoption or even invention of the
particular type of present-day pastiche that can conveniently be
described as time travelling Diaghileff immediately established a
position of mastery again. It was not even necessary that his
associates should be time travellers themselves--for by picking on
collaborators sufficiently disparate in outlook he could achieve the
required effect--but to start with, at least, he required a similar
mentality on the part of his associates, and in Stravinsky, whose
executive abilities so far outweighed his creative gifts, and who,
like himself, was a somewhat dracin figure, he found the ideal
collaborator. _Pulcinella_ was the first example of this movement, and
though it may not seem on the face of it a very important piece of
work it ranks as an historical date with _Pellas_. It marks the
beginning of the movement sometimes dignified with the name of
neo-classicism.

Stravinsky was by far the best person for Diaghileff to send time
travelling in the eighteenth century because, both temperamentally and
racially, he was out of touch with the whole period. A Frenchman or an
Italian might have felt some embarrassment about jazzing up the
classics, but Stravinsky is like a child delighted with a book of
eighteenth-century engravings, yet not so impressed that it has any
twinges of conscience about reddening the noses, or adding moustaches
and beards in thick black pencil.

_Pulcinella_ combines the chic of today with the chic of the
eighteenth century--always a safe period to consider 'good taste'. Yet
there is something touchingly nave about Stravinsky's attitude
towards Pergolesi. His thematic material is all there for him, he does
not even have to vamp up a pseudo-Russian folk song, and yet by giving
the works a slight jolt, so to speak, he can make the whole thing
sound up to date and so enjoy the best of both worlds. The jolt he
gives the machine consists, on the whole, in a complete confusion
between the expressive and formal content of the eighteenth-century
style. In Stravinsky's adaptation the expressive element is treated in
a mechanical way, and purely conventional formulae of construction are
given pride of place. Like a savage standing in delighted awe before
those two symbols of an alien civilization, the top hat and the _pot
de chambre_, he is apt to confuse their functions.

Apart from the clash of periods shown in the music, _Pulcinella_ was
not a very complicated piece of pastiche. The choreography by Massine
and the dcor by Picasso were mild but pleasing. They were in keeping
with the subject and did not imitate such strokes on Stravinsky's part
as the use of jazz glissandos on the trombone by introducing
'black-bottoms' and skyscrapers. It was not until a later date that
Diaghileff may be said to have deliberately introduced incongruity as
an element to be admired.

Once the music of a ballet is allowed to be in two periods at once,
there is no logical reason why the dcor and choreography should share
even that particular type of pastiche or time travelling. Congruity
between the various elements in a stage presentation is an essentially
Wagnerian ideal, though as an ideal it lasted well into a period
which, from the musical point of view, was anti-Wagnerian. Debussy,
for example, revolted against the Wagnerian musical ideals in
_Pellas_, but it is safe to assume that he still desired the
congruity of the Wagnerian music drama to be applied to the production
of his own revolutionary work. Wagner's ideal of stage setting did not
in fact reach full fruition until the early days of the Diaghileff
ballet.

Diaghileff was always willing to wipe his boots on his earlier
productions and to rise on stepping stones of his dead self to higher
things, but he was astute enough, and in a way sincere enough, to
demand a satisfactory reason for his own volte-face. By realizing that
his earlier preoccupation with a sense of style and congruity was in
essence Wagnerian he was able to invest with a revolutionary glamour
the scrapbook mentality which in his later years he exploited with so
marked a success. These scrapbook ballets were of course only a more
grandiose and theatrical presentation of the scrapbook taste which is
considered so modern and 'amusing' when applied to interior
decoration.

It is a mistake to think that modern taste is really represented by
Corbusier rooms, furnished with fitting mechanical austerity. Modern
taste is to be found far more in the typical post-war room, in which
an Adam mantelpiece is covered with negro masks while Victorian
wool-pictures jostle the minor Cubists on the walls. In such a room a
Picasso reproduction is not considered 'amusing' unless flanked by
pampas grass or surrounded by a Gothic frame made out of walnut
shells, any more than a Brancusi bird is considered 'amusing' unless
set off by a cage of stuffed tits, and an effigy of Queen Victoria. To
the post-war intellectual snob all periods are equally _vieux jeu_,
including his own, and it is only by a feverish rushing from one
period to another that he can disguise from others and from himself
his essentially static intelligence.

The chic chaos of the type of room described above is reflected in the
music of such a composer as Poulenc, the most 'amusing' of the many
minor composers who were called on to vamp up the music for
Diaghileff's fashionable dinners. Poulenc does not write in any
particular style that he fancies to be fashionable at the moment, but
in every style of the past and present that is not actually frowned on
as pompous and outmoded. The easy charm of the folk song, the gay
allure of the military band, the sparkle of the eighteenth century,
the 'amusing' sentimentality of the nineteenth, the spicy harmonies of
our own time, the saccharine smile of the prostitute, the extended
tongue of the gamin, mazurkas, ragtimes, ritornellos, rigadoons,
Stravinsky, Scarlatti, Chabrier, Gounod--all are paraded before us
with bewildering rapidity, and the changes of style are executed with
such abruptness that not the most lynx-eared of the fashionable cheka
who are the self-appointed arbiters of vogue has the time to exclaim:
'A little dated--don't you think?'

Poulenc is the most accomplished and insouciant of time travellers, a
Captain Spalding amongst musical explorers, and _Les Biches_, a witty
social commentary reaching a high level of distinction from the point
of view of choreography, was the most agreeable of the 'amusing'
Diaghileff ballets in that it made no pretences. 'Amusing'
rearrangements of sections cut through past periods keep a number of
amateurs, who might otherwise set up business as artists, out of
harm's way, and it is only when these poltergeists set themselves up
as Demon Kings that it is time to call a halt. Unfortunately, the
influence of Diaghileff and the Diaghileff type of mind has led to
incongruous rearrangements being confused with genuine revolution and
constructive progress. To take a homely sartorial example, the late
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven--whose work will be remembered
by readers of _The Little Review_ and _Transition_--gained a
reputation for revolution in dress by wearing a beaver hat trimmed
with clocksprings, and using the frying pans out of doll's houses as
buttons for her overcoat. This revolution in dress though superficial
in nature was, however, of great interest as a forerunner of
surrealism.

(c) Surrealism and Neo-Classicism


Putting on one side the political tenets of the surrealists, which, as
occasion has convincingly shown, they themselves are perfectly willing
to do when a chance of some bourgeois publicity turns up, surrealism
may conveniently be defined as the free grouping together of
incongruous and non-associated images. Whether these images are drawn
from dreams and the unconscious mind, or whether they are the result
of a particularly self-conscious and deliberate choice, is a question
that only the artist can answer, and in no way affects the spectator.
Cocteau has said that images in dreams are like flowers under the sea,
in that they immediately lose their colour on being brought to the
surface, and the spectator confronted with dream images set down on
canvas may well feel the impotent boredom of a guest who is forced to
share the dream experiences of a voluble host, experiences which,
drawn from the mystery of sleep, have withered at the breakfast table.
But not even the most exasperating of Dunne raconteurs expects to be
paid, or claims aesthetic value for his account of how he was chased
by a cow which eventually turned into the Eiffel Tower what time he
himself was having his teeth removed by a lady dentist.

Big Business men must often have lain awake at night thinking how
others, by sleeping, have become for a few hours commercially
non-existent, wrapped in slumber, and devoting their precious time to
useless dreams. It has been left to artists to achieve the final
triumphant stroke of Big Business commercialization. They have
valorized the dream. Beddoes' whimsical query 'If there were dreams to
sell what would you buy?' has now become a matter of hard fact. 'Some
cost a passing bell, some a mere sigh', and some cost many thousand
francs in La Rue de la Botie. The fortunate poet need no longer say
'I being poor have only my dreams', for dreams have now assumed a
commercial value far exceeding the cloths of heaven.

One's reason for suspecting the validity--quite apart from the
hypothetical interest--of these dream experiences is the extraordinary
similarity and monotony of surrealist art. It is natural for one man
trying to paint a guitar and a pair of boots to be influenced by
another painter who is an admitted master of that genre, but it seems
strange that a painter whose avowed object is the mere transcription
of his dream should be influenced by the night fancies of some other
painter. Perhaps dreaming is becoming an acquired accomplishment with
its own standards of excellence. It may be that in the near future
there will be schools of dreaming where you will be taught to do the
thing properly. Dreamers will become classified into academic
dreamers, who are chased by bulls, and modern dreamers, whose
unconscious mind has more of a Viennese lilt. Dreaming, let us hope,
will eventually assume a gossip-column value: Lady Trampleasure, best
known perhaps as a breeder of Bedlingtons, has other interests
besides. Her many friends who see her only at Goodwood would be
surprised to learn that she is one of the most accomplished dreamers
in the Dukeries.'

Turning from the future of dreams to their present-day firstfruits in
practical form, the surrealist school of painting may be described as
being predominantly literary in content. Unlike previous schools of
painting, such as the Impressionists or Cubists, which can only be
classified by a consideration of their actual way of painting, the
surrealists can be classified by what they paint. Their lack of formal
content is the logical outcome of the overthrowal (in accordance with
the famous manifesto of Breton) of the control exercised by the
reason, and of any aesthetic choice, prejudice or preoccupation. Their
academic realism of technique, though not actually demanded by their
book of rules, is a natural corollary of their automatic-writing
attitude towards painting. It is not necessary that a ouija board
should be beautiful or significant in itself--it is only necessary
that it should convey its message. Legibility rather than decorative
effect is the quality to be prized in automatic writing.

Surrealist painting relying for its effect on the dream-like
association of incongruous images, it is necessary that these images
should be as immediately recognizable as the
easy-to-draw-but-hard-to-get cottage loaf of the pavement artist.
There is no theoretical reason why a surrealist painting should not
use the technique shown in such a work as 'The Doctor' by Sir Luke
Fildes, and indeed if the doctor was given a cat's face for a head,
the lamp beside him being a miniature railway signal, and the patient
painted in the nude but with his various limbs scattered about the
room, one detached hand giving the doctor a smart clip on the ear, the
whole thing would be a remarkably successful example of surrealist
painting.

The type of artistic experiment which tends to a slight, or even
complete, obscuring of the immediately recognizable shape and function
of the depicted object in the interests of formal unity, has no place
in surrealism. The Cubists, for example, chose a guitar, a newspaper,
a bottle of wine, and a pipe, as material for experiment, because they
provided the right type of raw material for their purpose, and not
because they were symbols of music, politics and self-indulgence. In
spite of Jean Cocteau's lachrymose and Baldwinesque attempt to reduce
Picasso to the stature of the _brave bourgeois_ by pointing out that
there was a pipe, a paper, and a bottle of wine in every true
Frenchman's house, and also in every abstract of Picasso, it is
reasonable to assume that this particular type of Home Sweet Home
symbolism was the last thing that prompted Picasso's Cubist epoch.
Between the Cubist epoch in painting and the surrealist movement lies
as great a gulf as exists between the impressionism of Stravinsky's
pre-war ballets and the neo-classicism of his post-war concertos.

Academic critics have, in the past, so covered themselves with
ignominy by saying that anyone could paint like Van Gogh or that
anyone could write like Debussy, that it requires no little courage to
point out the short cuts and simplifications introduced by the
surrealists into creative expression. It is possible to produce a
poem that would satisfy surrealist canons by pasting together odd
strips from a newspaper--this method is actually advocated by
Breton--and it is possible to create a surrealist picture by pasting
together, provided they are sufficiently contrasted in subject matter,
odd scraps of old magazine illustrations--the more academic in style
the better--a method followed by Max Ernst in his book _La Femme--Cent
Ttes_.

That these methods can produce amusing and exhilarating results is
shown by Max Ernst's book, but it is clear that all that is needed to
produce this type of work is a quick wit and a modicum of sensibility.
Instead of Max Ernst's nude statues and Fantomas illustrations, one
can use old vintage years of the Royal Academy Illustrated and achieve
equally striking results. One can even turn the tables and construct
quite a good Max Ernst with incongruously superimposed fragments of
pictures by Boecklin. A surrealist called upon to design a new costume
need not display the invention of a Picasso or even the discrimination
of a Poiret--he can simply trim a beaver hat with clocksprings, like
the late lamented Baroness.

There might not, at first sight, seem to be any direct connecting link
between the neo-romanticism of the surrealists with their sacrifice of
form and texture to literary interest, and the neo-classicism of
Stravinsky, with its apparent concentration on formalism and minute
details of texture to the detriment of any emotional quality. But
actually the mentality behind these two outwardly opposed
manifestations is of much the same order and the apparent disparity
between the results achieved is due to the essential difference of the
medium only. In the past the minor artist without any intense or
personal vision usually relapsed into a mild form of academicism;
today he is offered the exhilarating outlet provided by deliberate
incongruity. In painting this is most simply achieved by a plain
visual statement, and when an artist can satisfy both his conscience
and his patrons by an unexpected arrangement of realistically painted
objects it would be churlish to demand an equally unexpected
development in their actual painting.

Music can offer no direct parallel to this type of surrealism for the
very simple reason that realistic representation, except of the
farmyard order, cannot be recognized without the aid of a programme.
Strauss, the most accomplished master of photographic suggestion in
music, can, it is true, suggest a flock of sheep by a bleating on
muted trombones, a couple of monks by a modal passage on two bassoons,
and a boat on the water by the usual aqueous devices; but it is highly
improbable that by a combination of the three he could bring before
our eyes a picture of two monks in a barge with a lot of sheep.

But although music provides no recognizable objects for rearrangement
it provides certain recognizable styles and also certain formulas that
are so familiar to us that they have almost the quality of a
realistically painted object. The rapid time travelling from one
period to another that we find in Poulenc's _Les Biches_, or in his
concerto for two pianos, provides a parallel to the placing together
of dissimilar objects in space that we find in the work of Yves Tanguy
or John Banting. The use of jazz glissandos in _Pulcinella_ has much
the same effect as a photograph of a negro with a cocktail shaker
pasted into the background of an Alma Tadema reproduction. The
cadences in the chorales of _L'Histoire du Soldat_ give one the same
shock as the combination of classical statues with balloon ascents to
be found in Max Ernst's _La Femme--Cent Ttes_.

If Poulenc's rapid changes of style may be compared to Ernst at his
most facetious, Stravinsky's more subtle and more far-reaching
pastiches may be compared to Chirico at his most characteristic. Both
Stravinsky and Chirico stand a little outside the more unscrupulous
and arriviste work of their disciples, and disdaining the beaver hat
and clocksprings of the late Baroness they come before us like statues
of early Victorian statesmen, clad in all the specious solemnity of
the toga.

A background of classicism is by no means incompatible with the
surrealist mind working in music. Like the realistic style of the
surrealist painters it provides the essential norm without which the
abnormalities would pass by unnoticed--it is significant that the
sculptured head that appears with such monotonous persistence in
modern paintings is always a Graeco-Roman head, never a primitive, or
exotic, head. Stravinsky's researches into the past do not carry him
as far back as the periods where you can never be quite certain what
the composer is going to do next. He uses as his raw material either
the formalized style of the eighteenth century as represented by
inferior Bach, or else the sentimental clichs of Tchaikovsky which
through their saccharine obviousness give a peculiar savour to the
acidities of their incongruous accompaniment. A discordant
harmonization of a familiar tune like 'God Save the King', for
example, would be much more of a shock to us than any given fourteen
bars in an atonal work. Chirico can convey by his classically painted
broken columns an effect which would fail were the columns to be
painted in the manner of Rouault. The groups of geometrical planes
which take the place of breasts in his gigantic philosophers are only
remarkable through their contrast with the uninspired realism of the
rest of the painting. Similarly, Stravinsky can achieve a surrealist
incongruity by his wilful distortion of familiar classical formulas. A
perfect cadence is broken across like a Chirico column, a suave and
formal fugue leads, like the toga of Chirico's mobled sages, to a
harsh and discordant collection of abstract patterns.

Although Diaghileff employed both Chirico and Stravinsky in his
post-war ballets it will be remembered that with that genius for the
chicly incongruous that made him the most successful of commercial
surrealists he did not present two such kindred spirits at the same
time. He also made use of the official surrealists--as represented by
Ernst and Miro--though on one occasion only. To have given them his
continued support would have destroyed his prestige as a time
traveller and _marchand de nouveauts_. As a space traveller, before
the war, he could occasionally afford to call a halt by the wayside,
but as a time traveller he could not afford to be in the same epoch
for any length of time. Besides, to have lent continued support to the
surrealist school would have shown a congruity of thought and action
hardly in conformity with surrealist theory.

It may seem that in concentrating so much attention on Diaghileff
himself one is treating his collaborators in summary fashion. But
Diaghileff was far more than a mere impresario. Though not, strictly
speaking, a creative artist he had very much more genius than many of
the artists who worked for him, and it hardly seems worth while
examining the work of such minor composers as Dukelsky, Sauguet,
Nabokoff, and others, apart from their connection with Diaghileff.
They were merely the gunmen executing the commands of their Capone,
who, like all great gangsters, never touched firearms himself.
Besides, Diaghileff's personality concentrated in a probably
unparalleled way the spirit of a whole generation of artistic thought.
His sensibility, if not always profound, was always rapid, and he had
an astounding 'nose' for the growth of any particular movement of
taste or snobbism. Being as near to a creative artist as any producer
can be he was able to express things that were outside his own
experience; but being a creative artist manqu, without a genuine urge
or belief round which to orientate himself, he was always liable to
become the tool of those whom he had brought into existence, and whose
feelings he had formulated for them. He became a victim of the
fashions he himself had set, and being an older man than his
entourage he was correspondingly more afraid of fashionable reaction.
When he was young he could afford to attach his name to certain
movements, but in later years he did not dare to face the accusation
of conservatism that such an attachment would imply.

Before the war he created a vogue for the Russian ballet, but after
the war he merely created a vogue for vogue. All art became divided
into 'choses fades' and 'choses vivantes'--'choses vivantes' meaning
any novelty however futile, that he could use as a knout with which to
lash the jaded public into enthusiasm. There was always the danger,
though, that the knout might prove a fragile switch, easily broken and
revealed only too plainly as a 'chose fade'. He thus became pledged to
the sterile doctrine of reaction for reaction's sake, a doctrine which
was well summed up by his henchman Stravinsky in the revealing phrase
'Toute raction est vraie'.


(d) 'Toute raction est vraie'


Before the war Stravinsky's work was so intimately bound up with the
mentality and organization of the Russian ballet that the idea of his
breaking away from Diaghileff would have seemed as absurd as Alice
trying to wake up the Red King. It is true that _Le Rossignol_ showed
a slight divergence from the narrow path of ballet mentality, but it
had the excuse of being only a continuation of a work begun in
pre-Diaghileff days, and its independent existence was shortlived,
Stravinsky after a few years reducing it to a version which could take
its place in the Diaghileff rpertoire. As for the concert-hall works
of this period, the _Chansons Japonaises_ and the cantata _Le Roi des
Etoiles_, although they contain excellent music they are the only
works of his to achieve no notoriety. Until 1914, then, Stravinsky and
Diaghileff may be treated as partners in the same firm. The war
interrupted this collaboration but the Russian revolution provided a
new link by throwing them into the same political and social
situation. Willy nilly they became White Russians with all the trials
such a role involves.

It is insufficiently realized how gravely political and social issues
may affect what appear at first sight to be purely aesthetic problems,
particularly when these problems concern--as in ballet--the public and
the patron as much as the creative artists. The most striking
successes of the pre-war Russian ballet depended very largely on
Russian glamour, a Slavonic nostalgia either of the barbaric
semi-Asiatic type, with its Tartar warriors, or of the more civilized
semi-European type, with its wilting young women. The nostalgia was
successful because it was false and because the oriental tradition and
the imperial rgime still existed. But the Russian revolution gave
Russian glamour a severe setback; the nostalgia for old St. Petersburg
became all too real a fact when the town was called Leningrad. The old
Russian glamour was kept up in a sadly retrospective way by groups of
migrs with their unaccustomed balalaikas, but revolutionary pioneers
like Stravinsky and Diaghileff could not afford to become professional
exiles. The new glamour of revolt exploited in later years by the
Soviet films had not yet reached artistic maturity and, even if it
had, it is unlikely that an exploitation of this type of glamour would
have best pleased the aristocratic patrons on whom Diaghileff was of
necessity financially and socially dependent.

The national spirit that until then had sufficed Stravinsky and
Diaghileff suddenly became an unreal shadow leaving them without a
spiritual foundation for their work. Diaghileff, as we have seen,
found his own solution to the problem; but whatever he did he had to
stick to his own particular section of artistic expression, the
ballet, and however much he reacted for reaction's sake he had always
to be entertaining in the widest sense of the word. Stravinsky,
although his greatest successes had always been in ballet form, was
not so bound to the theatre, and his successive reactions led him to
change not only the texture of his music, but also the angle of its
appeal. It was necessary for him to be a pioneer, to create a
revolutionary sensation, but he had already exhausted the vocabulary
of sensation, and there were no more buildings left to raze.

Like a spectacular sinner the only course left open to him was a
spectacular conversion. If sensation could not be caused by a
departure from the audience's norm it could at least be caused by a
departure from his own norm, that of sensation--which, incidentally,
the audience was gradually beginning to adopt as its own. His
audience expected cocktails and jazz, but it was impossible to give
them stronger cocktails, or louder jazz. They craved sensation--very
well, they should have it. Cold water and a sermon for them. They
expected to see their host in new and increasingly elaborate costumes.
Very well, they should see the crowning _creation_ of all--the
Emperor's New Clothes. Stravinsky, in his last works, has achieved the
final triumph of fashion, he has created a fashion for boredom.

In this country at least Stravinsky is best known by his early ballets
and his later concertos; and it thus appears as if his chilly
neo-classicism was an immediate volte-face from his barbaric
impressionism. Such a conception is a dangerous telescoping of his
musical progress. He has, it is true, proceeded by a series of
reactions, but they have each been linked together by the presence of
one or two qualities in common with the preceding epoch, and it is
impossible to understand the true nature of the solemnities of
_Oedipus Rex_, without examining the series of rather facetious
miniatures he wrote during the war.

These works, _Renard_, _L'Histoire du Soldat_, _Pribaoutki_, the
_Berceuses du Chat_, the _Pices Faciles_ for piano duet, and many
other works of similar calibre are chiefly marked off from the early
ballets by a striking reduction in scale, both in texture and
conception. The vast orchestra of _Le Sacre du Printemps_ is
supplanted by a handful of instruments, and the human panorama of
_Petrushka_ is replaced by a penny peep show. They are essentially
marionette works. Petrushka is no longer even half human, he is merely
stuffed with straw, and Stravinsky, the oriental magician, can play
his little tunes on the flute with no ghost of emotion to disturb him.

Although written during the war they are an anticipation of the
immediately post-war period of deliberate silliness in the arts. This
silliness was sometimes almost inspired--as in the case of that
admirable figure Erik Satie--but for the most part it had the flavour
of an over-repeated practical joke. There is little doubt that it was
a reaction against both the real and the false heroics of the
preceding years. Heroics in music were apt to be all too reminiscent
of the panache of 1914, and music-hall repartee was not unnaturally
preferred to an oration. The logical spirit of 'I go to the theatre to
make me laugh--after all there is enough sadness in life already
without having to pay for it' became adopted towards all the arts.
Unfortunately, music is not very well adapted to wit--as apart from
the good humour of a composer like Haydn--and the only type of humour
possible in music is buffoonery. A drearily forced wit and a species
of intellectual and self-conscious buffoonery are the dominant
literary characteristics of Stravinsky's wartime works.

Far be it from me to support the attitude of injured patriotism,
almost, that so many critics take up when faced with the insignificant
facetiousness of so much wartime music. Historical catastrophes can
only become material for art when viewed in perspective. The only
great treatments of historical and political events in music,
Mussorgsky's operas, deal with periods remote from his own. Even the
Russian revolutionary films were made some time after the situations
they celebrated were a fait accompli, and the finest of them,
_Potemkin_ and _La Nouvelle Babylone_, were constructed round the 1905
revolution and the Paris Commune respectively--revolutions easier to
use as artistic material because they were not only separated from the
present period but were also unsuccessful.

An artist must either take part in action or withdraw from it
entirely. He cannot glorify it from outside. One can sympathize with
the artist who enters with gusto into warfare and also with the artist
who is a conscientious objector. But the artist who puts not himself
but his art at the service of warfare, the composer who writes battle
hymns, and the novelist who indulges in bellicose propaganda--those
are the figures who should rightly incur the dangers of the trenches
and the rigours of solitary confinement. When the death of some
thousands seems to serve no other purpose than to inspire figures like
Lord Northcliffe and James Douglas to an even purpler prose, and the
sound of gunfire can be heard at the breakfast table, it is small
wonder that the artist should turn aside to write lullabys for his cat
or to record the adventures of the old colonel who never succeeded in
shooting anything.

In Stravinsky's case the reaction against excess and brutality of any
kind, particularly heroic excess and patriotic brutality, that every
artist must feel during war time, coincided with the period in his
career when he himself had already reached the limits of excess and
brutality achievable in his own medium. He had therefore a double
reason for reaction. It is typical of the composer that his reaction
should have been spectacular. The gargantuan forces of _Le Sacre_ were
reduced not to the sober dimensions of the classic orchestra, but to
the mere handful of instruments called for by _Pribaoutki_ and
_L'Histoire du Soldat_.

A work like _Renard_, though it may seem a reaction against the
earlier ballets, is linked to them by its use of Russian material and
by its concentration on purely rhythmic devices. But there is a
significant difference between the niggling use of rhythm in
Stravinsky's nursery-rhyme period and the orgiastic use of rhythm in
his barbaric period. In _Le Sacre_ rhythm is dissociated from its
melodic and harmonic components for the purposes of emphatic
expression, and the same may be said of the orchestration. It is used
not abstractly but nervously and emotionally, and the lack of any
intrusive melodic element is only a perverted and negative example of
romanticism designed to give to the rhythm and orchestration a more
romantically barbaric quality. In the nursery works of Stravinsky
rhythm is dissected for dissection's sake--it is no longer used even
in its lowest form, the purely physical. The glorious period of 'the
objective investigation of aural phenomena' has begun. Music, from
being an ordered succession of sounds, has become a matter of
'sonorities', and anyone who can produce a brightly coloured brick of
unusual shape is henceforth hailed as an architect.

In _Renard_ the obsession with rhythmic jigsaw puzzles is still tinged
with the old national colour, though the Russian folk dance is by now
no longer a live and kicking peasant but a dead kulak whose corpse is
so much material for a lecture by the dissecting surgeon. The same
type of fragmentary folk material is, however, put to far more
significant use in _Les Noces_ where the national spirit makes an
impressive and galvanic death struggle. _Les Noces_ is one of the
masterpieces of this period and possibly the only really important
work that Stravinsky has given us. It stands on one side of his main
output, though, and will be more fully considered in the chapter on
exotic influences.

Although _Les Noces_ did not actually appear until 1923 it was
conceived and practically finished in 1917, and by the time we reach
_L'Histoire du Soldat_, written in 1918, the remnant of vitality
provided by the Russian folk song is gone, and the material used is
less picturesque and more international. The Russian folk dance gives
way to the pasodobl of the street band, the polka of the musical box,
and the valse of the mechanical piano. The constant rhythmic changes,
which had some logic when applied to the asymmetrical line of the
Russian folk song, acquire a new perversity when attached to the
left-right-left and the one-two-three-hop of the wooden soldiers'
march and the baby's polka.

The valse, ragtime and tango which the soldier plays on his violin are
not parodies like the polkas of Walton and Berners, nor are they meant
to have the Ren Clair-like evocative significance, the bal-musette
sentimentality of the valses of Auric. They are like the familiar
objects, the bottle of wine, the guitar, and the pack of cards used by
the Cubist painters because their very familiarity would draw added
attention to their geometrical distortion. To dance to these movements
is really as absurd as it would be to read the news in the sections of
_Le Journal_ incorporated by Picasso or Juan Gris in one of their
'abstracts'. Stravinsky was quite right to protest against Massine
using the _Ragtime_--a work of much the same type, and of roughly the
same period--for dancing purposes. The _Ragtime_, like the piano _Rag
Music_, is an abstract pattern created out of the raw material of
certain syncopated devices. It has no connection whatsoever with
either the technique or the emotional world of jazz.

_L'Histoire du Soldat_ is chiefly of interest as the most elaborate
and convincing work of Stravinsky's abstract period, that is to say,
the period in which he uses popular and humorous material for the
purposes of abstract rhythmical dissection. The abstraction of these
nursery-rhyme works is more significant than their buffoonery, for
there is singularly little geniality or gusto about their
self-conscious clowning.

The paraphernalia of the harlequinade are not of necessity humorous in
themselves. One man may laugh like a child when he sees the red-hot
poker applied to the butcher's inviting rump, another man may use the
occasion for a lecture on the origins of laughter, with some notes on
the connection between sadistic impulses and the risible faculties in
the mentality of the infant. In the hands of Stravinsky the red-hot
poker becomes the ruler of the maths master. We should not allow the
outr orchestration of this work--always, as with Stravinsky, the most
accomplished side of it--to blind us to its essentially coldblooded
abstraction.

Apart from the two short chorales, which point forward to his
neo-classical period, _L'Histoire du Soldat_ consists almost entirely
of an objective juggling with rhythm, or rather metre, for there can
be no true rhythm where there is no melodic life. Like Gertrude Stein,
Stravinsky chooses the drabbest and least significant phrases for the
material of his experiments, because if the melodic line had life
dissection would be impossible. A statement like 'Everyday they were
gay there, they were regularly gay there everyday' etc., from Gertrude
Stein's _Helen Furr_ and _Georgine Skeene_, has no particular value as
content, least of all is it meant to be gay. It is merely material for
a fantasia in rhythmic values whose effect would be equally
appreciated by someone with no knowledge of English whatsoever.
Similarly, the melodic fragments in _L'Histoire du Soldat_ are
completely meaningless in themselves. They are merely successions of
notes that can conveniently be divided up into groups of three, five
and seven and set against other mathematical groupings.

The melodic poverty, or even nullity, of such a movement as the _Petit
Concert_ reaches its logical development in the final section, a
cadenza for drums alone that is actually the most consistently
satisfying feature of the whole work. It represents the goal towards
which the earlier compositions of this period had been tending.
Harmony, melody, all that could give the least emotional significance
to his music, has been banished in the interests of abstraction, and
musical purity has been achieved by a species of musical castration.
The formula of sound for sound's sake is here reduced to its ludicrous
essentials, and there is no further progress possible on these lines.
The percussion solo which ends _L'Histoire du Soldat_ has much the
same satisfaction of finality as the map of that pioneer of
abstraction The Bellman, which was, we are told, 'a perfect and
absolute blank'.

Unlike Debussy, who was strong enough to conquer his early mannerisms
and put his revolutionary technique to a flexibly expressive use,
Stravinsky was caught in the mechanics of his technical mannerisms,
and the deliberate exploitation of certain facets of musical thought
for their own sake led him to a definite blind alley from which there
was no escape except by a deliberate reaction. He is like a motorist
who spends all his time with his head inside the bonnet. _Chi ha
vissuto per amore, per amore si mor_ ('Those who live for love are
killed by love') sings the street musician in Puccini's _Il
Tabarro_--and he might have added: 'Those who live for technique are
killed by technique.'


(e) Synthetic Melody


The series of reactions by which Stravinsky has progressed have been
imposed upon him not only by the exigencies of fashion, but by his
complete lack of any melodic faculty. Even his greatest admirers, I
think, would admit that from the pale Wagnerian reflections of the
Scherzo Fantastique (_La Vie des Abeilles_) to the monotonous peasant
fragments of _Les Noces_ there is nothing in his music that can be
described as a typical Stravinsky tune. We can recognize him
immediately by his scoring, by his rhythm and by the setting he gives
to his themes, but the themes themselves are either traditional or
characterless.

During the Impressionist period the excitement aroused by the new
world of colour that had been opened up led to an almost complete
neglect of the expressive possibilities of line, and melody through
its traditional association with sentiment was tarred with the same
brush as sentimentality. Melody came to be regarded merely as one of
the elements in music, whereas it is not only the most important
element but an all-embracing one. Harmony without melody is only an
aural tickling, and rhythm without melody is not even rhythm--it is
only metre, and can have at the most a vaguely mumbo-jumbo appeal,
with no true musical significance. A melody, though, is a complete
work of art in itself and the unaccompanied Gregorian chants still
remain among the most perfect and satisfying achievements in music.

A composer may have a rudimentary harmonic sense or a rudimentary
rhythmic sense, and yet remain a great composer on the strength of his
line alone. To a composer gifted with melodic genius there may be
problems of technique but there can be no problems of style, for a
vital melody not only has intrinsic value but carries with it the
implications of its harmonic, rhythmic and contrapuntal treatment. A
complete and arbitrary change of style is unthinkable to a great
melodist, for to him melody is a living thing, a part of himself--it
is a tree which follows a natural growth and not a piece of wood which
can be painted any colour, or used for any old piece of furniture. A
composer like Tchaikovsky, for example, who, whatever his limitations
as a symphonist, is undoubtedly one of the world's greatest melodists,
shows no abrupt change of style at any moment in his career. His
progress as a composer can be gauged by the increasing richness of his
melodic powers. _La Belle au Bois Dormant_ is a better work than _Le
Lac des Cygnes_ because melodically it is both more fertile and
powerful, and the increasing richness of the harmony and orchestration
is not an elaborate faade which conceals structural weaknesses, it is
naturally conditioned by this melodic improvement.

Although a melodic gift does not force a composer to change his style
it places no bounds on his developments, as does harmonic and rhythmic
specialization. Delius obviously reached the extreme limit of what he
could express by harmonic means by the time he had written _The Song
of the High Hills_--or even earlier--and Stravinsky obviously reached
the extreme limit of rhythmic expression in _Les Noces_. But a
composer like Verdi, whose strength lay in his melodic line, arrived
at no such cul-de-sac, either technical or emotional. He was not
reduced to repeating his earlier manner like Delius, or to reacting
against it like Stravinsky. He was able to pursue a logical process of
development which resulted in those two masterpieces of expressive
force and technical skill--_Otello_ and _Falstaff_--both written in
his seventies. It may be pleaded that the greater richness of the
orchestral accompaniment is what chiefly distinguishes these operas
from his earlier works, but, as in the case of Tchaikovsky, this
richness is merely the logical counterpart of the greater power and
flexibility of the melodic line.

One of the more deplorable results of the so-called speeding up of
modern life is the credit for vitality given to an artist who
satisfies the jaded appetite of his mondaine public by frequent
changes of style. In any other age but the present it would be a
truism to point out that frequent changes of styles argue a low
vitality and undeveloped personality on the part of the artist--an
inability to exploit more than the surface texture of his medium. When
the mentality of the spoilt child who kicks his meccano to pieces out
of boredom is valued above that of the man with the skill and patience
involved in building a bridge, it is clear that some examination not
only of the methods but also the impulses of the modern artist is
gravely needed. With the minor Parisian figures, the camp followers of
Diaghileff, it is fairly safe to assume that lack of individuality and
desire for chic were at the back of their changes of style, but with
Stravinsky we may charitably assume that the reasons were more
technical, for to do him justice there has always been an almost
hieratic earnestness about his apparently facetious technical
juggling. Les Six performed their little tricks with all the quips and
cranks of the cheerily anecdotal nothing-up-my-sleeve type of
conjurer, but Stravinsky approached his public with the pontifical
solemnity of the oriental illusionist.

We have seen how the dissection of harmony and rhythm in the
Impressionist period for expressive purposes was followed in
Stravinsky's wartime period by the dissection of harmony and rhythm
for abstract purposes. The one element that hitherto had not been
dissected as such was melody. Melody, in fact, had been classed with
the 'choses fades'. But given the type of mentality that can say with
all sincerity 'toute raction est vraie', it is not surprising to find
the once-despised melodic element suddenly enthroned as a 'chose
vivante'. The time travelling of the _Pulcinella_ ballet probably
provided the impetus for Stravinsky's neo-classical period, which,
apart from the adoption of eighteenth-century forms and titles, is
chiefly noticeable for its attempt to create melody by synthetic
means. Unfortunately melody cannot be learnt like counterpoint, nor is
it capable of either dissection or synthetic manufacture. One cannot
create a creature of flesh and blood out of fossil fragments.

It need hardly be pointed out that the sequences, cadences, and other
stylistic features of the best classical tunes are not their most
important element. They take their place in the scheme of things, they
have a formal and even emotional logic, but they are the faade, not
the whole building. It is the easiest possible thing to take four
bars out of one of the best-constructed and most moving of Mozart's
arias and find that in themselves they have remarkably little value.
This, in fact, is what Stravinsky often does without, however,
realizing that he is confusing the periwig with the face beneath it.
The turns of phrase that occur at the end of a melody with much the
same conventional beauty and constructional logic as a Corinthian
capital occurring at the top of a column are taken by Stravinsky,
isolated from their surroundings and plastered over the faade with a
complete disregard of their true function and a complete inability to
add anything to them except a little incongruous colour. Lest I should
be thought to be exaggerating the confusion between eighteenth-century
thought and eighteenth-century mannerism exhibited by Stravinsky and
his followers, I should like to recall the occasion when Diaghileff
included as a symphonic interlude at the Russian ballet Mozart's
_Musical Joke_, a brilliant parody of the stupid and mechanical
application of eighteenth-century formulas to insignificant and
ludicrous material. No one saw the joke except Diaghileff himself. His
entourage took the piece with perfect gravity as an example of
classicism to be admired and imitated.

To create even a synthetic melody--such as the one in the slow
movement of Ravel's concerto--to any degree of satisfaction requires a
power of sustained linear construction which it is only too clear
Stravinsky does not possess. His melodic style has always been marked
by extreme shortwindedness and a curious inability to get away from
the principal note of the tune. This was no matter in his earlier
ballets where the abrupt fragmentary phrases and the repetition of one
insistent note emphasized a barbaric quality which would have been
destroyed by the introduction of a long and well-made melody. But the
essence of a classical melody is continuity of line, contrast and
balance of phrases, and the ability to depart from the nodal point in
order that the ultimate return to it should have significance and
finality.

That Stravinsky's shortwinded methods are incapable of producing even
a satisfactory synthesis of this type of melody we can see by taking a
concrete example, the theme which opens the slow movement of his Piano
Concerto--a movement which may be said to set the type of Stravinsky's
adagios for the next few years. It opens with a two-bar phrase in the
eighteenth-century manner--commonplace enough, but still, capable of
yielding results of a certain distinction in the hands of a composer
such as Vivaldi. Stravinsky, however, is unable to continue this
phrase or even find a contrasting two bars. He repeats it with a
slight rhythmic variation--the only type of treatment that comes
easily to him--twists its tail for a moment and then lets it fall
gradually back on itself, the process of extinction being artificially
held up by the mechanical application of sequential figures, which
derive not from eighteenth-century lyricism, but from
eighteenth-century passage work.

The repetition of the theme, by the orchestra, adds even less to the
very insignificant content of the opening phrase which, like
Stravinsky's earlier themes, is restricted to a small interval
centred round the one note. The second subject strikes a more
convincing atmosphere at the outset because, consisting of a little
minor phrase repeated three times over a double ostinato, it takes us
back to the peasant mentality of the old Stravinsky. But here again
the phrase is illogically extended by eighteenth-century passage work,
whose origin is not thematic, but harmonic. That is to say in a quick
eighteenth-century movement for a keyboard instrument the harmonies
are often split up into toccata-like figures for the sake of the
texture alone, the figures thus produced having no significant content
as pure melody. Their raison d'tre is the harmony that lies beneath
them, and to use them as Stravinsky does as melodic material over a
totally different harmonic base is a complete misunderstanding of
their value and function, and a convincing proof, if any such is
needed, of the artificial and synthetic quality of his alleged
classicism.

A phrase like 'Ladies and gentlemen, unaccustomed as I am to public
speaking' is flat enough in all conscience, but if it occurs at the
beginning of a speech as a prelude to a remark of some weight we can
accept it readily enough as an unavoidable and inoffensive formula;
but we can hardly be expected to keep patience with a speaker whose
whole oration consists of a portentously solemn Mene Mene Tekel
Upharsin delivery of a Stein-like fantasia such as 'Ladies and gentle
ladies and gentlemenu-manumissionaries unaccustomed as I am to a
Siamese customary una-menu-mina-mo ('alf a mo' ladies) to a ladies'
public bar and gentlemen's speakeasy I mean to easy public speak
I-N-G spells ING.'

Stravinsky's later slow movements, it is true, show a greater
flexibility--due mainly to the greater vocabulary of formulas that are
drawn upon--but the artificial method of construction remains the
same. In his quick movements a certain effect of logic and continuity
is obtained by adopting the shape and type of an eighteenth-century
toccata, but the form thus achieved is purely extrinsic, and has none
of the intrinsic form and inevitability of shape which is independent
of formalism. Like the material itself the form is synthetic.

Once we have realized the synthetic nature of Stravinsky's
neo-classicism we can follow, step by step, the various applications
of this method to material drawn from different and later sources. To
the melodic formulas drawn from Bach which are used in the Piano
Concerto are added, in later works, fragments from Beethoven, Bellini,
Chopin, Tchaikovsky and even Johann Strauss--who enters with ludicrous
effect into Jocasta's air at the beginning of the second act of
_Oedipus Rex_--while to synthetic calm succeeds synthetic drama, and
to synthetic austerity synthetic charm.

Stravinsky is essentially a decorator, not an architect, and he must
always find new shapes to decorate. _Oedipus Rex_, _Apollon Musagte_,
_Le Baiser de la Fe_, may differ in outward shape, but the mentality
behind their fabrication remains the same. They are not so much music
as renowned impersonations of music. _Oedipus_ has all the
paraphernalia of a tragedy, and the only thing wrong with it is the
complete lack of any genuine pity or genuine terror. It attempts to
move us by reviving the dramatic restraint and formalism of Gluck
without realizing that this austerity is apparent to us at the present
time, but was in no way apparent to Gluck himself, who, on the
contrary, sought the most passionate form of expression his technique
and period allowed him. It is surprising to find Jean Cocteau, who so
truly remarked, 'One may derive art from life, but not from art',
associated with a work which is so triumphant a proof of his dictum.
_Oedipus_ is a synthetically emotional work, created by the use of
type-material associated in our mind with the genuine emotion of
classical opera.

There is no essential difference between the mock tragedy of _Oedipus_
and the mock gaiety of the _Piano Capriccio_. They are both examples
of frustrated ectogenesis. The finale of the _Capriccio_ imitates the
sound and the methods of gay music without once achieving the quality
of gaiety. Jazzed-up Johann Strauss, with neither the sentimental
appeal of Strauss nor the exhilaration of jazz, it has the depressing
effect of a gramophone record of someone laughing.

The same methods of fabrication, more openly avowed, can be seen in
the ballet _Le Baiser de la Fe_ where a series of Tchaikovsky's
lesser piano pieces are treated in the Procrustean manner once applied
to Pergolesi's innocent charms. Here the neglected element of melodic
charm is exploited with all the mechanical solemnity of _Oedipus_,
though the necessary element of chic and time travelling is provided
by the sour and deliberate harmonic distortions of such a saccharine
melody as 'None but the Weary Heart'. The effect is like a
collaboration between Marcus Stone and Picabia, and _Le Baiser de la
Fe_ is perhaps the most surrealist of his works, combining the
nationalist charm of _L'Oiseau de Feu_ with the neo-classical
solemnities of his later period. This analysis of charm is not so much
a killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs, as a dissection of
the egg that might have produced another Golden Bird. At the same time
the very fact that the thematic material is drawn from the always
fecund Tchaikovsky gives to _Le Baiser de la Fe_ a certain character,
which is lacking in the later works, such as the Violin Concerto.
Stravinsky's brilliant sense of orchestral colour, which for some
years he had rigorously suppressed, is here allowed full and charming
play, and has much the piquant effect of Sickert's coloured
transcriptions of Victorian engravings.

The extreme lack of thematic distinction shown in the first movement
of the Violin Concerto--which in this respect recalls the earlier
Concertino for string quartet--and the negative nature of the finale
of that superb example of Musica Celestia the _Symphonie des
Psaumes_--which bears much the relation to true melody that the finale
of _L'Histoire du Soldat_ does to true rhythm--suggest that Stravinsky
has reached a turning point in his career similar to that which he
reached after the war. But while it is interesting to speculate about
the future of most contemporary composers of note, the mentality
revealed by Stravinsky, both in his compositions and in his spoken
pronouncements, gives us little hope that his future reactions will
be based on anything more urgent and compelling than the exigencies of
vogue.

As an example of Stravinsky's attitude towards reaction for its own
sake I may quote an instance of his urging young composers to give
their tunes to the violins and not to the trumpet on the grounds that
too many people had been writing tunes for the trumpet in the last few
years. So might Patou and Poiret forecast the colours for the coming
season. It does not seem to have occurred to him that orchestration
has any relation to the technical nature or expressive quality of a
given theme, that one writes for the cor anglais because that is the
tone colour one wants, and not because it happens to be a Tuesday.
Similarly Stravinsky's followers will say with all the withering
self-satisfaction of those that have caught the last seat in a crowded
bus, 'It's no use writing that sort of harmony _now_', and will
themselves admittedly falsify their originally conceived harmonies
purely with a view to giving them a more strictly contemporary
quality.

It really is of no great significance which period of music Stravinsky
chooses to exploit next. His time travelling is like the space
travelling of a character like Douglas Fairbanks who finds a golf club
and an American bar wherever he goes, whether it be Malaya or
Madagascar. At one time we were told that the truth lay in Bach, at
another that it lay in Tchaikovsky, and if tomorrow Stravinsky took to
producing synthetic Grieg--and there are remoter possibilities--no
doubt we should be told that it was towards the melodic freshness and
harmonic charm of the Norwegian composer that Stravinsky had been
aiming all his life. The 'chose vivante' of today becomes the 'chose
fade' of tomorrow, and when every reaction is equally true then every
reaction becomes equally insignificant.

The somewhat melancholy catalogue of Stravinsky's later works has been
worth examining not so much for their individual merit as for their
significance as types. Like Diaghileff, Stravinsky stands for more
than he himself has achieved, and it is as a group soul or _Zeitgeist_
that he is a figure of weight. The enormous influence exerted by his
technical dexterity, and previously won prestige, has undoubtedly
helped on a movement which, although it might have existed without
him, would not have received such sharp definition.

It is not necessary to study in detail the reactions of his various
Parisian and would-be Parisian followers, who, with touching
unanimity, mimic his different movements and changes of style much as
the minor painters who group themselves round Picasso automatically
switch over from 'abstracts' to Ingres, and back again, in accordance
with the whims of their leader. They are like the confidante in _The
Critic_ who imitated her mistress even to the point of coming in mad,
dressed in white satin. To examine seriously their synthetic
imitations of an already synthetic product would be to lose all sense
of proportion.

At the same time we should distinguish between Stravinsky's use of
pastiche--which may more accurately, though laboriously, be described
as the synthetic creation of music by a rearrangement of previously
existing formulas--and the more obvious use of pastiche in the
accepted sense of the word such as we find in the parodies of Walton
and Berners, or the genre pieces of Ravel. Nor should we confuse it
with the natural classicism of Prokofieff whose music has from the
outset shown affinities with the academic generation of Russian music
represented by Glazunoff and Medtner. The contrast between _Daphnis
and Chloe_ and _Bolero_, between _Alla and Lolly_ and _L'Enfant
Prodigue_ is significant as showing a general trend in modern music,
but it is Stravinsky who is the key-figure of our times. As Mr. Cecil
Gray has rightly remarked, if he had not existed it would have been
necessary to have invented him. The only thing that prevents him from
becoming a lay figure on which to drape the latest intellectual
fashions is a pleasantly atavistic trait which peeps through the
austerities of his later period much as the homely African features of
Francis Williams, the eighteenth-century Negro Scholar of Jamaica,
belie the periwig on his head and the geometrical instruments in his
hand. Like so many Russians Stravinsky has adopted and been adopted by
a Parisian intellectual world that is not his by racial right. You
cannot, or so I have been informed, scratch a Russian without finding
a Tartar, and the formula applies even to those Russians who are more
at home on the boulevard than on the steppe.

It stands to reason--as Norman Douglas would say--that the composer of
_Le Sacre_ and _Les Noces_ cannot entirely suppress his natural
leanings and genuine impulses even when these impulses have been
intellectually classed as 'choses fades'. The healthily barbaric
tradition of Russian music will insist on breaking through the chilly
austerity of his neo-classical works and the most impressive moments
in these compositions are undeniably those when he returns to the
ostinatos, the short repeated phrases, the primitive incantations and
the rhythmical emphasis of his early ballets; such moments as the
kaleidoscopic cadenza in the first movement of the piano
concerto--which recalls _Les Noces_--the fine Gloria in _Oedipus_, the
sombre pulsing on two notes that accompanies the opening and final
chorus in the same work, and the closing bars of _Apollo_ with their
repetition at varied rhythmic intervals of the same little figure.
This last device is Stravinsky's favourite method of bringing a
movement to an end, and can be traced back to the first tableau of
_Petrushka_ and the first tableau of _Le Sacre_. The final page of
_Apollo_ has an entirely different tempo and quality of sound, but in
spite of its suavity it displays essentially the same primitive use of
rhythmic emphasis to achieve finality. This effect may be compared to
the use of the word Shantih in the final section of Eliot's _Waste
Land_ and the most successful example of it in Stravinsky's work is to
be found in the final pages of _Les Noces_ where a short phrase for
bass voice is presented in curtailed form by the pianos and finally
reduced to three strokes on the bell recalling the Shantih, Shantih,
Shantih, that brings the _Waste Land_ of Eliot to an equally
impressive end.

It is typical of Stravinsky's art that to achieve an air of finality
he should curtail a phrase and not extend it. It is an essentially
primitive attitude and in spite of his dazzling and outward
sophistication Stravinsky is essentially primitive and nave. His real
talent is _au fond_ nationalist and illustrative, and it is only the
forces of mechanical reaction and vogue, that we have been examining
in this chapter, that have slowly driven him to being the apostle of
abstraction and internationalism in music.

Although it is a truism to say that art has no boundaries and that
music is the purest of all of the arts because it is
non-representational, it is worth while pausing for a moment and
asking whether any but a small proportion of the world's greatest
music can be called international and whether any of it can be called
abstract.


(f) Abstraction in Music


Nothing is more typical of the superficial nature of most modern or
rather modernist criticism than its slipshod use of the word abstract,
particularly as applied to music.

The word abstract has, of course, a certain definite significance when
applied to painting, and it is a tenable hypothesis that the best
modern paintings and sculptures have been abstract. Even so it would
be reasonable to point out that, by denying himself realism, the
painter, though he thus avoids the pitfalls of anecdotage at the same
time cuts himself off from the variety and significance of forms that
intelligently used realism can provoke. The modified realism of
Czanne can be of far greater interest from the purely formal point of
view than the abstractions of Leger; but even though we may grant that
the highest form of plastic art consists in a significant organization
of shapes devoid of all purely representational sentiment and literary
association, it by no means follows that this hasty and sweeping
thesis holds good for music. It is all very well to hammer out a
theory, however mistaken, that applies to an art functioning in space:
it is quite another matter to apply this to an art that functions in
time. Most of the modern fallacies about abstraction, literary
sentiment, representationalism, romantic contamination, etc. in music
are due to ignoring this elementary distinction.

A picture with a narrative element in it is vaguely unpleasing not
because it is literary, but because it is trying to represent time by
cutting a section through it in space. _The Last Day in the Old Home_,
for example, relies for its appeal not only on its own
representational qualities and arrangement of forms, but on the
associative and imaginative powers of the spectator, who is
irresistibly led to reconstruct the events that have led up to this
moment of time, and to speculate sympathetically on the future. The
interest of the spectator is forced away from the scene as it occurs
in space to the event as it occurred in time. The picture is,
therefore, in the nature of an uncompleted sentence. The artist has
only suggested a line of thought and depends for his final effect on
an element of time that he cannot define in his own medium, that of
space. The same incident, however, could obviously occur in a novel
and be perfectly satisfactory, for then it would be one of a series of
events in time and could balance the other events from the formal
point of view, acquiring architectural value, as well as sentimental
appeal.

Conversely, a pair of boots painted by a master like Van Gogh is a
perfectly finished artistic statement in space, whereas the most
detailed literary description of a pair of boots would hardly have
much artistic value except, perhaps, as a prelude to the treatment of
boots in time, as it were, by attaching to them a series of events
like those that befell Andersen's goloshes.

Neither of the two paintings mentioned above is exactly an ideal
subject for musical inspiration. Not even Strauss, that master of
realism in music, could produce the musical equivalent of Van Gogh's
boots. At the same time, while the prospect of a Strauss symphonic
poem based on Martineau's _chef-d'oeuvre_ may seem too grisly to be
envisaged, it is undeniable that he might achieve something by trying
to express the underlying emotion of the scene, and by attempting to
follow the sequence of implied events in terms of musical form. The
impure picture, in fact, is nearer to music because of its emotional
appeal, and its time element.

It is highly undesirable, of course, that the time element in musical
design should be put to the purposes of sentimental narrative, but the
mere fact that it can be so used distinguishes it from plastic design.
The repetitions of a certain underlying curve in an abstract or
representational picture have no dramatic content because they occur
in the same movement of time--one's eye can choose which it looks at
first, or take in the various statements of the same form
simultaneously. But the return of the first subject after the
development in a symphonic movement has an inevitable touch of the
dramatic, merely through the passage of time that has elapsed since
its first statement. Time, in fact, is rather vulgarly dramatic; it is
the sentimentalist of the dimensions, and small wonder that _visuels_,
like Wyndham Lewis, feel that it is occupying too much space in our
lives.

Quite apart from this expressive time element, which grows in effect
in direct proportion to the length of the work--the reminiscences of
earlier themes in _Gtterdmmerung_ having a more powerfully
associative and expressive quality than similar reminiscences in
_Valkyrie_, for example--there is a naturally expressive element in
all types of music, whether primitive or sophisticated, that it would
be unnecessary to insist on, or even mention, in any other age but our
own. The type of modern composer and critic who would have us believe
that the greatest music consists of an abstract succession of
tastefully arranged notes is fond of contrasting the pure classicism
of the eighteenth century with the decadent romanticism of the
nineteenth century, enthroning the pure Mozart as hero and casting the
impure Wagner in the role of villain. Music--or so we are led to
understand--was written in an objective spirit until the nineteenth
century, when contamination from romantic sources set in, and
composers, led by Beethoven, began to exploit emotional expression,
pictorialism, their own personalities and other extra-musical
qualities.

Mr. Alan Pryce-Jones has actually gone so far as to say that 'the
present-day function of a tune is to prompt emotion, and its power to
do so is almost entirely a legacy of Beethoven'. He has evidently,
like so many critics, mistaken the cool restraint of the
eighteenth-century masters for a deliberate frigidity and not troubled
to look further back than this much-vaunted golden period of music. To
borrow a phrase from Edmund Dulac, he is like a man who would write a
history of the horse by giving us a list of famous Derby winners.

Even if one were to grant for a moment that the greatest music of the
eighteenth century is abstract and unemotional, to assume that this
holds good for the earlier classics argues a complete lack of
historical perspective. Actually, the subjective spirit in which
Wagner sat down to write an opera is a far more common attitude in the
history of music than the objective spirit in which Bach sat down to
write a concerto. Emotional and romantic expression in music is not a
late and decadent excrescence, but a natural tradition, that only
became temporarily eclipsed in a few minor eighteenth-century works.

Music, far from being an abstract art is as naturally emotional as
painting is naturally representational. If we speak of Mozart as a
pure composer it is only in the sense that we speak of Renoir as a
pure painter. _Figaro_ is pure compared to _Elektra_, just as _La
Premire Sortie_ is pure compared to _When Did You Last See Your
Father?_ but that does not mean for a moment that Mozart or Renoir
believed in abstraction in art. Mozart's best music, as is well known,
was found unpleasing by many of his contemporaries because of its
intensely melancholy and romantic nature. Those present-day critics
who see in Mozart nothing but a glorified craftsman making a concord
of sweet sounds in a spirit of angelic detachment offer convincing
proof of their complete insensitiveness to all save the purely
stylistic aspects of music.

The romantic and emotional nature of music is latent in its origins.
The earliest forms of music were, as far as can be ascertained from
history and from the examination of still primitive races,
unaccompanied folk songs and ritual drumming. A folk song, it stands
to reason, is expressive and even programmatic. The best examples
represent in embryo, as it were, the balance between emotional and
formal content that has been struck by the greatest symphonists. As
for primitive instrumental music, need one point out that the negro
beating a tomtom is aiming not so much at an abstract dissection of
rhythm in the manner of Stravinsky, as at the creation of an
altogether unobjective state of physical excitement?

Without in any way wishing to link the primitive origins of secular
music with the primitive origins of religious music, one may recognize
that in spite of its deliberately restricted manner Gregorian chant
still remains one of the most moving expressions of the musical
spirit. As befits religious music, the emotion is to some extent
impersonal, that is to say it embraces the individual in a communal
feeling. But there is a world of difference between this impersonal
expression of a devotional spirit and a cold objectivity. If it be
pleaded that an unaccompanied vocal line, whether sacred or profane,
hardly provides a parallel to the later complications of instrumental
and choral music, one has only to look at the great period of choral
writing to realize the folly of those who would hold up pure music as
the classic norm. The religious music of the sixteenth century
displays a great concentration on technical device, but this
concentration is not objective, it is adapted to deeply expressive
ends. The emotion may vary from the serenity of Palestrina to the
passion of Vittoria--which recalls El Greco in its violence--but it is
an integral part of the music. To suggest that these masters were
merely fabricating musical material in the spirit of Hindemith and
later Stravinsky, would be pure impertinence.

The same lack of objective spirit is to be found in the secular and
instrumental music of the period which shows, particularly in England,
a vein of romanticism and pictorialism which anticipates the least
austere of nineteenth-century composers. A title like the _Pathetic
Symphony_ is looked on as an example of decadent romanticism by
purists who have forgotten Dowland's _Lachrymae or Seven Teares
figured in Seven Passionate Pavans_. Ravel's _La Valle des Cloches_
is considered too pictorial and onomatopoeic, yet as a piece of
impressionism it is outweighed by Byrd's _The Bells_. Mussorgsky's
word painting is considered a sacrifice of pure melody to
extra-musical interests, yet he cannot be held to have exceeded
Purcell in this respect. It is true that with the development of
musical instruments grows the development of display with its
inevitable thinning out of musical content. The Fitzwilliam Virginal
Book, for example, contains a number of pieces in variation form whose
aimless and facile figuration foreshadows the pattern making of the
minor eighteenth-century harpsichordists; but these are, by common
consent, the least interesting and characteristic pieces in the
collection. They do not typify the spirit of their time.

Objective pattern making is, roughly speaking, a product of the
eighteenth century and it marks not an artistic progress, but a social
and spiritual decline. Those who listened to a motet such as
Vittoria's _O Vos Omnes_ took part in it spiritually if not actually;
those who listened to a madrigal such as Weelkes _O Care thou wilt
despatch me_ as likely as not were all actually performing it--they
each took a part and the part was worth taking. The same is true of
the seventeenth-century consorts of viols whose decline is so lamented
by those two splendid critics Roger North and Thomas Mace. With the
advent of the professional violinist, and the decline of the amateur
viol player, part writing gave way to fireworks and pattern making.[4]
Music ceased to be a vital and spiritual experience and degenerated
into a mere aural decoration--as which it is defined by that typical
child of his time, Dr. Burney.

[Footnote 4: For an excellent short account of the decline of music
during this period see Peter Warlock's introduction to Purcell's 3, 4,
and 5 Part Fantasias for Strings (Curwen).]

If you play music in your home, then you choose music of emotional
content and technical interest; but if you are going to treat music as
a background or ornament to social life in general, such qualities
would be a positive disadvantage and all you require is something that
is brilliant, easy and consonant. The eighteenth century produced a
mass of such occasional music with nothing to recommend it except a
certain elegance of style. It is only this elegance combined with an
absence of actual vulgarity that entitles it to any more serious
consideration than the average present-day foxtrot. (In absolving the
eighteenth-century minor composers from vulgarity we must remember
that musical vulgarity though a pungent enough smell to the composer's
contemporaries, is a quickly fading scent. It may only be that our
noses are not keen enough to catch the faint odour of corruption. The
dung of today becomes the potpourri of tomorrow. The vulgarities of
Auber have already taken on a period charm, like Victorian wool-work,
and it is only a matter of time before the vulgarities of Wagner and
Liszt achieve in turn an old lavender quality.)

Although the greatest achievements of the eighteenth century have
probably never been surpassed, the general level of everyday music has
probably never been lower. There is a certain distinction about the
minor composers of earlier periods, but the minor eighteenth-century
composers are merely garrulous and perfunctory. The same is true of
the minor works of even such great masters as Mozart and Haydn. The
trouble with modern enthusiasts for the purity of eighteenth-century
music is their apparent inability to distinguish between romantic and
subjective masterpieces, like Mozart's G Minor Quintet and G Minor
Symphony, and the many divertimenti that he cynically turned out in
order to pay for the rent and a little champagne.

The pices d'occasion of this period are sufficiently lacking in
intellectual and emotional content to justify the admiring epithets of
abstract and objective applied by the present-day exponents of purity
in music. But they also achieve the well-known combination of purity
and dullness. In fact, it may safely be said that the only classical
music that is abstract is bad classical music. The Romantic movement
which is still held by a certain school of critics to have dethroned
purely musical interests in favour of dramatic expression and literary
associations actually was a perfectly reasonable reaction back to the
true tradition of music, a tradition of far greater force and a far
greater duration than the elegant divagation provided by all but the
finest eighteenth-century masters. The reaction inevitably took an
extreme turn with the result that perfunctory sentiment was apt to
take the place of perfunctory pattern making. Classical technique
became confounded with classical coldness, and the desire to achieve
romantic atmosphere and warmth at all costs led to an unnecessary
overthrowal of formal devices and to the creation of a false
distinction between classicism and romanticism that has lasted to
this day.

We are still apt to regard formalism and emotional expression as
opposed interests instead of as an indissoluble whole. That is why at
the present time even sympathetic critics are sometimes puzzled by the
combination of mathematical methods and melodramatic atmosphere to be
found in so much atonal music. If we were to forget the arbitrary
distinction between classic and romantic we should realize that a
composer like Alban Berg, who uses a carefully wrought and alembicated
technique for highly expressive ends, stands nearer to the true
tradition of music as represented by the sixteenth and
seventeenth-century masters than any of the self-conscious classicists
of the eighteenth, or the self-conscious romanticists of the
nineteenth centuries. Berg's music itself would have sounded strange
to seventeenth-century ears, but his aims were much the same as
theirs. At that period there was no divorce between intellectuality
and emotionalism. Mace, lamenting the decline of the
seventeenth-century string fantasias refers to these 'solemn and sweet
delightful ayres' not only as 'so many pathetical stories', but as
'subtle and acute argumentations'. Could one not also describe
_Pierrot Lunaire_ as a series of pathetical stories and acute
argumentations? The atonal school, whatever its faults and in spite of
its superficial air of mathematical frigidity, can in no way be
described as abstract.

(g) Erik Satie and his Musique d'ameublement


The only modern composer whose music, in its complete lack of any
romanticism, pictorialism, or dramatic atmosphere can be described as
abstract is that much-maligned and misrepresented figure, Erik Satie.
It was once said of Delius that he divided English critics into two
camps, those who did not know his works disputing the opinions of
those who did. Of Satie the same cannot be said. English critics have
been unanimous in their disapproval, and one has yet to see that their
contempt is based on any knowledge of his work as a whole.

Satie is looked upon in this country as a farceur and an incompetent
dilettante. Before examining his work, then, it is perhaps necessary
to point out that in spite of his verbal wit, and his many blagues and
cocasseries, no composer, not even Debussy, took a more essentially
serious view of his art. As for his being incompetent, we have it on
the eminent authority of Albert Roussel from whom he took lessons 'Il
n'avait rien  apprendre.... Il tait prodigieusement musicien', while
far from working in a careless and dilettante manner few composers
have devoted such unceasing labour to the revision and remoulding of
phrases and the perfection of detail--for instance, the limpid opening
bars of _Socrate_ are preceded in his notebooks by six alternative and
rejected versions of the phrase.

One cannot, it is true, add to one's musical stature by taking
thought, but if Satie's technical skill and probity of outlook do not
in themselves make him an important composer, they at least
distinguish him from the opportunists and Dadaists with whom he is
still thoughtlessly classed.

Satie's reputation as a humorist and eccentric has unfortunately
outweighed his reputation as a composer. Few people know his works,
but most people have heard of his remark 'Monsieur Ravel has refused
the Legion of Honour but all his music accepts it', or of the occasion
when he went up to Debussy after a rehearsal of the first movement of
_La Mer (De l'aube  midi sur la mer)_ and said he liked it all, but
particularly the little bit at a quarter to eleven. His verbal humour
used to overflow into his compositions to which he would add
ludicrously inappropriate titles and elaborate programmes, and some of
his most charming music is to be found in the _Aperus Dsagrables_
and the _Airs  Faire Fuir_. These, and other more fantastic titles
which were aimed at the precious pictorialism of the Impressionists
have undoubtedly had their designed effect of repelling those too
insensitive to see beyond their superficial buffoonery. However, both
those who find this type of humour agreeable, and those who find it
exasperating, should try and forget this side of Satie's mentality
when examining his music, for too great an obsession with Satie's
humour--whether in the archaic or present-day sense of the word--is
apt to distract one from realizing his position as a composer.

What chiefly distinguishes Satie from the other representatives of
post-war Parisian mentality is the fact that while they were catching
up with the times he had the no doubt gratifying sensation of seeing
the times catch up with him. Stravinsky's post-war works represent a
reaction from his pre-war activities, but Satie's are a logical
continuation of what he had been aiming at since 1900 and earlier.
When Satie starts off _Parade_ with a chorale[5] and fugue he is not
wittily reacting against the pictorialism of the previous decade--as
represented by _Petrushka_--he is quite simply following his own
established manner.

The reaction against Impressionism with its appeal to the nerves; the
insistence on line, not colour; the development of popular melodies
and forms; the revival of fugal devices--all these typical traits of
the post-war movement are already to be found in Satie's early suites
for piano duet _En Habit de Cheval_ and _Trois Morceaux en forme de
Poire_. For that reason Satie's post-war music has a sincerity and
above all an easiness which is lacking in many of his contemporaries.

He was an old practioneer amongst over-zealous students and, like an
Italian priest, could allow himself an occasional bottle of wine or a
risqu story which the English convert would regard as a lapse from
devoutness. In Socrate and other works he was able to achieve a
classical calm that was in no way due to pastiche, because there had
always been a classical element in his work, even in the early
_Gymnopdies_ and _Sarabandes_.

[Footnote 5: This chorale, together with a long penultimate movement,
is, unfortunately, not included in the piano duet arrangement.]

These pieces with their anticipation of Debussy's harmonic style have
been considered by some as a precursor of Impressionism, while others
have indignantly denied Satie's influence on Debussy, maintaining that
Satie himself had been imitating Debussy's unpublished compositions.
The point is immaterial, for Satie's method of using so-called
Impressionist harmony is entirely different from that of Debussy.
Debussy uses his chords for their own sake, Satie as an accompaniment
to a beautifully formed melodic line. The _Gymnopdies_ in spite of
their harmonic basis foreshadow not Impressionism but neo-classicism.
Although the Rosicrucian flavour of these early pieces gives way in
his later ballets to a more robust and popular tang, the _Gymnopdies_
establish the constructive methods that he was to follow all his life.

Technically speaking his music is rather difficult to analyse in words
and without the use of music type, but one can draw attention to
certain traits that appear in works as widely separated in date and
superficial style as the early _Gnossiennes_ and the late _Relche_.
Melodically speaking we find the juxtaposition of short lyrical
phrases of great tenderness with ostinatos of extreme and deliberate
bareness. Harmonically speaking, Satie's methods differ as much from
Debussy's static use of chords for their own sake as they do from
Liszt's rhetorical use of chords as so many points in a musical
argument. His harmonic sense--of which a particularly happy example is
to be found in the posthumously published _Jack in the Box_--is rich
and pleasing but, like his lyrical sense, displays a curiously
objective and unatmospheric quality. The strangeness of his harmonic
colouring is due not to the chords themselves, but to the unexpected
relationships he discovers between chords which in themselves are
familiar enough. There is however no instance in his works of the
spicing up of a simple harmonic basis by the addition of what are
popularly--and rightly--known as 'wrong notes', such as we find in
Auric. Nor is there any suggestion of the illogical distortion of
recognized classical methods such as we find in Stravinsky. His
progressions have a strange logic of their own, but they have none of
the usual sense of concord and discord, no trace of the _point
d'appui_ that we usually associate with the word progression. They may
be said to lack harmonic perspective in much the way that a cubist
painting lacks spacial perspective.

The lack of any feeling of progression that we find in his personal
use of harmony is emphasized by his equally personal use of form. By
his abstention from the usual forms of development and by his unusual
employment of what might be called interrupted and overlapping
recapitulations, which cause the piece to fold in on itself, as it
were, he completely abolishes the element of rhetorical argument and
even succeeds in abolishing as far as is possible our time sense. We
do not feel that the emotional significance of a phrase is dependent
on its being placed at the beginning or end of any particular section.
On Satie's chessboard a pawn is always a pawn; it does not become a
queen through having travelled to the other side of the board.

Satie's habit of writing his pieces in groups of three was not just a
mannerism. It took the place in his art of dramatic development, and
was part of his peculiarly sculpturesque views of music. When we pass
from the first to the second _Gymnopdie_ or from the second to the
third _Gnossienne_ we do not feel that we are passing from one object
to another. It is as though we were to move slowly round a piece of
sculpture, and examine it from a point of view which, while presenting
a different and possibly less interesting silhouette to our eyes, is
of equal importance to our appreciation of the work as a plastic
whole. It does not matter which way you walk round a statue and it
does not matter in which order you play the three _Gymnopdies_.

The same may almost be said of the two acts of the ballet _Relche_.
They are so formally linked together by thematic repetition and
transformation that the second act is like a reflection of the first
in a mirror. Yet it is arguable that the work would retain its formal
logic were the order of the acts to be reversed, or the work to be
played backwards as regards the order of the movements. This type of
formal logic which is independent of all dramatic or narrative element
is, of course, in the most complete contrast to the formal logic of
the Romantic school. We have only to imagine the effect of playing the
march in Liszt's _Mazeppa_ before the opening section to realize how
far Satie had travelled from all that the music of the preceding
century stood for.

There is no romance about Satie's music, not even of the modern type
that takes the form of anti-Romanticism. Auric in his preface to
_Parade_ has wrongly suggested that the work has a vein of mechanical
romanticism by saying that Satie's score 'se soumet trs humblement 
la ralit qui touffe le chant du rossignol sous le roulement des
tramways'. This is far from being even approximately true, for the
most striking feature of _Parade_ is its combination of monotonously
repeated and mechanical figures with passages of great lyrical charm.
Satie was too objective in his standpoint to side with either the
nightingales or the tramcars. If while riding on a tramcar a
nightingale had flown on to the same seat he would not have seen in it
a symbolization of two opposed worlds and indulged in either
philosophy or regrets. He would have accepted it quite naturally as a
simple occurrence, just as we accept the fantastic items of general
information--such as 'Owl steals pince-nez of Wolverhampton
builder'--detailed in the papers as News from Far and Near.

If Satie's music is difficult to appreciate it is not due to any
obscurity in his technical style, which is always clear cut and
limpid, but to his habit of abruptly changing his mood within the
course of a single bar. He does not, like his followers, present us
with stylistic incongruity, but he does present us with a far more
disturbing emotional incongruity. The _Prlude en Tapisserie_, for
example, consists of about half a dozen thematic fragments which
though carefully wrought into a formal balance are totally opposed in
mood. This emotional incongruity may be taken by some to be almost
realistic in the effect, an echo of the lack of congruity to be found
in the sights and sounds that impinge on our consciousness during a
haphazard walk through the streets. But I feel that it is more likely
to be a deliberate refusal on Satie's part to create an effect of
logic and continuity by any save strictly technical means.

Occasionally this incongruity is used pictorially, as in the movement
representing Chaos in _Les Aventures de Mercure_. Here, instead of the
harmonic and orchestral outburst and the avoidance of line that an
impressionist composer would have brought to bear on the subject,
Satie presents us with a clear pattern in two parts, a skilful
blending of two previously heard movements, one the suave and
sustained _Nouvelle Danse_, the other the robust and snappy _Polka des
Lettres_. These two tunes are so disparate in mood that the effect,
mentally speaking, is one of complete chaos, yet it is achieved by
strictly musical and even academic means, which consolidate the formal
cohesion of the ballet as a whole. Even such very modified
pictorialism, however, is an exceptional case in Satie's work, and in
_Socrate_, the most extended of his later works, the music refuses to
reflect in any direct way the meaning and emotion of the words.

It has been suggested by Ren Chalupt, in his preface to _Socrate_,
that Satie's music is like a series of illustrations by Ingres to the
dialogues of Plato. But the simile is hardly accurate. Satie
steadfastly refuses to illustrate, and his music may be more aptly
compared to the printer's art. The lettering is graceful, the margins
well proportioned, and the occasional decorative capitals have a grave
charm, but there is no alteration in style and make up because one
page happens to be more tragic in content than another.

The surprising restraint of _Socrate_ is again no stunt on Satie's
part, but the logical application of theories that he had always held.
Many years before he had objected to the instrumental melodrama of
Wagner's operas, remarking: 'A property tree does not grimace because
the hero walks on to the stage.' He felt that music should supply a
suitably coloured background to the words, but should never usurp the
dramatic and narrative element supplied by the text.

_Socrate_ is the logical continuation and reductio ad absurdum of the
musical restraint shown in certain sections of _Pellas and
Mlisande_. The music, always limpid and serene, pursues a modified
rondo form which has no connection with the argument of the text, or
the change of character; it is an unobtrusive background against which
the characters of the dialogue appear in undramatic contrast. The
greatest concession made to the dramatic element is in the death scene
where the music far from gaining actually loses intensity, fading out
to the monotonous repetition of a bare fifth as if it feared to draw
one's attention away from the tragedy of the text. _Socrate_, though
perfectly successful as the logical application of a theory has
something of the rigor mortis always associated with overtheorized
music. Satie's refusal to reflect the incidental emotion of the words
becomes, in the end, as irritating as the insistence on detailed word
painting that we find in Dargomizhky's _Stone Guest_, or Mussorgsky's
_Match Maker_. There are two kinds of chastity in music, as in life,
and it is easy for the composer to confuse restraint with impotence.
The restraint of _Socrate_ degenerates at times from the calm of a
philosopher to the passivity of a dead object.

Though written in Satie's most serious vein _Socrate_ has a certain
affinity with his most flippant pieces, the _Musique d'ameublement_,
which, though of no intrinsic importance, throw an interesting
sidelight on his outlook on music. He felt that the entr'acte between
two parts of a concert provided too great a break in the general
atmosphere, and that music should be played in the foyer, to which
music, however, people would pay no more concentrated attention than
they would to the furniture or the carpet. He accordingly wrote a
ludicrous set of pieces for piano duet, bass trombone, and small
clarinet in which themes from _Mignon_ and _Danse Macabre_ were
mingled with his own. The players were put in different parts of the
room and the short pieces were played over and over again, it being
hoped that the audience would not listen but would talk, move about
and order drinks. Unfortunately, the moment the placard _Musique
d'ameublement_ was put up, the audience stopped talking and listened
as solemnly as if at the opera until, at the thirtieth repetition of
one of the furniture pieces, Satie, exasperated beyond reason by this
uncalled-for respect, dashed furiously round the foyer shouting:
'Parlez! Parlez! Parlez!' This may seem merely a typical example of
Satie's blague, but it also indicates his detached and objective view
of music and explains why even in his serious works, like _Socrate_,
the music sometimes takes on a deadly and static quality.

There is a moment, almost impossible to analyse, when a piece of
sculpture, through excessive simplification on the part of the artist,
ceases to be a living form however simplified and becomes an abstract
object. However much we may admire Brancusi's fish, for example, we
may ask ourselves at times whether the process of simplification has
not been carried to a point when not only the inessentials, but the
essentials of sculpture have been thrust on one side. Like Brancusi,
Satie states a certain problem in its most acute form, but his work is
even more open to question because he is dealing with a dynamic medium
functioning in time, and far less suited to the static objectivity
which both these artists undoubtedly achieve.

We may well ask ourselves if, to obtain the static abstraction of
Satie's best work, it is worth while throwing over the dynamic
movement and expressiveness which has hitherto always been considered
an essential part of music. At the same time, one must admit that in
such movements as the Bain des Graces in _Mercure_, Satie achieved a
more complete objectivity than any other composer has done.
Stravinsky's essential dynamic qualities keep breaking through even in
so outwardly abstract a work as the Concertino for string quartet, and
his abstract music must therefore be considered less complete as an
artistic statement than that of Satie--though some may find it more
vital for this very reason. A statement, however, is not necessarily
valuable because it is complete, and although Satie is of great
interest both as an individual figure and as a curious anticipation
of the post-war _Zeitgeist_ he can hardly be said to be a major
composer. In spite of his intensely musical faculties it is impossible
not to feel that the mentality that directed these instincts would
have found truer expression in one of the plastic arts.

This warping of the medium to use it for a form of expression best
suited to another art is by no means confined to composers, amongst
modern artists. While Satie and Stravinsky may be said in their
objective compositions to be taking up the work of the painter, the
surrealist painters are working on lines which would obviously find
more convincing and fluid expression in writing, while transitional
writers like Gertrude Stein are aiming at rhythmic patterns and formal
arrangements of sound that would have far more weight if expressed in
musical form. By working out of focus with one's medium one can
undoubtedly achieve results of the utmost experimental interest; but
it is rarely that these experiments have led to anything but a
technical and spiritual cul-de-sac.

Although Satie's formal and harmonic methods are full of suggestions
for future development, he has up to the present had hardly any real
followers, and must be looked upon as a figure rather on the margin of
music. His experiments, though fascinating, have in no way altered the
path of music because the abstraction at which he aimed, if not an
essentially unmusical ideal in itself, led to the denial of so much
that is essentially musical, just as a concentration on abstract form
in painting leads to the denial of so much that is essentially
paintable from the formal point of view. Even in Satie's own music the
partial pictorialism and expressiveness of _Mercure_ yields more
interesting results from the abstract point of view than the
deliberate abstraction of _Socrate_.

Satie is not a sufficiently powerful figure or dominating influence to
lend support to those who uphold abstraction in music. Least of all
does he lend support to those who preach internationalism. For his
music, in spite of its objectivity, has at times a very strong French
flavour and it is probably this quality that is mainly responsible for
the hasty dismissal of his work by English critics, who only seem
favourably disposed to those French composers such as Berlioz and
Debussy, who, from the French point of view, are in the nature of an
exotic culture.

Much as one may deplore the narrow critical outlook which is one of
the concomitants of nationalism in music, it may be doubted whether it
is possible or even desirable at the present moment that music should
regain the internationalism which it displayed in the eighteenth
century. It may even be doubted whether the style of the eighteenth
century was as international as it appears to us today. The British
Empire does not become international because it is far flung, nor does
a musical style become international because it is shared by a number
of different countries. The style of the eighteenth century was mainly
Italian, that of the nineteenth century--until broken up by foreign
influences--mainly German, and twentieth-century dance music, which
provides the most genuinely international style of today, is
international only at the cost of submission to America.

There is no denying, however, that compared with the composer of the
present day the eighteenth-century composer possessed an international
language comparable to the Latin in which medieval savants carried on
their arguments. But the nationalism of the intervening century has
made any attempt to revive this type of musical language as fruitless
as the efforts of the neo-classical composer to achieve intrinsic form
by copying the extrinsic formality of classical masters.

One cannot erase the results of nationalism any more than one can
erase the results of Romanticism. What the eighteenth century achieved
with ease and by traditional means we must achieve with difficulty and
in our own individual way. When we look at Sibelius' _Finlandia_, and
then at his Seventh Symphony, we may well agree with George Moore that
art must be parochial in the beginning to become cosmopolitan in the
end.

Internationalism, like simplicity, is a desirable end but, like
simplicity, it is found only in the highest and the lowest forms of
art. The paintings of Giotto speak an international language and so do
lavatory drawings. We must beware lest in aiming at one we produce the
other. It is fatally easy for the modern composer, reacting against
the passionate nationalism of recent musical movements, to rid himself
of parochialism not by intensifying his thought but by denuding it,
and to reach universality through nullity.

We cannot, however, understand the present-day problem of nationalism
versus internationalism without going back a little in history and
examining the influence on musical style and form of
nineteenth-century nationalism--a musical influence as potent as that
of religious thought or romantic feeling.




_Part III_

Nationalism and the Exotic

    *    *    *    *    *


(a) Nationalism and Democracy
(b) The Russian Nationalists
(c) The Conflict between Nationalism and Form
(d) Nationalism and the Modern Scene
(e) The Cult of the Exotic
(f) Exoticism and 'Low Life'
(g) The Spirit of Jazz
(h) Symphonic Jazz




Nationalism and the Exotic


(a) Nationalism and Democracy


The theory that music is an international language may be compared to
the statement that blood is thicker than water. They are both so
obviously untrue that no one worries about them any longer or is
likely to protest at their frequent occurrences in public speeches. I
doubt if anyone would notice were a speaker to use one for the other,
forgetting for the moment whether he was addressing the Empire League
or the Worshipful Company of Musicians. At the same time the present
neo-classical revival in music has led not only to a revival of
eighteenth-century formulas but to a revival of what we imagine
eighteenth-century ideals to have been, and one of these is
internationalism.

Internationalism in the eighteenth century was not so much a political
ideal as a social fact. From Major-General Fuller's _War and Western
Civilization_ we learn that even the art of war was an aristocratic
profession, conducted with as little national feeling as possible.
When, as late as 1813, Sir Humphry Davy and Faraday were entertained
by French scientists in Paris, during the Napoleonic Wars, their visit
was not looked on as an international gesture or anti-patriotic
move--it was taken as a matter of course. We have only to compare
this attitude with that of the scientists and artists on opposed sides
during the late war to get the exact measure of the growth of national
feeling in the arts; for the freedom and impartiality shown by the
scientists was of course shared by the artists of that time and
earlier. In the eighteenth century there was an artistic league of
aristocrats instead of a political League of Nations, and aggressive
nationalism in music would have been considered as parochial an
offence against good manners as aggressive nationalism in behaviour.
It would have been regarded not so much as an artistic freak as a
social degradation.

The most natural and powerful form of national and racial expression
in music is to be found in the folk song, and the average
eighteenth-century composer faced with an unpolished folk song felt
like Millamant faced with Sir Wilful Witwoud--'Ah rustic, ruder than
Gothick'. When Millamant said 'I nauseate walking, 'tis a country
diversion' she was making a remark not only in the character of her
part but in the character of her time. In the eighteenth century
untutored nature gave way to the urban grove, and the countryside,
which is the basis of nationalism in music, took a secondary place in
art.

Occasionally a periwig is ruffled and a shapely leg cuts unexpected
capers--the Croatian peasant and the English sailor peep out for a
moment in the symphonies of Haydn and Boyce--but for the most part
eighteenth-century composers chose to address their audiences in a
cultivated Esperanto with its roots in Italian. A light accent was the
nearest approach to dialect allowed. A person with a 'nose' for
national inflections will of course be acutely sensible to these
provincial variants, will realize from certain harmonic traits that
Scarlatti was at one time in Spain, will be able to tell which parts
of Handel's _Time and Truth_ were written in England, which in Italy,
and so forth; but at no time will he find national feeling expressed
with such directness that it stands between him and the musical
thoughts of the composer. He may prefer Arne to Locatelli, Paisiello
to Mhul, but it is unlikely that in his preferences he will be
directly influenced by national prejudices as he might be in
preferring Vaughan Williams to Bartk, or Milhaud to Sibelius.

We must not think, however, that the modified internationalism of the
eighteenth century is any more a permanent and integral part of
musical tradition than the objective pattern-making of the period.
When we go back to earlier musical epochs we find, in spite of the
obscuring patina of time, a far more decided national tang. Dowland
and Byrd and their French contemporaries are as distinctly national as
Borodin or Mussorgsky. The difference being that they wear their
nationalism easily and unconsciously--it gives a positive and piquant
flavour to the music without ever becoming a negative and excluding
influence. Dowland could absorb as much Italian influence as he wished
without any fear of losing his own unconsciously English personality.

Similarly, in a later period, when music was already beginning to
show the formal and cosmopolitan imprint of aristocratic tastes,
Purcell was able to graft the Italian manner on to his early
post-Elizabethan manner with no loss of national individuality. The
happy and homogeneous duality of his style is indeed symbolized by
_Dido and Aeneas_ where the exquisite classicism of the Italianate
court scenes is set against the rowdy nationalism of the sailors'
stews. Such a scene as the drunken sailors' chorus in _Dido_ would
have been considered in the eighteenth century not only barbarously
national but intolerably vulgar. We get similar scenes in _The
Beggar's Opera_, it is true, but only as a burlesque which forms the
most powerful comment possible on the artificial taste of the time,
for such a burlesque would have been impossible in Purcell's day when
mythological goddesses, woodnymphs, dairymaids and ladies of the
street met on equal terms.

Romanticism and nationalism are, in fact, to be found just as much in
earlier music as in the nineteenth century, but they are never
exclusive and dominating elements, and are invested with none of the
pseudo-political significance of a 'movement'. The later extreme
specialization of these elements is due not only to the democratic
movements of the nineteenth century whose connection with nationalism
is pointed out in Major-General Fuller's book, but also to the
constricting influence of the classical and aristocratic tastes which
eighteenth-century society imposed upon the music of the time.

The reaction against this constriction gave a special impetus to the
romantic and national elements which had previously been either
latent or taken for granted. Decorum gave way to fine frenzy and
cosmopolitanism to jingoism. The romantic and national elements which
were latent qualities in the older music became enthroned as conscious
and guiding impulses, much as the macabre element in _Macbeth_ and the
patriotic element in _Richard II_ became specialized into such forms
as the Tale of Terror and the Imperial Ode.

M. Georg Brandes has devoted many considerable volumes to the
influence of romanticism on literary form, and it would require at
least an equal number fully to analyse its influence on musical form.
Mr. Cecil Gray has admirably summed up the literary side of the
romantic movement in music in the prelude to his _Survey of
Contemporary Music_ and in a study like the present, which is mainly
devoted to post-war problems, it is hardly necessary to do more than
docket full-blooded and self-conscious romanticism as an artistic
movement which has little direct influence except of a negative or
distorted order on the present-day composer.

The romantic and national movements in music, though to some extent
interlinked (as in the case of Weber for example), are more easy to
separate from each other than the similar movements in literature, and
their separation becomes more marked as the nineteenth century wears
to an end. Romanticism as a conscious movement is of little weight in
modern music because its original impulse is by now faded; the effects
of the nationalist movement, however, are still at work in music, and
in many countries nationalism is as much a battlecry today as
romanticism was a hundred years ago. The explanation, as is so often
the case, is as much political as artistic. The nationalist movement
in music was not only a temperamental and stylistic reaction against
the frigidity of the preceding epoch--it was intimately bound up with
the growth of racial and political consciousness. The romantic
movement may be held to be only an extreme statement of something that
had always been latent in music--even in the classical music against
which the romanticists were reacting--whereas the national movement
brings in a new and extra musical element.

In spite of the fact that music is held to be an international
language we can trace the growth first of racial then of proletarian
consciousness as easily through Russian music, for example, as through
Russian literature--more easily in some cases, as music is not so
ruled by the censor. The most obvious example of the connection
between nationalism and music is, of course, the somewhat bastard one
of the patriotic or revolutionary song, where the presence of actual
words is apt to confuse any estimate of the evocative power of the
music qua music. We must try carefully to distinguish between those
tunes that are moving in themselves and those that are only moving
through political and verbal associations. It would be childish, for
instance, to pretend that the growth of the Communist party in England
has been in any way influenced (save perhaps negatively) by the music
of _The Red Flag_; but in the case of a song like the _Marseillaise_,
the most far reaching of popular songs, the effect is clearly
dependent for its major appeal on the music itself and it is
significant that the tune if not actually popular in technical origin
is popular in general allure and non-classical in construction.

It is doubtful if the Marseillais of 1792 indulged in the splitting of
technical hairs, but it is more than likely that the tune had for them
an added, if unrealized, significance through its denial of the
principles of taste and construction which mark the music of the
aristocratic rgime. We have only to compare it with a classically
constructed tune written by a professional composer, like _Rule,
Britannia_, to see the difference between a work which though national
in feeling places musical construction first, and a work in which
national or political feeling is paramount, sweeping technical
considerations on one side through its intensity of mood.

Although _Rule, Britannia_ is the best written of national songs, and
the _Marseillaise_ shares with the Toreador's Song from _Carmen_ the
distinction of being the most clumsily constructed tune that has ever
become universally popular, it is not surprising to find that the
latter has had more far-reaching effects. We can imagine _Rule,
Britannia_ being played by a ship's band or being hummed on the
quarter-deck by some dilettante admiral, but we can hardly hear it
being sung by sailors as they go into battle. The classical
construction and the operatic nature of some of the
vocalization--particularly in its original form--immediately give to
it an aristocratic quality which prevents it from becoming truly
popular in the fullest meaning of the word.

These two tunes conveniently symbolize not so much the difference
between two countries as the difference between two ages--the
difference between the political and artistic ideals of the eighteenth
century and those of the nineteenth. _Rule, Britannia_, a song written
in honour not only of patriotism but of aristocracy, is embedded in
the style of its day, whereas the _Marseillaise_ points forward to the
style of the succeeding epoch, to Auber and Berlioz, to the age when
operas and even symphonies began to assume an extra-musical and even
politically national quality. It was not only due to the political
situations that Auber's _Masaniello_ once caused a revolution, and
that in later years Verdi's _O Signore dal tetto natio_, Smetana's
cycle of symphonic poems _Ma Vlast_, and Sibelius' _Finlandia_ were
almost to assume the quality of revolutionary anthems. These emotional
reactions are latent in the style of the music as apart from its
associations. No amount of association with revolutionary sentiment
could turn an opera by Grtry into a call to action or make a Haydn
symphony a symbol of the Croatian Separatist movement.

From the purely musical point of view the direct association of
political feeling with a piece of music is the lowest and least
desirable form of nationalism; but it is necessary to insist on its
existence and not to regard it as a regrettable side show. No
political pamphlet or poster can get a hundredth of the recruits that
are enrolled by a cornet and a bass drum; and it is doubtful whether
the war would have lasted six months without the aid of that purest of
the arts, music, whose latest gift to civilization is the notorious
Horst Wessel Song.

We must realize the social and political bases of nationalism in music
in order to realize the artificiality of those present-day composers
who, on purely musical grounds, would revert to the international
musical style of the eighteenth century with none of the physical and
mental background which makes such internationalism sincere, natural
and convincing.

The present reaction in some quarters against excessive nationalism in
music is in some ways an aesthetic reaction against the abuse of
folk-song material, but we shall not rid ourselves of nationalism by
refraining from use of the folk song. The nationalist movement of the
nineteenth century is of course inseparably connected with the folk
song, the simplest and most agreeable form of national expression. It
would be a mistake, though, to think that the nineteenth-century
composers sound national because for purely musical reasons they chose
to base their style on folk songs and folk-song material. They chose
to use this type of material in order to express as fully as possible
a national and racial feeling that was already there from the social
point of view, and which was sufficiently strong to influence even
such purely aesthetic problems as symphonic development, for example.

The composer who is more concerned with political destruction than
with musical construction may seem hardly worthy of the name; but we
must remember that the same attitude, intensely sublimated, is to be
found in the work of such undoubtedly important figures as Bartk and
Vaughan Williams. In a work like Vaughan Williams' _Pastoral Symphony_
it is no exaggeration to say that the creation of a particular type of
grey, reflective, English-landscape mood has outweighed the exigencies
of symphonic form. To those who find this mood sympathetic, their
intense and personal emotional reaction will more than compensate for
the monotony of texture and lack of form, of which a less
well-disposed listener might perhaps be unduly conscious.

This symphony is one of the landmarks in modern English music, and to
many English critics it is one of the masterpieces of recent years.
Yet it is a well-known fact that few English works have met with less
understanding and appreciation abroad. In this case music, far from
proving an international language, has produced a work more baffling
to the foreign mentality than a translation of a dialect novel of
English country life. You can say to a Czechoslovakian who does not
appreciate the symphonies of Elgar, 'However unsympathetic you may
find this mentality you must admit the mastery of technique, the
virtuosity of orchestration', but to a Czechoslovakian who dislikes
the _Pastoral Symphony_ you can only say, 'Oh well, I suppose you
don't like it.'

Elgar's music is as national in its way as the music of Vaughan
Williams but, by using material that in type can be related back to
the nineteenth-century German composers, Elgar avoids any suspicion of
provincial dialect, even though his national flavour is sufficiently
strong to repel certain countries--France in particular. Similarly,
Walton (who, reacting against the music of the immediately preceding
generation, has far more in common with Elgar than with Vaughan
Williams), by using material that can be related to Handel on the one
hand and to Prokofieff on the other, addresses an international
audience in easy terms without losing his national and personal
qualities.

Vaughan Williams, however, whose style is based on material without
classical or international precedent and which, without necessarily
being folk-songy in the picturesque way, is intimately connected with
the inflections and mood of English folk music, cannot be said to
share the freedom from provinciality shown by Elgar and Walton. His
appeal is undoubtedly more intense but it is also more limited. This
limitation of appeal proceeds not only from the intensely national
quality of the material itself but from the formal treatment, which is
logically evolved from this material. This logicality is the strongest
feature of the work and yet is the most potent force in restricting
its appeal.

Unlike so many composers, notably Brahms, with whom the creation of
musical material and its subsequent treatment appear to be two
separate mental processes, Vaughan Williams nearly always evolves his
form from the implications of the melody and rarely submits his themes
to a Procrustean development. In this he recalls Debussy who, however,
wisely refrained from attempting the balanced four movements of a
symphony. The form of the _Pastoral Symphony_ follows logically enough
from the material, but hardly achieves either the contrast or sense
of progression that is usually associated with symbolic form, and is
the essential feature of classical symphonic writing. By refraining
from the conventional type of symphonic development Vaughan Williams
avoids the complete contrast between mood and method shown by such a
fabricated symphony as Dvork's _From the New World_, but this
negative virtue does not in itself mean that the _Pastoral Symphony_
satisfies us as much from the architectural point of view as it does
from the point of view of mood and colouring. Just as the form, though
logical, is restricted through its dependence on the thematic
material, so the thematic material, though beautiful, is restricted
through its insistence on a specifically local mood.

We can appreciate Debussy's _Rondes de Printemps_ without knowing or
liking French landscape, but it is clearly difficult to appreciate
either the mood or the form of the _Pastoral Symphony_ without being
temperamentally attuned to the cool greys and greens, the quietly
luxuriant detail, the unemphatic undulation of the English scene.
Beautiful as this work is, one feels that it is too direct a
transcription of a local mood and that the material has not undergone
that process of mental digestion, as it were, which can make the
particular into a symbol of the whole and can, as in Sibelius'
symphonies, give to local and individual characteristics the quality
of universality.

The _Pastoral Symphony_ not only raises the problem of how far it is
wise for an artist to detach himself from cosmopolitan tradition in
order to reach individual and national expression: it also represents
in acute fashion the clash between local colour and classical
construction which is the main drawback to nationalism in music. The
clash is particularly noticeable in that this work comes so late in
the nationalist movement. Like a germ which gathers force as it sweeps
through the population, striking with added virulence the final victim
of an epidemic, so the nationalist movement in music has acted most
strongly on those countries which have received its influence late in
the day.

The dbcle of the nineteenth century has put English music a little
out of focus with time, and the English nationalist movement thus
constitutes a special case, an isolation ward of more value to the
specialist than to the student.

The effects of the national movement on German music, though marked,
are a little difficult to disentangle because in Germany the romantic
movement and the nationalist movement are not only closely interwoven
but carry on almost imperceptibly from the previous century. One
realizes, listening to Schumann's _Rhenish Symphony_, that here is
music as exclusively and deliberately German as _Prince Igor_ is
Russian, but it is difficult to say exactly where, between the _Magic
Flute_ and the _Rhenish Symphony_, this element has crept in.

The pros and cons of nationalism can be examined most clearly in the
Russian school, partly because it has a stronger and more convincing
racial background than in England, partly because its origins and
results are more clear cut than in Germany, and partly because it is
sufficiently distant, both from the point of view of date and culture,
to be examined without local or contemporary prejudice.


(b) The Russian Nationalists


Glinka is one of those convenient historic figures, like Sir Walter
Raleigh, to whom almost all discoveries can be ascribed--and in his
case with justice. The task of reviewing the influence of nationalism
on musical style and structure is enormously simplified in the case of
Russian music by the fact that Glinka had the field entirely to
himself for about thirty years, and also by the fact that whereas
every Russian composer since Glinka had been enormously indebted to
his influence, he himself appears to have sprung fully armed from the
racial womb.

It is impossible to say when music written in Germany became
specifically Teutonic; but we can say with no exaggeration that
Russian music became specifically Russian in the year 1836, the year
of the first performance of _A Life for the Czar_. _Russlan and
Ludmilla_, which appeared six years later, is of more importance from
the purely musical point of view, but _A Life for the Czar_
inaugurated a period whose tail-end is still with us, and in spite of
its many dubious qualities it must be considered one of the turning
points in music.

There is no Russian composition of importance--unless Scriabin's
orchestral poems be considered important --that is not directly
indebted to one or both of these operas. Even Mussorgsky who, on the
whole, was influenced more by Dargomizhky--Glinka's 'spiritual
nephew', if one may steal a phrase from Edward Lear--pays open homage
to him in several pages of _Boris_ and more particularly
_Khovantchina_. We are apt to forget this, merely because such music
of Glinka's as is known in this country has for the most part appeared
some time after that of his later followers. Those who, knowing their
_Coq d'Or_ and _L'Oiseau de Feu_, expect much the same degree of
sophistication from Glinka, forget that _Russlan and Ludmilla_,
although the direct forerunner of these two works, is actually nearer
in date to the _Magic Flute_ to which, indeed, it provides a Russian
counterpart.

It is necessary to emphasize the fact that not only Rimsky-Korsakoff,
Borodin and the avowed followers of Glinka owe much of their
inspiration and their methods to him, but that his direct influence is
to be observed as late as _Le Sacre du Printemps_ and Debussy's
_Iberia_--for example, the middle section of the first movement of
_Iberia_ is constructed on the principle laid down by Glinka in
_Russlan_ and crystallized in _Kamarinskaya_; while as for the
reflections of Glinka in Stravinsky's music they are too clear to
require further definition. What may be called Franco-Russian
scoring--as opposed to the Strauss-Elgar treatment of the
orchestra--is the direct legacy of Glinka, and it is not too much to
say that the whole of the movement in taste known as 'Russian Ballet'
is implicit in certain pages of _Russlan_.

Among nineteenth-century composers Glinka is second only to Liszt in
historical importance; but he was more than a gifted amateur who
happened to pop up at the right time. In spite of the sedulously
fostered impression to the contrary, he was in every sense--save the
financial--a professional composer and the occasional weaknesses in
even his best work are due not to any technical deficiency on his part
but to the method of his approach and the angle of his appeal. In
considering the pros and cons of nationalism we need not really go
further than Glinka for our case. It is essentially as unnecessary to
drag in such excellent but minor figures as Rimsky-Korsakoff and
Liadoff as it would be to drag Strauss into a discussion on the
symphonic poem when we have Liszt's thirteen examples before us.

Glinka's importance as a composer is very largely due to a fortunate
coincidence of temperament and period. In the eighteenth century a
figure like Glinka would, in all probability, have cheerfully gone on
composing in the fashionable Italian manner. As a matter of fact he
had a great sympathy for the Italian style and was at times as worthy
an exponent of the Bellini bel-canto as Verdi himself; but he lived in
the period when Russian national consciousness was beginning to awake
and find concrete expression in the works of Poushkin. His spiritual
background was not so much the fashionable emulation of Western
manners as the nostalgic appreciation of Russian peasant life that we
find so superbly presented in Oblomov's dream.

Admirably loyal and law-abiding as the plot of _A Life for the Czar_
may be, the fact remains that it is an opera not about Czars but about
peasants. From the patriotic sentiments of Glinka to the revolutionary
sentiments of Mussorgsky is a comparatively small step. The real break
comes between the mythological operas of the eighteenth century and
Glinka's national epic. At a time when cultured Russians spoke in
French and sang in Italian Glinka thought in Russian and wished, in
his own words, to write music 'that would make his countrymen feel at
home'. It is not surprising that to do so he turned to the shortwinded
but intensely felt songs that he heard sung by his nurse at home and
by coachmen in the streets. One should notice that Glinka speaks not
of himself but of his countrymen. The choice of words is significant.
It indicates not only his personal reactions but also the growing
racial consciousness and pride in purely local as opposed to
sophisticated Western tradition that is to be found in the Russian
literature of the time. He succeeded in making some of his countrymen
feel too much at home, and some of the more popular choruses in _A
Life for the Czar_, notably the one whose accompaniment imitates the
balalaika, were contemptuously dismissed as 'coachmen's music'. The
condemnation was of course an unintentional tribute to the genuinely
vital and racial qualities of the opera. No one would refer to Vaughan
Williams' works as 'farmhands' music'.

_A Life for the Czar_ is admittedly a most unequal work and much of it
is written in an amiable but rather debased Italianate style. What is
surprising though, considering its date, is not how little genuinely
Russian music the opera contains, but how much. It is noticeable that
the most characteristically and movingly national passages are
invariably given to the chorus. This is typical of the whole of
Russian music from Glinka to Stravinsky and can be seen in such widely
different operas as the _Snow Maiden_, _Prince Igor_ and _Boris
Godunoff_. While the music given to the soloists is sometimes
conventional, superficial and Italianate in style, the music given to
the chorus is national and deeply felt.

We have only to compare the cantilena solos in the _Snow Maiden_ with
the choruses in the carnival scene, to compare the duets and cavatinas
in _Prince Igor_ with such a chorus as the incomparable 'Gsak the
Conqueror' in the fifth act, to realize that Russian music at its best
is not only national but proletarian. It is a truism to point out that
in _Boris Godunoff_, the greatest of all Russian operas, the hero is
not Boris but the people; and this would be seen still more clearly if
the opera, instead of being presented in a distorted and mutilated
version as a peg on which to hang a piece of admittedly brilliant
ranting, were given to us in its original form with the personal
tragedy of Boris set as an incident against the real background
provided by the Russian people. Even in the case of Stravinsky his
most important work is _Les Noces_, a choreographic oratorio in which
solo singers and solo dancers are banished in the interests of the
chorus and corps de ballet.

This proletarian quality, though only hinted at in _A Life for the
Czar_ is nevertheless clearly apparent in many of the choruses, of
which the most striking from an historical point of view are the
previously mentioned balalaika chorus and the wedding song in
five-four time. The first struck right through the classical-toga
snobbery of the period and was a direct forerunner of the use of
popular and jazz-band timbres which is so great a feature of
contemporary music. The second, by its introduction of what were then
considered exotic and barbaric rhythms, opened up the way to the
rhythmic experiments of Borodin and Stravinsky and freed music from
the restricting and lumbering rhythms of the German Volkslied. Though
it would obviously be too much to trace the broken rhythms of
Stravinsky's _Danse Sacrale_ back to the regular five-four wedding
chorus in _A Life for the Czar_, we can without exaggeration trace a
direct line of descent through this chorus to the slightly more
elaborate hymn to Lel in _Russlan and Ludmilla_--with its five-four
broken by two-two--the eleven-four chorus to Yarilo in the _Snow
Maiden_, the chorus to Ladou in Act IV, Scene 3 of _Khovantchina_, and
the finale of _L'Oiseau de Feu_.

In spite of the significance of a few individual passages in _A Life
for the Czar_, Glinka would have remained a figure of historical
rather than intrinsic importance had he written nothing after this
opera. It is _Russlan and Ludmilla_, written six years later, which
clinches Glinka's position as a composer. There are still weak and
conventional numbers, it is true, but they are in a great minority.
Written with far more skill than was displayed in the earlier opera
_Russlan_ not only establishes the heroic national style on a firm
basis but, for the first time, introduces with success and
significance the oriental or exotic element which has since played
such enjoyable havoc with tradition. It would take a whole book to
enumerate the technical devices--harmonic, orchestral and
rhythmic--which, found for the first time in _Russlan_, have altered
the whole face of European music. Even so extreme a development of
modern technique as the adoration de la terre section in _Le Sacre du
Printemps_, held at one time to have no connection with any tradition
save that of primitive instinct, can in its essence be traced back to
the astounding passage at the end of the Caucasian Lezginka, which was
considered so daring even in the present century that it was always
cut at the Imperial Opera. As _Russlan_ is known chiefly by its
pleasing but quite uncharacteristic overture my estimate of this
opera's importance may seem a little far fetched. The present study
not being a history of Russian music or a treatise on modern
orchestration I must deny myself technical proof and ask my readers to
take these statements on trust.

Glinka changed and enriched every branch of music but
one--construction--and this formal weakness is evidently part not only
of Glinka's make-up but of the whole make-up of Russian music, or
deliberately national music anywhere. It was not, as is so often
thought, a question of technical deficiency or amateurishness on
Glinka's part. We have only to glance at the comparatively
conventional but extremely skilful overture to _Prince Kholmsky_ or
the brilliant finale to the first act of _Russlan_ to dispel that
legend. The weakness is due to the inherent struggle between national
expression and symphonic form.

Spiritually speaking, this struggle is symbolized by the contrast
between the sonata and the fugue on the one hand, types of
aristocratic, international and intellectual expression, and the folk
song and folk dance on the other, types of popular, national and
instinctive expression. More technically speaking, it is due to the
fact that folk songs--round which national expression in music
centres--being already finished works of art with a line of their own,
obstinately refuse to become links or component parts in the longer
and more sweeping line demanded by the larger instrumental forms. One
cannot use a small watchchain as a link in an anchor cable.


(c) The Conflict between Nationalism and Form


Glinka, though not specifically admitting this technical and spiritual
conflict, implies it in a letter referring to the difficulty he had in
developing his themes symphonically when engaged on the symphonic poem
_Tarass Bulba_. It was not that Glinka was unable to master the
mechanics of conservatoire construction--it was that in trying to
reflect the particular atmosphere of Gogol's heroic tale he was bound
to invent material of a type that would not submit to traditional
methods of treatment. The question of too literary an attitude does
not enter into this particular instance. Nothing could be more
literary than the programmatic framework of Berlioz's _Symphonie
Fantastique_, yet formally speaking it is among the finest of
nineteenth-century symphonies.

Although excessively romantic and literary programmes are hardly
compatible with the true symphonic tradition they do not capsize
symphonic form to the same extent as the use of folk-song material.
The romantic movement as exemplified by such typical though widely
separated examples as Byron's _Manfred_ and Villiers de l'Isle Adam's
_Axel_ is marked by its insistence on the individual as opposed to the
crowd; and the musical reflection of this insistence finds its most
satisfactory expression in the monothematic symphonic poem, such as
Liszt's _Tasso_, rather than in the symphony. But symphonies like
Berlioz's _Fantastique_ and Liszt's _Faust_ show that this
hero-worship or self-concentration--call it what you will--by no means
disintegrates the formal instinct. The classical symphony has as its
spiritual background the aristocratic and international qualities of
eighteenth-century society. The romantic movement gives an
individualist twist and an added picturesqueness to the
eighteenth-century symphony which alters its technical form without
seriously striking at its spiritual foundations. Nationalism, however,
destroys both the aristocratic quality of the eighteenth-century
abstract symphony and the individualist quality of the
nineteenth-century programme symphony.

The conflict is not only technical and emotional, it is almost a class
conflict, and it is hardly too far fetched a play upon words to
suggest that the phrase 'first subject' is in itself undemocratic. In
Mussorgsky this conflict is openly avowed. Symphonic development was
repellent to him because it symbolized not only foreign domination but
aristocratic domination. In _Boris_ and _Khovantchina_ we find the
strongest expression in any art form, up to the present day, of the
conflict between aristocratic internationalism and proletarian
nationalism.

It may be pleaded that Wagner was a self-conscious nationalist and
that yet his operas are remarkable for their formal continuity and
almost symphonic shape. We should remember, though, that Wagner's
nationalism lay more in his theoretical pamphlets than in his actual
music. The _Meistersinger_ which, with its comparatively popular
atmosphere, its crowd scenes and occasional folk dances, stands closer
to the Russian school than does the rest of his output, is the only
opera of his which does not display his usual symphonic qualities.

The two most common forms of nationalism in music are the evocation of
a landscape background of a specifically local type and the evocation
of a popular gathering--for example, Balakireff's _Russia_, Sibelius'
_Finlandia_, Rimsky-Korsakoff's _Grande Pque Russe_, Albeniz's
_Fte-Dieu  Seville_, Vaughan Williams' _Norfolk Rhapsody_, etc.
These two forms of expression are obviously incompatible with the
avoidance of the realistic and picturesque, which is one of the
essentials of the symphony, and also incompatible with the ide fixe,
the internal monologue that lies at the back of the Lisztian
symphonic poem.[6] It is important to emphasize once more the
spiritual conflict that lies at the back of the obvious technical
conflict between the folk song and classical form.

To put it vulgarly, the whole trouble with a folk song is that once
you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except
play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music,
indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully
disguised though the fact may be. If we look at _Russlan and
Ludmilla_, for example, we see that, except in those sections which
are conventional in colour, the composer never gets further than a
repetition of an unvarying folk song or folk-type tune with a varied
harmonic and orchestral background. Within these limits he produces an
extraordinary range of colour, as can be seen by comparing the chorus
of the Giant's Head at the end of Act II with the Persian Chorus at
the beginning of Act III, but by the time we reach the end of the
opera this short winded method of construction begins to interfere
with our enjoyment of the continuous flow of melodic and harmonic
invention. The same is true of his purely instrumental works.
_Kamarinskaya_, the most typical of these, is a little masterpiece no
doubt, but Tchaikovsky was wrong in describing it as the acorn from
which the oak tree of Russian music grew. It is an acorn that has
miraculously produced a series of larger and more decorative acorns.

[Footnote 6: What may be called the externalized symphonic poems of
Liszt, such as _Festklnge_, are patently inferior to those that
centre round some individual figure, like _Hamlet_.]

The marches and ballets in _Prince Igor_ are more technically
advanced, more powerful and opulent than those in _Russlan_, but they
show no advance in conception. And if this is true of Borodin it is
doubly true of Rimsky-Korsakoff who spent his life producing a
charming but essentially unimportant series of operas in which various
facets of Glinka's genius are gently developed.

Borodin's two symphonies[7] are thoroughly enjoyable continuations not
so much of the Beethoven tradition as of the Haydn tradition, but they
do not constitute a symphonic school. It is noticeable too, that the
second and more powerful symphony, with its heroic and national
colouring reminiscent of _Prince Igor_, is, from the formal point of
view, far less satisfactory than the first symphony which achieves an
admirable symphonic texture at the cost of a partial denial of purely
Russian and popular atmosphere. Balakireff, more of an individualist
and less of a nationalist than Borodin, did not provide a solution to
the problem of reconciling national colour and formal tradition. The
folk-song finale of his first symphony, hopelessly at variance with
the mood of the first movement, is a typical instance of a piece of
music delightful in itself that has no place in a symphony. In
_Thamar_ and _Islamey_ he produced two masterpieces of their genre,
but they can hardly be considered as specifically national in feeling.
Combining the stylized exotic atmosphere of _Russlan_ with a Lisztian
technique they are both more Eastern and more Western than the works
of Mussorgsky, the Russian par excellence.

[Footnote 7: The third symphony being pieced together by Glazunoff
after Borodin's death cannot be taken as an example of Borodin's
formal methods. In any case it is a work more noticeable for melodic
charm than for constructional merit.]

The outstanding masterpiece of the Russian school is by general
consent Mussorgsky's _Boris Godunoff_, a work whose content it would
be impossible to overpraise but whose form leaves us much where we
were before. _Boris_ depends for its effect on the direct
transcription of the emotional implications of the scene before the
spectator, relying on no formal or extrinsic device to aid its
inherent worth. The method, in fact, is the simple one of hit or
miss--if a scene is bad or dull we cannot say, as we do of Wagner,
that it is essential to the formal unity of the work. Fortunately
Mussorgsky's inspiration in this particular opera was at such white
heat that there is not a single dull bar and we are never conscious of
the possibility of his missing. But, like Debussy after him,
Mussorgsky established no method and no tradition.

Human nature being what it is, no art can depend entirely on
inspiration. It was possible for a second-rate but able musician of
Mozart's time to produce quite admirable results by following Mozart's
methods--how many people indeed, without being primed, can tell when
listening to the _Requiem_ where Mozart ends and Sussmayer begins? It
is impossible, though, to produce neo-Mussorgsky or neo-Debussy. There
is indeed no more convincing proof of the dangers of the hit-or-miss
method than Debussy's minor piano pieces.

This, however, is a slight digression. The point about _Boris_ is
that, while admittedly the highest peak achieved by Russian
nationalism, it represents the greatest divagation possible from the
classical, aristocratic, formalized opera of the Mozart type or the
romantic, individualist, and symphonic opera of the Wagner type. Mr.
Calvocoressi, it is true, has made an interesting attempt to prove
that the whole of _Boris_ is based on the opening phrase; but this, I
am convinced, is no more than an able scholastic theory displaying a
crossword-puzzle ingenuity of which Mussorgsky was palpably incapable.

That _Boris_ lacks formalism or symphonic continuity is, in itself, no
fault; nor is it a fault that certain scenes can be taken away from
the opera without absolutely injuring the effect of the whole. The
same is true of most of Shakespeare. We do not condemn his chronicle
plays because they lack the deliberate formal unity of Euripides on
the one hand, Ibsen on the other; nor do we say that _Hamlet_ is
second rate because we can follow the plot after it has been severely
cut. I am not trying, however, to determine the intrinsic merit of
_Boris_. I am only trying to point out that this national and
proletarian opera represents the complete break-up of the formal
tradition of the eighteenth century. A sympathetic critic of the day
might well have thought that one opera of this sort was worth half a
dozen more carefully constructed operas of the German school, and
personally speaking I find that to go from _Boris_ to any of Wagner's
operas is like going from a Shakespeare play to one of the
nineteenth-century poetic dramas like _Becket_. This, however, is a
purely individual reaction which in no way affects my argument that it
is to nationalism even more than romanticism that we owe the
destruction of the classical tradition that so many contemporary
composers are trying to revive by a species of artificial respiration.

_Boris_ and _Prince Igor_ possess such extraordinary vitality and
colour that to a contemporary observer it might have seemed that one
could well spare a school of symphonic writers when faced by such
virility and genius. Unfortunately _Boris_ and _Prince Igor_ are not
only the climax of the Russian nationalist school but to all intents
and purposes its finale. After the death of Borodin we find little of
any genuine interest. Rimsky-Korsakoff continued his series of operas,
in which the fresh primary colours of Glinka became gradually effaced
by the weary pastel shades of Wagner. Liadoff, a real petit-matre,
produced at rare intervals a few miniatures of extraordinary felicity
but of little weight. Glazunoff, whose earliest and best works, such
as _Stenka Razin_, are in the Borodin tradition, relapsed into
premature middle age, producing a series of well-wrought symphonies
whose occasional touches of national colour only throw into greater
prominence the conservatoire qualities of the rest of the work. The
Diaghileff ballet, by providing the plastic equivalent of the musical
atmosphere of the national school, gave a sort of strychnine injection
to the practically defunct body of the Glinka tradition and produced
in Stravinsky's pre-war ballets its final impressive and galvanic
death struggles. But Russian nationalism had by then already lost its
psychological background, and Stravinsky's ballets had in them that
element of pastiche which was to be openly avowed in his post-war
works.

The Russian national tradition, therefore, may now be considered as
dead as mutton and, as it is the only national movement in music whose
beginnings and whose end we can so clearly trace, it is worth while
pausing a moment to see what it has given us that is good--and also
what harm it has done. On the credit side are one opera of outstanding
genius, another half-dozen of remarkable merit, one great symphonic
poem--also with its train of satellites--a couple of symphonies of
unequal merit, and a host of short orchestral and piano pieces of
undeniable albeit monotonous charm. Permeating all this a wealth of
vitality, colour, and primitive nostalgia which breaks through the
stuffy conservatoire tradition of the central European composers as
refreshingly as the painting of Gauguin and Van Gogh breaks through
the traditions of the French Salon. But, as I have said elsewhere,
Russian music produced no Czanne. In its lack of any genuinely
architectural element it carried with it the seeds of its own ultimate
collapse.

The constructive shortwindedness to be found in Glinka--which as we
have seen was the inevitable counterpart of Glinka as a Russian
composer, not of Glinka as an individual composer--is echoed
faithfully in every work which continues his tradition. There is an
extraordinary lack of formal as opposed to merely colouristic progress
in Russian progress, and during the seventy years that separate
_Russlan_ from _Le Sacre du Printemps_ there is less real advance,
save of a purely decorative and two-dimensional order, than there is
in the thirty years that separate Beethoven's first symphony from his
ninth. On the debit side, then, is this one grave accusation. Russian
music had the vitality to break up the eighteenth-century tradition,
but not the vitality to build up another. Like nomad Tartars, the
Russians razed the Western buildings to the ground but put up in their
place only gaily painted tents.


(d) Nationalism and the Modern Scene


There is no other country, however, which has produced a purely
national school for which we can say so much. The Spaniards can show
no _Boris_, no _Prince Igor_, no _Coq d'Or_--nothing but a series of
glorified and tasteful picture postcards of the come-to-sunny-Spain
order. The grandeur of its historical and artistic past, the
austerities of its inhuman and inspiring landscape, are conquered by
the monotonous _espiglerie_ of the cabaret dancer. In Russian music
the voice of a street singer is sometimes the voice of the people, but
in Spanish music it remains the voice of the street singer--charming,
alluring, nostalgic no doubt, but essentially limited both in its
appeal and in its potentialities.

The whole of Spanish music so far is summed up in a few of Albeniz's
piano pieces: notably _Evocation_, _Malaga_, _El Polo_ and _Triana_.
These, within their narrow range, have a unique charm and an
unexpectedly profound emotional appeal; but they are exceptional
examples of an unvarying formula which soon becomes wearisome in the
extreme. Manuel de Falla after continuing the Albeniz tradition in a
somewhat desiccated manner has only found an escape from this obvious
cul-de-sac by grafting on to his national style a chilly
neo-classicism. Most other modern Spanish composers seem unable to
realize that they are in a cul-de-sac at all, and figures like Turina
still rely on the picturesque glamour of the folk dance and the
religious procession to disguise the essential thinness of their
musical thought. With the inevitable and not-far-distant conquest of
the jazz band, and the already established conquest of an
antireligious government, this glamour will suffer a severe setback
even if it does not disappear altogether.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the Spanish national
style was invented by a Russian, Glinka, and destroyed by an
Englishman, Lord Berners; for after the latter's amazingly brilliant
parody of Spanish mannerisms it is impossible to hear most Spanish
music without a certain satiric feeling breaking through. The
self-conscious concentration on purely local characteristics which is
the hallmark of all Spanish composers without exception, the eternal
stamping of heels and clacking of castanets, is at times as irritating
and embarrassing as the self-conscious racial exhibitionism of those
who unconvincingly remark 'Wouldn't I be telling you that it's Irish I
am', or those who suddenly break into a 'black-bottom' to cries of
'Vo-dodeo-vo' and 'Whoopee-e-e' in a vain effort to persuade others
and themselves that they are instinct with the overbrimming vitality
of the New World.

This irritating sense of artificiality is doubled by the time we get
to the modern English school of nationalist composers. To the
technical disadvantages inherent in the use of folk song as musical
material, that we have already examined, is added the depressing fact
that English folk songs have for the average twentieth-century
Englishman none of the evocative significance that the folk songs of
Russia had for the average nineteenth-century Russian. The Petrograd
coachmen would have been found singing tunes of the type that occur
quite naturally in _Boris_, but the London bus conductor is not to be
found singing the type of tune that occurs in _Hugh the Drover_; if he
sings at all he is probably singing a snatch of _Love is the Sweetest
Thing_, in an unconvincing though sickening imitation of the American
accent.

Folk songs in England are not a vigorous living tradition, as they
were in Russia, nor have they the power to graft a foreign influence
on to themselves while retaining their own individuality, like the
Catalan sardanas which have added to their primitive basis
sophisticated and foreign elements without losing their essentially
Catalonian qualities. The English folk song, except to a few crusted
old farmhands in those rare districts which have escaped
mechanization, is nothing more than a very pretty period piece with
the same innocent charm as the paintings of George Morland. The
particular type of self-conscious Englishry practised by the
folk-song composers is in itself curiously un-English. England has
never produced an artist so 'echt-English' as Mussorgsky is
'echt-Russian', or Renoir 'echt-French'. The strength of the English
tradition in art is that it has always been open to fruitful foreign
influences, which have been grafted on to the native plant without
causing it to wither away. The Elizabethans, and Purcell after them,
drew what they could from their Italian contemporaries without in any
way submerging their own personalities. Even in our day Elgar and
Delius have, in their widely different ways, written music that is
essentially English in feeling without having to dress itself up in
rustic clothes or adopt pseudo-archaic modes of speech.

Although at the time it started the English folk-song movement
probably provided an excellent pied--terre for those who not
unnaturally wished to rid English music of the intolerable accretion
of German clichs that had been strangling its growth for a hundred
years or so, it is by now--if it was not always so--a definitely
exotic and 'arty' movement completely detached from any genuine life.
That English folk songs are indeed an exotic growth to even those
composers who exploit them is suggested by the way in which they
mingle homely English with barbaric Irish songs. In Borodin the
Russian and Tartar tunes are always kept severely apart, the latter
being recognized as a definitely exotic element opposed to the natural
expression of the former. The English composers have invented a
species of synthetic Anglo-Irish melodic line which conjures up the
weakest passages in Housman and Yeats at one and the same time.

There is about this music something both unbearably precious and
unbearably hearty. Its preciosity recalls the admirably meant
endeavours of William Morris and his followers to combat the products
of those dark satanic mills with green and unpleasant handwoven
materials, while its heartiness conjures up the hideous faux bonhomie
of the hiker, noisily wading his way through the petrol pumps of
Metroland, singing obsolete sea chanties with the aid of the Week End
Book, imbibing chemically flavoured synthetic beer under the
impression that he is tossing off a tankard of 'jolly good ale and
old' in the best Chester-Belloc manner, and astounding the local
garage proprietor by slapping him on the back and offering him a pint
of 'four 'alf'.

It may seem unreasonable to condemn a school of composers for what
some people might consider extraneous social reasons; but it is
essential that we should see music against its social background. The
recent invention by certain critics of a hitherto unknown art
described as 'pure music' has resulted in the criticism of music
becoming more and more detached from any form of life, composers being
treated as though they produced patterns of notes in a spiritual
vacuum, uninfluenced by the landscape, social life, and political
situations surrounding them. For every technical argument for or
against a method of composing, there is at least one social argument,
and the social argument is often the more far reaching and
convincing.

At the present time the arguments against deliberate nationalism in
music are twofold. The first point is a minor technical one, but it is
yet worth establishing. Modern harmony has progressed to such a point
that the application of it to a modal folk song is as absurd as an
atonal setting of _Land of Hope and Glory_. The harmonic style of
Glinka and Borodin, like the harmony of the sixteenth century but
unlike the harmony of the eighteenth century, provides a natural
counterpart to the modal line of the folk song, the reason being that
it is based roughly on the harmonic implications of the melody itself.
Though the harmony may give an unexpected twist to the melody, the two
exist in a state of amity up to the end of the century. But with _Le
Sacre du Printemps_ we begin to get folk tunes treated in an harmonic
style that has not the remotest emotional or technical relation to the
harmonies suggested by the melody itself. The relation between the
melodic line and its harmonic setting is no longer friendly. It
resembles more that between the unfortunate yokel in the dock and the
cynical barrister prosecuting him.

This lack of rapport between the tune and harmony is particularly
noticeable in some of the later works of Bartk. Although in his
earlier works, such as the first two string quartets and the opera
_Bluebeard's Castle_, Bartk achieves a melodic line which, like that
of Vaughan Williams at his best, is intensely individual while yet
drawing its inflections from national song--a line which is at one
with its stark harmonic background--in his later works, such as the
piano sonata, a dangerous split is apparent between melody and
harmony, the melody becoming definitely simpler, squarer and more
'folky' while the harmonic treatment becomes more cerebral and outr.
The gap between the two becomes such that in some passages, notably
the finale of the piano sonata, the composer gives up all attempt to
bridge it, merely punctuating each pause in an innocent folk song with
a resounding, brutal and discordant crash, an effect which, did it not
remind one of a sadistic schoolmaster chastising some wretched country
bumpkin, would verge on the ludicrous. This is an extreme example,
perhaps, but it is obvious that the less consonant harmony becomes,
the more artificial is the effect provided by the introduction of
folk-type material.

There is a far more profound argument, however, against the deliberate
fostering of a national style at the present day, and that is the lack
of any genuine spiritual or social background to lend force to such a
movement.

We have only to think of the average large street in twelve different
European capitals, streets distinguished from each other only by the
names painted over the shops or the way the windows open, filled with
men in precisely the same drab clothes following precisely the same
drab occupations, supporting wives or mistresses wearing the same
cheap French models and using the same cheap French perfume, going to
the same Garbo film, listening to the same American light music,
watching the same kind of sports and driving the same kind of motor
car, to realize the absurdity of conjuring up one street by a can-can,
another by a hopak, a third by a tango, a fourth by a morris dance
and so forth through the stock list of national dances. Specific and
stylized national forms, such as the folk dance with its
characteristic rhythm, are now become symbols as artificial as the
various types of hat--the flat top hat of the sturdy Rowlandson John
Bull, the tall top hat of the dyspeptic goatee'd Uncle Sam, the
astrakhan hat of the bearded Bolshevik, the Phrygian cap of the
matronly tricoteuse--by which political cartoonists try to disguise
the fact that we are all represented by much the same type of tired
and harassed business man wearing a characterless and standardized
bowler.

It is true, of course, that you don't destroy a nation by destroying
certain national customs, that the fact that the delegates at Geneva
look alike does not prevent their disliking each other, that England
is England still, the spirit of Drake, etc.--any journalist can be
asked to fill in the rest of this paragraph....

Music, however, being the most instinctive of the arts is more than
any other art susceptible to the purely mechanical differences of
civilization in so far as they affect our emotional life. The argument
that England is England still is an intellectual one to which the
musical nerves refuse to listen. If the composer imagines that he can
treat present-day Surrey with its charabancs, filling stations,
hikers, road houses, dainty tea rooms, and loud speakers discoursing
cosmopolitan jazz, in the way the Elizabethan composers treated the
'woodes so wilde' he is living in a narrow world of escape, incapable
of producing anything more than a pretty period piece.

A composer cannot, without performing a spiritual amputation, entirely
detach himself from his times. One does not require that his work
should be a strictly contemporary record, but one does require that it
should not be a series of studio pictures.

_Boris Godunoff_, though dealing with an earlier period than
Mussorgsky's own, was in no way a period piece, for the Russian people
and its relations to the Czar and his government were still much the
same in Mussorgsky's day as they had been for centuries past. The
spiritual foundation of _Boris Godunoff_ was the spiritual foundation
of Mussorgsky's Russia, and that is why every scene has such
extraordinary realistic force quite apart from its purely musical
value. But the spiritual background of a modern peoples-opera, like
Vaughan Williams' _Hugh the Drover_, is something that no longer
exists and which nothing will bring back and the work in consequence
fails to move us except in a detached nostalgic way.

_Tristan_, again, though laid in legendary Cornwall is no more a
period piece than _Boris_, for the setting is not an integral part of
the opera but a frame to the expression of Wagner's feelings about
himself and about love in general. There is no possibility of a modern
_Tristan_ either, because this particular type of romantic feeling has
crumbled away just as much as the national feeling of Mussorgsky's
time. There was nothing forced about Wagner's and Liszt's romanticism.
It was the most natural thing in the world for Liszt to take his young
countesses on Lake Como and read them Tasso and Victor Hugo. If anyone
still thinks this spirit exists let him visualize himself taking his
young woman on the Serpentine and reading her T. S. Eliot. I don't
want him to dismiss the argument as facetious or trivial, I just want
him to spend a minute or two visualizing the scene. The various
inhibitions, social and personal, which would prevent this scene
taking place, or being in any way moving did it improbably take place,
exactly explain why the modern composer cannot hope to write a
movement like the Gretchen section in the Faust symphony.

If we go further back in history for a great opera that owes much of
its greatness to its firm spiritual and social background, we find
that Mozart's operas are not a symbolic but an exact reproduction of
the spirit and society of his day. He himself could have walked into
one of his own operas, which combined the most delicate spiritual
beauty with the social topicality of a play by Somerset Maugham. The
essential falsity of modern attempts to revive the delicious formality
of the Mozartian period of opera lies in the fact that the whole
framework of society, whose relation to the individual symbolizes the
cadences and codas that gently restrain the flow of Mozart's
passionate line, is crumbling away if not already completely
desiccated.

If we take _Figaro_, _Tristan_, and _Boris_, as representing three of
the highest peaks in the history of music, we see that they symbolize
three phases of human thought without which background they would have
taken on a very different shape and quality. (The same is true of the
instrumental works of these three periods, but the relation is more
clearly grasped in a stage work.) Mozart represents the aristocratic
internationalism of the eighteenth century, Wagner the passionate
individualism of the romantic movement, Mussorgsky the equally
passionate democratic nationalism of the nineteenth century--which had
its basis in emotion not in economics. The people who, in effect, say
to the modern composer 'Why don't you stop making those beastly noises
and write lovely tunes and pleasant harmonies like those in _Figaro_,
_Tristan_ and _Boris_, etc.', may not realize that even were a modern
composer sufficiently endowed with invention and technique he is
totally lacking in the artistic faith, conscious or unconscious, that
these phases of thought provided.

It is hardly worth while pointing out that the aristocratic
internationalism of Mozart's time is gone, once and for all. As for
the romanticism that inspired Liszt and Wagner, it may still beat in a
few isolated breasts, but the latter-day individualist must feel
painfully dracin--unless he happens to be a temporary dictator, in
which case his twenty-four-hour day hardly leaves him time for
composition. The decline of individualism has been so devastatingly
exposed in Lewis' _The Art of Being Ruled_ that there is no need for
me to expatiate on it at length.

Manfred and Don Juan would not be allowed to walk about Europe alone
today. They would have to buy a guitar, join a band of Wandervogel and
put up at special hostels. Axel and Sara would neither renounce the
world nor enjoy it--they would carefully invest their money, and
spend it on the improvement of the Axel estate or the construction of
an emancipated school on Bertrand Russell lines for the benefit of the
villagers. Tristan would not have entered into his regrettable
emotional entanglement, either because he had been carefully brought
up to realize the folly of such anti-social behaviour, or because his
experimental marriages with both Isolde and Brangane had already been
proved a failure--in any case he would be a teetotaller and would say
'No, I am afraid I never touch potions in any form'.

The decline, not so much of romanticism but of the individualism and
obstinacy without which it cannot exist, is aptly symbolized in the
gradual transformation of the Rowlandson-like John Bull into the
Little Man of Strube, the black-coated citizen at the beck and call of
the Press barons, docile, smiling and obedient, capable only of mass
indignation, herd pleasures and community singing.

Although most people would admit that the aristocratic
internationalism of Mozart's time and the romantic individualism of
Wagner's were both, if not extinct, completely enfeebled in our own
day, it might be thought that the nationalism that inspired _Boris_ is
more rampant now than ever. At first sight this may seem to be so but,
just as there is more food than ever in the world and also more
starvation, just as there is more music than ever in the world and
also less genuine musical experience, so at the present there is more
petty nationalism than ever combined with a less genuine basis for
national feeling. As this is not a political pamphlet and was indeed
intended--as a glance at the title page will show--to be a book on
music, I cannot enlarge on this aspect of present-day life even if I
were competent to do so. No one, however, whatever his political
opinions, can fail to distinguish between the liberal spirit of
nationalism that inspired political figures like Mazzini and musical
figures like Mussorgsky, and the retrograde spirit of nationalism that
inspires the petty dictators and juntas of gangsters, with their
pathological worship of violence and hatred of all true intelligence,
even from their own nationals, that are becoming our leaders today.
Does anyone imagine that the dictators of today and the tariff wars
they engage in will inspire works like _Boris Godunoff_ and _Prince
Igor_? The gangster film or the comic strip would seem more suitable
mediums in which to treat the self-appointed puppet leaders and
would-be leaders of the people.

However much inspiration the composer may draw from the contemporary
scene it is unlikely that he will draw any from the Press-fomented
patriotism of the present political situation. More particularly as
the recent increase in political separatism coincides with a period
when, through the advance of mechanical communications, mechanical
reproduction of music and wireless, the physical and psychological
separatism is decreasing.

The physical texture, the uniform drabness of modern urban life is far
more vividly presented by Hindemith and his followers than by any of
the self-conscious nationalists. For not only does Hindemith produce
busy and colourless music without any distinguishing spiritual or
national quality, but his followers and pupils, whether they write in
Serbia or in Golder's Green, produce precisely the same type of busy
and colourless music. Their works differ as much from each other as a
Cook's office in one town differs from a Cook's office in another.
They represent the final decline of the aristocrat, the romantic and
the peasant, of the three types of whose psychology the composer must
in some degree partake. Here at last is the musical equivalent of the
robot and the adding machine. Whatever its merits as psychological
realism this is obviously, from the audience's point of view, the
least desirable form for the reaction against excessive nationalism to
take--it is like exchanging Burns' poems for Mr. Ogden's basic
English. Moreover, its avoidance of essential psychological
differences in national musical thought is as false as the insistence
on superficial differences in national musical style.

Whatever we think of nationalism in music we cannot sweep aside the
whole of music since Glinka. The only solution is an absorption of
national feeling in an intellectually self-supporting form such as we
find in the symphonies of Sibelius. While the peculiar atmosphere of
Sibelius' music is no doubt as influenced by intense national feeling
as anything in Bartk or Vaughan Williams, we are never conscious of
his allowing local atmosphere to interfere with formal and expressive
preoccupations. He is a citizen both of Finland and of the world. His
symphonies, in which incidentally nothing approaching a folk song
appears, are not Finnish symphonies but symphonies by a Finn. He alone
among modern composers has combined the national intensity of
Mussorgsky's operas with the formal intensity of Beethoven's quartets;
and listening to his works we realize that our whole quarrel is not so
much with nationalism as with that particular form of provinciality
that has degraded nationalism to the level of the exotic.


(e) The Cult of the Exotic


In literature the exotic and the nationalist keep rather severely
apart. As far as I can remember Swinburne is the only poet to deal
both with legendary oriental queens and Northumbrian fisher-lasses,
and he took great care that they should not occur in the same poem. In
music, however, the cult of the exotic and the cult of the peasant are
curiously intermingled in the works of the same composer and, very
often, the same composition. This may be due to the fact that the cult
of the exotic was 'established', so to speak, by the same phenomenal
genius who established nationalism--namely, Glinka. The fact that
Glinka was a Russian strengthens the link, for in Russian folk tales,
more than any others, do we get the familiar treatment of fabulous
oriental czars side by side with homely Russian peasant heroes. At a
later date the link between the two may signify, as I have suggested
in the previous section, that nationalism itself has become something
of an exotic culture.

The exotic elements in Glinka's music are of two kinds. First of all
we get the exploitation of the exotic atmosphere suggested by the
music of those countries nearest to his own, such as Persia and
Caucasia. These have a certain authenticity of conception and feeling
that marks them off completely from the usual oriental fantasies of
western composers, so brilliantly pilloried by Kaikhosru Sorabji in
his _Around Music_. It is natural that exoticism of a convincing kind
should have its foundation in Russia, for Russia on the one hand, and
Spain on the other, form the boundaries of Western music.

It is an interesting experiment to put on gramophone records of native
music, starting from Catalonia, going on to Andalusia and over the sea
to Morocco, eastwards through Persia and India as far as China and
Japan, then back through Siberia to central Asia and Caucasia. It will
be seen, in spite of the striking differences between these various
forms of so-called native music, that the real break comes between the
squarecut and breezy melodies of Catalonia and the oriental arabesques
of southern Spanish flamenco music, between the modal tunes of
European Russia and the chromatic tunes of eastern Russia. Oriental
influences have occasionally been grafted on to European music
directly, as when Debussy became influenced by the Cambodian music
heard at the Paris Exhibition, but on the whole they have percolated
naturally through these racial frontiers, and undoubtedly the
Mongolian element in Russian music and the African element in Spanish
music give a firm basis to the exoticism to be found in the music of
these two countries.

Exoticism of a certain sort existed, of course, before Glinka, but
only in the form of a deliberate type of chinoiserie. Mozart's Turkish
rondo is like a negro page in an eighteenth-century salon--there is no
feeling that Mozart's spiritual home was Stamboul rather than Vienna
or Prague. Glinka was the first to establish in music that particular
type of nostalgic world of escape which has now become so familiar
and, unfortunately, vulgarized that it hardly requires further
definition.

The Persian chorus and oriental dances in _Russlan and Ludmilla_ are
the fountain head of a tradition that is still with us and whose
course it is unnecessary to trace. Glinka's particular genius lay not
so much in his introduction of oriental tunes into Western music as in
the harmonic justness and taste with which he treated them. We have
only to compare the particular tune which occurs in act three of
_Russlan_ in one of Ratmir's recitatives (page 160 of the piano score,
Frstner edition) with the setting of the same tune in Felicien
David's _Le Dsert_ to realize the difference between objective and
subjective exoticism. Besides his happy gift for investing an oriental
tune with an appropriate harmonic atmosphere, Glinka may be said to
have invented the particular type of stylized tune we get so often in
Rimsky-Korsakoff which, convincing the Western listener as being
oriental in atmosphere, bears much the same relation to oriental music
as Bilibin's charming illustrations do to Persian painting. A
parallel to this stylized treatment of the exotic music closest to
one's own national tunes may be found in the Irish tone poems of the
English composers, such as Bax's _Garden of Fand_, and the Spanish
rhapsodies of the French school, such as Chabrier's _Espaa_.

Besides this comparatively authentic exoticism Glinka may be said to
have established, in his _Jota Aragonesa_ and _Summer Night in
Madrid_, the even more familiar form of exoticism which consists in
exploiting the atmosphere of an alien music--a type of musical
sabotage, in fact. These two innocent fantasias have had an even more
numerous and fantastic progeny than the oriental passages in
_Russlan_, and there are few modern composers who do not owe something
to Glinka's typically northern nostalgia for the south.

At first sight it might seem that exoticism in music, by opening up to
the Western composer a new world of melody, timbre, and above all
rhythm, would have the same healthy effect as exoticism in sculpture;
and it is true that the exotic influences in the Russian and Spanish
schools have superficially broken up and fertilized the academic
nineteenth-century Teutonic tradition in much the way that the
appreciation of Egyptian, Chinese, Mexican and African sculpture has
broken up and fertilized the Graeco-Roman tradition; but the
comparison is not a true one, for whereas the Western and Eastern
sculptors were working in the same medium with approximately the same
tools and facing the same formal problems, the Western musician and
the Eastern musician cannot really establish a technical point of
contact.

We can say without falsity that we prefer the design of a Utamaro
print to that of a Puvis de Chavannes panel, or that we admire Maya
carvings more than those of Mr. Moore; but we cannot say that we think
that classical Indian music shows a more highly developed sense of
form than classical Italian music, because the whole basis of thought
and principle of construction is so entirely different. Nor can we
compare the orchestration of Chinese theatre music with the
orchestration of European theatre music, for there is hardly an
instrument common to the two. Any attempt of a Western composer to
approximate to oriental instrumentation by the use of exotic drums,
bass flutes, etc., is monstrously crude when compared to the genuine
article, partly because it is impossible to rival the virtuosity of
the oriental performer, and partly because the melodic instruments
cannot execute the minute and subtle divisions of the scale found in
non-European music.

More important, however, than these technical considerations is the
fact that while we can appreciate oriental plastic art without
altering our angle of approach, or adopting a different criterion, we
cannot appreciate oriental music without a violent dislocation of our
usual critical processes, if indeed we can appreciate at all an art
that lives in so different an emotional world and depends to so great
a degree on improvisation. Exoticism in music is therefore more
artificial than exoticism in literature or the plastic arts, and for
this reason it might be expected to produce even fewer works of
ultimate importance and architectural value than self-conscious
nationalism. But actually its artificiality is in its favour, for it
induces in the composer a certain degree of stylization that is often
to be preferred to the verism of the nationalist composer. Moreover,
the imitation of the arabesques of oriental melody--though appalling
at its worst--can, in the works of a composer of sensibility like
Balakireff or Debussy produce themes of a far greater plasticity than
the rigid folk songs which the nationalists plump down in the middle
of a symphony.

Sorabji, himself an authority on oriental music, has spoken of the
Asiatic affinities shown in the suppleness of rhythm, the richness and
delicacy of colouring, and the flexibility of melodic line in
Debussy's best works. A tune of an exotic type, unless it is to be
accompanied merely by a Maskelyne and Devant tom-tomming, compels an
equally unconventional and supple formal treatment, and thus
exoticism, though even more disruptive of the eighteenth-century
spiritual tradition than is nationalism, has produced a greater
variety of valuable architectural experiment. Balakireff's _Thamar_ is
a more closely knit and convincing piece of construction than any of
Brahms' symphonies--the programme in this case actually aids the form,
for Lermontoff's poem has a convenient element of
recapitulation--while Debussy's _Iberia_ has a far greater formal
compactness and invention than the symphonies of Elgar--or, should
this comparison seem too far fetched, let us say those of Glazunoff or
D'Indy.

Even amongst Stravinsky's work we find that _Les Noces_ is by far his
most interesting ballet from the architectural point of view. At first
sight _Les Noces_, with its simple peasant background, might seem his
most nationalist work, but its orchestration and its peculiarly
African use of rhythm and form remove it from the peasant expression
of Mussorgsky's operas. It is equally far removed from the oriental
lushness of Rimsky-Korsakoff's operas. The exoticism of _Les Noces_ is
of the 'darker' D. H. Lawrence order and we feel at any moment that
middle-aged Englishwomen are going to slip out of the stalls and join
in the singing, like the heroine of the _Plumed Serpent_.

In _Les Noces_ all influences of Debussy's impressionism have
disappeared and we are no longer worried by the disparity between the
vocal line and its harmonic background. It is impossible indeed not to
admire the consistency of this work, even though we may feel that the
consistency is of a negative order, achieved by rejecting most
elements in musical composition rather than by blending them into one
harmonious whole. Whereas the orgiastically rhythmic sections of _Le
Sacre_ were contrasted with other sections that relied more on
melodic, harmonic, or colouristic appeal, in _Les Noces_ rhythm is
paramount. The harmonies on the pianos are merely there to fix a
rhythmic shape in space, as it were; they have no value as sound if
examined vertically. The occasional appearance of counterpoint in the
choral part, again, is due not to any actual contrapuntal feeling but
to an antiphonal use of melodic phrases reminiscent of primitive
African singing. The resultant harmonies are really quite arbitrary.
This particular attitude towards rhythm links up _Les Noces_ not only
with African music but with certain types of Asiatic music--notably
the Laotian orchestras, whose use of conflicting rhythmic passages on
two or more marimbas provides an exact parallel to Stravinsky's use of
four pianos.

Seen on the stage, where the dynamic rhythms are given an additional
force by Nijinska's monumentally constructed and austere choreography,
_Les Noces_ has an undoubted nervous and emotional appeal; but heard
in the concert hall, the ear soon wearies of a design on one plane
only. The pleasure we get from the cross rhythms in Elizabethan music
comes largely from the way they are fitted into the melodic and
harmonic scheme, just as the pleasure we get from the design of a
Czanne picture is largely due to the skill with which he has been
able to base it on three-dimensional realism without seeking the easy
path of two-dimensional abstraction. The trouble with exotic music is
that so much of it is emotionally and technically two-dimensional. The
austere exoticism of Stravinsky's rhythms soon becomes as wearisome as
the lush exoticism of Delius' harmonies.

I do not wish, when faced with exoticism, to adopt an attitude which
can best be described by the admirable expression 'po-faced'. We
cannot live perpetually in the rarefied atmosphere of the austerer
classics, whether ancient or modern, and it is absurd not to enjoy a
work merely because it is essentially sterile in influence. Personally
speaking, if it is a question of choosing between an exotic work and
a so-called abstract work, give me exoticism every time. But as we are
examining in this chapter the decline of the classic tradition it is
necessary to lay more emphasis on the fatality of that _femme-fatale_
exoticism, than on her feminine charms.


(f) Exoticism and 'Low Life'


If we compare the average titles of present-day orchestral pieces with
those of twenty or thirty years ago, we might think that exoticism had
died out of music save in the brilliant parodies of Lord Berners or
the works of a few isolated figures like Villa Lobos. _Pur-sang_
exoticism of the fruity Oscar Wilde order is indeed extinct, but it
would be a great mistake to imagine that the type of mentality it
represents has died out, either among artists or audiences. The world
of escape which lies behind exotic expression has shifted its
_venue_--that is all.

Even the most austere amongst us occasionally feel a desire to escape
from our drab physical surroundings and our drab spiritual
surroundings into a more highly coloured and less moral world, and
with certain types--not, I admit, major artists but often minor
artists of distinction--this momentary desire may become an obsession.
In the nineteenth century, and more particularly during the 'nineties,
this desire usually expressed itself in a series of oriental and pagan
daydreams laid in regal surroundings, ranging from Lermontoff's
_Thamar_ --'Peri mysterieuse, cruelle, astucieuse et divine  la
fois'--to Swinburne's innumerable processions of legendary queens.

Apart from the natural reaction against any overdone literary fashion,
oriental daydreaming has suffered a slight setback since American
travelogues, emancipated potentates and shoals of scrutable Indian
students have brought the East unromantically near; but America, in
destroying the romance of other countries, has created a romance of
her own and the 'gangster's moll' has overthrown the 'veiled houri' of
the 'nineties. Unable to find exoticism in the strange and distant, we
force ourselves to dive down into the familiar, and what is
conveniently called Low Life provides the exotic motive for the
post-war artist. The grubby gamins and snotty little brats that haunt
the pages of Gide and Cocteau have taken the place of Pierre Louys'
pitiless courtesans; and Swinburne, were he alive today, would write
about a very different sort of queen. The worship of violence for its
own sake which we find disguised as a piece of antique fancying in
_Aphrodite_ is openly avowed in present-day French literature; and the
connection between violence and romanticism has been so perfectly
summed up by Proust when discussing the medieval proclivities of M. de
Charlus (see page 200 of the first volume of _Le Temps Retrouv_) that
it need hardly be emphasized again.

Without wishing to bring a Freudian element into the argument, I think
we can, without exaggeration, see a certain connection between this
neurasthenic and sophisticated nostalgia for the world of the apache
and the modern composer's obsession with caf tunes, dock life, and
negro bands. As might be expected, this neurasthenia is far more
marked among central European composers than among those of Paris,
whose satiric feeling has usually prevented them from sentimentalizing
modern life, to the same extent as Krenek and Kurt Weill for example.
Kurt Weill for all his deliberately sordid topicality is as
essentially romantic as Marschner, only the romanticism is more
localized and the poor white, the racketeer and the bum provide the
element of rakishness once sought in Lord Ruthven and his attendant
Gadshill. In the nineteenth century they cried for the moon and today
we cry 'Oh, show us the way to the next whisky bar'. The sense of
frustration is the same, however.

This neurasthenic exploitation of popular themes is almost exclusively
a post-war development, and there is certainly no hint of it in the
'aise aimable qui rayonne' of Emanuel Chabrier who technically
speaking may be considered--far more than Erik Satie--the father of
the post-war movement associated with the names of Les Six and the
Ecole d'Arceuil. It is impossible to praise too highly the wit, charm
and skill of this composer, whose works are still airily dismissed
with the label 'light music'. His _Espaa_ and _Fte
Polonaise_--typically French in spite of their titles--his _Bourre
Fantasque_ and _Joyeuse Marche_ have all the verve and reckless gaiety
of Offenbach at his best, combined with the harmonic and orchestral
subtlety of Ravel. As an harmonic innovator, his influence, though
acting within a smaller range, is no less far reaching than that of
Glinka himself, though this fact will not be fully realized until _Le
Roi Malgr Lui_ is better known. He is, too, the only composer to have
equally influenced both generations of modern French music--the
pre-war aesthetic period and the post-war 'tough' period.

Above all, Chabrier holds one's affection as the most genuinely French
of all composers, the only writer to give us in music the genial rich
humanity, the inspired commonplace, the sunlit solidity of the French
genius that finds its greatest expression in the paintings of Manet
and Renoir. There was, too, a touch of Toulouse-Lautrec about him if
we can imagine Toulouse-Lautrec without any of his sinister qualities.

Although he unfortunately spent half his time trying to become a
French Wagner, his best work is a musical summing up of the
anti-Wagnerian aesthetic which was not to find concrete verbal
expression until much later--in Cocteau's _Coq et Arlequin_. He was
the first important composer since Mozart to show that seriousness is
not the same as solemnity, that profundity is not dependent upon
length, that wit is not always the same as buffoonery, and that
frivolity and beauty are not necessarily enemies.

It is little wonder that the post-war French composers, reacting
equally against German romantic heaviness and French impressionist
tenuity, should have seen in this genial figure an ideal to be
followed. There is unfortunately the gravest of differences between
the composers who unconsciously establish an aesthetic and those who
consciously follow it. The mere fact that Chabrier wrote _Gwendoline_
shows that his _Joyeuse Marche_ and similar works were not the result
of a deliberate artistic formula, similar to that proposed by Cocteau.
After listening to the abundant gaiety of Chabrier's music, which
flows forth with all the natural ease of his period, Cocteau's
post-war exhortations to the younger French school to rid themselves
of pomposity, to be typically Gallic and gay, and to draw inspiration
from the bal-musette and street band, read painfully like one of
Doctor Crane's once famous 'Tonic Talks'.

The typical French gaiety of the bal-musette school of composers is
really as artificial as the typical English jollity of the country-pub
school of composers. They both draw their inspiration from a side of
life which is either dying out altogether or taking on an American
accent. The curious lack of any rhythmic sense shown by the average
French dance-band player has prevented French dance music becoming so
rapidly Americanized as the dance music of other nations: but it has
suffered all the same. Ren Clair would not dare to synchronize one of
his scenes with the sound of a real bal-musette band taken on the
spot, for most of the while they would be playing some atrocious
version of 'Broadway Melody'.

The low-life exoticism of Les Six and the Ecole d'Arceuil started off,
then, with a definitely sentimental handicap, a period lag which
became more noticeable every year. Chabrier's gaiety had a solid
period backing, so to speak, and his tunes, though evocative of the
caf-concert are in no way pastiches of caf-concert tunes, being
indeed of a far superior order. But the post-war composers, lacking
Chabrier's spontaneous gaiety, could only be evocative of the
caf-concert by deliberately aping its methods, producing a synthetic
gaiety through means of association: thus, most of the tunes in the
ballets of Poulenc, Auric, and Milhaud are not gay in themselves--they
recall the type of tune played in places popularly supposed to be gay.

In the heyday of the music-hall aesthetic it was often urged that
since painters like Manet could produce their best work in such
paintings as the Bon Bock or the bar at the Folies Bergres, etc.
there was no reason why composers should not achieve work of a similar
greatness, taking their inspiration from similar scenes--I am speaking
of course of some years ago, before the invention of 'pure music'.
This theory is an obvious fallacy. The painter in treating the bar of
the Folies Bergres or the basement of the Boeuf sur le Toit does not
have his formal methods and his texture dictated by the subject.
Provided the picture is ultimately recognizable, the associative
effect is much the same whether it is painted in the style of Degas or
Severini. To the musician, however, the essence of the scene lies in
its associations and emotional reactions, which can only be expressed
by a certain type of tune involving certain formal and harmonic
limitations, as may be seen even in Chabrier, the least shackled of
popular composers.

There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on
writing in one dance rhythm (this limit is obviously reached by Ravel
towards the end of _La Valse_ and towards the beginning of _Bolero_).
The sudden changes of rhythm open to him in a symphonic work are not
open to him in a dance work, because they involve not only a change of
time but also a change of atmosphere. It is not a question of going
from three-four to four-four, but of going from valse time to foxtrot
time. There is also a limit to the amount of harmonic gingering up and
melodic distortion that a composer can impose on a dance tune while
yet retaining its associative qualities. A dance tune cannot really be
submitted to the same variety of treatment that can be imposed on an
object by a painter. Picasso's cubist bottles of wine still remain
bottles, but Schnberg's atonal valses emphatically do not remain
valses. As the melodic shape is clearly the most important factor in
pre-jazz popular music, composers have usually contented themselves
with harmonic rather than formal and melodic developments of popular
tunes, and hence has arisen what is vulgarly known as the 'wrong note'
school of modern music or, in order not to hurt people's feelings,
shall we say the school which applies to melodies of a nave and
popular character harmonies of a piquant and sophisticated nature?

The obvious disadvantage of this style of writing--which can, on a
small scale, be quite amusing--is its inflexibility, which combines
the technical disadvantages of the nationalist school with an even
more limited emotional background. If a tune depends for its vitality
on the unsuitability of its harmonic background, it is impossible to
develop it, use it contrapuntally, or add anything to it after its
first statement. Although the harmony may seem wildly at variance with
the tune from the vertical point of view, it is yet indissolubly
linked with it from a horizontal point of view. This type of writing
is seen at its worst in the ballets of Auric, which consist for the
most part of a string of boy-scout tunes with an acid harmonic
accompaniment, hopelessly lacking in either development or continuity.

Even Milhaud, who shows considerably more technical skill, cannot
disguise the weakness of his methods in those of his works which are
based on exclusively popular material. In _Le Boeuf sur le Toit_, the
most amusing of the highbrow music-hall ballets, he achieves a certain
continuity and shape by the adoption of an ingenious key scheme and a
variant of the rondo form--both essentially academic devices. But this
extrinsic form does not disguise the essential inflexibility of his
methods which consist not in developing the melodic line, but in
imbedding it in a series of ineluctable ostinatos, or presenting it in
three keys at once. The mechanical imposed polytonality of Milhaud's
earlier works, which jump sharply from the most academic euphony to
the most startling cacophony, remind one of a host who having
forgotten to put gin in the first round of cocktails puts methylated
spirits in the second round to make up for it. In his later works, it
is true, Milhaud's polytonality is softened down into a flexible use,
not so much of different keys as of different modes at once, and in
_Le Cration du Monde_ the treatment of the melodic material is far
more plastic than in _Le Boeuf sur le Toit_. This work, however, one
of the best examples of popular material put to genuinely constructive
use, belongs more properly to the later movement of negro influence
and will be more fully treated in the section on jazz.

On the whole, it may be said that since Chabrier's day the only
successful examples of sophisticated music with a popular allure have
been works on a small scale. William Walton's brilliant accompaniments
to Edith Sitwell's _Faade_, for instance, avoid the monotony and lack
of continuity of Auric and Milhaud by their concentrated brevity. They
are not examples of the sentimental and exotic attitude towards
lowbrow tunes but satirical genre pieces--over in a flash, but
unerringly pinning down some particular aspect of popular music,
whether foxtrot, tango or tarantella. They represent only one facet of
the composer's personality, however, a facet that is not shown to us
in his symphonic works and, although to my mind the most enjoyable of
the modern pieces based on tunes of a popular kind, they are not from
the psychological or historical point of view as important as those
works where the popular element is paramount and treated with a
certain emotional seriousness.

Although the belated attempt to revive the glories of Chabrier in the
shape of the bal-musette sentimentalities of Auric, the military-band
exoticism of Poulenc and the wise-cracking South Americanisms of
Milhaud has produced little work of even temporary value--and
certainly no work of anything like permanent value--this
self-consciously popular movement has been worth examining if only for
the fact that it provides the link between pre-war national exoticism
and post-war international exoticism. It is strange indeed that the
slangy squarecut vulgarity of Auric and Milhaud, as exemplified by
_Les Matelots_ and _Le Boeuf sur le Toit_ should be the bridge between
the sturdy provincialism of the folk dance and the emasculated
cosmopolitanism of the foxtrot.


(g) The Spirit of Jazz


By jazz, of course, I mean the whole movement roughly designated as
such, and not merely that section of it known as Afro-American, or
more familiarly as 'Harlem'. The negro once enjoyed a monopoly of
jazz, just as England once enjoyed a monopoly of the industrial
revolution, but for the negroes to imagine that all jazz is their
native province is as if an Englishman were to imagine that all
locomotives were built by his compatriots. Even the Harlem section of
jazz is by no means so African as might be supposed.

There is a double yet opposed conspiracy to persuade one that modern
dance music represents a purely negroid tradition. On the one hand, we
have the crusty old colonels, the choleric judges and beer-sodden
columnists who imagine they represent the European tradition,
murmuring 'swamp stuff', 'jungle rhythms', 'negro decadence' whenever
they hear the innocent and anodyne strains of the average English
jazz band, hugely enjoying their position of Cassandra prophesying the
downfall of the white woman. On the other hand, we have the
well-meaning but rather sentimental propagandists of the negro race,
only too eager to point out that the negroes are the only begetters of
a movement that has admittedly swept all over the world and that
provides an exotic influence far exceeding the localized exoticism of
Cocteau and his followers. The only flaw in both these arguments is
that most jazz is written and performed by cosmopolitan Jews. Were
this fact sufficiently realized, it would hardly abate the fury of the
colonels and the columnists, for from their point of view the Jew is
just as much an enemy of the British and Holy Roman Empires as the
negro; but it might slightly curb the hysterical enthusiasm of the
poor-white negro propagandists whose sentimental effusions must be so
embarrassing to the intelligent negro himself. The particular type of
white inferiority complex responsible for this propaganda has been so
ruthlessly dealt with by Wyndham Lewis in his _Paleface_ that one can
add little to his conclusions except to point out that in music also
the same game of intellectual 'pat-a-cake' is taking place.

The European's enthusiasm for so-called negro music is in equal ratio
to the negro's appropriation of European devices, and the more the
European tries to imagine himself 'down on the Delta' the more the
negro tries to imagine himself in an aristocratic salon. In this
connection, it is amusing to recall the situation that arose recently
when a well-known negro-dance arranger was called in to produce a
ballet for a highbrow company trained in the classical tradition.
While all the Europeans flung aside their carefully won training to
indulge in an orgy of pseudo-Charlestons the negro himself was moved
to tears, not by his own work but by the classic elegance of _Lac des
Cygnes_.

If anyone doubts the essential element of European sophistication in
jazz, it is a simple matter for him to compare a typical piece of jazz
music, such as Duke Ellington's _Swampy River_, first with a lyric
piece by Grieg and then with a record of native African music. It must
be clear to the most prejudiced listener that apart from a few
rhythmical peculiarities the Ellington piece has far more in common
with the music of Grieg. I am not denying for a moment the racial
characteristics implicit in these rhythmical peculiarities--I am only
pointing out that Ellington, like all negro composers, has to use the
European harmonic framework. Ellington's works are no more examples of
African folk song than James Weldon Johnson's poems are examples of
the Dahomy dialect;[8] they both represent the application of the
negro temperament to an alien tradition and an acquired language.

[Footnote 8: Paul Morand tells us that African natives, far from
reacting favourably to jazz records, find records of Russian folk
songs more exciting and sympathetic.]

The emotional appeal of jazz depends not only on its rhythms which,
though childishly simple compared with those of African folk music,
may legitimately be accounted African in origin, but also on its
harmonic colour, which cannot conceivably be traced back to Africa
for the simple reason that harmony as we understand it does not exist
in primitive African music. Hornbostel in his admirable handbook on
African music records only one example of pure harmonic writing in the
whole history of his discoveries, and that consisted of two chords at
the end of a satirical song about the local missionary, the intention
of which was obviously to parody the lugubrious effect of his
harmonium.

The harmonic element in Afro-American music is an acquired element
mainly due to the religious music of the Anglo-Saxon, an influence
that naturally had a more powerful effect on the dracin negroes of
America, bereft of their language and their cultural traditions, than
on the self-satisfied if not contented negroes of Africa. We find it
hard now to realize not only the emotional effect but the full sensual
effect of the hymns of John Bacchus Dykes and his followers. They
were, however, the first real popularization of what is known as
'juicy' harmony, and the force of their influence can be judged by the
fact that the modern English composer brought up in their tradition
often hits on exactly the same type of variant of their harmonic style
as does the negro composer--possibly Delius, who has been equally
subjected to the influence of Anglo-Saxon church music and its negro
variants, provides the link. The reaction of the sentimental and
oppressed negroes to the rich and unctuous melancholy of
nineteenth-century religious music was of course enormously enhanced
by the religious nostalgia of the words--the oft-repeated desire to
escape from this vale of woe into a better and happier land.

Another factor in the growth of harmonic sense on the part of the
negro was the popularization not of the banjo but of the guitar, an
instrument which, in the hands of the improviser, easily gives rise to
remarkable harmonic combinations. The phrase 'barber-shop
chord'--which denotes a chord of unusual succulence--dates back to the
days when a guitar hung in every negro barber's shop, and a client who
was waiting would vamp about on the instrument until at a lucky
_trouvaille_ everyone would shout 'Hold that chord'. It need hardly be
pointed out that this type of harmonic experiment is as sophisticated
in its method as that of the contemporary composers who--deny it hotly
though they may--compose 'at the piano'.

The lack of any innate harmonic sense in the negro can be realized by
listening to the bands in the poorer bals ngres in Paris, where the
orchestra consists of unsophisticated negroes who have been brought up
in the French colonies and not subjected to the influence of the
succulently harmonized Anglo-Saxon religious music. Here we can find
no hint of the typical 'blue' harmony of the negro New York composers.
The same rhythmic and improvisatory sense is there, but applied to the
rudimentary harmonies of the French musical song.

The superiority of American jazz lies in the fact that the negroes
there are in touch not so much with specifically barbaric elements as
with sophisticated elements. Negro talent being on the whole more
executive than creative, and modern negro music being essentially an
applied art, jazz is naturally largely dependent for its progress on
the progress of the sophisticated material used as a basis for its
rhythmic virtuosity. The sudden post-war efflorescence of jazz was due
largely to the adoption as raw material of the harmonic richness and
orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period of highbrow music.
Orchestral colour of course is not a thing that can really be
appreciated in itself; it is largely dependent for its colour on the
underlying harmonies. The harmonic background drawn from the
impressionist school opened up a new world of sound to the jazz
composer, and although the more grotesque orchestral timbres, the
brute complaints of the saxophone, the vicious spurts from the muted
brass, may seem to bely the rich sentimentality of their background,
they are only thorns protecting a fleshy cactus--a sauce piquante
poured over a nice juicy steak.

Jazz, or to be pedantically accurate, 'ragtime', from having a purely
functional value--a mere accompaniment to the tapping of toe and heel,
the quick linking of bodies and the slow unburdening of minds--has
suddenly achieved the status of a 'school', a potent influence that
can meet the highbrow composer on his own terms. Though popularly
regarded as being a barbaric art, it is to its sophistication that
jazz owes its real force. It is the first dance music to bridge the
gap between highbrow and lowbrow successfully. The valse has received
august patronage from Beethoven onwards, it is true, but the valses of
the nineteenth-century composers are either definite examples of
unbending or definite examples of sophistication--sometimes both.
Chabrier's _Fte Polonaise_ has an harmonic and orchestral elaboration
far beyond anything imagined by the popular valse writers of his time,
but the modern highbrow composer who writes a foxtrot can hardly hope
to go one better than Duke Ellington, if indeed he can be considered
as being in the same class at all. In the nineteenth century the split
between the classical and popular came between a follower of Liszt,
let us say, and a follower of Gungl. Today the split occurs between a
composer like Kurt Weill and a composer like Jarnach--both of them
pupils of Busoni.

The same rapprochement between highbrow and lowbrow--both meeting in
an emotional _terrain vague_--can be seen in literature. Though Byron
wrote a poem about the valse there is little in common between his
poems and the popular songs of the period; Rossetti kept his limericks
and his sonnets severely apart; and though Dowson frequented the
breezy music halls of his day there is no touch of Dolly Gray about
Cynara. In the poetry of T. S. Eliot, however--particularly in
_Sweeney Agonistes_--we find the romantic pessimism of the nineteenth
century expressed in the music-hall technique of the twentieth-century
lyric writer, not ironically but quite genuinely. 'This is the way the
world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world
ends, not with a bang but a whimper' echoes not only the jingle of the
jazz song but its sentiment. Whimpering has indeed become recognized
as one of the higher pleasures.

The words of jazz songs mark the first popularization of that
well-known modern vice--the Inferiority Complex. Until recently a
certain exuberant self-confidence has usually formed the spiritual
background of a popular tune. 'What fine fellows we all are' is the
predominant sentiment of _Liberty Bell_, _On to Victory_ and the other
magnificently extrovert marches of John Philip Sousa. A general air of
physical attractiveness, sexual bounce and financial independence is
naturally assumed by the writers of pre-war song hits. The singer's
hat is at a jaunty angle, his gloves are in his hand, he suffers from
no inhibitions or self-consciousness as he walks down the pier,
receiving the glad eye from presumably attractive girls with whom he
ultimately and triumphantly 'clicks'. Even if he 'can't afford a
carriage' he can at least stump up enough for a tandem bicycle, which
is considerably more than the hero of 'I can't give you anything but
Love, baby', can claim to be able to do.

In modern songs it is taken for granted that one is poor,
unsuccessful, and either sex-starved or unable to hold the affections
of such partner as one may have had the luck to pick up. Even when the
singer says that he has a woman crazy about him he hastens to point
out that her attitude is clearly eccentric and in no way to be
expected. For the most part, though, the heroes and heroines of modern
songs meet with the rebuffs they deserve and take refuge in the unmute
reproach of 'Ain't misbehavin'', and 'Mean to Me', or the facile
melancholy of 'Dancing with Tears in my Eyes', 'You've got me Cryin'
again, you've got me Sighin' again', and 'When you Want Somebody who
Don't want You, perhaps you'll Think of Me'.

The other side of the medal, the series of crazy words, crazy tune
numbers, with their assumed galvanic energy has an equally
neurasthenic basis. The so-called 'hot' songs are as depressing as the
so-called 'sweet'; they spring from no genuine gaiety such as inspires
the marches of Sousa, the sardanas of Bou and the valses of
Waldteufel--they are a desperate attempt to hide an underlying boredom
and malaise. The difference between the gallops of Offenbach and the
'black-bottoms' of today is the difference between a champagne party
at eleven in the morning and a gin-jag in the small hours.

The most irritating quality about the Vo-dodeo-vo, poo-poop-a-doop
school of jazz song is its hysterical emphasis on the fact that the
singer is a jazz baby going crazy about jazz rhythms. If jazz were
really so gay one feels that there would not be so much need to
mention the fact in every bar of the piece. Folk songs do not inform
us that it's great to be singing in six-eight time, or that you won't
get your dairymaid until you have mastered the Dorian mode. In the
nineteenth century there are occasional references to 'Valses
endiables', but for the most part the music is left to tell its own
tale. It is almost impossible to find a quick foxtrot, however, that
does not inform us that it is in a particular variant of common time,
and that it is very gay in consequence. Martin Tupper, who claimed to
be the first since King David to set words to a dance tune, has a
heavy onus to bear if he is the father of the numerous technical
songs such as 'I'm going to Charleston, back to Charleston', 'Crazy
Feet, I've got those Crazy Feet', and 'I tell you Rhythm is the Thing,
Rhythm is the Thing, Rhythm is the Thing of today'. What should we
think of a concert aria which kept harping on the fact that the
singer's mouth was open and that her vocal chords were in prime
condition?

The third type of song--that which describes a dream world in some
remote American state which the singer apparently is permanently
prevented from visiting--is now happily on the wane, but in its heyday
it provided an amusing reversal of the more mawkish 'There is a Happy
Land' type of hymn tune. The prosperous Anglo-Saxon having held out
unctuous consolation to the poor negro, it is now, apparently, the
turn of the prosperous negro to hold out unctuous consolation to the
poor white. That is, if we assume that the tunes are actually written
by negroes. In point of fact, jazz has long ago lost the simple gaiety
and sadness of the charming savages to whom it owes its birth, and is
now for the most part a reflection of the jagged nerves, sex
repressions, inferiority complexes and general dreariness of the
modern scene. The nostalgia of the negro who wants to go home has
given place to the infinitely more weary nostalgia of the cosmopolitan
Jew who has no home to go to. The negro associations of jazz, the
weary traveller, the comforting old mammy, the red-hot baby, have
become a formula of expression only, as empty and convenient as the
harlequin and columbine of the nineteenth century. The pierrot with
the burnt-cork face symbolizes not the England of yesterday but the
Jewry of today.

The importance of the Jewish element in jazz cannot be too strongly
emphasized, and the fact that at least ninety per cent of jazz tunes
are written by Jews undoubtedly goes far to account for the curiously
sagging quality--so typical of Jewish art--the almost masochistic
melancholy of the average foxtrot. This masochistic element is
becoming more and more a part of general consciousness, but it has its
stronghold in the Jewish temperament. As Blaise Cendrars has said: 'Y
a-t-il eu un peuple au monde plus profondment masochiste
qu'Isral?... Isral se contortionne, Isral verse des larmes de sang.
Mais Isral jouit de sa bassesse et se dlecte de son avilissement.
Quel volupt et quel orgueil! Etre le peuple maudit ... avoir le droit
de se plaindre, de se plaindre  haute voix ... avoir la mission de
souffrir.... Les Juifs seuls ont atteint cet extrme dclassement
social, auquel tendent aujourd'hui toutes les socits civilises, et
qui n'est que le dveloppement logique des principes masochistes de
leur vie morale. Tout le mouvement rvolutionnaire moderne est entre
les mains des Juifs, c'est un mouvement masochiste juif, un mouvement
dsespr, sans autre issue que la destruction et la mort: car telle
est la loi du Dieu de Vengeance, du Dieu de Courroux, de Jhovah le
Masochiste.'

There is an obvious link between the exiled and persecuted Jews and
the exiled and persecuted negroes, which the Jews, with their
admirable capacity for drinking the beer of those who have knocked
down the skittles, have not been slow to turn to their advantage. But
although the Jews have stolen the negroes' thunder, although Al
Jolson's nauseating blubbering masquerades as savage lamenting,
although Tin Pan Alley has become a commercialized Wailing Wall, the
only jazz music of technical importance is that small section of it
that is genuinely negroid. The 'hot' negro records still have a
genuine and not merely galvanic energy, while the blues have a certain
austerity that places them far above the sweet nothings of George
Gershwin.

The difficulty of estimating the contribution of the negro to jazz is
largely due to the fact that a jazz record, unlike a valse by Johann
Strauss, is rarely the work of one man; more often than not it is the
work of three composers and three arrangers plus a number of frills
that are put on by the players at the spur of the moment. Of this
synod only one member may be coloured and usually the negro element is
confined to the actual arabesques of the execution. These arabesques
may be of the most fascinating order; but the fact remains that they
are improvisations over an accepted basis and not true composition at
all. (It is the greatest mistake to class Louis Armstrong and Duke
Ellington together as similar exponents of negro music--the one is a
trumpet player, the other a genuine composer.)

Improvisation is all very well in its way, so long as its expressive
and formal limitations are realized. At first sight it might seem that
improvisation would lead to a greater freedom in music, but in actual
practice it proves a considerable restriction--at least in music based
on the European harmonic system. It is possible that a purely melodic
improvisation based on a more varied range of modes than our own, such
as we get in Indian music, might provide a melodic line of greater
expressive and formal interest than our squarecut classical tunes; but
when it comes to a number of players improvising dance music together
they can only avoid complete chaos by sticking to a simple and
mutually recognized ground as a basis for their cadenzas. It is the
monotony and paucity of musical interest in this perpetually recurring
harmonic ground that eventually makes us lose interest in the cadenzas
themselves.

An artist like Louis Armstrong, who is one of the most remarkable
virtuosi of the present day, enthralls us at a first hearing, but
after a few records one realizes that all his improvisations are based
on the same restricted circle of ideas, and in the end there is no
music which more quickly provokes a state of exasperation and ennui.
The best records of Duke Ellington, on the other hand, can be listened
to again and again because they are not just decorations of a familiar
shape but a new arrangement of shapes. Ellington, in fact, is a real
composer, the first jazz composer of distinction, and the first negro
composer of distinction. His works--apart from a few minor
details--are not left to the caprice or ear of the instrumentalist;
they are scored and written out, and though, in the course of time,
variants may creep in--Ellington's works in this respect are as
difficult to codify as those of Liszt--the first American records of
his music may be taken definitively, like a full score, and are the
only jazz records worth studying for their form as well as their
texture. Ellington himself being an executant of the second rank has
probably not been tempted to interrupt the continuity of his texture
with bravura passages for the piano, and although his instrumentalists
are of the finest quality their solos are rarely demonstrations of
virtuosity for its own sake.

The real interest of Ellington's records lies not so much in their
colour, brilliant though it may be, as in the amazingly skilful
proportions in which the colour is used. I do not only mean skilful as
compared with other jazz composers, but as compared with so-called
highbrow composers. I know of nothing in Ravel so dextrous in
treatment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient _Hot and
Bothered_ and nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic than the final
section. The combination of themes at this moment is one of the most
ingenious pieces of writing in modern music. It is not a question,
either, of setting two rhythmic patterns working against each other in
the mathematical Aaron Copland manner--it is genuine melodic and
rhythmic counterpoint which, to use an old-fashioned phrase, 'fits'
perfectly.

The exquisitely tired and four-in-the-morning _Mood Indigo_ is an
equally remarkable piece of writing of a lyrical and harmonic order,
yet it is palpably from the same hand. How well we know those
composers whose slow movements seem to be written by someone else--who
change in the course of the same section from slow Vaughan Williams to
quick Stravinsky and from quick Hindemith to slow Csar Franck. The
ability to maintain the same style in totally different moods is one
of the hallmarks of the genuine composer, whether major or minor.

Ellington's best works are written in what may be called ten-inch
record form, and he is perhaps the only composer to raise this
insignificant disc to the dignity of a definite genre. Into this three
and a half minutes he compresses the utmost, but beyond its limits he
is inclined to fumble. The double-sided ten-inch _Creole Rhapsody_ is
an exception, but the twelve-inch expansion of the same piece is
nothing more than a potpourri without any of the nervous tension of
the original version. Ellington has shown no sign of expanding his
formal conceptions, and perhaps it is as well, for his works might
then lose their peculiar concentrated savour. He is definitely a petit
matre, but that, after all, is considerably more than many people
thought either jazz or the coloured race would ever produce. He has
crystallized the popular music of our time and set up a standard by
which we may judge not only other jazz composers but also those
highbrow composers, whether American or European, who indulge in what
is roughly known as 'symphonic jazz'.


(h) Symphonic Jazz


There is, on the face of it, no reason why the jazz idiom should not
prove a more stimulating and fruitful _materia musica_ than the cult
of the neo-classic, the exotic, or what the French describe as 'trs
folk-lore'. The barbaric and vital negro element, though small,
provides the same stimulus for the present day as oriental exoticism
did for the 'nineties, while the sophisticated and masochistic Jewish
element provides a far more convincing and natural background to
contemporary thought than any school of folk song. Much as we may
deplore the latter fact, there is no getting away from it. The sheer
anger aroused in 'hearties' of the Beachcomber order by such different
manifestation of contemporary depression as jazz songs and the poetry
of Eliot is an unconscious tribute to the strength of this negative
spirit. The intoxicating low spirits of jazz do not, like the
music-hall songs of the 'nineties, express a certain mood of a certain
class in a certain country; they express, whether we like it or not,
the constant tenor of our lives. They are not a cordial which changes
in every country, like schnapps; they are a universal anodyne, like
aspirin.

The curiously delocalized and declassed atmosphere of jazz was aptly
symbolized in the film version of Noel Coward's _Cavalcade_. Whereas
in the earlier part of the film the barrel-organ tunes were used to
hit off the atmosphere of London lower-class life at a particular
date, towards the end of the film the jazz song 'Twentieth Century
Blues' was used to hit off the atmosphere of post-war life in any
venue. Mr. Coward's symbols are, in their way, so trite and vulgar
that the mind rather boggles at accepting them. We hardly like to face
the fact that they are not only good theatre but sober truth. Yet, in
spite of its facile melancholy, is not Mr. Coward's 'City'--with its
'unbelievably tiring, Life passes by me, noise and speed are
conspiring to crucify me'--as perfect a symbol of the
nineteen-twenties as Pierce Egan's 'Oh London, London Town for
me'--with its 'masquerades, grand parades, famed gaslights, knowing
fights, such prime joking, lots of smoking', etc.--is of the
eighteen-twenties?

Jazz considered as a musical idiom has other qualities besides the
somewhat melancholy one of psychological truth. The American style in
popular music of today fulfils much the same function as the Italian
style in classical music of the eighteenth century. It is
internationally incomprehensible, and yet provides a medium for
national inflection more convincing than the very modified and
occasional provincialities of Boyce and Grtry. Although linked
together by a common derivation, nothing could show more subtle racial
variations than the highbrow jazz of such composers as Milhaud, Kurt
Weill, Copland, Schulhoff and 'Spike' Hughes. These subtle variations
are a far more accurate symbol of the differences between the urban
life of different countries than the highly coloured, exotic
differentiation provided by folk song, yet they avoid the drabness of
the purely internationalized Hindemith manner, with its evocation of
underground railways and hygienic tiling.

From the technical point of view, the jazz idiom is a more plastic
basis than the folk song or the pre-jazz popular songs. Jazz, like so
much exotic music, depends more on rhythmic and melodic inflections
than on a squarecut rhythmic and melodic scheme. An Irish folk song or
a Sousa march depends on balance of phrase and melodic form for its
atmosphere; it does not exist in sections, and as a whole it is too
clearly cut and rounded off to be of any use as material. But the
cadences of a jazz tune do not so restrict the composer, nor are they
incompatible with construction of a classical and even academic kind.

To take a striking instance, Darius Milhaud in _La Cration du Monde_
represents the primeval incantations of the gods Nzam, Mbre and
Nkwa by a three-part jazz fugato over a percussion accompaniment. The
rhythm and inflections of the fugue subject are clearly derived from
jazz arabesques, yet, at the same time, the subject is an admirable
one from any save the most crusty academic view. Crudely and navely
analysed, the percussion background provides the necessary barbaric
atmosphere, the jazz inflections of the tune suggest a stylized negro
speech, the counterpoint provides the element of mingled and growing
effort, while from the objective point of view the passage, theatrical
atmosphere apart, is an excellent and logical 'arrangement of notes'.
Had Milhaud used a negro folk song for this scene, he might have
obtained the requisite dark atmosphere, but he would have been unable
to add to this the constructional plasticity allowed by the jazz idiom
he has chosen. This whole work and in particular the final section,
with its brilliant blending of themes, is a most remarkable example of
the compromise possible between popular idiom and sophisticated
construction. Though perhaps not great music in itself, it opens up an
avenue of progress which this too versatile composer has unfortunately
passed by with a careless gesture.

It is often suggested that jazz rhythm, though exhilarating at first,
ends by becoming monotonous through its being merely a series of
irregular groupings and cross-accents over a steady and unyielding
pulse. This is true in a way, and certainly nothing is more wearisome
than the mechanical division of the eight quavers of the foxtrot bar
into groups of three, three and two; yet in the best negro jazz bands
the irregular cross-accents are given so much more weight than the
underlying pulse, that the rhythmic arabesques almost completely
obscure the metrical framework, and paradoxically enough this 'bar
line' music often achieves a rhythmic freedom that recalls the music
of Elizabethan times and earlier, when the bar line was a mere
technical convenience like a figure or letter in a score. On paper the
rhythmical groupings of a tune like 'Step on the Blues' (from _The
Girl Friend_) bear a striking resemblance to the irregular groupings
to be found in the music of Edmund Turges (circa 1500) who, it need
hardly be added, was roundly condemned for his metrical eccentricities
by the august Dr. Burney.

We make a mistake in considering these rhythmic arabesques abnormal or
artificial. It is the lack of rhythmic experiment shown in the
nineteenth century that is really abnormal--at least as regards
English music and the setting of English words. Without wishing in
any way to denigrate the magnificent achievement of the German
romantic school from Weber to Mahler, we can without exaggeration say
that it is remarkably deficient in purely rhythmic interest. Wagner
himself was conscious of this failing and admitted it with a
deprecatory 'Well you can't expect everything' air.

Yet we in this country have a musical upbringing based on the German
classics plus a strong leavening of hymns--'ancient and modern'. We
still go on setting English poetry in the totally unsuitable rhythms
drawn from the German Volkslied. Actually, had not the course of
English music been interrupted first by Handel and then, more gravely,
by Mendelssohn, we should probably have found the rhythmic tradition
of English music very much more eccentric and more full of 'conceits'
than the tradition of jazz. As it is, certain jazz songs show a more
apt feeling for the cadence of English speech than any music since the
seventeenth century.

There is, of course, no reason why the composer who draws inspiration
from contemporary dances should limit himself to the metrical frame
imposed by the ballroom. The rhythmic pattern of Walton's _Portsmouth
Point_ is clearly derived from jazz, yet after the sturdy opening in
four-four time, the composer, having established his norm, proceeds to
juggle with the bar line in a manner which is unfortunately denied to
the commercial composer. We need not expect the symphonic jazz of the
future to bear any more superficial resemblance to the foxtrot of the
night club than the scherzi of Beethoven's symphonies did to the
minuets of the eighteenth-century salon. We should remember that most
of Richard Strauss's _Elektra_ owes as great a debt to the rhythms of
Johann Strauss as even Ravel's _La Valse_ itself.

Whether the composer can afford to treat the harmonic basis of jazz so
freely is a little doubtful. Much of the emotional stimulus of jazz is
due to the piquant contrast between the terse and slangy rhythm and
the somewhat glucose harmony. Although _Portsmouth Point_ is a
successful example of jazz rhythm used apart from jazz harmony to
produce an atmosphere that is in another world from Harlem, there is
always a danger that jazz rhythm so used may become a purely synthetic
means of giving to a work some surface vitality. An atonal foxtrot is
as disturbing a thought as an atonal waltz. Nothing indeed is more
irritating than the way in which atonal and neo-atonal composers
sometimes use dance rhythms, whether valse, tarantella, or Charleston,
to give an associative rhythmic value to works whose mood is
hopelessly at variance with that of the original dance forms from
which these rhythms derive. Thus, many of the march pieces of
Hindemith and Prokofieff owe their stimulus not to any intrinsic
vitality but to the left-right left-right, bands-playing,
banners-waving, associations of the Sousa rhythms employed. Jazz
rhythm entirely detached from jazz melody and harmony can become as
empty a device as the melodic sequences of the neo-classicists.

The composer of highbrow jazz must obviously extend his harmonic
vocabulary beyond the somewhat narrow range of the syncopated kings,
but, if his work is to show any sense of style, this development must
be on the lines of a broader view of what is desirable as
consonance--as in Milhaud--rather than on a narrower view of what
constitutes dissonance--as in Hindemith.

The development of jazz is now clearly in the hands of the
sophisticated composer. The negro composer was able to give new life
to his music by moving from the harmonies of Dykes to those of Delius,
but he cannot execute a similar move today for the simple reason that
the post-impressionist harmonic experiments, the austerities and
asperities of Stravinsky and Bartk, are hardly of a type to lend
themselves to sentimental exploitation. The scoring and execution of
jazz reach a far higher level than that of any previous form of dance
music, and in Duke Ellington's compositions jazz has produced the most
distinguished popular music since Johann Strauss; but having caught up
with the highbrow composer in so many ways the jazz composer is now
stagnating, bound to a narrow circle of rhythmic and harmonic devices
and neglecting the possibilities of form. It is for the highbrow
composer to take the next step.

The firstfruits of symphonic jazz have been a little disappointing, it
is true, particularly in the land where they have been most
common--the United States of America. The Americans seem to live too
near Tin Pan Alley to get the beauties of this street in proper
perspective; their pictures of it are either too realistic or too
romantic. They suffer from the immense disadvantage of being on the
spot--are not Rousseau's paintings of tropical landscapes more
impressive even than those of Gauguin? The difficulty of making a
satisfactory synthesis of jazz is due to the fact that it is not,
properly speaking, raw material but half-finished material in which
European sophistication has been imposed over coloured crudity. There
is always the danger that the highbrow composer may take away the
number he first thought of and leave only the sophisticated trappings
behind. This indeed is what has happened in that singularly inept
albeit popular piece, Gershwin's _Rhapsody in Blue_. The composer,
trying to write a Lisztian concerto in jazz style, has used only the
non-barbaric elements in dance music, the result being neither good
jazz nor good Liszt, and in no sense of the word a good concerto.
Although other American composers, and even Gershwin himself, have
produced works of greater calibre in this style, the shadow of the
_Rhapsody in Blue_ hangs over most of them and they remain the hybrid
child of a hybrid. A rather knowing and unpleasant child too, ashamed
of its parents and boasting of its French lessons.

The French have perhaps too keen a sense of the ridiculous to get the
best out of jazz--for jazz is distinguished from earlier forms of
dance music by its intense and mumbo-jumbo earnestness. One can be
light and frivolous in a valse, but in a foxtrot one can only be
either solemn or facetious. Most French symphonic jazz is the latter,
and suffers from a rather tiresome consciousness of the Gallic tongue
being thrust ever so wittily into the Gallic cheek. Earnestness is a
pompous word no doubt, but it is unfortunately necessary to be a
little pompous to produce even the slightest of musical achievements.
It is boring for the composer, but in the long run less boring for the
audience. _Le Boeuf sur le Toit_ in which Milhaud guys night-club
music is an amusing jeu d'esprit which soon palls; whereas _Le
Cration du Monde_, in which dance idioms are turned to serious use,
has remained remarkably undated.

If the French are, for the most part, facetious, the Germans redress
the balance with a solemnity of depravity that is at times faintly
ridiculous. The jazz idiom is from every point of view so
diametrically opposed to the 'echt-Deutsch' tradition that the Germans
exploit it with the earnest and thoroughgoing sense of sin that gave
such a peculiar flavour to pre-Hitlerite night life. Jannings going to
the dogs is not a more melancholy spectacle than some worthy Teutonic
fiddler putting a little pep into a 'shimmy-fox'.

This Baudelairian earnestness has, however, given to the best examples
of German highbrow jazz an importance which is not to be found in the
Parisian school. It has enabled a composer like Kurt Weill, for
example, to catch the weariness and nostalgia that is the underlying
emotion of present-day dance music. Weill is undoubtedly the most
successful and important of the Central European composers who have
experimented with the jazz idiom. It is curious that a German should
be the first to sum up in musical synthesis certain phases of American
life. American jazz is either too Hollywood or too Harlem--it rarely
suggests the dusty panorama of American life which gives such
strength to even second-rate films. Weill is almost the only composer
who can evoke in music the odd, untidy, drably tragic background that
is presented to us so forcibly by William Faulkner in _Sanctuary_ and
_Light in August_.

Unlike so many composers who have taken up jazz as a stunt and dropped
it the moment they felt it was no longer the most daring fashion,
Weill has gradually evolved from disparate German and American
elements a style of highly individual expressiveness. Even in his
early and crude _Drei Groschen Opera_ there is a certain Hogarthian
quality, a poetic sordidness, which gives a strength to what otherwise
might have been a completely worthless work. Just as the _Drei
Groschen Opera_ in spite of its crude Americanisms catches the
ramshackle charm of the poorer quarters of London, so _Mahagonny_ in
spite of its Teutonic traits sums up the inverted poetry of American
'low life'.

_The Seven Deadly Sins_ marks as great an improvement on _Mahagonny_
as _Mahagonny_ did on the _Drei Groschen Opera_. Here the American
scene is not portrayed realistically, but taken as a convenient
background to a cynical morality of unexpectedly profound quality. As
presented with dcor by Neher and choreography by Balanchine, _The
Seven Deadly Sins_ is the most important work in ballet form since
_Les Noces_ and _Parade_. In spite of its superficial air of bustle
the music is remarkable for its extraordinary weariness, a
neurasthenic fatigue which, though sterile in a way, reaches in the
finale a certain grandeur. I am not pretending that _The Seven Deadly
Sins_ is a work of very great intrinsic or permanent value, but, quite
apart from its inevitability of medium--though its swift panorama
derives from the screen, there is no moment when we feel that the
camera would do the job better--I feel that this work has considerable
strength in the way it manages to deal with a modern and emotional
subject without chi-chi, false sentiment or mechanical romanticism.

There are remarkably few post-war composers who can get to grips with
their audience in the frank and admirable manner of Puccini. This
would not matter if it meant they had sufficient strength to rise
above the cinematic emotions of _Madam Butterfly_, but it does matter
if it means that they have insufficient vitality to rise even so far.
No doubt the greatest art is free from this type of emotionalism and
free also from any direct reflection of the contemporary scene. We can
listen to Sibelius' Seventh Symphony without any evocation of Finland,
the twentieth century, or our own personal emotions. But we cannot
live permanently in the austere world of Sibelius and Czanne. It
stands to reason that most art is produced at a lower level of
concentration and, without being second rate, must belong to the
second rank. It is in music of this more genial type that the present
age is so conspicuously lacking, and the presence of so many 'renowned
impersonations' of great music is no consolation.

Today, everyone with the rudiments of Greek grammar sets out to be a
Homer although incapable of even the police-court heroics of an Edgar
Wallace. The dreary spate of classical titles and classical subjects
that floods the music of our time is the symbol not of a classical
austerity to be admired but of an antique-fancying aridity to be
despised. What a relief to find a writer like Weill who, whatever his
merits or demerits, can at least appear in public wrapped neither in
cellophane nor a toga but in the clothes of today!

That two works so strikingly different in outlook and texture as _The
Seven Deadly Sins_ and _Le Cration du Monde_ should both draw their
inspiration from the jazz idiom is sufficient answer to those who
imagine that this idiom must inevitably produce a flat, monotonous,
and restricted style. It is true that in both cases the use of a jazz
idiom is justified by the subject matter, in the one case a negro
ritual, in the other the life of an American dancer. There is as yet
no purely instrumental and non-pictorial work of any value that is
similarly based on the jazz idiom, and it might be thought that the
popular associations of this style would prove too strong an element
of distraction for a symphony or concerto. I can see no reason,
however, why a composer should not be able to rid himself as much from
the night-club element in jazz as Haydn did from the ballroom element
in the minuet, and produce the modern equivalent of those dance suites
of Bach which we treat with as much seriousness as the sonatas of
Beethoven.

For reasons I have already stated, the next move in the development of
jazz will come, almost inevitably, from the sophisticated or highbrow
composers. Although we get an exceptional popular composer like
Ellington turning jazz to some use, his skill--as considered apart
from that of his executants--is hardly appreciated by any except the
highbrow public. To the ordinary public jazz is not even a thing
specifically to be danced to, let alone be listened to with any
discrimination. It has become a sort of aural tickling, a vague
soothing of the nerves giving no more positive pleasure then the
mechanically-lit gasper. At its best it provides merely a group
emotion for those incapable of more independent sensations.

More than the music of any other period jazz has become a drug for the
devitalized. As with all drug habits one dare not stop, for fear of
the reaction, and it is no rare experience to meet people whose lives
are so surrounded, bolstered up and inflated by jazz that they can
hardly get through an hour without its collaboration; with no doubt
unconscious logic they make up for the threadbare quality of their own
emotions by drawing on the warm capacious reservoir of group emotion
so efficiently provided by the American jazz kings.

The man who plays jazz all day is of course no more a music lover than
the man who drinks 'hooch' all day is a connoisseur of wines. The
concertgoer who with conscious superiority listens to six Bach
concertos in an evening may well think that it is no use wasting tears
about the vulgarization of vulgarization. To him it is a matter of
indifference whether jazz is a stimulant, a drug, or a piece of mental
wallpaper. But he would do well to reflect whether the same process of
vulgarization is not taking place in the case of classical works;
whether the highbrow as well as the lowbrow is not becoming the victim
of the appalling popularity of music.




_Part IV_

The Mechanical Stimulus


(a) The Appalling Popularity of Music

(b) Mechanical Romanticism

(c) Craft for Craft's Sake

(d) Mechanical Music and the Cinema

(e) The Disappearing Middlebrow




The Mechanical Stimulus

(a) The Appalling Popularity of Music


Music has an odd way of reflecting not only the emotional background
of an age but also its physical conditions. The present age is one of
overproduction. Never has there been so much food and so much
starvation, and (as I pointed out before) never has there been so much
music-making and so little musical experience of a vital order.

Since the advent of the gramophone, and more particularly the
wireless, music of a sort is everywhere and at every time; in the
heavens, the lower parts of the earth, the mountains, the forest and
every tree therein. It is a Psalmist's nightmare. At one time a
cautious glance round the room assured one, through the absence of a
piano, that there would at least be no music after dinner. But today
the chances are that one's host is a gramophone bore, intent on
exhibiting his fifty-seven varieties of soundbox, or a wireless fiend
intent on obtaining the obscurest stations irrespective of programme.
It is to be noticed that the more people use the wireless the less
they listen to it. Some business men actually leave the wireless on
all day so that the noise will be heard as they come up the garden
path, and they will be spared the ghastly hiatus of silence that
elapses between the slam of the front door and the first atmospheric.

The people, and they are legion, who play bridge to the accompaniment
of a loud speaker, cannot be put off their game even by _The Amazing
Mandarin_ of Bla Bartk. Were The Last Trump to be suddenly broadcast
from Daventry by special permission of Sir John Reith--and I can think
of no event more gratifying to the stern-minded Governors of the
B.B.C.--it is doubtful whether it would interfere with the cry of 'No
Trumps' from the card table.

What people do in their own homes is fortunately still their own
concern, but what takes place in public streets and public houses
concerns us all. The loud speaker is little short of a public menace.

In the neighbourhood where I live, for example, there is a loud
speaker every hundred yards or so, and it is only rarely that they are
tuned in to different stations. If they are playing the foxtrot I most
detest at one corner of the street, I need not think that I can avoid
it by walking to the other end. At times there is a certain piquancy
in following a tune in two dimensions at once, so to speak--to buy
one's cigarettes to the first subject of a symphony, to get scraps of
the development as one goes to the newsagent, and to return home to
the recapitulation--but the idea of the town as one vast analytical
programme, with every pavingstone a barline, soon palls. It would not
matter so much were the music bad music but, as the B.B.C. can boast
with some satisfaction, most of it is good. We board buses to the
strains of Beethoven and drink our beer to the accompaniment of Bach.
And yet we pride ourselves on the popular appreciations of these
masters.

Here is yet another example of the gradual fusion of highbrow and
lowbrow to which I drew attention before. Instead of the admirable old
distinction between classical and popular which used to hold
good--classics for the concert hall or home, popular for the street
and caf--classical music is vulgarized and diffused through every
highway and byway, and both highbrow and lowbrow are the losers.

The principal objections to music provided by the now almost universal
loud speaker are its monotony and unsuitability. Whereas you can
escape from a mechanical piano by going to the next caf, you can
rarely escape from a B.B.C. gramophone hour by going to the next
public house because they are almost bound to be presenting the same
entertainment to their clients. The whole of London, whatever it is
doing, and whatever its moods, is made to listen to the choice of a
privileged few or even a privileged one.

To take the example of Mr. Christopher Stone whose well-modulated
voice has doubtless given pleasure to millions. At certain hours of
the day, it is impossible for anyone to escape from his breezy
diffidence. That he is a benevolent autocrat I am sure is true, just
as I am sure that his choice of records is reasonably intelligent and
eclectic. But the fact remains that he enjoys a position of
dictatorship as fantastic as anything in Aldous Huxley's _Brave New
World_. At one time G. K. Chesterton propounded the amiable and
consoling theory that people would cheat the prophets by refusing to
do what was laid down in the pseudo-scientific and so-called 'Utopian'
books. It would appear, though, that the most jaundiced of imaginative
writers can hardly keep pace with the blessings of mechanical
progress, that pass in a year or two from a vicious and improbable
fancy to a grimly ineluctable fact.

Even worse than the lack of individual choice in loud speaker music is
the almost invariable unsuitability of its style and timbre. Music in
the streets, in cafs, and at fairs is an admirable scheme, but a
certain gaiety of outline and pungency of timbre is essential. The
Catalan coblas are the ideal example of outdoor music, but anything,
from a military band playing Sousa to a man playing Carmen on the
ocarina, is preferable to having the strains of the Air on the G
String, reduced in quality but amplified in quantity, floating out
over the noise of traffic. Even the dance music which on stylistic
grounds is to be preferred, in the circumstances, to Beethoven or
Bach, has a quality of sickening and genteel refinement not to be
found in the exhilarating tintinnabulation of the fast-disappearing
mechanical piano. It has actually been suggested that the 'inartistic'
confusion of fair music, the dizzy and arbitrary counterpoint of
round-abouts, with their whistling organs, should be supplanted by the
uniform of blaring synchronized loud speakers.

It is clear that we are fast losing even the minor stimulus of
genuine healthy vulgarity. In the present age it is impossible to
escape from Culture, and the wholesale and wholetime diffusion of
musical culture will eventually produce in us, when we hear a Bach
concerto, the faint nausea felt towards a piece of toffee by a worker
in a sweet factory.

The same phenomenal indifference towards what they listen to can be
seen as clearly in those who have loud speakers thrust upon them as in
those who deliberately foster their use. One might have thought that
the sturdy British working man entering a public house and being
greeted with a talk on the Reclamation of the Zuyder Zee, or a string
quartet by Alban Berg, would have requested the proprietor, and not
entirely without reason, to 'put a sock in it'; but actually he just
sits stolidly there, drinking his synthetic bitter to sounds of
synthetic sweetness, not caring whether the loud speaker is tuned in
to a jazz band, a talk on wildflowers, a Schnberg opera or a reading
from 'The Land' by the authoress. So long as certain waves are set up
in the ether to produce a certain reaction on his tympanum he is
content. The most severe complaints about the wireless are indeed from
people who indignantly discover that for five minutes during the day
the machine is not functioning at all.

Far be it from anyone interested in contemporary music to complain
that the B.B.C. have the enterprise to put on such works as the operas
of Berg and Schnberg. One's complaint is not with the programmes
themselves, which, through an independence of advertising interests
are of an admirably eclectic nature, but with their intolerably
wholesale diffusion through portable sets and loud speakers.

In previous ages, listening to music was a matter of personal choice
usually involving either individual skill in joining with other people
in singing a madrigal, or at least the concentration, and sacrifice of
time and money, required by a cycle of _The Ring_. But now no one can
avoid listening to music, whether in town or country, in a motor car,
train or restaurant, perched on a hilltop, or immersed in the river.
It is even more trying for the musical than for the non-musical; it is
impossible for them to escape from their profession or relaxation, as
the case may be.

Another symbol of the present age is thus curiously provided. Those
who in the eighteenth century felt like killing their fellow creatures
were able to exercise their natural faculties with others of the same
bent in a comparatively restricted space. The unbellicose were, save
in exceptional circumstances, not affected. But today everyone is a
potential combatant and will no longer be able to escape mechanized
death in the next war than at the present moment he can escape
mechanized music.

We have at present no idea of what havoc may be wrought in a few
years' time by the combined effect of the noise of city life and the
noise of city music--an actual atrophy of the aural nerves would seem
to be indicated. Already it is to be observed that people are no
longer thrilled or even aggravated by the most powerful of modern
tuttis. The explanation is simple. The noise provided by such
adjuncts of modern life as the pneumatic drill, the movietone news
reel and the war film, leaves the most sadistic and orgiastic of
composers at the starting post. When Berlioz wrote the _Symphonie
Fantastique_ he was providing probably the greatest sonority that
anyone, including even those military men present, had ever heard.
When George Antheil adds to his score sixteen pianos, an electric
buzzer or two, an aeroplane propeller, and a pneumatic drill he is,
after all, providing little more than the average background to a
telephone conversation.

Although excessive sonority has lost its thrill, we still demand it as
an ever-increasing factor in our lives. It is noticeable, indeed, that
those whose business lives are the most surrounded by extraneous
noises are those who most insist on the continuous support of
gramophone and loud speaker during their leisure hours. We live in an
age of tonal debauch where the blunting of the finer edge of pleasure
leads only to a more hysterical and frenetic attempt to recapture it.
It is obvious that second-rate mechanical music is the most suitable
fare for those to whom musical experience is no more than a mere aural
tickling, just as the prostitute provides the most suitable outlet for
those to whom sexual experience is no more than the periodic removal
of a recurring itch. The loud speaker is the street walker of music.


(b) Mechanical Romanticism


There is, of course, nothing wrong with street walkers provided people
don't get too romantic about them. In the case of mechanical music
there is a curious class of people to whom it is not so much a
convenient substitute for the concert hall as a thing to be prized in
itself for its mechanical qualities. These qualities are even expected
to be a stimulus and a guide for the composer.

It is well known that, even in so unintellectual a matter as eating
and drinking, people soon acquire a preference for synthetic products.
Those who are used to tinned Canadian salmon have little use for fresh
Scotch salmon, and those who are used to certain types of London beer
would be nonplussed by a drink that was actually brewed from malt and
hops. It will, on the same principle, be of the utmost interest to see
if the repeal of Prohibition in U.S.A. will lessen the taste for
'hooch' or not.

So it is with canned music. Certain composers, notably Milhaud, make
no secret of their preference for the timbres of the tone film. I have
heard a woman of some intelligence and musical training actually state
that she preferred the magic tone of the oboe over the wireless to the
actual sound of it in the concert hall; and I have heard a painter,
who prides himself on his modernity, state that the two-dimensional
effect of broadcast music was to be preferred because the sound
instead of escaping round the hall came straight at you and had 'a
frame round it'. These remarks would not be worth quoting were they
not typical of a large and increasing class of music-fanciers.

This obsession with the wireless and the gramophone is, however, only
a new twist to an old type of mechanical romanticism which goes back
to Walt Whitman, with his lists of objects and occupations; to Rudyard
Kipling, with his appalling messroom conversations between
locomotives, and to writers earlier still, such as T. Baker with his
notorious admiration of the power of steam.

The mechanical romanticism of today takes its most familiar forms in
stage and interior decoration. How well one knows the reading lamps
like X-ray apparatus, the wall cupboards like strong boxes, the
cocktail bars like operating theatres, with their daunting array of
angular glass and chromium plating. The reaction against the fake
antique is no doubt healthy and natural, but that is no reason why a
gramophone or wireless set, instead of enjoying the wooden discretion
of a commode, should parade itself before us like an electric chair in
a gangster film. It is a truism to point out that to the interior
decorator of the post-Corbusier period a mechanical aspect is of more
importance than the actual pure principles of utility which he
professes. A needlessly bare and uninviting mechanical
picturesqueness, evocative of Channel-crossings and visits to the
dentist, has taken the place of the blue china of the 'nineties and
the antimacassars of an earlier period.

As an example of the purely picturesque and non-utilitarian attitude
of the mechanical romanticists may be quoted the constructionist
scenery of the ballet _La Chatte_, where the stage was cluttered up
with a number of objects which, apart from looking as if they might
conceivably separate milk from cream, merely served to hinder the
movements of the dancers. They were, in fact, obstructionist rather
than constructionist and, from the mechanical and utilitarian point of
view, were far less justified than the painted canvas of theatrical
tradition.

The musical equivalent of this obsession with the mechanical, the
_sportif_ and the soi-disant contemporary, is provided by the navely
realistic orchestral pieces of Honegger, such as _Pacific 231_ and
_Rugby_.

Honegger, with his publicly paraded interest in foot-plates and
supercharging, is a fine example of the new type of sportsman composer
as opposed to the old type of poet composer who ruled the roost in the
nineteenth century. (We have only to read Berlioz' memoirs or Heine's
_Florentine Nights_ to realize the extraordinary impact that the
composer had on the public of the time, what, in these days, would
vulgarly be called the 'gossip-column value' of musicians.) The
glamour of the 'pale and interesting' musician is now supplanted by
the glamour of the sun-tanned and boring athlete, and plus-fours are a
more potent symbol than the black hat. This is particularly the case
in Paris, which may be described as the fashion centre for minor
artists even more than for women. If we see a begoggled leather-coated
and plus-foured figure, starting off with a _dmarrage formidable_ in
a rakish racing model, we may be sure that the driver is really more
at home in La Rue de la Botie than at Brooklands. The old vagabond
Don Juan conception of the artist drawn from mingled recollections of
_Louise_ and _La Bohme_ has certainly disappeared, but the new
conception is equally a picturesque legend woven by the artists round
themselves.

It is doubtful whether the mechanical picturesque is so great an
improvement on the romantic picturesque. Honegger's _Pacific 231_,
_Skating Rink_ and _Rugby_, Mossoloff's _Song of the Machines_,
Martinu's _Half-Time_ and Prokofieff's _Le Pas d'Acier_ are, au fond,
as sentimental in conception as the lyric pieces of Grieg. Honegger,
indeed, has claimed that _Pacific 231_ sets out to capture the
lyricism of an express train moving at top speed. Unfortunately this
lyricism has been overlaid by the mechanically picturesque
onomatopoeics of the piece, and the nostalgia of the train journey is
lost in a study of escaping steam and jolting points. A little more
thought might have told the composer that music, which depends on
varying degrees of stylized noise and speed for its expression, is, on
the face of it, the last medium in which to attempt an evocation of
non-stylized noise and speed (there are few pieces more essentially
static than Debussy's _Mouvement_, for example).

The objection to realism in music is not that it makes things too easy
for the listener but that it makes them too difficult. Instead of
receiving an immediate and incisive physical impression he receives a
vaguely visual one, which has to be related back to early associations
and personal experience before it produces the emotional reaction
which the music should have evoked directly. It is for the composer,
not the listener, to digest the raw material of his inspiration.

There is no reason whatsoever why the composer should not derive
inspiration from trains, aeroplanes, moving staircases,
penny-in-the-slot machines and other triumphs of mind over matter,
provided these sources of inspiration are so absorbed and transformed
that the final result produces a directly musical reaction. In a work
for the stage this is not necessarily so, for there the eye can
implement the oral suggestions. The brilliant realism of _Petrushka_
is thoroughly legitimate when performed, as intended, in the theatre.
But in the concert hall a work like Debussy's _Ftes_ produces by
purely musical means a far greater effect of speed and gaiety than
Stravinsky's onomatopoeics.

The place for music of the Honegger type is not the concert hall but
the cinema. Those who are bored by _Pacific 231_ in the concert hall
would have been surprised at the brilliant effect it made when used in
conjunction with the Soviet film _The Blue Express_.

The present vogue for mechanical realism, being based primarily on the
picturesque aspects of machinery, is bound to disappear as the
mechanic more and more comes to resemble the bank clerk, and as the
Turneresque steam engine gives way to the unphotogenic electric train.
It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus,
and there is already a faint period touch about _Pacific 231_ and _Le
Pas d'Acier_. One feels that they should have been written when
railways and factories really were beginning to alter our lives; that
Prokofieff should have written ballets about the spinning jenny and
the Luddite riots; that Honegger should have been there to celebrate
the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the death of
Huskisson with a 'Symphonie Triomphale et Funbre'. Our latter-day
mechanical romanticists are indeed only filling in a corner
which--save for a few ludicrous exceptions like Marenco's
_Excelsior_--was left unexploited by the nineteenth-century aesthetic
romanticists.

It may seem contradictory to condemn composers like Honegger for
basing their work on the contemporary scene after complaining that the
neo-classicists are so out of touch with contemporary life. But works
like Honegger's symphonic movements are only in touch with certain
purely decorative and ephemeral aspects of contemporary living. They
have no spiritual foundation even of a meretricious order.
Prokofieff's _Le Pas d'Acier_, for all its realism, tells us less
about proletarian Russia than the comparatively stylized and abstract
_Les Noces_.

Realistic fantasias have always been a minor part of music, but they
lose their savour so rapidly that we are apt to forget they were
written in past ages at all, and imagine they are the particular
province of the present day. We think of _Rugby_ as representing 'the
new spirit in music', yet that great critic Roger North writing in the
early eighteenth century says, 'But it is very possible that the
thoughts of some folks may run upon a dance, ye hurry of football
play, ye mad folks at bedlam or mortall Battells at Bear Garden, all
wch Bizzarie ye masters of musick will undertake to represent, and
many persons that doe not well distinguish between real good and
evill, but are hurryed away by caprice, as in a whirlewind, think
such musick ye best; & despise those who are not of ye same opinion
and (as ye rabble) crye, it is brave sport.' The realistic fancies of
which North wrote are now completely forgotten, and it is unlikely
that those of Honegger will enjoy an exceptionally long life. They are
merely stunts of no intrinsic importance, unlikely to produce any
progeny. It would be a pity to treat them too seriously, either in
praise or blame, and to do Honegger justice his later works, such as
the _Third Symphonic Movement_, suggest that he too is turning back
from the decorative cul-de-sac of mechanical romanticism so aptly
symbolized by the Rue Mallet-Stevens in Paris.

A far more disastrous example of mechanical romanticism is provided by
the works of Hindemith. For whereas Honegger's works only affect the
faade of music as we know it, Hindemith's apply a pneumatic drill to
its foundations, a pneumatic drill wielded by the most efficient and
determined of mechanics.


(c) Craft for Craft's Sake


It would be foolish to underestimate the importance of Hindemith. He
is undoubtedly one of the most proficient musicians alive today, and
as an influence on modern musical thought is second only to
Stravinsky, if not by now the more potent influence of the two. He is
everything in fact but an artist, and it is more than likely that he
would indignantly repudiate so non-utilitarian a title. To put it
vulgarly, Hindemith is the journalist of modern music, the supreme
middlebrow of our times. Standing in Central European music between
the reserved and intellectual Alban Berg on the one hand, and the
facile and popular Kurt Weill on the other, he reflects the tempo and
colour of modern life in the brisk unpolished manner of the newspaper
reporter. His concertos, however varied in content, have the family
resemblance of shape and texture that one edition of a newspaper bears
to another and, as in journalism, Tuesday's edition irrevocably dates
that of Monday.

Lytton Strachey writing of Macaulay says that his style, 'with its
metallic exactness and its fatal efficiency was certainly one of the
most remarkable products of the Industrial Revolution'. Hindemith
bears much the same relation to the German classics as Macaulay did to
the English classics, and his style, with its deadness and monotony of
rhythm, its atonal jazzing up of Bach's sewing-machine counterpoint,
is an equally typical product of the present Mechanical Age. It has
the hardness of outline and slightly hollow ring that Strachey finds
in Macaulay. To do Hindemith justice his style is lacking in the
falsities and incongruities of Stravinsky's; his neo-classicism is not
so much a distortion and incongruous harmonization of phrases drawn
from the classics as a translation into modern terms of
eighteenth-century commonplace.

There is practically no music which does not conjure up a certain type
of scene which is at the same time a complement to the music, and the
most suitable surroundings in which to hear it--it is in no spirit of
preciosity that we prefer to listen to Vittoria in a cathedral and to
Ellington in a night club. The social nimbus that surrounds
Hindemith's music is of a less colourful order. Listening to his
firmly wrought works we seem to see ourselves in a block of hygienic
and efficient workman's flats built in the best modernismus manner,
from which emerge troops of healthy uniformed children on their way to
the communal gymnasium. Hindemith's technique is indeed a gymnastic
technique, and his attitude towards 'expressive' music is reminiscent
of an instructor in physical jerks pooh-poohing the poses and
affectations of ballet--even though they may demand a higher degree of
training than he himself possesses.

A display of gymnastics, though admirable from many points of view, is
boring to watch, and a display of musical gymnastics is not only
boring to listen to but hopelessly sterile in aim. The whole problem
for the composer is a fusion of emotion and technique, and this is a
problem which, up to the present, Hindemith and his numerous followers
admittedly refuse or disdain to solve. They have set up, instead of
the old doctrine of art for art's sake, the equally 'arty' doctrine of
craft for craft's sake. Not only do they refuse to wear their hearts
on their sleeves but the sleeves themselves are rolled up in the most
approved proletarian fashion.

Their obsession with the utilitarian and the mechanical is as much a
piece of perverted romanticism as the furnishings of Corbusier houses.
The concentration on the specifically new--the cocktail shaker, the
movie camera and the typist's office--becomes just as tiresome as the
concentration of the older German music on the specifically
decaying--withered roses, crumbling ruins and waning loves. It is a
kind of proletarian sentimentality that has replaced the individualist
sentimentality of the romantic poet.

One can, of course, entirely sympathize with the spirit that has
prompted this reaction. When we think of the stranglehold German
romanticism had on this country thirty years ago, we can imagine what
it must have been like in Germany itself. German romanticism had come
to resemble a stuffy and scented drawing-room, overdecorated with silk
flounces, and encumbered with vast padded sofas and downy cushions.
Hindemith and his followers have thrown open the double windows, torn
down the hangings, put sackcloth instead of brocade and replaced the
upholstery with glass and chromium plating. But there is still too
much furniture about. German music has always been fatally plethoric
and the new 'Gebrauchsmusik' is no exception.

As it is felt by some of his followers that Hindemith's music has been
somewhat unduly saddled with the description of
Gebrauchsmusik--bread-and-butter music, workaday, or utility music are
perhaps the best English equivalents--it is as well to quote the
artistic credo of the master himself. Hindemith calls himself a
craftsman, never a tone poet, and has said that 'a composer should
never write unless he is acquainted with the demand for his work. The
times of consistent composing for one's own satisfaction are probably
gone for ever.'

This anti-aesthetic no-nonsense-about-me type of argument is so
superficially palatable at the present day that few people seem to
have given it sufficient attention to realize its patent fallacies.
Like most of the decadent movements in modern music, Gebrauchsmusik is
based on a misapprehension of the medium in which the composer
expresses himself.

In literature, the man who has neither the vision, the imagination,
the sense of beauty or the wit that are popularly supposed to go to
the production of a poem, novel or play, can turn his literary skill,
such as it is, to the production of advertisements, book reviews and
crime reports. He is a utility or workaday writer. In painting, the
same type of man, able to use a pencil and brush with some skill
without attempting to be a Czanne or a Picasso, can profitably and
pleasantly spend his time in such varied ways as the designing of book
jackets, the faking of old masters and the painting of presentation
portraits. In the three-dimensional arts one can distinguish even more
clearly between art and craft, and the carpenter who makes a chair can
claim to be satisfying a universal demand which is not met by the
sculptor. A chair is undoubtedly more comfortable to sit on than all
save a few examples of the sculptor's art. But in music there can be
no such thing as a chair opposed to a painting, or the craftsman
opposed to the pure artist.

The whole theory of utility music is based on the misconception that
one can distinguish between the aesthetic and the useful in this
particular medium. Apart from music for organized and non-aesthetic
action such as military marches and foxtrots--which, typically enough,
Hindemith has not written--music is only useful if it is good music,
whether light or serious. Unless it provides one with some vital
experience which no other art can convey it is not only useless but a
nuisance. The objective craftsman that Hindemith sets up as an ideal
is far more of a sentimental luxury than the despised aesthetic 'tone
poet'. His daily covering of music paper is a task as essentially
fruitless as those strange tasks assigned to the innocent dupes in the
stories of Sherlock Holmes, the man in 'The Red-headed League' who
copied out the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ or the stockbroker's clerk
who was set to making a list of the pottery firms in Paris.

If we examine Hindemith's second statement we find an even more
striking fallacy. With an altogether praiseworthy modesty Hindemith
appears to imagine that by ceasing to write for his own satisfaction
he is necessarily writing for the satisfaction of others. There is an
old and trite saying 'If you don't believe in yourself, nobody else
will', and in music it may with equal truth be said that if a composer
is not interested in his own music he can hardly expect others to be.
Even the most nauseating of popular tunes, that would appear to be
written solely with the desire to satisfy the public taste at its
least critical and most mawkish, must mean something to the composer,
and be primarily written for his satisfaction, if it is to 'get the
public'. Purely 'occasional' music whether deliberately vulgar or
deliberately refined always brings boredom and distrust in its wake.
Unless the composer has some definite reason for putting pen to paper,
he had far better play patience or do a little gardening.

It is this refusal to make music for its own sake that is responsible
for the passionate sincerity and popular success of Puccini's operas,
in spite of all their vulgarity. The followers of Hindemith may
shudder at this instance, but after all Puccini, as a superb craftsman
who certainly satisfied a popular demand, should theoretically
speaking be one of their idols; otherwise they are convicted of an
antisentimental bias which is the reverse of objective.

Hindemith is equally mistaken when he imagines that the writing of
music is governed by the laws of supply and demand. There is no
regular demand for musical material as there is for writing material
or boxes of matches; there is only a demand for something which
creates its own demand--a good piece of music in fact. By all means
let us have as many new piano concertos as possible, provided they are
equal to, or superior to, those in the standard of repertory. There is
no specific demand, however, for a new concerto as such, irrespective
of quality. A pianist does not ask for a new piano concerto as he does
for a new pair of shoes, giving the old one away to an amateur.
Concertos may wear thin in the course of time, but handsewn leather is
better than mass-produced cardboard.

As a further example of Hindemith's attitude towards music in general,
and to his own compositions in particular, one may quote a few
typical passages from the preface to _The Lesson_, a communal
entertainment with words by Bert Brecht, who is better known through
his collaborations with Kurt Weill: 'As the sole objective of this
composition is to employ all present and not primarily to evoke any
definite impressions by means of music and poetry, the form of the
piece should be adapted as far as possible to the main intention....
Omissions, inversions and additions are practicable. Musical portions
may be left out ... passages from other composers may be introduced if
necessary, provided they conform to the general style of the
original.'

If the composer treats his own music with so little respect, one may
well ask why the listener should be expected to show any more. But
perhaps Hindemith regards the listener with the lofty contempt with
which he regards the artist. He seems to think that some mystic value
resides in the mere performance of notes--that the scraping of
horsehair over catgut is in itself a health-giving and praiseworthy
action, comparable to having a cold bath in the morning or being a
Storm Trooper. His view of music would appear to be almost excretory.

There is at the beginning of this work a short quotation from
Shakespeare which is symbolical in more ways than one. It will be
observed that Cleopatra emphatically preferred billiards to music.
This attitude, though somewhat philistine perhaps, is to be praised in
that it recognizes that music and billiards represent two different
sides of life. Cleopatra neither confused the functions of the two
diversions nor suggested that they were better combined. Today,
however, she would either have wireless turned on continually in the
billiard room, or else she would have to listen to composers like
Hindemith, who reduce music to the spiritual level of billiards,
pingpong and clock golf.

By resolutely turning his back on 'art' Hindemith has lessened our
interest even in his craft. For a problem in craft can only really
become a problem when the fusion of emotion and form has to be
considered. To confuse the arbitrary counterpoint of Hindemith with
the expressive counterpoint of Byrd and Palestrina is to confuse the
tightrope itself with the tightrope walker. It need hardly be pointed
out that skill in the manipulation of purely academic counterpoint can
be acquired in a few months by almost any person of average
intelligence, whether musically gifted or not. The galvanic and
plethoric counterpoint of Hindemith is only distinguishable from the
bustling counterpoint of any nineteenth-century pedagogue by its
slight atonal touches and general air of latter-day briskness.
Occasionally by sheer quickness of hand Hindemith is able to deceive
the ear, but in his slow movements the lack of any genuine motive
force or any genuinely lyrical line is pitilessly shown up. Much the
same is true of his sense of form which is, in reality, not an
intrinsic sense of form but an extrinsic use of formalism.

A musical idea of any real vitality determines, or should determine,
its own formal treatment. The orchestral _Images_ of Debussy and the
later symphonies of Sibelius are not formal in the mechanical
post-war sense, but every detail in them is as connected with the
main trend of the musical thought as the twig is connected with the
trunk of a tree. Having something to say these composers, not
unnaturally, also knew how to say it. But a composer like Hindemith
appears, on his own admission, to have nothing personal to say and
indeed despises the composer who thus vulgarly thrusts his personality
before the public. His musical ideas are consequently lacking in
generative power--they are not saplings but dead brushwood. To give
them an air of logic he casts them into some pre-established and
externally imposed form which, to the non-technical listener, gives a
vague impression of solidity and musicianship. His form is an
unyielding mould like those hideous porcelain objects into which
blancmange and cornflour mixtures are poured, eventually solidifying
into a dish known in some circles as 'shape'.

It is true that in one or two works, notably the opera _Cardillac_ and
the oratorio _Das Unaufhrliche_, Hindemith has clearly made an effort
to rise above the uniform drabness of his innumerable pieces of
Konzert Musik and Kamnermusik. The oratorio, indeed, whose libretto
suggests a none too happy collaboration between Nietzsche and James
Douglas, almost takes us back to the bad old days of music with a
message. Its pessimistic philosophy suggests that Hindemith himself
has lost his faith in conscious modernity. But the occasional and
praiseworthy attempts in this work to write free, expressive and
uninhibited music are not so convincing as the 'echt-Hindemith'
baritone solo 'I'm an Opportunist, I'm of the present'. After his
utilitarian debauches he evidently finds it difficult to cultivate an
aesthetic grande passion. One is reminded of the English poet who
after writing political leaders in a jingo paper for a number of years
complained that his Muse had deserted him.


(d) Mechanical Music and the Cinema


One is criticizing Hindemith's music, of course, from the point of
view of the listener in the concert hall, for in spite of his numerous
works for odd and specific occasions the greater part of his music is
still designed for performance in the ordinary way. It is often said
of this type of music that even if it fails to satisfy us in the
concert hall it is eminently suited to mechanical reproduction, or to
film or radio work; but this is merely another example of the false
thinking engendered by mechanical romanticism. Because a work is
mechanically conceived it does not follow that it is suited to
mechanical reproduction. It is manifestly ludicrous to eschew all
sentiment and pictorialism, and then to claim that your music is the
ideal accompaniment for an art like the cinema, which depends to so
great a degree on just this type of appeal. The composer has so often
been urged to desert the concert hall for the wireless or cinema
studio that perhaps it would be as well to examine, without prejudice,
the supposed advantages of adapting oneself to contemporary mechanical
media.

As regards writing with a view to the limitations of the gramophone,
there is frankly not much to be said for it. Gramophone companies are
remarkably chary of taking up any work that has not made its
reputation already, and if this is the case then the public want the
nearest approximation to what they hear in the concert hall. It is
obviously to the advantage of a jazz composer like Ellington to take a
ten-inch record as his scale, but in the case of the symphonic writer
the man who deliberately designed a work with pauses that coincided
with the change-over from one record to another would look faintly
silly when the next mechanical improvement obviated the necessity of
these pauses. It is said that there have already been patented several
forms of mechanical reproduction which abolish the terrible hiatus
between one record and another, and that these improvements are
deliberately held back by the gramophone companies in view of the
wholesale mechanical changes their adoption would enforce. Be that as
it may, it is obvious that in a few years' time recording will have
improved on the present methods as much as the present methods have
improved on the old pre-electric horn recording, with its euphoniums
instead of 'cellos, and its handful of Stroh violins.

To write specially with a view to the deficiencies of recording
technique is to upset the natural order of things. In the nineteenth
century the tremendous improvement in the design and manufacture of
wind instruments was directly due to the elaborate demands made on the
player's skill by the composer; and the same is true of present-day
recording whose advance is due to people demanding from the talking
machine the complex subtleties of timbre that they hear in the concert
hall. It is not for the composer to play handmaiden to the engineer.

There is only one quality which is the exclusive property of the
gramophone, namely the ability to change the pitch of the music
abruptly in the middle of the work. This device can be put to
excellent effect in records of political or patriotic speeches, but it
is doubtful whether it is much of a contribution to serious music.
Milhaud has made some records of choral works in which by an
adjustment of the speed of the recording machine the final effect is
some two or three tones higher than as actually sung, thus producing a
choral climax of peculiar acerbity. The occasional use of this device,
however, hardly entitles the gramophone to be considered as a medium
in itself.

Works written for the wireless as a medium may be divided into two
classes. First there are those which are really concert-hall works
orchestrated in a manner specially suited to radio reproduction; and
here we are faced by the same arguments that apply to music written
especially for the gramophone. The brittle texture of a typical
Hindemith work undoubtedly comes over the ether better than the more
subtle timbres of works by Delius, Sibelius, or Van Dieren--to take
three composers who have only this subtlety in common--but the
progress being made in wireless reproduction is so great that it would
be waste of time for a composer to deliberately score his works from
the microphonic point of view, unless paid to do so. Moreover, while
the wireless, unlike the gramophone, offers opportunities for the
production of new works, it is necessary to point out that no musical
work can make its reputation by radio performance alone. In spite of
the wider dissemination of gramophone and radio the composer is still
ultimately dependent on the rclame provided by an actual concert-hall
performance.

Composing with a view to actual microphone technique is quite another
matter. It is clear that the combination of several studios gives
scope for a fascinating superimposition of different types of sound
particularly in combination with the spoken word. One can easily
imagine a wireless drama compounded of speech, stylized realistic
sound, synthetically produced music and, possibly, television which
would carry to its logical end the expressionism hinted at in the
later plays of Strindberg and unobtainable on the legitimate stage. It
is equally clear, though, that music qua music must take a subordinate
place in such an entertainment. The production of a suitable aural
background and the juxtaposition of realistic sound and stylized
speech calls for a selective rather than a purely creative artist--a
man who will bear the same relation to a composer that the
photographer does to a painter. In work of this type a composer of the
Hindemith school is obviously to be preferred to the subjective 'tone
poet', to use Hindemith's own contemptuous description of the romantic
musician. It may well be that wireless entertainment of this type
will, in the future, open up to the minor composer the same outlet
that the designing of posters opens up to the minor painter. In the
meanwhile the composer of merit is well advised to regard the wireless
as a possible adjunct to his income rather than as a tenth Muse.

The cinema is undoubtedly the most important of the mechanical stimuli
offered to the composer of today; and in spite of its ephemeral nature
it is the only art whose progress is not at the moment depressing to
watch. While the music of today seems either to be a romantic swan
song regretting past days, as in Delius; an alembicated and
intellectual crossword puzzle, as in Von Webern, or a callow
reflection of the drab minutiae of daily life, as in Hindemith, the
films with superb insolence have blended old-fashioned navety of
sentiment with up-to-the-minute sophistication of technique, producing
as if by accident the most vigorous art form of today.

Films have the emotional impact for the twentieth century that operas
had for the nineteenth. Pudovkin and Eisenstein are the true
successors of Mussorgsky, D. W. Griffiths is our Puccini, Cecil B. de
Mille our Meyerbeer and Ren Clair our Offenbach. It is not
exaggerating to say that a film like King Vidor's _Hallelujah_ has a
far greater aesthetic significance than any opera written since the
war, and that the pickaxe spiritual in _I am a Fugitive_ is, in its
medium, worthy to be compared with the chorus crying for bread in the
original version of _Boris_.

The cinema from being the servantgirl of the arts, the butt of every
footling dramatic critic who once saw a play by Ibsen, has blossomed
out into the one art form of today which while in touch with the
public can yet beat the intellectual at his own game. There must be
few surrealists and transitionists who do not feel that the Marx
Brothers have stolen their thunder and sent it rolling uproariously
round the room in Lewis Carroll fashion, and few artists of any kind
who do not feel abashed when faced with the phenomenal inventive
genius of Walt Disney, the only artist of today who exists
triumphantly in a world of his own creation, unhampered by the
overshadowing of ancient tradition or the undercutting of contemporary
snobbism.

It is little wonder, then, that so many musicians, particularly those
who, immediately after the war, toyed with the music-hall aesthetic,
should now be attracted by the cinema aesthetic. Unfortunately they
are a little too late in the day to achieve anything in the nature of
symphonic cinema music. The idea of a film as a musical entity
vanished with the first Al Jolson picture. It is true that Pudovkin
and Eisenstein are the spiritual successors of Mussorgsky, but
unfortunately they found no Mussorgsky to write music for them. The
music provided by Meisel for _Potemkin_ was a great improvement on the
ordinary cinema music of the time, but it would be idle to pretend
that it was a worthy counterpart of the film itself.

By the time composers of merit turned their attention to the screen
the entire technique of sound accompaniment had been revolutionized.
Music as such was banished, except as an invisible and improbable
accompaniment to love scenes, and purely realistic synchronized sound
took its place.

As far as one can tell, Pudovkin was the first to realize the
possibilities latent in purely realistic sound, treated not as an
accompaniment but as a counterpoint to the visual image. Sketching out
a treatment in sound of a famous sequence in the silent film _Mother_,
in which a picture of the mother crying was 'cut in' with a picture of
a dripping kitchen tap, he remarked that instead of accompanying each
with its appropriate aural image he would synchronize the tap with the
sound of a woman crying, and vice versa. Modified use of this
contrapuntal treatment of sound is by now a commonplace in almost
every American film. Its use is limited, however, not only by the fact
that the opportunities for pure sound as opposed to human speech are
relatively few but by the difference in tempo between our perception
of sight and our perception of sound. There are remarkably few sounds
whose significance and associations we can immediately perceive
without the aid of a visual image; on the other hand a visual image
carries with it an immediate association of sound. A photograph of a
fire engine carries with it an implication of the sound of its bell
greater than the implication of the appearance of a fire engine
aroused by its noise.

The specimen counterpoint suggested by Pudovkin is only likely to be
successful because both visual images would be shown to the audience
as well as both aural images--even though they are shown at different
times. The sound of a dripping tap cannot be used as a counterpoint
to a visual image unless its own visual image has been previously
established, whereas a momentary and unprepared visual image can
easily be used as a counterpoint to a continuous aural background. It
is impossible, therefore, to achieve in music the equivalent of the
'quick cutting' which is the basis of the Pudovkin-Eisenstein
technique. There is no real equivalent in music even of the
'wipe-dissolve' which leads the eye gently but quickly from one scene
to another.

The ideal sound counterpoint of Pudovkin has perforce given place to a
more flexible and symbolic use of realistic noise blended with, or
superimposed upon, a musical background. As an easy example of this
type of sound treatment may be quoted a musical effect derived from
the sound of riveting which was used in an otherwise completely
undistinguished film called _The Half-Naked Truth_. In the scene in
question the noises of city life were shown playing on the nerves of
an overworked man in an office. First one riveter was heard, combined
with its visual image, then another, striking a higher note and
gradually assuming a more strictly musical rhythm and tone till, as
the shot changed to an office scene, they merged into a neurasthenic
blues whose orchestration ingeniously maintained the rapid metallic
tremolo of the riveting machine. The example was slight and isolated,
but its skill and flexibility pointed the way to a use of realism and
'actualities' more significant than the undigested concert-hall
onomatopoeics of _Pacific 231_.

Using the cinema as a medium, composers like Honegger could deal with
actualities not only with greater force but with greater artistry. Its
strength lies in the fact that it is the only art which can produce
significant form out of essentially shoddy material. Sickening
sentimentality and revolting brutality can, when treated
cinematically, achieve an aesthetic value which would never be theirs
in literature or the drama. The reason is that the life of a film lies
far more in its texture--understanding by this both the camera work
and its montage--than in its theme and outlook. One can conceive a
great book being clumsily written, but a film that is clumsily
produced automatically loses any possible artistic significance.

The cinema, in fact, not only offers opportunities for the pure
craftsmanship which is so meaningless in music but, being mainly a
selective rather than a creative art, offers to the minor artist a
positive montage instead of a negative pastiche. It is a tenable
theory that much of our dissatisfaction with post-war music derives
from the fact that the most typical post-war composers are cinema
producers manqus. Children of their time, they have yet remained
outside the most stimulating medium of their time. Instead of
producing null and void concertos, Hindemith should be the camera man,
Honegger should be in charge of the sound effects and Stravinsky, with
his genius for pastiche, should be entrusted with the cutting. The
cinema also offers a more convincing form of expression to artists
very different in temperament from the workaday composers. For
although in one way the cinema's strength lies in the positive value
it cannot extract from intrinsically negative actualities, in another
way its strength lies in its suitability to the 'dream-aesthetic'
which can be so irritating in the older arts.

It is fairly clear, I imagine, that films are the only logical medium
for the inconsequent dream images of surrealist thought. In literature
it is almost impossible to give sufficient visual impact to the
conflicting images. If we examine a typical piece of surrealist prose,
such as the extract from Soupault's _Death of Nick Carter_ quoted by
Herbert Read in his _English Prose Style_, we can see that it depends
for its effect on its visual content, or suggestions, and not on any
verbal rhythm. Rhythm is not even called in to emphasize the visual
images which are created by means as direct and as flat as a colour
adjective. It reads, as do so many transitional prose pieces, like an
elaborate stage direction from some super-Strindbergian play.

In painting, although the visual images can be set before one
directly, the absence of any time element is an obvious restriction to
the representation of a dream experience. The attempt to overcome this
deficiency, rather than any purely formal preoccupation, is probably
the cause of the confused and overcrowded design we occasionally find
in the pictures of Salvador Dali--in many ways the most important and
convincing of the surrealists. His pictures are as hampered by the
lack of time element as _The Last Day in the Old Home_ of Martineau or
the _Belshazzar's Feast_ of Martin. The repetition of the same object
in two different sizes, that familiar device in surrealist pictures,
is also an attempt to represent time experience in spatial form, to
capture the sudden and dramatic incongruity of scale which, invented
by D. W. Griffiths, has reached its climax in the _Silly Symphonies_
of Walt Disney--as for instance the mermaid scene in _King Neptune_.

The best of surrealist literature and surrealist painting seems clumsy
and rudimentary when put beside even a minor surrealist film such as
Germaine Dulac's _The Sea Shell and the Clergyman_, and there is
little doubt that surrealist thought would gravitate entirely round
the cinema were it not for the expense involved in the production of a
film as compared to the production of a picture or poem.

It has been remarked before that the most striking feature of the art
of our time is the way in which the popular, commercial and lowbrow
arts have adopted the technical and spiritual sophistication of the
highbrow arts. There is not much connection between Maeterlinck and
Marie Lloyd, but there is a definite connection between surrealist
prose and the Marx Brothers.

This inspired family has achieved in a successful and popular form
what the transitional writers labour at in the self-appointed
obscurity of an unsuitable medium--the translation into French of the
scenario of _Animal Crackers_ might have come straight out of
_Transition_ itself. The outrageous puns and verbal intricacies of the
conversations between Groucho and Chico are distinguished from the
philological wisecracks of _Work in Progress_ by the fact that they
invariably come off. Perhaps the most significant of the brothers
from a contemporary historian's point of view is not the wise-cracking
Groucho, magnificent though he is, but the silent and Freudian Harpo.
The scene in _Animal Crackers_ where he steals the birthmark from the
art dealer is surrealist poetry at its most fanciful. The scene where
he kicks the hostess, Mrs. Rittenhouse, is surrealist violence at its
most practical. How infinitely preferable to Max Ernst is the
sculptured group which comes to life, fires a revolver, and then
returns to bronze.

The films of the Marx Brothers, though surrealist in content, are,
like so many surrealist pictures, realist in method. It is noticeable,
though, that more and more American films are introducing, wherever
the script allows, dream sequences which, deriving from the early and
unappreciated _Beggar on Horseback_, are definitely surrealist in
their method. It is only a matter of time before these two lines of
thought are linked up and we get the first genuinely surrealist
commercial film.

Surrealism is at present connected in most people's minds with cliques
and preciosity, but that is no guarantee that it will not, under
another name and in cinematic form, become the dominant entertainment
of the future. It is a mistake to think that popular taste remains the
same or even demands the same sort of thing. Who in the late
seventeenth century, straining to hear some trumpery fiddle solo in
Banister's public-house Concert Room in Whitefriars would have
foreseen that in the 1930's a popular audience would stand in serried
ranks and respectful silence while six 'poderose consorts' were
played without interruption?

Music having ousted the other arts in popularity may well sink back
again and suffer the same social decline as poetry.

It may be that the break-up of tradition we see in literature,
painting, and music is not a transitional disruption paving the way
for a new tradition but a definite and final disruption. It may be
that specialized experiment in the arts has reached its logical end,
and that the only progress lies in a surrealist fantasia that will
embrace them all. Selection and superimposition or, if the word be
preferred, montage is the key note of such widely differing
contemporary manifestations as Eliot's poetry, Diaghileff's ballets,
Stravinsky's concertos, Ernst's pictures and Eisenstein's films. It is
only natural that these arts, having lost their specifically
characteristic background, should merge into the one form which is
capable of absorbing them all and producing a significant result--the
surrealist film.

Musical montage may not seem the highest form of occupation, but it is
the only future for the middlebrow composer of today.


(e) The Disappearing Middlebrow


To return abruptly from the surrealist future to the all too real
present, it may be asked in what way Hindemith and his followers are
fitted to deal with the mechanical mediums as they stand today. There
is nothing impertinent in such a question. If a man announces that he
has resigned from his job it is only natural, and indeed sympathetic,
to enquire 'And what do you propose to do now?' Most modern musical
criticism is no more than a futile examination of surface texture for
the reason that it stops short of the ultimate and inescapable 'and
then what?'

Without wishing to set up an hypothetical criterion, it is only
reasonable to ask what future lies in store for the composers of
Gebrauchsmusik if they are to live up to their declared convictions.
Hindemith having turned his back on the composer as poet for the few,
we must see if he is in any way fitted for the post of composer as
hack for the many. If a man says he is a craftsman we have a right to
ask what he can make. We do not judge a mechanic by the cut of his
dungarees but by his manual ability, and it would seem that Hindemith
is as little suited to lulling the senses of the stupid as he is to
arousing the interest of the intelligent.

The surrealist film is of the future, and the symphonic silent film is
of the past. At the present moment the only opportunities for the
cinema composer--apart from preludial fanfares, short semi-realistic
sequences in shots of machinery, etc.--lie in the definite musical
film either of the Eddie Cantor revue type or the Ren Clair operetta
type. Hindemith and his followers are patently incapable of tackling
such a task, in that they lack all the geniality of melodic invention
that is required of composers of this type of music. There is no test
so merciless as a 'theme song'--either it is good or it isn't. There
is no getting away from failure by describing it a pregnant thematic
fragment. Emotion of some sort is demanded of the least of composers
and even synthetic sentiment, the musical equivalent of glycerine
tears, is harder to achieve than abstraction. Abstract music is only
suited to that dismal and fruitless branch of entertainment, the
abstract film.

It is difficult indeed to see what precise function is fulfilled by
the composers of Gebrauchsmusik, for all their superficial air of
practicality and efficiency. Their technical dexterity is undeniable,
but it exists in a vacuum. The poor creatures are all dressed up with
nowhere to go.

A composer like Hindemith, although essentially a minor figure, is of
considerable importance, however, as a symbol of the modern artist
who, having lost or thrown aside the spiritual background of the
romantic artist, has signally failed to adapt himself to the physical
background of modern life. He is neither a good wife nor an attractive
whore--the adjectives are interchangeable. Incapable of the spiritual
and technical concentration that has gone to such works as Sibelius'
Seventh Symphony, Alban Berg's _Lyric Suite_, or Van Dieren's _Sonetto
VII of Edmund Spenser's Amoretti_, to name at random three of the
masterpieces of our time, he is equally incapable of the melodic
fertility and the ability to synthesize popular sentiment that we find
in a work like Kurt Weill's _Seven Deadly Sins_,[9] not to mention
such genuinely popular pieces as Duke Ellington's _Mood Indigo_ or
Cole Porter's _Love for Sale_. There is hardly a work of his which, to
use a hackneyed phrase, does not fall spectacularly 'between two
stools'. It is permissible to take as a fair example the Philharmonic
Concerto that he wrote for the Jubilee of the Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra. It consists of a set of variations on a theme of quite
phenomenal dullness, each variation presumably designed to throw into
alto relievo a particular section of the orchestra. Not Hindemith's
greatest admirer, I imagine, would pretend that this work is to be
taken as seriously as, for example, Schnberg's _Variations_ for
orchestra, yet as a bravura piece it is patently inferior to the
glittering _Capriccio Espagnol_ of Rimsky-Korsakoff. (Its combination
of natural aridity with deliberate virtuosity is indeed most
displeasing. Exhibitionism is only to be tolerated in the physically
attractive.)

[Footnote 9: Weill has written his utility music and indeed was at one
time associated with Hindemith, but it is by his more recent work, as
exemplified in the _Seven Deadly Sins_, written since he left Germany,
that I am judging him.]

Hindemith having embraced the goddess Practicality must be judged by
her own Draconic laws, and there are few works of his that do not lay
themselves open to this dual criticism. They fail to satisfy any
logical canon of criticism that today offers us, and in criticizing
them we must perforce talk in terms of today, for his widespread
influence is already on the wane. We need hardly worry ourselves about
the verdict of the future, for the journalist who has failed cannot
console himself, like the unsuccessful poet, with the possible
adoration of posterity.

Those who sit in the middle of a joy wheel may seem to move slowly,
but their permanence is more assured than those who for the sake of a
momentary exhilaration try to pin themselves to its smooth and shining
periphery.

By rejecting the individualist attitude towards art Hindemith has
bound himself to the law of social change, and although it is rash to
prophesy these changes I think we may say that Gebrauchsmusik, as we
at present understand it, will find no place in the social life of the
future. As far as we can discern any general social trend in the music
of today it would appear that the middlebrow composer is disappearing.
Music in this way is following much the same course as poetry.

In the early nineteenth century one could be a great poet and yet a
popular figure. It was possible by poetry alone, and good poetry at
that, to achieve the popular success now vouchsafed only to the prose
of Arlen and Priestley. But now poetry of any merit has become the
specialized enjoyment of the few and there is no great poet of our
times who is genuinely in touch with the public as a whole. While the
highbrow poet, through his no doubt sincere complexity, has lost all
save a small section of the old middlebrow public, the lowbrow
poet--the type of writer who in the nineteenth century produced
'Champagne Charlie' and now produces revue lyrics--has, through his
social and technical sophistication, gained the greater part of it.
The middlebrow poet, as represented by the present Poet Laureate and
the old volumes of Georgian verse, has been left stranded.

The poetic atmosphere of our time may be likened to a severe winter
that kills off all animals except those sufficiently sophisticated to
live indoors and those sufficiently primitive to have tough hides. The
sensitive nature-poet now presents the pathetic yet suitable spectacle
of a frozen robin. Although middlebrow poetry drags on a kind of
half-sentient existence, it is clear that poetry is now divided up
between the unpopular and sophisticated highbrow, like Sacheverell
Sitwell, and the popular and sophisticated lowbrow like Cole Porter or
Noel Coward. Anything between the two is a _terrain vague_--a deserted
kitchen garden littered with rusty rakes and empty birdcages.

Much the same process of splitting up is taking place in music. Elgar
was the last serious composer to be in touch with the great public.
Sophisticated composers are either becoming more sophisticated, like
Alban Berg, or they are deliberately turning their sophistication to
popular account, like Kurt Weill.

As far as I can see it, music written by composers whose individualism
links them with the great composers of the past and whose work, being
the result of a spiritual concentration requires at least a modicum of
this concentration from the listener, will become a specialized art
like poetry, appreciated with the same intensity by an equally small
public. Apart from this, music will be a definitely popular form of
art, not revolving round the concert hall but adapting itself to
wireless and the films. An easygoing, pleasant and exhilarating noise
which will form a kind of _musique d'ameublement_. There may be
writers in both camps, just as there are poets who turn their hand to
journalism, but their two professions will be recognized as being
completely different.

In this process of splitting up, any music which does not belong
specifically to either type will be ruthlessly disregarded. The
middlebrow composer will disappear in the same way as the middlebrow
poet, and the mechanically conceived Gebrauchsmusik of Hindemith and
his followers will suffer the same swift oblivion as yesterday's
newspaper.




Part V

Escape or Submission


(a) A Psychological Cul-de-sac
(b) Schnberg and Official Revolution
(c) Sibelius and the Integration of Form
(d) The Symphonic Problem
(e) Sibelius and the Music of the Future




Escape or Submission

(a) A Psychological Cul-de-sac


If by now the reader is left with a somewhat confused impression of
post-war music then I have, if only negatively, succeeded; for a clear
impression of post-war music would of necessity be false. The New
Music of today displays no such recognizable and direct tendency as
the New Music of the early seventeenth century. We cannot speak of any
contemporary composer as Roger North spoke of Purcell--'Mr. H. Purcell
who unhappily began to show his great skill before ye reforme of
musick al Italiana'--because we are none of us agreed as to what
constitutes present-day reform or present-day revolution. Yet apart
from the one or two isolated and exceptional figures who constitute
all that ultimately counts in contemporary music there are few
composers who are not attached, either officially or unwittingly, to
some one or other revolutionary 'movement'. Just as the various
coloured-shirt political parties that have sprung up in Europe having
nothing in common save their faith in the shirt as a symbol, so these
various musical parties have nothing in common save their faith in the
label 'revolutionary' or '_avant-garde_'.

The unsophisticated listener may well be puzzled as to what
constitutes revolution in music when he is successfully asked to
regard atonality, polytonality, highbrow jazz and neo-classicism as
the dernier cri. He may, though, on closer acquaintance, detect two
common threads which, however twisted and coloured, run through all
contemporary musical movements. One is revolution, the other
classicism; and their confused proximity is sufficient indication of
their shallow spiritual foundation. The post-war composer is lacking
in the genuine spirit of revolt that we find in a composer like
Mussorgsky, or the genuine spirit of conservatism that we find in a
composer like Cherubini; for to him revolution has become merely a
mechanical reaction and classicism merely a receptacle, a rolltop desk
into which he can thrust incongruous scraps of paper.

The label 'modern' is already becoming a stale joke, as one can see by
the dreary comedy that is being played in advanced musical circles in
Central Europe. Whereas before the war we had the familiar spectacle
of old conservatives chiding youth for its earsplitting cacophony and
bad manners, we now have the delicious spectacle of old
revolutionaries chiding youth for its consonance and its good manners.

A particularly happy instance of this new development was provided by
the reception accorded Walton's latest work at that officially
revolutionary meeting the Festival of the International Society for
Contemporary Music. Some ten years ago an immature quartet of
Walton's, written in the then fashionable revolutionary manner of
Central Europe, earned for him the title of 'International Pioneer'.
In 1933 his mature but regrettably consonant _Belshazzar's Feast_ was
dismissed, particularly by the older critics, as 'routinier',
conventional, and unworthy of its place in so selectly revolutionary a
festival. The rest of the works were still in the style that Walton
himself had used ten years before, but it so happened that Walton's
development had led him away from official revolt to personal revolt.
It would be a tenable hypothesis that Walton himself was the real
revolutionary and the others the conservatives. In fact, if A accuses
B of being reactionary, B can always reply 'on the contrary, I am
merely reacting against your reaction against reaction'. Whatever else
we may blame the post-war composer for, we can only be grateful to him
for having deprived of any conceivable meaning the epithet
'revolutionary'.

In the present age the word classicism has become not so much deprived
of meaning as degraded in meaning. The classic spirit should be
something as positive as the revolutionary spirit, it should represent
not a rejection, or even curbing, of the imagination, but the
direction of it through interlinked channels--neither a flood nor a
dam but an aqueduct. The neo-classicism of today, as we have seen in
examining different aspects of it in Stravinsky and Hindemith, is a
bare framework, a stereotyped scaffolding designed to give to the
inconsequent and devitalized ideas of the post-war composers a
superficial air of logic and construction. It is a conscious revival
of formulas that were the unconscious inessentials of the age that
originally produced them--as who should confuse archaic spelling or
the use of the long 's' with the content of the writers in whom these
devices are to be found.

The moment we realize that the revolutionary spirit and the classical
spirit, which would appear to form such odd bedfellows in the work of
the average post-war composer, are in fact not revolution and
classicism at all but reaction and formalism, then we see that there
is no real conflict between the two, that they are both expressions of
the same underlying weakness--lack of faith, or, if that phrase be
considered too sentimental, soft and yellow for this tough,
red-blooded, poker-faced, he-man age, shall we say, no sense of
direction. The feverish fashionable reactions of post-war Paris, the
mathematical revolutionary formulas of post-war Vienna, indicate that
the average post-war composer has either nothing to say or does not
know how to say it--possibly both. That so many works written today
depend to such an unparalleled extent on the modern adaptation of
academic device is a sign not of formal strength but of emotional
weakness. We have almost no composer who has sufficient faith in
himself to get to grips with his medium directly, in the fashion of
Mussorgsky or Debussy, and create a personal yet intelligible idiom.
We bolster up our lack of faith with party cries, and pour our bootleg
gin into cracked leather bottles with olde-worlde labels.

The spiritual background of the eighteenth-century classics and the
nineteenth-century romantics has gone, and it now seems that even the
spiritual background of the pre-war revolutionaries has gone also.
The composer finds himself in a spiritual waste land with only the
cold and uncertain glimmer of intellectual theorizing to guide and
console him. It is, of course, in his spiritual and social background
that we must seek the reasons of his decline, of which technical
mannerisms are only the outward expression. There is, I imagine, no
critic who still thinks that the contemporary composer adapts any
particular style through sheer lack of ability or through a desire to
leg-pull. Technical craftsmanship is at as high a level as ever, and
indeed is apt to intrude itself too much--not too little.

'The spirit of the age' is a vulgar and easily misapplied phrase, like
'the will of the people', but after all some peoples show a common
will and some ages a common spirit. To say that the spirit of the
romantic age found fuller and more successful expression in music than
in painting may be a crude generalization, but it is undoubtedly a
true one. Similarly we may say that the spirit of the present age
finds its best expression not so much in music as in abstract painting
and satire, whether literary or cinematic.

Abstraction and satire are not so opposed in impulse as might at first
appear. The one is an escape from reality, the other an attack on it.

There is very little Whitmanesque acceptance of life about the artist
of today. He is not a 'yea-sayer'. Faced with life, he either turns
away from it or debunks it. Joyce's _Work in Progress_, abstract
films, and Disney's _Silly Symphonies_, represent the escape attitude,
Lewis's _Apes of God_ and the James Cagney, Lee Tracey type of tough
Hollywood film represent the debunking attitude. Both attitudes,
though perhaps negative in impulse, have in certain media produced
results that are positive in their excellence. But neither abstraction
nor satire is suited to the medium of music, and consequently the
typical composition of today is either a swan song echoing from
another period or else a present-day echo from another art.

This state of affairs may only be a temporary lull due to present-day
social conditions or, as I have suggested in a previous chapter, it
may be that the various arts are going to merge into the all-embracing
medium of the surrealist film. In any case it can hardly be denied
that the composer of today is out of joint with both his medium and
his period. He is too intellectualized or too commercialized and,
unable to cope with life and music on equal terms, he becomes either
an aesthetic or a whoremonger. Stravinsky's intellectual pastiches
represent an escape and Hindemith's 'work for the day' represents a
submission. Neither represents a satisfactory and positive solution.

To give the problem that local touch that so endears, let us take the
case of a composer in present-day England--patriotically assuming that
a great composer is as likely to be produced here as anywhere else.
The England that formed the background to Byrd, Purcell, and even
Boyce is completely gone, only a dismal echo of it remaining in the
imaginations of the folk-song school. The collapse of English music
during the nineteenth century might seem almost an advantage from the
purely contemporary point of view, in that the modern English composer
is not so hampered by the bulky shadows of the recent past as his
rivals in Berlin and Vienna. But the English church-music
tradition--the only branch of English music that in any way flourished
during the Victorian age--provides on a smaller scale the positive
influence of a tradition that is in our blood, and the negative
stimulus of something that has deliberately to be fought against.
(Thus the complete absence of anything approaching Dykes-like
harmonies in Holst's music points to a deliberate discarding which is
in itself a proof of negative influence.) The lack, however, of any
important English composer in the nineteenth century simplifies the
problem to some extent. The classical tradition that slowly declined
in other countries was in England abruptly broken off, and any attempt
to revive it is therefore revealed in its full artificiality.

In Elgar, the first figure of importance since Boyce, we get an
example of a composer, in touch both with his audience and his period,
expressing himself nationally in an international language. It is more
than probable that, but for the social and spiritual changes brought
about by the war, Elgar would have been a more potent influence on
English music than Vaughan Williams; but the aggressive Edwardian
prosperity that lends so comfortable a background to Elgar's finales
is now as strange to us as the England that produced _Greensleeves_
and _The Woodes so wilde_. Stranger, in fact, and less sympathetic.
In consequence much of Elgar's music, through no fault of its own, has
for the present generation an almost intolerable air of smugness,
self-assurance and autocratic benevolence.

Owing to the late sprouting of nationalism in this country the
inevitable post-war reaction to the spirit of Elgar took advantage of
the world of escape provided by the folk-song revival, and there is
thus no genuinely Georgian music to oppose to the Edwardian symphonies
of Elgar. This rustic arbour is now showing signs of imminent
collapse, and since the Shropshire Lad himself published his last
poems some ten years ago it may without impertinence be suggested that
it is high time his musical followers published their last songs. The
ground might then be left clear for something less nostalgically
consoling but more vital.

It is difficult to see what is genuinely vital in English civilization
at the moment, a civilization that is summed up by the buildings, with
neither the elegance of the Old World nor the efficiency of the New,
that are now being set up in London. One does not so much bemoan the
passing of picturesque old London as deplore the absence of anything
stimulating in the newly built London. One would not mind the Dickens
streets disappearing to give way to the Babylonian beauty of the New
York skyscrapers, but one does object to their giving way to such
appalling examples of modern degeneracy as, for example, Regent
Street.

What is true of London is true of the country as a whole. We have
concentrated on a prosperous industrial civilization to the exclusion
of everything else, and now that our material supremacy is passing we
have no other form of life to console us. To the English artist that
is the great difficulty. It is no use his sentimentalizing about the
old England, yet what is there to inspire him in our present state,
which is lacking even the stimulus of the mechanical hysteria of
America? To be honest he must accept a work like Eliot's _Waste Land_
as symbolizing the essentially negative and bleak spirit of post-war
intellectual England. Yet what a rejection of lyrical impulse this
acceptation involves!

It is typical of the hiatus that exists between music and the other
arts today that in England, the country where poetry and music have,
in the past, been almost indissolubly linked, there are no musical
settings of the more important poems of our time. I say 'of our time'
advisedly, for although there are magnificent settings of early
Yeats--notably Peter Warlock's _The Curlew_--there are none of later
Yeats, let alone of poets more closely in touch with the contemporary
_Zeitgeist_. (Walton's settings of Edith Sitwell's _Faade_, being for
spoken voice, hardly constitute a fair exception.)

The position in England has, of course, its local vagaries and
peculiarities, but it represents roughly the position in which the
composer finds himself in every country today. Unable to progress any
further in the way of modernity he has not a sufficiently sympathetic
or stimulating background to enable him to start afresh or to
consolidate his experiments. The stupider composers--to whom,
regrettably enough, most of this book has been devoted--escape from
the situation either by an empty and wilful pastiche of an older
tradition or by an equally fruitless concentration on the purely
mechanical and objective sides of their arts. The more intelligent
composer is forced in on himself and made to over-concentrate on his
own musical personality, a process which is inclined to be dangerous
and sterilizing.

The premature senility of so many modern composers can mainly be
ascribed to this concentration on purely personal mannerisms. Most of
the great figures of the past have been content to leave their
personal imprint on the _materia musica_ of the day without
remodelling it entirely. It is only the minor figure whose every bar
is recognizable, just as it is only the minor painter, like Marie
Laurencin, whose handiwork can be detected at a hundred yards. The
number of musical devices, turns of phrase and tricks of rhythm that a
composer can appropriate to himself alone, is surprisingly few, and a
refusal to lose caste by vulgarly moving outside these self-imposed
barriers results in a similarly narrow and restricted content.

This can clearly be seen in the case of Bla Bartk. Though one
respects the spiritual integrity that has led to his
self-concentration, one cannot help feeling that his later works are a
warning of the dangers of too great subjectivity on the part of the
composer. The austere but impressive line which gave such strength to
the opera _Bluebeard's Castle_ has by now been fined down to a
barbaric minimum of inflection, while the stark harmonies that
supported it have been concentrated into a percussive cluster of
notes. So much so that in certain works the limit of intelligibility
and concentration is reached, if not passed.

A composer must, through the very nature of his art, externalize his
emotions to some slight degree. He cannot demand collaboration from
his audience while deliberately turning his back on them. The
obsession with a narrowly personal world of sound that is to be
noticed in some of the later works of Bartk--his fourth quartet, for
instance--is the musical equivalent of navel gazing on the part of a
philosopher.

What we require from the composer is neither a contemplation of his
own navel, nor a frenzied dashing about in sports cars, but an
expression of musical personality free from deliberate pastiche--which
is escape--or from mechanical revolution--which is submission. The
composers, such as Sibelius, Busoni, and Van Dieren, who in different
ways represent this spiritual freedom rarely, if ever, form a school
and are not usually the most outwardly advanced in style. They are
free from the vulgarity of the label, above all the official
'revolutionary' label with which so great a figure as Schnberg has
unfortunately been associated.


(b) Schnberg and Official Revolution


An intelligent musician who, for some reason or other, had been kept
completely out of touch with the movements of the last thirty years,
would think on examining for the first time a score by Schnberg that
here was one of the great isolated figures in the history of music, an
'original' like Gesualdo, Berlioz or Busoni. It would come as a shock
to him to find that Schnberg was a leader of a school, and that a
style at first sight so peculiarly personal had been aped with
moderate success by every other student in Central Europe. Schnberg
at one time was indeed the great isolated figure of Europe, but he has
gradually become the official leader of the official revolutionaries,
and is in many ways the most pedantic of modern composers. He has
escaped from an academic set of rules only to be shackled by his own
set of rules, and this self-imposed tyranny is taken over en bloc by
his pupils.

The similarity of method shared by the atonal composers is, on the
face of it, as suspect as the similarity of method shared by the
abstract and surrealist painters. The desire to escape from the
tyranny of the key system in music is as understandable as the desire
to escape from academic realism in painting; but, whether we like it
or not, tonality in music and realism in painting are a norm that is
in our blood--departure from them, however successful and however
praiseworthy, is technically speaking an abnormality. While a school
of normality is a logical and harmless affair, a school of abnormality
is a psychological contradiction. Those who wish to overthrow the
formulas of convention have everyone's sympathy but, unlike political
revolutionaries, they must revolt alone. Every man his own surrealist
and every man his own atonalist should be the slogan for today.

If we can rid the word abnormal of any outside associations of taboo,
or even glamour, then we must admit that the atonal movement is by far
the most abnormal movement music has ever known. It cannot be compared
with the gradual breaking down of accepted harmonic formulas that we
find in Debussy, Stravinsky or Bartk, the slow destruction of the key
system that we find in Milhaud's polytonality or Vaughan Williams'
polymodality. It is a radical and intellectual revolution whose
origins are not to be found in any primitive school of music, and
which has no instinctive physical basis.

The unco, a species of Malayan ape noted for its singing in
quarter-tones, is, as far as one can tell, the only living creature,
capable of vocal production, that possesses no sense of tonality.
Although the scales of folk music may vary from the simple pentatonic
scales of the Hebridean to the complicated ragas of the Hindu, the
same outlook on tonality is implied; and without this tonal sense not
only our sense of concord and discord--without which counterpoint is
meaningless--but our sense of form, even, becomes mechanical and
arbitrary.

To the child who has not been trained to expect certain harmonic
formulas there is nothing intrinsically strange or shocking in _Le
Sacre du Printemps_, for example; and he finds no more difficulty in
accepting it as sound than he does in the case of Wagner. But
atonalism is often a stumbling block to the most sympathetically
inclined of listeners. It is not that the sound shocks in itself, for
by totally abandoning tonality Schnberg also destroys all sense of
discord. Passively speaking, his music is easy to listen to, or rather
to accept as sound; but actively speaking the listener finds it
difficult to think clearly or convincingly in an idiom so essentially
unvocal, so remote from primitive song--which is the ultimate
foundation of our musical sense. It is to be noticed also that the
best interpreters of atonal music confine themselves to this school
alone, as though it were only by shutting out all other idioms from
their consciousness that they could think naturally in this particular
one.

While the listener finds that most aural stumbling blocks disappear
with repeated experience, it is rarely that he overcomes the initial
strangeness of atonalism, even when sufficiently familiar with the
idiom to detect immediately the difference between its few masters and
the many fumbling secondraters. It is true that there are more
practising atonalists in Europe today than there were ten years ago.
This may mean that as an idiom it has become acclimatized, or it may
mean that Schnberg's peculiar methods of approach have degenerated
into a mechanical and easily applied formula.

Except for a few isolated figures, however, I think it in the highest
degree unlikely that atonalism will ever become an instinctive and
natural idiom, part of our mental background, in the way that
Debussy's idiom has become so--his mannerisms now being the property
of every jazz hack. 'So much the better', may think the followers of
Schnberg, Berg and Von Webern, but, after all, the vulgarization of
Debussy, like the vulgarization of Wagner, is a proof of the
essentially solid basis on which these onetime revolutionaries built.

There is one objection to atonalism so simple and childish that no one
seems to have had the courage to make it. Although atonalism has
produced complicated and objective fugal structures that can with
justice be compared with the _Kunst der Fugue_ of Bach, subjective and
neurasthenic operas that can be compared with _Tristan and Isolde_ or
_Parsifal_, it has produced nothing that we can set beside Chabrier
and Offenbach, let alone the comic operas of Mozart. The dance
movements in the _Serenade_ and the _Op. 25 Piano Suite_, which are
Schnberg's nearest approach to this genre, are sufficient proof of
the essential solemnity of atonalism. An atonal comic opera is a
chimerical thought, and though it is unlikely that either Schnberg or
Berg would in any case wish to attempt such a genre, the mere fact
that the task would be impossible is a proof of the narrow emotional
range offered by their idiom.

Atonalism, though plastic in minor details of texture, is in fact the
least flexible and most monotonous of media, and for that reason alone
it is unlikely to play much part in the music of the future. It will
always remain a thing apart, having something of the hieratical
solemnity and exclusiveness of a hereditary religious order; and the
more we free ourselves from tonal prejudice and from the tyranny of
textbook harmony the less appeal atonalism will have, because it is
based on a direct reversal of academic method. Like blasphemy, it
requires a background of belief for its full effect. Composers like
Bartk or Vaughan Williams could no more become atonalists than a
freethinker could take part in a Black Mass.

There is a strong flavour of the Black Mass about Schnberg. He has
the complete lack of humour of the diabolist, while a glance at his
earlier work indicates how devout a believer he once was. His later
eccentricities are in direct ratio to his early conventionalities,
just as the excesses of a revolution are in direct ratio to the
previous oppression.

There is no composer whose early work, superficially examined,
displays so great a contrast to his later development. Debussy's early
piano pieces and Bartk's early orchestral suites may seem
conventional enough when compared to their more mature work, but they
contain the seeds of their later efflorescence. But in Schnberg's
early works such individuality as he had was completely stifled by the
overbearing influence of German romanticism. There is always a
temptation to be wise after the event and to detect in some innocent
early work the flavour of a later masterpiece, but in Schnberg's case
the smell that detaches itself from his early _Lieder_ is the familiar
Teutonic aroma of stale potpourri prevented from leaving the room by
the heavy curtains and double windows. These songs belong essentially
to the 'nineties and in that, rather than in any intrinsic merit, lies
their interest for the student of Schnberg. The fin-de-sicle quality
of these works is a constant factor in all Schnberg's music--at least
up to the war--and the more advanced and revolutionary his methods
become, the greater is our sense of the spiritual conflict between his
subjective and sentimental vision and his objective and mathematical
technique.

If, while admitting the superficial contrast between Schnberg's
earlier and later works, we examine their technique in more detail, we
find that Schnberg, although sabotaging the conventional tonal sense
of German romanticism, has in many ways retained its general texture
and rhythm. Although it may seem a far cry from Schumann's
_Frauenliebe und Leben_ to Schnberg's nightmare _Herzgewachse_, there
is no denying a certain resemblance in shape between Schnberg's
melodies and those of the romanticists. The rhythm is the same and the
placing of the wider intervals is the same. A typical Schnberg phrase
bears far more resemblance to the preludes to the first act of
_Tristan_ or the third act of _Parsifal_ than it does to the work of
any more recent composer. It is this that makes so much of his music
disturbing to listen to, and gives it a curious flavour of morbidity
that reaches its climax in the operas.

Music does not strike us as abnormal unless at the same time it
recalls the normal--as in Strauss's _Salome_ and _Elektra_. We can
listen to Bartk's _Amazing Mandarin_ without a qualm, for we accept
the composer's statements directly without referring them back to
conventional experience. We do not feel that we are listening to Liszt
or Dvork 'gone wrong'. But in many of Schnberg's transitional works
we do emphatically feel that we are listening to Schumann and Wagner
'gone wrong'. To hear a performance of the _Kammer Symphonie_, for
example, is as disquieting an experience as meeting a respected family
friend in a state of half-maudlin, half-truculent intoxication. Even
in _Pierrot Lunaire_, one of the masterpieces of our time, there is a
slight touch of a _Lieder_ recital that has taken the wrong turning.
Yet _Pierrot Lunaire_ undoubtedly owes its force to the curious
conflict of outlook and method. It is like an explosive formed out of
two elements that in themselves are anodyne, and only develop their
disruptive power when mixed in precisely the right proportions. In
many of the earlier works the emotional force has not received the
definition given by the technique, while in too many of the later
works the technique is unleavened by any emotional force.

To find a parallel to Schnberg's amazing technical virtuosity, his
exasperated sensibility and his strange half-mathematical,
half-sentimental outlook, we have to turn to literature, where James
Joyce provides an example of a remarkably similar mentality proceeding
through much the same phases of thought and technique. The work of
each, taken up to date, divides itself into the usual textbook 'three
periods'. Joyce's weakly sentimental _Chamber Music_ and dully
realistic _Dubliners_ are a parallel to the stodgy and academic
imagination of _Verklarte Nacht_, and Schnberg's early work in
general. In the _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ Joyce is
beginning to find himself in much the way that Schnberg develops his
personality in his settings of Stefan George. The revolutionary and
monumental _Ulysses_ may be compared to _Pierrot Lunaire_ and the
other works of Schnberg's middle period, while the intellectual
juggling of _Work in Progress_ is the equivalent of the cerebral
counterpoint of Schnberg's post-war compositions.

The quality which is most obviously common to both writers is the
faded romanticism of their early work. With Schnberg it takes the
form of a rather stuffy Teutonic nostalgia; with Joyce a mild and
watery variation on themes from the 'nineties seen through Celtic
eyes. Both writers are in fact born sentimentalists--however much
their technical harshness, Schnberg's 'daring' discords, or Joyce's
'daring' frankness, may seem to deny this. The extreme feminine
emotional sensibility shown by their first works combined with their
inquiring, mathematical and detached intellect is partly responsible
for the violence of their subsequent revolution. Their intellect
almost seems to have dragged them where their emotions alone would
have turned away in disgust.

There is no Rabelaisian enjoyment about the obscenities in _Ulysses_
and no primitive delight in noise and harshness about the operas of
Schnberg--which provide a parallel to the nightmare fantasia in
_Ulysses_. There runs through the work of both a curious neurasthenic
horror which is partly a relic of the old Edgar Allan Poe-cum-Aubrey
Beardsley spirit but mainly, one feels, the horror of an oversensitive
artistic mind disgusted with life, yet too intellectually honest to
turn away from it into a sentimental dream world of its own. Both
writers express their warped romanticism in forms of the utmost
complexity, but here again one may detect a sense of withdrawal as of
a man so shy that he is unable to write a love letter except in the
form of a crossword puzzle.

In their later work, such as Joyce's _Anna Livia Plurabelle_ and
Schnberg's post-war piano pieces, the crossword-puzzle technique
gains the upper hand of the romanticism it once expressed. What,
however, may be acceptable as a vehicle of expression may not be so as
a purely detached essay in technique. Both Schnberg and Joyce, unable
to achieve anything of importance with the accepted vocabulary, forged
for themselves a highly revolutionary technique in an obviously
sincere attempt to express their own particular cast of mind. But to
the reader and listener the interest lay not so much in their method
itself as in its power to convey new meanings and sensations. The
Schnberg method unaccompanied by the morbid fire of his best works is
frankly dull and pedantic, as his followers have only too convincingly
shown. Its monotonous inversions and mathematical contortions of
ordinary procedure are as academic as the worst Kapellmeister music of
the old school. (Most imitators of Schnberg belong to the type who,
in an earlier generation, would have been followers of Max Reger.)

Atonalism as a school of thought and as a formulated set of principles
has, as might be expected, centred round those works of Schnberg
where the musical interest is at its lowest and the mathematical
complexity at its most acute--namely those works which come in
between _Pierrot Lunaire_ and his recent _Orchestral Variations_. In
this period the devices which were occasionally present in _Pierrot
Lunaire_ as a means to an end are now treated as the be-all and
end-all of music. Schnberg's innate romanticism is suppressed as far
as possible and mechanically applied contrapuntal conceits are
multiplied in number to an extent that is frankly ludicrous. It need
hardly be pointed out that a contrapuntal device has no more intrinsic
value than an unsuccessful pun if it is not recognizable by the ear
alone. It may be a convenient method of filling in a blank patch, but
it can hardly claim to have, prima facie, any real significance as
sound. The ear must be the final judge--not the eye.

People are apt to forget that the score of a work is not the work
itself, but a convenient visual representation of it that enables the
band parts to be copied and the conductor to study it. The widespread
publication of scores as an aid to the student has led to visual
conception being confused with aural execution. A piece of music is
not like a poem which can be listened to as a whole, or read word by
word; it has no real existence save in actual performance at the
proper speed. A man trained in reading scores can gain an excellent
idea of the resultant effect from the printed page, just as a chef can
see from looking at a recipe whether a dish will be palatable or
not--but the actual process of listening or eating is what really
matters.

Music consists not of symbols in space, but of definite vibrations in
time. The innumerable inversions, augmentations, diminutions and
crabwise canons of Schnberg's later works can, for the most part, be
detected only by the visual analyst with time to spare. That a work is
capable of elaborate analysis proves nothing, for a bad work may be
just as interesting from the analyst's point of view as a good one. It
is quite amusing, for example, to discover in the introduction to
Schnberg's Variations that one instrument is playing the notes
B-A-C-H very slowly while another is playing them backwards at four
times the speed, but such tricks in no way effect the ultimate value
of the work. They are _au fond_ as childish as the hidden rivers and
prep school puns that adorn Joyce's _Anna Livia Plurabelle_.

There is, of course, no reason why these devices should not be used,
provided they are not allowed to usurp the place of genuinely
significant material. Schnberg's contrapuntal writing varies in
quality as much as Bach's fugues: at times it is worthy to be set
beside the more introspective of the '48, while at others it sinks
below the level of the Mirror fugues in the _Kunst der Fugue_--which,
being visually conceived are, apart from their more agreeable
consonance, open to precisely the same objections as Schnberg's
crabwise canons. We must distinguish between the occasional and
expressive counterpoint in _Pierrot Lunaire_ and the contrapuntal
obsessions of the wind quintet.

Because since his Op. 10, or thereabouts, Schnberg's work has been
consistently atonal, we are apt to think of it as a consistent and
logical development, forgetting that his post-war works represent
almost as great a reaction from his pre-war works as do Stravinsky's
post-war concertos from his pre-war ballets. In Stravinsky's case the
reaction was spectacular because, his pre-war technique being based on
barbaric impressionism, he had to adopt an entirely new paraphernalia
of sound to achieve a neo-classical result. Schnberg's pre-war works
were, as I have pointed out in the opening chapter, impressionist
also, but they were impressionist in spite of themselves. Their
technique, viewed on paper at least, was often cold and scientific;
and therefore by lowering, if not eliminating, the subjective content
of his works and by emphasizing their contrapuntal construction,
Schnberg achieved the objective and anti-romantic ideal of the
post-war movement without the dislocation of outward style that
Stravinsky found necessary.

Had Schnberg not written his _Orchestral Variations_ one would be
tempted to look upon him as yet another modern composer who, through
self-conscious theorizing and overconcentration on the objective side
of technique had reached a premature and desiccated senility. But his
_Variations_ represent a return, if not to the freedom of method of
his earlier work, at least to its freedom of outlook. It is
significant that it is Schnberg's first work for full orchestra since
the works of his middle period; its scoring is more contrapuntal, but
still has a definite pointillism which--particularly in variations 6
and 7--emphasizes its connection with his early works. Though it would
be absurd to describe it as being either popular or eclectic, it marks
a definite break away from the narrow range of ideas and mathematical
self-concentration of Schnberg's post-war period. In spite of the
acrostics on the name Bach, the introduction is definitely atmospheric
in colour; while in spite of its mathematical inversions, the theme
itself is purely romantic in feeling.

Just as Joyce in order to bring _Anna Livia Plurabelle_ to a climax
has to drop his philological wisecracks and relapse into the frank
negro-spiritual sentimentality of 'Beside the rivering waters of,
hither and thithering waters of', so Schnberg, in order to achieve a
work of importance, has to return--though in a less neurasthenic and
more solidly constructive spirit--to the romanticism of _Pierrot
Lunaire_. It is interesting to compare the variations with Schnberg's
only other purely orchestral work, the _Five Pieces for Orchestra_. In
both cases the final section is the least convincing, and it would
seem that Schnberg, in spite of his technical dexterity, is unable to
build up a symphonic structure that will satisfy not only our
appreciation of incidental formalism but our sense of organic form.
The romantic nature of his art is emphasized by the fact that his two
most satisfactory finales, those of _Pierrot Lunaire_ and the second
string quartet, are both of them settings of poems.

One likes to think that just as the _Five Pieces_ paved the way for
_Pierrot Lunaire_ so the _Variations_ are paving the way for a second
masterpiece of similar calibre. Even if this be not the case, the
_Variations_ remain among the most outstanding works written since the
war and are undoubtedly the most important music Schnberg has
written for twenty years. For whereas the post-war piano suites might
have been written by any of Schnberg's followers, the _Variations_
could only have been written by the master himself.

Of Schnberg's pupils and followers by far the most significant is
Alban Berg. With the others one feels that they have taken over
Schnberg's methods without in any way sharing the spiritual
experience that produced them--but with Berg we feel we are dealing
with a very similar type of romantic mentality to whom atonalism has
become a natural background. It would not be too much to say that
Berg's recent works are far more worthy and genuine successors to
Schnberg's pre-war works than Schnberg's later works themselves; for
we find in them the same sombre imagination, the same nervous feeling
for orchestral colour, the same paradoxical combination of
intellectual method and physical result. Thus, in the
_allegro-misterioso_ movement of the _Lyric Suite_ an examination on
paper reveals a mathematical series of inversions, but in performance
these inversions pass for nothing and what chiefly impresses us is the
nervous and impressionistic physical effect--an effect which cannot be
imagined from a visual examination alone. Similarly, the opera
_Wozzek_ is on paper a soberly planned symphony, but in performance a
'thriller' of the most theatrical order.

Although in some of his works, notably the uninviting but undeniably
impressive Double Concerto for violin, piano, and wind instruments,
Berg is _plus royaliste que le roi_--he cannot be described as a
wholehogging atonalist. Much of _Wozzek_ is definitely tonal, and
although the greater part of the _Lyric Suite_ is technically speaking
atonal, the compromise Berg effects with _pur-sang_ atonalism may be
judged by the fact that he introduces two bars from the prelude to
_Tristan_ without any real dislocation of style. The whole work, as
its title suggests, is no typical post-war piece of warped romanticism
but an example of genuine lyricism which, though in no way derivative,
is worthy to be put beside the work of Wagner from which it quotes. Of
all atonal works it is the most readily acceptable to those who find
initial difficulty in appreciating this idiom, and its reception by
the amateur public has, on the whole, been far more friendly than its
reception by the professional critics. Although written after the
Double Concerto, the distance between the two, one year only, is not
sufficient for us to draw deductions as to future tendencies. It may
be noticed, though, that the relapse from strict atonalism which we
find in Berg's _Lyric Suite_ is partially echoed in Schnberg's recent
_Variations_. Berg may now be almost considered the spiritual leader
of the two, and the direction his work takes in the next few years
cannot fail to be indicative of far-reaching future developments.

A typical individualist and romantic, making no compromise with his
audience, writing at rare intervals works for his own satisfaction,
Berg is yet the only atonal composer who is in any way in touch with
the general public, having achieved with his opera _Wozzek_ a far
greater success than is usually vouchsafed to the musical
'extremists'. Unfortunately the greater part of his public was
confined to Germany, where the atonal school was favourably received
for two reasons: consciously, because technically speaking it
sabotaged the moribund romantic tradition; and unconsciously, because
it was emotionally linked to it. In Vienna, its own home town,
atonalism is a small and detested cult; in Paris its appreciation is
restricted to a few; and though in London Schnberg's works have had
since pre-war days a sympathetic following, the sympathy has, on the
whole, been more respectful than enthusiastic.

However much one may have disliked the almost political prejudice in
favour of a revolutionary idiom that marked pre-Hitlerite Germany, in
consequence of which many thirdrate figures achieved a momentary
notoriety due to their idiom only, there is no doubt that this
revolutionary atmosphere enabled a few composers of genuine merit to
obtain that actual hearing without which a composer may be compared to
an airman flying blind. Since the advent of Hitlerism, however, music
of the Alban Berg type has been completely banished. Even in the case
of an atonal composer who was neither a Jew nor a Communist, his music
would be banned on the grounds of idiom alone, such sounds being
officially classed as 'intellectual Bolshevism'.

Were there to be a Communist counter-revolution in Germany--and more
unlikely things have happened--no doubt atonalism, though hardly a
popular idiom, would be encouraged on the grounds of its
'revolutionary' label, much as Prokofieff, that completely bourgeois
figure, received the official blessing of the Soviet; but until that
day Schnberg and Berg are cut off from the greater part of their
already small audience, with only a precarious chance of obtaining a
foothold in England or America. However much we may deplore the
writing-to-order Gebrauchsmusik attitude of Hindemith, it is difficult
to imagine how any but the most exceptional figure can go on writing
for a non-existent audience. It will be interesting to see whether
Berg in face of this situation will proudly concentrate on the most
extreme aspects of his style, eventually becoming a remote and
romantic legend--Berg, or the last of the Atonalists--or whether he
will adopt a more eclectic and less outr manner, establishing that
contact with his audience which, in spite of initial prejudice, all
the great composers of the past have eventually established and which
a composer like Sibelius appears to be establishing today.


(c) Sibelius and the Integration of Form


Sibelius differs from all the other composers in this study in that it
is impossible to attach any 'label' to him. He is the only composer of
today who enjoys both a popular and an intellectual esteem. His _Valse
Triste_ is as widely known and as vulgarized as anything by Puccini,
yet his Fourth Symphony is as little known and as little comprehended
as the work of Schnberg. Although already established as an important
figure by the end of the nineteenth century, he does not strike us as
belonging to the older generation of Elgar and Strauss. On the
contrary, he is the only modern composer who has maintained a steady
and logical progress, being forced neither into a mechanical
repetition of his own mannerisms nor into an equally mechanical
reaction against them. It is only recently indeed that he has been
estimated at anything like his true worth.

The reasons for this tardy appreciation are of two kinds. To begin
with, though Sibelius' popular works have kept his name before the
general public they have created a prejudice amongst the 'snob' public
which has so regrettably powerful an influence. It is still necessary
when talking to a certain type of person to explain that when you
refer to Sibelius as a great composer you are not thinking of _Valse
Triste_--which is as though when praising Beethoven you had to say
'but not of course the _Minuet in G_, or the March from the _Ruins of
Athens_'. _Finlandia_, though a better work than _Valse Triste_, has
had an even more regrettable effect on the public. The pleasantly
Nordic nationalism of this work has led many people into believing
Sibelius to be no more than a local petit matre, a Finnish Grieg. As
late as 1933 we find Mr. W. J. Turner actually describing _Tapiola_ as
'neo-Grieg', although this work, even to those who may dislike its
poetic atmosphere, gives clear evidence of a constructive ability and
continuity which is unparalleled within the last fifty years.

There is no conceivable reason from the artistic point of view why a
great composer should not write works like _Finlandia_, the _Karelia
March_ and even _Valse Triste_--which are all excellent examples of
their genre. The great composers of the past have never been afraid to
come down to earth, and their ability to do so on occasion is a
certain negative tribute to their integrity and spiritual force, which
is of too solid a nature to be shattered by a brush with the man in
the street. It is better for the commonplace to be definitely
segregated into a separate genre, as in the case of Sibelius, than for
it to be a subtle but all-pervading aroma, as in the case of Richard
Strauss.

But from the outside point of view the result in Sibelius' case has
been peculiarly unfortunate--I am speaking now of the years before the
recent and gratifying interest in his music. On the rare occasions
when an important work of his was performed, the highbrow public
stayed away and the lowbrow public, drawn there through memories of
_Finlandia_ and _Valse Triste_, were frankly nonplussed. Confusion was
still worse confounded by a certain number of works that were neither
potboilers nor works of individual genius, but honest Kapellmeister
achievement, and when we consider that these three types of work do
not represent any chronological development, but are found existing
side by side from his earliest period up to the present day, it is
scarcely surprising that until recently critics have been inclined to
sit on the fence, particularly those who have been propagandists of
the more revolutionary schools of writing.

Even if Sibelius, instead of being an all-embracing and protean
figure, had concentrated only on the production of his greatest and
most personal works--namely the seven symphonies, and the symphonic
poems, _A Saga_, _The Bard_, _The Oceanides,_ and _Tapiola_--it is
doubtful if opinion among the more advanced critics would have been
more decided.

Let us take, for example, the case of Sibelius' Fourth Symphony in A
Minor Op. 63 which, written in 1912, may be considered the highest
point reached by Sibelius before the war. This Symphony, although in
every way as remarkable and challenging a work as the famous 'spot'
pieces of Debussy, Stravinsky and Schnberg that were studied in the
first chapter of this book, seems to have made singularly little
impact on the consciousness of the time, and even today it remains
among the least comprehended and most neglected of his works. The
reason is that it obstinately refuses to be fitted into any category,
ancient or modern.

To start with it is a symphony written at the time when all
revolutionary composers were turning their backs on any title that
smacked of the conservatoire. Yet it in no way satisfies the
conservatives by carrying on the older tradition of the Brahms or
Tchaikovsky school of symphonic writing. The harmonic idiom, with its
occasional touches of polytonality, is at times sufficiently
disturbing to frighten off the academic critic without being
sufficiently outr, or specialized in manner, to attract the attention
of the revolutionary propagandist. The restrained and economical
orchestration, though of the utmost originality, is lacking entirely
in the refined sensuality of Debussy and Ravel, the opulent vulgarity
of Strauss and Scriabin, or the barbaric glitter of Stravinsky. The
work as a whole is notable for its tragic intensity of mood, its grim
austerity of colour and its elliptical compactness of form, qualities
at no time very popular with the multitude and in 1912, the period
when it was written, definitely out of fashion with the so-called
advanced composers.

Like all great works it does not lend itself to superficial analysis
or specialized comment. It is a sign of weakness in a composer's
make-up when our attention is inevitably directed towards one
particular facet of his music--Delius' harmony, Stravinsky's rhythm,
etc. We do not say of Mozart's _Prague Symphony_ 'what interesting
rhythm, what delightful scoring, what sense of counterpoint',
although, of course, we should be right in saying so. We say simply
and dully 'what a great symphony'. So it is with Sibelius; his music
is three-dimensional and, as with a good piece of sculpture, although
we may choose to focus our attention on one particular silhouette, the
work is equally satisfactory when viewed from any angle.

The only quality which stands out with such distinctness that it can
be used as a handle by the superficial commentator is Sibelius' sense
of orchestration. Unlike so much modern scoring, which is directed
mainly towards the exploitation of the most acute and acidulated
timbres of the wind instruments to the detriment of string writing,
Sibelius' scoring is marked by an intense realization of the
unexplored possibilities of string colour, while the neglected lower
registers of the orchestra are treated with great virtuosity, his use
of independent harmonic parts on doublebasses and tympani being
particularly striking.

His orchestral requirements rarely exceed those of the Tchaikovsky
orchestra, and even this orchestra is used in his later works with
unwonted restraint. But though his use of the brass is sparing,
concentrating far more on its sostenuto than on its percussive
qualities, and making no use of the fashionable muted effects, there
is no one who can build up a more overwhelming climax when he so
desires. The last five minutes of _Tapiola_ is a revelation of the
effect that can be obtained by essentially normal and legitimate
means. The climaxes of Scriabin's _Pome de l'Extase_ are angry waves
beating vainly at the breakwater of our intelligence--the climaxes of
_Tapiola_ and _The Oceanides_ are a rising flood that carries all
before it. Sibelius for all his restraint is the greatest orchestral
innovator of our time. The scoring of almost all other modern
composers can be traced back to one or other of these two great
innovators, Berlioz and Glinka. Strauss, making allowances for a
certain Teutonic thickness of texture, may be considered the successor
of Berlioz, while Stravinsky is the successor of Glinka; the scoring
of Stravinsky's ballets, admittedly of the utmost brilliance, is a
direct continuation of the tradition begun by Chernomor's March and
the Caucasian Leszginka in _Russlan_. In his search for ever more
brilliant and pungent tones, Stravinsky was led away from the clear
colours of Rimsky-Korsakoff's orchestration to a gradual distortion of
the natural timbres of each instrument, so that it is rarely that a
player is given a passage to be played in the ordinary manner in the
ordinary register. This persistent use of extreme colouring eventually
becomes as monotonous in its way as the drab shades and muddy impasto
of Brahms. The principal objection to Stravinsky's scoring lies not so
much in its monotonous eccentricity as in the fact that it is
essentially applied scoring; it is quite possible to conceive several
different and equally effective ways of orchestrating any given
passage in Stravinsky, just as it is possible to detach Stravinsky's
methods from their contents and apply Stravinsky scoring to any piece
of music. Like everything else in his music, it is two-dimensional,
and bears much the same relation to Sibelius' scoring as Gauguin's
colour does to that of Czanne.

Like the colour in a Czanne landscape, Sibelius' orchestration is an
integral part of the form. One might almost describe it as having a
kind of aural perspective, supplying a contrapuntal element that is
sometimes lacking in the music itself. Just as in the polyphonic
period a vertical section taken through the counterpoint often reveals
harmonic combinations more remarkable than any to be found in the
Monteverdi school of writers, so in Sibelius' symphonies a vertical
section taken through the orchestration often reveals a spacing of
instruments more remarkable than anything to be found in the
impressionist school. But, as in the case of the polyphonic writers,
this point of colour is the result of a logical development of
independent lines. It cannot be detached from its context and for this
reason Sibelius' scoring does not lend itself to plagiarism as do
Delius' harmony or Stravinsky's rhythm.

If I have concentrated on what may seem a superficial aspect of
Sibelius' genius, it is to show that even in the case of an often
purely external quality like orchestration his technique is always a
means to an end, and is never deployed for its own sake. Whatever
aspect of his music we may look at, our attention is finally drawn
towards his astonishing sense of form. The word form has been so
degraded by the 'pure music' school of critics that perhaps it would
be better to say power of sustained musical thinking.

Whereas most modern music is concerned mainly with vocabulary,
Sibelius is concerned with content; he has not, like so many
contemporary composers, been forced to adopt an outr manner in a vain
attempt to disguise the commonplace character of his thought. The
quarter-tone quartets of Aloys Haba, for example, differ from the
quartets of Brahms only through being written in the quarter-tone
scale. Once we have assimilated their somewhat uninviting sounds, we
find ourselves back in the old world of thought and form. Sibelius'
symphonies rarely contain any chords which, examined by themselves,
cannot be found in the works of Grieg or Tchaikovsky. Yet through the
manner of their presentation these chords are made to take on an
entirely new meaning. Their importance is due, not to their momentary
sound in space, but to their placing in time.

This power of sustained and concentrated thought over a long period of
time gives to Sibelius' works a spaciousness which is in striking
contrast to the shortwindedness of even the best 'revolutionary
music', and for a parallel to which we must go back beyond even Wagner
to the first movements of the _Eroica_ and _Choral Symphonies_. One is
so used to being told that some trifling and shortwinded neo-classical
pastiche represents a return to the spirit of Bach, that one is a
little chary of evoking the shade of Beethoven where Sibelius is
concerned; but the comparison is inevitable, for not only is Sibelius
the most important symphonic writer since Beethoven, but he may even
be described as the only writer since Beethoven who has definitely
advanced what, after all, is the most complete formal expression of
the musical spirit.


(d) The Symphonic Problem


However perfect we may consider the symphonies of Mozart to be, we
must admit that the first movements of the third and ninth symphonies
of Beethoven--to mention only two instances--represent a new scale of
thought. Mozart may be more temperamentally sympathetic to us, but it
is by the standard set by the greatest creations of Beethoven that any
succeeding symphony must be judged. Standing at the threshold of the
romantic movement, yet imbued with all the tradition of a classical
upbringing, Beethoven gave to the symphony a new richness of
expression and yet achieved a balance between expression and form
that has, except in one instance, never been equalled since. But his
symphonies carry with them the seeds of destruction. By giving to his
themes a greater emotional content and a more contrasted individuality
than we find in the symphonies of the eighteenth century he raised the
problem--always present in the symphony but never stated so acutely
before--of the clash between emotional and formal balance.

The element of formal balance provided by the recapitulation that is
an integral part of sonata form is one of the greatest stumbling
blocks to a sensitive composer--for although he is dealing with time
in the abstract he has to express himself with time in the concrete.
We know from his letters that Mozart conceived his symphonies in a
moment of time, that is to say from his point of view the
recapitulation did not necessarily come after the development, but
that does not alter the fact that the audience will have to hear them
in that order. The composer's mind must to some extent resemble that
of the scientist who can conceive time according to the theories of
Einstein and Dunne, whereas the listener probably shares the mentality
of those who conceive time as symbolized by the clock face. The
composer may see the whole design at once, as in a framed picture, but
the listener can only appreciate it as if being shown a long Chinese
picture on rollers, of which only a fragment is visible at one moment.
He will be conscious of the repetitions as such, and whether these
repetitions--admittedly necessary in one form or another for reasons
of balance--strike him as being redundant and tautological depends not
only on the quality but on the nature of the music.

Repetitions that are charming in Haydn become wearisome in
Tchaikovsky, but we should not jump to the conclusion that the cause
lies only in Tchaikovsky's inferiority as a composer. The repetitions
in Tchaikovsky are wearisome because a definite emotional reaction is
attached to the different themes as they occur, whereas in Haydn or
Mozart our emotional reaction is derived from the movement as a whole.
The nineteenth century added to sonata form the element of dramatic
contrast, or surprise.

Mr. Milestone, in Peacock's _Headlong Hall_, when told that the
principal quality in a landscape garden was that of _unexpectedness_
said, 'Pray sir, by what name do you distinguish this character when a
person walks round the grounds for a second time?' His remark
admirably sums up the difficulty of writing a romantic work in
classical form, for in the sonata we are willy nilly taken round or
led up the garden for a second time.

In a formal Italian garden (to which we may compare the
eighteenth-century symphony) it is not only excusable but desirable
that one grove of trees should balance another, that the beds should
be placed symmetrically; but in an English landscape garden--to which
we may compare the nineteenth-century romantic movement--the sinister
effect of an overshadowed ruin is completely spoiled if it occurs
every hundred yards.

Beethoven marks the transition from formal to landscape gardening. It
is to the influence of the C Minor Symphony that we owe the
'masculine' first subject, the 'feminine' second subject, and also the
deplorable school of romantic analysts from Sir George Grove to Dr.
Hugo Leichtentritt. And it is to Beethoven also--or rather to his
commentators--that we owe the conception of the artist as being
alternately bludgeoned by Fate and consoled by Platonic Love, the
Beauties of Nature and Ultimate Faith in a Beneficent Providence. This
atmosphere of storm and stress is excellent material for music,
provided it is not poured into the wrong mould. Unfortunately the
balanced repetitions of sonata form are a poor medium for emotional
narrative--however suited they may be to emotional statement or
summing up, as in the symphonies of Mozart. The nineteenth-century
composers gave to their symphonic subjects a dramatic significance
which was reduced to anticlimax by their adherence to a formal
construction only suited to music of a totally different order of
conception. Tchaikovsky's symphonies are wearing thin not so much
because we are losing faith in his dramatic conception of Fate, as
because he himself destroys this faith by bringing in Fate at such
fixed and mechanical intervals.

The _Lamento e Trionfo_, the idea of the artist as hero winning
through adversity to a glorious apotheosis, that lies behind so much
of nineteenth-century romanticism, is a conception wholly suited to
musical expression, but not to that branch of it known as symphonic
writing. Liszt, with his unerring though unrecognized instinct for
form, was the first to realize this and evolved the symphonic poem,
the nineteenth-century form par excellence, and the logical
development of the programme symphonies of Berlioz. The ascription of
actual individuality to a recurrent or 'motto theme' and the attaching
of symbolical significance to its later transformations, devices
wholly at variance with the classic principles of symphonic form, are
here perfectly justified, and in his thirteen symphonic poems Liszt
achieves a unity of expression and form which may be sought for in
vain in the symphonies of the period.

Although chronologically speaking one might have expected the symphony
to develop during the nineteenth century, we have only to look at the
spiritual foundations of the period to realize why it did not. The two
fertilizing sources of inspiration during the nineteenth century were
romanticism and nationalism. Nationalism, as we have seen, is
antagonistic to formal construction--_Thamar_, the one formal
masterpiece of the Russian school, is romantic rather than
nationalist--and while romanticism is not specifically anti-formal it
is specifically anti-symphonic. For that reason the formal progress of
nineteenth-century music is to be judged not by the pale repetitions
of classic form to be found in the symphonies of Mendelssohn,
Schumann, and Brahms, but by the symphonic poems of Liszt and the
operas of Wagner which, as Mr. Newman has rightly pointed out, may be
considered symphonic poems on a vast scale.

One might almost say that the only good romantic symphonies are not,
strictly speaking, symphonies at all, for the _Fantastique_ of
Berlioz, in spite of its classical first movement, marks a transition
towards the symphonic poem established in Liszt's great _Faust_
symphony, which in reality is three interlinked symphonic poems of
which the first happens to be based on sonata form. Even in
Tchaikovsky's case the _Manfred_ symphony, which belongs to the
Berlioz-Liszt school, shows more organic unity than his
pseudo-classical symphonies.

The classical symphony in the nineteenth century, far from marking a
development of the Beethoven tradition, marks a definite decline. On
the credit side there are Borodin's symphonies, genial works which
continue the Haydn rather than the Beethoven tradition, and the
symphonies of Brahms, which, though entirely lacking in the
germinating vitality of Beethoven, command at least our respect. But
for the typical nineteenth-century symphony as represented by
Tchaikovsky _No. 5_, Dvork's _From the New World_, and Csar Franck
in D Minor, there is frankly nothing to be said; their mingling of
academic procedure with undigested nationalism, maudlin sentiment, or
both, produces a chimerical monster, a musical Minotaur that
fortunately has had no progeny.

The decline of the symphony from 1820 to 1900 is more spectacular than
its advance from 1800 to 1820. By the opening of the century the
symphony as a form was completely moribund. So also was the romantic
movement, and it might have been thought that the decline of
romanticism would have marked a return to the principles of the
classical symphony; but the advent of impressionism with its
disintegrating and anti-formal bias completed the process of
corruption. (It is true that the English took to writing symphonies
at a time when other nations were ceasing to do so; but in view of the
peculiar hiatus in English musical history this may be looked on as a
making up for lost time rather than as a contemporary gesture. The
symphonies of Bax, though technically speaking of our day, belong
spiritually to the nineteenth century and suffer from the same
inherent disadvantages as the romantic symphonies. It is doubtful
whether future critics will consider them as important as his
symphonic poems, any more than they will place Elgar _No. 1_ beside
_Falstaff_ and the _Enigma Variations_ or Vaughan Williams' _London
Symphony_ beside _Flos Campi_ and _Job_.)

The great revolutionary figures of before the war, Debussy,
Stravinsky, Schnberg and Bartk turned their back on the symphony and
all that it stood for, and a pre-war critic, ignorant of Sibelius'
work, might pardonably have thought that the symphony was as outmoded
and antediluvian as the horse bus.

In Sibelius, however, we have the first great composer since Beethoven
whose mind thinks naturally in terms of symphonic form. Coming at the
end of the romantic movement, he is as far removed from the apex of
the romantic past as Beethoven was from its future. His symphonies,
then, though subjective in mood, are free from the tautological
emotional repetitions of romantic music cast in the classic mould.
Though their grim colouring clearly owes much to the composer's
nationality and surroundings there is nothing in them that can be
considered a folk song. Therefore, without being eclectic they
address an international audience and are free from the conflict
between local colour and construction which is to be observed in the
Russian school. Finally, Sibelius is the one important figure of our
times who has been uninfluenced by the Impressionist revolution--even
_The Oceanides_ though pointillist in orchestration and superficially
Impressionist in form reveals on close analysis a construction as
firmly knit as any of the symphonies. He has concentrated on the
integration of form and has not wasted his energies on the
disintegration of colour.

This formal strength explains why, unlike all other composers who
belong equally to the pre-war and post-war periods of modern music,
Sibelius' work does not split itself into two periods, and shows no
sign of the definite reaction that we associate with the last ten
years. One soon reaches the end to the possible dissection of
technique and elaboration of vocabulary. This end was reached for all
practical purposes in 1913, and since then the revolutionary composers
having pulled the clock to pieces and being mentally incapable of
putting it together again have taken to arranging the wheels and
levers in neat little patterns.

Formalism is only the complementary reaction to formlessness, and
montage follows naturally enough on disruption. But a sense of musical
form, the power not only to arrange sounds tastefully but to think in
them vitally, is a living and generative force which reaches no such
dead end, and Sibelius' symphonies in consequence show a steady and
logical process both formally and emotionally. The Olympian calm of
_No. 7_ may seem in contrast to the bitter and tragic quality of _No.
4_ but technically speaking it is the logical result of the process of
concentration and integration that is to be observed from the second
symphony onwards.

The first symphony hardly comes into a book on contemporary music.
This opulently scored and virile work is the final flowering of the
later nineteenth-century symphony, and though an excellent example of
its genre it is constructed for the most part on recognized lines. Not
until the second symphony are we faced with Sibelius' highly
individual method of formal construction. The first movement of
Sibelius' _No. 2_ differs from any previous symphonic movement in that
its undoubted continuity and formal balance are not established until
the last bars. The exposition of a Beethoven symphony is by no means a
complete statement, but it is logical enough as far as it goes. The
exposition of this particular movement, a string of apparently loosely
knit episodes, is completely incomprehensible at a first hearing, and
it is only towards the end of the development and in the curiously
telescoped recapitulation that the full significance of the opening
begins to be apparent. Instead of being presented with a fait accompli
of a theme that is then analysed and developed in fragments, we are
presented with several enigmatic fragments that only become a fait
accompli on the final page. It is like watching a sculptured head
being built up from the armature with little pellets of clay or, to
put it more vulgarly, it is like a detective story in which the reader
does not know until the final chapter whether the blotting paper or
the ashtray throws more light on the discovery of the corpse in the
library.

This individual formal outlook is not to be found in the rest of the
symphony. The second movement is finely and broadly planned, but apart
from the sinister outbursts in the bass, which convey a curious sense
of frustration, it offers us no problem; the last two movements though
full of vigorous material are disappointingly conventional in form and
hark back to the outlook of the first symphony.

The third symphony, though enjoyable, is a rather transitional work.
The first movement, clearly analysable according to the accepted
principles of sonata form is, though more compact, less individual in
method than the similar movement in _No. 2_. The second movement
foreshadows and in some respects excels that of _No. 5_, in the way a
seemingly monotonous repetition of a monotonous theme is made to yield
an astonishing variety of feeling and colour. It is in the third
movement that we find the continuation of the formal integration begun
in the first movement of _No. 2_. A distorted wisp of melody from the
slow movement leads to a sombrely coloured but capricious scherzo in
which short thematic fragments are swept aside by the obstinate
rhythmic figures on the strings. It is only gradually that these
fragments resolve themselves into the broad chorale-like tune, so
typical of Sibelius in its apparent commonplace and actual
distinction, which dominates the symphony with increasing power until
the final bars. All the elements of the last two movements in a
Beethoven symphony are here, but instead of these elements being
marshalled into opposed and regular military formation they proceed
naturally one from the other and, once formulated, are thrown aside.
We seem to have been unseen spectators of the artist at work rather
than guests at a private view.

The formal concentration of the last movement of the third symphony
prepares us for the astonishing conciseness of the great A Minor
Symphony, even if its comparatively cheerful mood is in the utmost
contrast to the bitter and gloomy note that is apparent in every bar
of its successor. In the fourth symphony the classical four-movement
form is reduced to its bare bones. Conventional repetition and
development are reduced to a minimum, but the evocative significance
of the themes is so great that in some instances, notably at the end
of the scherzo, the most fragmentary reference to a previous theme is
sufficient to restore our sense of formal balance. For grave beauty of
sound the slow movement is unsurpassed in modern music, even by
Sibelius himself, and the deceptively care-free opening of the finale
is evidently planned as a temporary relief from its weight of
introspection. The comparatively spacious lines of the last movement
faintly recall Sibelius' earlier symphonies, but the astounding coda
recalls nothing that has been written before or since, even if its
almost unbearable spiritual and technical concentration may be held to
form a modern parallel to the posthumous quartets of Beethoven.

It is curious how certain critics, more noteworthy for geographical
knowledge than for nervous sensibility, have ascribed the undoubted
coldness of this work to the inclement climatic conditions that
prevail in Sibelius' home country. The chilly atmosphere of the fourth
symphony is something more than a Christmas-card nip in the air: it is
a bitter and heroic resignation of the spirit with nothing in it of
external theatricality or maudlin emotionalism. The fourth symphony is
the crowning work of Sibelius' middle period--it is to Sibelius what
_Pierrot Lunaire_ is to Schnberg, and like _Pierrot Lunaire_ it only
yields up all its secrets after close study. To maintain this standard
is hardly to be expected of any man, and it cannot be held that the
more popular _No. 5_ is a work of equal significance. To develop in
each individual movement the fining-down process to be observed in the
fourth symphony was clearly impossible--if only for the reason that
further compactness would have eliminated not only the inessentials
but also the essentials.

The fifth symphony, with its imposing finale and heroic proportions,
might at first sight seem to be a mature reversion to an earlier mood,
and it may be described as the most obviously great of Sibelius'
symphonies. Actually, though, it is not a backward step but a gradual
approach to the one monumental movement of _No. 7_. The first movement
consists of two interlinked sections of which the second, in the
nature of a scherzo, is based to a large extent on the material of the
sombre first section. The relation between the two sections is much
closer than is the case in the finale of _No. 3_, and this fusion of
the customary first movement and scherzo prepares us for the fusion of
all four movements in the seventh symphony.

If _No. 5_ is a technical foreshadowing of _No. 7_, the sixth symphony
is a spiritual foreshadowing. In its four-movement form it may
superficially be compared to the A Minor Symphony, but the different
movements have none of the dramatic contrast we find in the earlier
work, and are indeed less differentiated than the two interlinked
sections of _No. 5_. In their continuity of mood and texture they do
not look back to the tragic abruptness of _No. 4_, but to the
spiritual calm and serene continuity of _No. 7_. Although at present
this fascinating study in half-tones, emotional and orchestral, is
overshadowed by the grandeur of _No. 5_, I feel that future
commentators may find its intimate quality more indicative of the true
Sibelius, just as many of us feel that Beethoven's fourth and eighth
symphonies are more 'echt-Beethoven' than the popular odd-number
symphonies.

The one-movement Symphony in C Major, _No. 7_, is a continuation--an
elliptical summing up--of the intellectual and emotional content of
the two preceding symphonies, combining the austere grandeur of the
fifth with the subtle and elusive methods of the sixth, and in it
Sibelius' art reaches its second great apex. It is impossible to
convey on paper the magnificent formal sweep and emotional logic of
this work and only repeated hearings--fortunately the work is
recorded--enable us to appreciate the perfection of its structure.
Just as in the second symphony the group of contrasted themes at the
opening is gradually resolved into one integral idea, so in this
symphony the traditional group of contrasted movements is resolved
into one continuous web of sound. This work seems not only to contain
all the elements of the old type of four-movement symphony, but also
to create a satisfactory synthesis of the various 'warring' forms of
the last two centuries--the fugue, with its continuous development,
the symphony, with its balanced sections, the symphonic poem, with its
imaginative freedom.

Mr. Cecil Gray in his book on Sibelius--to which every subsequent
writer must needs be indebted--has rightly pointed out its 'lofty
grandeur and dignity, a truly Olympian serenity and repose which are
unique in modern music'. One might qualify this statement by saying
that it is the only modern work whose repose has in it no hint of any
lack of vitality, and whose classicism has in it no hint of pastiche.
We should not confuse its Olympian serenity with the cold detachment
of Stravinsky's _Apollo Musagetes_ and its many neo-classical
imitations. There is a repose which marks a final victory and a repose
which marks an early defeat. Not everyone who renounces the world is a
Buddha.

The symphonic poem _Tapiola_ marks a totally different aspect of
Sibelius' formal mastery. Unlike the symphonies, which reduce a
contrasting series of fragments to one simple statement, _Tapiola_ is
an example of the wealth of variation and colour that can be obtained
from a handful of notes. The work is entirely monothematic,
and--although less rhetorical and more closely knit--should be
regarded as a continuation of the formal principles first evolved by
Liszt. More immediately attractive and picturesque than the later
symphonies, it is a fine example of Sibelius' ability to propound the
most complex statement in terms of absolute intelligibility. There is
nothing in it to perplex the ordinary listener, yet to the technician
it is a never-ending source of wonder.

The climax of this remarkable work is an apt symbol of Sibelius' art
as a whole. Though in performance the effect is overwhelming,
suggesting an orchestra of vast dimensions treated with the utmost
elaboration, an examination on paper reveals nothing more than a
chromatic tremolo on the strings and a simple placing of a
moderate-sized group of brass. Sibelius has not found it necessary to
distort his medium; in a sudden moment of intense vision, he has, like
a Newton or an Einstein, revealed the electrifying possibilities that
are latent in the apparently commonplace.


(e) Sibelius and the Music of the Future


If, in a book that for the most part has purposely avoided a
point-to-point analysis of individual works, I have devoted so much
space to Sibelius' symphonies, it is not only that I consider the
fourth and seventh symphonies to be two of the most astonishing
creative efforts of our time, but also because I feel that Sibelius'
music contains the answer to so many of the questions, both direct and
implied, that have been raised in this study.

Sibelius has always been a figure apart from the rest of modern music.
The lack of revolutionary vocabulary in his music has in the past led
superficial critics to believe that he was apart through being behind
the times. Now that the smoke of bombs and gunfire has cleared away we
can see that his solitary position is really due to his having been in
advance of the anarchists. Although, chronologically speaking, of the
same generation as Strauss and Elgar, he is of all living composers
the most interesting and stimulating to the post-war generation. The
pre-war revolutionaries have become victims to their own mannerisms,
and any attempt to imitate them produces a pastiche of a pastiche. The
succeeding generation, in spite of individually good works such as
Milhaud's _Prote_ and _La Cration du Monde_, Prokofieff's third
piano concerto and _L'Enfant Prodigue_ is curiously lacking in any
sense of direction, oscillating disturbingly between the pretty-pretty
and the ugly-ugly. Though technically mature, both Milhaud and
Prokofieff seem to suffer from a permanent spiritual adolescence; one
does not feel that their undoubted talent will ever reach a convincing
fruition. The composers of a still younger generation are even less
decided in outlook, ranging feverishly through the many movements and
'isms' that to some extent have been tabulated in this book.

Of all contemporary music that of Sibelius seems to point forward most
surely to the future. Since the death of Debussy, Sibelius and
Schnberg are the most significant figures in European music, and
Sibelius is undoubtedly the more complete artist of the two. However
much one may admire Schnberg's powerful imagination and unique
genius, it is difficult not to feel that the world of sound and
thought that he opens up--though apparently iconoclastic--is _au fond_
as restricted as the academicism it has supplanted. Sibelius' music
suffers from no such restriction, and it indicates not a particular
avenue of escape but a world of thought which is free from the
paralysing alternatives of escape or submission. It offers no material
for the plagiarist, and is to be considered more as a spiritual
example than as a technical influence. We are not likely to find any
imitations of Sibelius _No. 7_, such as we find of Stravinsky's
_Symphonie des Psaumes_, because the spiritual calm of this work is
the climax of the spiritual experience of a lifetime and cannot be
achieved by any aping of external mannerisms.

Sibelius has had no direct influence on his generation, but if we
compare the recent work of the revolutionary composers--Bartk's
second Piano Concerto and Schnberg's _Orchestral Variations_ for
example--with that of ten years ago we can see that it represents an
approach to the spirit of integration and artistic completeness that
has always characterized his music. There are signs, too, that the
most vital minds of the present generation are turning their back on
both the disruption of the Impressionists and the montage or pastiche
of the neo-classicists. Walton's Viola Concerto, one of the most
thoughtful and sincerely conceived works of recent years, refuses to
be put into any specific category from the point of view either of
technique or tendency. It is neither English nor cosmopolitan,
neo-classic or neo-romantic-it is that least sensational yet most
satisfying of all things, a finished and well-balanced work of art.

No composer can surprise us now with sensational technical
discoveries, nor are we content with self-expression that takes the
form of a personal alembication of a family joke. The glamour of the
anarchist and the mystery of the sphinx have begun to pall, and we are
faced with the unenviable task of making constructive effort and plain
statement appear interesting. The modern composer has now to
consolidate the reckless and fascinating experiments of the pre-war
pioneers while avoiding the dog-Latin classicism of the post-war
pasticheurs. He must make a synthesis of the present varied elements
with an emphasis on the one that has been most neglected, namely form.

The task after all is not so impossible. While one soon reaches the
physical limits of harmonic or rhythmic experiment, per se, there is
no limit to the development of a complete musical statement in which
every element is duly considered. To take the isolated case of
harmonic experiment: it might seem that after Schnberg the only
possible progress lay in the further subdivision of the scale. But the
music of Bernard Van Dieren indicates other lines of development less
sensational but no less far reaching. His earlier works, it is
true--such as the piano sketches and the still unperformed _Chinese
Symphony_--show signs of a Schnbergian ruthlessness, and it is
surprising to see in his later work--such as the _Spenser
Sonnet_--hardly any chord which, taken by itself, cannot be found in
Wagner. In his later work, however, the chords are not used
specifically as such, but are the result of a melodic counterpoint of
fascinating complexity. The approach to each chord is so unusual that
the most familiar combinations of notes take on an entirely new
meaning. Van Dieren's attitude towards harmony is more indicative of
future developments than the 'note clusters' of Henry Cowell or the
quarter-tones of Aloys Haba; it represents one facet of the general
consolidation of technique with which the modern composer is faced.

There is nothing in music which has really lost its meaning, no device
of rhythm, no harmonic combination which the composer of vision cannot
reanimate.

The music of the future, if it is to avoid the many psychological
cul-de-sacs which have been examined in this volume, must inevitably
be directed towards a new angle of vision rather than to the
exploitation of a new vocabulary. This music will not be outwardly
sensational, and though at times it may seem extremely unusual it will
not be of the type that can be labelled 'the new This' or 'the new
That'. It will not truckle to topicality by pretending to be inspired
by sporting events or by the opening of a wireless station, nor will
it lose itself in a dream world of forgotten loves and vanished days.
It is highly unlikely that it will be popular. But then we cannot
pretend that the best music of any time was at all popular in the
genuine sense of the word. Sibelius, it is true, has a popular
following today but, like that of Beethoven, it is mainly a tribute to
his worst works. His fourth symphony is as unappreciated now as were
the later sonatas and quartets of Beethoven in their day.
Nevertheless, just as the later quartets of Beethoven have influenced
modern thought far more than the fashionable works of Hummel and
Czerny, so will the symphonies of Sibelius have a more profound
influence on future generations than the pices d'occasion of his
contemporaries--the composers like Stravinsky and Hindemith who have
made their compromise with vogue.

I am not suggesting for a moment that the important composers of the
future will imitate Sibelius' form, any more than they will imitate
Van Dieren's harmony, but I am convinced that they will draw more
inspiration from the solitary figures of present-day music than from
the various petty movements which spring up every five years--and
disappear as rapidly. For if their work is to have any but ephemeral
value they will be solitary figures themselves.

The artist who is one of a group writes for that group alone, whereas
the artist who expresses personal experience may in the end reach
universal experience. He must not mind if for the moment he appears to
be without an audience. He has no right to complain if Cleopatra
prefers billiards. There is always the chance that she may become
bored with billiards also, and when she returns to the musician his
song will be all the more moving for having been written to please not
her but himself.




Index


(The indexing of names is complete. The indexing of works is
selective, being confined, for the most part, to those works with name
titles that have a definite bearing on the general argument.
Composers' names are not given after the works except in the case of
titles that have been used by more than one composer, e.g. _Iberia_.)

C.L.


_Airs  faire fuir_, 124
Albeniz, 37, 163, 170, 171
_Amazing Mandarin, The_, 234, 293
_Animal Crackers_, 266, 267
_Anna Livia Plurabelle_, 21, 296, 298, 300
Antheil, George, 239
_Aperus Dsagrables_, 124
_Aphrodite_, 193
_Apollo Musagetes_, 105, 111, 325
_l'Aprs-midi d'un Faune, Prlude _, 33
d'Arceuil, Ecole, 194, 196
Arlen, Michael, 272
Armstrong, Louis, 212, 213
Auber, 120, 148
Auric, Georges, 95, 127, 129, 197, 199, 200
_Axel_, 162, 180, 181


Bach, 65, 85, 105, 108, 228, 235-237, 247, 291, 298, 312
Bakst, 71
_Baiser de la Fe, Le_, 105-107
Baker, T., 241
Balakireff, 163, 165, 189
Balanchine, 225
Banting, John, 84
Bartk, Bla, 37, 143, 150, 175, 183, 222, 234, 286, 287, 289, 292, 293, 318, 328
Baudelaire, 51, 55
Bax, Arnold, 187, 318
B.B.C., The, 234, 235, 237
Beachcomber, 216
Beardsley, Aubrey, 49, 51, 53, 295
Beddoes, 79
Beethoven, 65, 105, 116, 165, 170, 184, 206, 220, 227, 235, 236, 305, 312, 314-318, 320, 322, 324, 331
_Beggar's Opera, The_, 144

_Beggar on Horseback_, 267

_Belle au Bois Dormant, La_, 99

Bellini, 65, 73, 105, 156

Bellman, The, 97

_Belshazzar's Feast_ (Martin), 265

_Belshazzar's Feast_ (Walton), 279

_Berceuses du Chat_, 90

Berg, Alban, 122, 237, 247, 270, 273, 290, 301-304

Berlioz, 55, 135, 162, 239, 242, 288, 309, 316, 317

Berners, Lord, 94, 110, 171, 192

_Biches, Les_, 52, 77, 83

Bilibin, 186

_Bluebeard's Castle_, 37, 175, 286

_Blue Express, The_, 244

Boecklin, 82

Botie, Rue de la, 79, 242

_Boeuf sur le toit, Le_, 199-201, 224

_Bolero_, 110, 198

_Boris Godunoff,_ 155, 158, 163, 166-168, 170, 172, 178-182, 260

Borodin, 39, 41, 48, 143, 155, 159, 165, 168, 173, 175, 317

Borotra, 51

Bou, Vicens, 209

Boyce, William, 142, 217, 282, 283

Brahms, 65, 151, 189, 307, 310, 311, 316, 317

Brancusi, 22, 76, 133

Brandes, Georg, 145

Brecht, Bert, 253

Breton, Andr, 80, 82

Browne, Sir Thomas, 35

Burney, Dr., 64, 120, 219

Busoni, 207, 287, 288

Byrd, 119, 143, 254, 282

Byron, 162, 207


Cagney, James, 282

Calvocoressi, M. D., 167

Capone, Al, 86

_Carmen_, 147, 236

Carroll, Lewis, 261

Cendrars, Blaise, 211

Czanne, 25, 38, 113, 169, 191, 226, 250, 310

Chabrier, 27, 51, 77, 194-197, 200, 207, 291

Chalupt, Ren, 130

Charlus, M. de, 193

_Chatte, La_, 241

Chavannes, Puvis de, 188

_Chinese Symphony_, 37, 330

Chirico, 84, 85

Chopin, 105

Cimarosa, 66

Clair, Ren, 94, 196, 260, 269

Cocteau, Jean, 71, 72, 78, 81, 106, 193, 195, 196, 202

Conder, Charles, 51

Copland, Aaron, 214, 217

_Coq d'or, Le_, 155, 170

Corbusier, 63, 76, 241, 248

Couperin, 67

Coward, Noel, 216, 217, 273

Cowell, Henry, 330

_Cration du Monde, Le_, 199, 218, 224, 327

Crane, Dr., 196

Czerny, 331


Dali, Salvador, 265

_Daphnis and Chloe_, 71, 110

Dargomizhky, 58, 131, 155

David, Felicien, 186

David, King, 209

Debussy, 25-53, 58, 60, 65-75, 81, 97, 123, 126, 135, 151, 152, 166, 185, 189, 206, 243, 254, 280, 289-292, 307, 308, 318, 328

Degas, 197

Delius, 37, 48, 99, 123, 191, 204, 206, 222, 258, 260, 308, 311

Diaghileff, 39, 52, 69-77, 85-89, 99, 102, 109, 268

_Dido and Aeneas_, 57, 144

van Dieren, Bernard, 37, 258, 270, 287, 329-331

Disney, Walt, 261, 266, 267, 281

_Don Giovanni_, 57

Douglas, James, 92, 255

Douglas, Norman, 110

Dowland, John, 42, 64, 118, 143

Dowson, Ernest, 53, 207

_Drei Groschen Opera_, 225

Dukas, Paul, 37

Dukelsky, Vladimir, 86

Dulac, Edmund, 116

Dulac, Germaine, 266

Dunne, 56, 78, 313

Dvork, 49, 152, 293, 317

Dykes, The Rev. John Bacchus, 204, 222, 283


Ebbing, Kraft, 54

Egan, Pierce, 217

Einstein, 313, 326

Eisenstein, 260, 261, 263, 268

_Elektra_, 55, 56, 117, 221, 293

Elgar, Sir Edward, 150, 151, 189, 273, 283, 284, 318, 327

Eliot, T. S., 111, 179, 207, 216, 268, 285

Ellington, Duke, 203, 207, 212-215, 222, 228, 248, 257, 271

_L'Enfant Prodigue_ (Prokofieff), 110, 327

_En habit de cheval_, 125

_Epigraphes Antiques_, 51

Ernst, Max, 82, 84, 85, 267, 268

_Erwartung_, 20, 22, 46, 54

_Espaa_, 187, 194

Evans, Edwin, 30, 48

Evreinoff, 68

_Excelsior_, 73, 245


Fairbanks, Douglas, sen., 108

Falla, Manuel de, 171

_Falstaff_ (Elgar), 318

_Falstaff_ (Verdi), 100

Faulkner, William, 225

_Faust Symphony_, 179, 162, 317

_Fte Polonaise_, 194, 207

_Ftes_, 31, 244

_Figaro_, 179, 180

Fildes, Sir Luke, 80

_Finlandia_, 136, 148, 163, 305

Firbank, Ronald, 52

Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, 119

Fokine, 71

Franck, Csar, 214, 317

von Freytag-Loringhoven, The Baroness Elsa, 77, 82, 84

Freud, 54, 193

_Fugitive, I am a_, 260

Fuller, Major-General, 141, 144


Gauguin, 169, 223, 310

Garbo, 176

_General Line, The_, 21

George, Stefan, 294

Gershwin, George, 212, 223

Gesualdo, Carlo, 288

Gide, Andr, 193

_Gigues_, 34, 52

Giotto, 136

Giraud, Albert, 53, 55

_Girl Friend, The_, 219

Glazunoff, 110, 165, 168, 189

Glinka, 39, 58, 154-161, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171, 175, 183-187, 195, 309

Gluck, 73, 106

_Glckliche Hand, Die_, 54

_Gnossiennes_, 126, 128

Gogol, 161

Goossens, Eugne, 22

_Gtterdmmerung_, 115

Gounod, 67, 77

Gray, Cecil, 48, 53, 110, 145, 325

Gray, Dolly, 207

Greco, El, 118

Gregorian chants, 98, 118

Grtry, 148, 217

Grieg, 108, 203, 243, 305, 311

Griffiths, D. W., 260, 266

Gris, Juan, 95

Grove, Sir George, 315

Gurin, Maurice de, 51

Gungl, 207

_Gymnopdies_, 125, 126, 128


Haba, Aloys, 68, 311, 330

_Hallelujah_, 260

_Hamlet_ (Liszt), 164

_Hamlet_ (Shakespeare), 167

Handel, 143, 151, 220

Haydn, 64, 91, 121, 142, 148, 165, 227, 314, 317

_Headlong Hall_, 314

Heine, 242

Hindemith, 118, 182, 183, 214, 217, 221, 246-255, 258-260, 264, 268-272, 274, 279, 282, 304, 331

_L'Histoire du Soldat_, 84, 90, 93-97, 107

Hokusai, 31

Holmes, Sherlock, 251

Holst, 283

Honegger, 242, 243, 245, 246, 264

Hornbostel, 204

_Horst Wessel Song_, 149

Hucbald, 26, 64

_Hugh the Drover_, 172, 178

Hughes, 'Spike', 217

Hugo, Victor, 178

Hummel, 331

Huskisson, 245

Huxley, Aldous, 34, 236


_Iberia_ (Debussy), 24, 34, 60, 155

Ibsen, 167, 261

_Igor, Prince_, 48, 153, 158, 165, 170, 182

_Images_ (Debussy), 33, 35, 36, 51, 254

_Indian Queen_, The, 57

Ingres, 109, 130


_Jack in the Box_, 126

_Jeux_, 36, 51

Johnson, James Weldon, 203

Jolson, Al, 212, 261

_Jota Aragonesa_, 187

Joyce, James, 21, 72, 281, 294-296, 298, 300

_Joyeuse Marche_, 194, 196

Jung, 54


_Kamarinskaya_, 155, 164

_Kholmsky_, Prince, 160

_Khovantchina_, 155, 159, 163

Kipling, Rudyard, 241

Krenek, 194

_Kunst der Fugue_, 291, 298


_Lac des Cygnes, Le_, 99, 203

_Lachrymae_, 118

Ladmirault, 41

Laurencin, Marie, 286

Lawrence, D. H., 44, 190

Leger, 113

Leichtentritt, Dr. Hugo, 315

Lermontoff, 189, 192

_Lesson, The_, 253

Lewis, Wyndham, 44, 115, 180, 202, 281

Liadoff, 156, 168

_Liberty Bell_, 208

_Life for the Czar, A_, 154, 156-159

Liszt, 26, 27, 55, 67, 120, 128, 156, 164, 172, 178, 213, 293, 315-317, 326

_Little Review, The_, 77

Lloyd, Marie, 14

_London Symphony, A_, 37, 318

Louys, Pierre, 51, 193

_Lyric Suite_ (Berg), 270, 301, 302


Macaulay, 247

Mace, Thomas, 119, 122

Maeterlinck, 26, 27, 266

_Magic Flute, The_, 153, 155

_Mahagonny_, 225

Mahler, 220

Mallet-Stevens, 63, 246

Manet, 195, 197

Manfred, 180, 317

Marenco, 245

Marschner, 58, 194

_Marseillaise, The_, 146-148

Martineau, 114, 265

Martin, John, 265

Martinu, 243

_Martyre de Saint Sbastien, Le_, 51, 53

Marx Brothers, The, 261, 266, 267

Massine, 71, 95

Maugham, Somerset, 179

_Mazeppa_, 128

Mazzini, 182

Medtner, 110

Meisel, Edmund, 261

_Meistersinger_, 163

Mendelssohn, 45, 220, 316

_La Mer_, 30-33, 124

Mercadante, 64

_Mercure_, 130, 133

Meyerbeer, 260

Milestone, Mr., 314

Milhaud, Darius, 68, 143, 197, 199-201, 217, 218, 222, 224, 240, 258, 289, 327

Mille, Cecil B. de, 260

Miro, Joan, 85

Monet, Claude, 25, 26, 38

Monteverdi, 310

_Mood Indigo_, 214, 271

Moore, George, 136

Moore, Henry, 188

Morand, Paul, 203

Morland, George, 172

Morris, William, 174

Mossoloff, 243

_Mother_, 262

Mozart, 34, 57, 65, 102, 115-117, 121, 166, 167, 179-181, 186, 195, 291, 308, 312, 315

_Musicall Gramarian_, 42

_Musical Joke, A_, 102

_Musique d'ameublement_, 132, 273

Mussorgsky, 27, 39, 92, 119, 131, 143, 155, 163, 166, 172, 173, 178, 180, 182, 184, 190, 260, 261, 278


Nabokoff, 86

Neher, 225

Newman, Ernest, 23, 316

Newton, 326

_New World, In the_, 152, 317

Nietzsche, 255

Nijinska, La, 191

_Noces, Les_, 94, 98, 99, 110, 111, 158, 190, 191, 225, 245

_Nocturnes_ (Debussy), 30, 35, 50

North, Roger, 42, 119, 277

Northcliffe, Lord, 92

_Nouvelle Babylone, La_, 92

_Nuages_, 31, 39


Oblomov, 156

_Oceanides, The_, 37, 307, 309, 319

_Oedipus Rex_, 90, 105, 106, 111

Offenbach, 194, 209, 260, 291

Ogden, C. K., 183

_Oiseau de Feu, L'_, 39, 48, 52, 107

_Otello_, 100

_Pacific 231_, 242-244, 263

Palestrina, 118, 254

_Parade_, 71, 125, 129, 225

_Parsifal_, 50, 291, 293

_Pas d'Acier, Le_, 243-245

_Pastoral Symphony_ (Vaughan Williams), 150, 152

_Pathetic Symphony_, 118

Patou, 108

_Pellas and Mlisande_, 28, 29, 31, 36, 50, 73, 75, 131

Pergolesi, 74, 106

_Petrushka_, 40, 48, 52, 90, 111, 125, 244

_Philharmonic Concerto_ (Hindemith), 271

Picabia, 25, 107

Picasso, 71, 74, 76, 81, 82, 95, 109, 198, 250

_Pierrot Lunaire_, 21, 24, 47, 53, 54, 60, 122, 294, 297, 300, 323

Poe, Edgar Allan, 51, 56, 57, 295

Poiret, 82, 108

Porter, Cole, 271, 273

_Portsmouth Point_, 220, 221

_Potemkin_, 21, 92

_Prlude en Tapisseries_, 129

_Pribaoutki_, 90, 93

Priestley, J. B., 272

Prokofieff, 110, 151, 221, 243-245, 327

Proust, 52, 193

Pryce-Jones, Alan, 116

Puccini, 64, 97, 226, 252, 260, 304

Pudovkin, 260-263

_Pulcinella_, 73, 74, 84, 101

Purcell, 57, 66, 119, 144, 277, 282

Pushkin, 156


_Ragtime_ (Stravinsky), 95

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 154

Ravel, 71, 102, 110, 118, 124, 194, 198, 214, 221, 308

_Red Flag, The_, 146

Reith, Sir John, 234

Reger, Max, 296

_Rehearsal, The_, 109

_Relche_, 126, 128

_Renard_, 90, 94

Renoir, 117, 195

_Rhapsody in Blue_, 223

_Rheingold, Das_, 50

Rimsky-Korsakoff, 48, 155, 163, 165, 186, 190, 271, 309

_Ring, The_, 50, 65, 238

Rittenhouse, Mrs., 267

_Roi des Etoiles, Le_, 88

_Rondes de Printemps_, 34, 152

Rossetti, 50, 51, 207

_Rossignol, Le_, 39, 53, 87

Rossini, 64

Rouault, 85

Rousseau (le Douanier), 223

Roussel, Albert, 123

Rowlandson, 177

_Rugby_, 242-245

_Rule Britannia_, 147, 148

Russell, Bertrand, 181

_Russlan and Ludmilla_, 39, 58, 154, 155, 159, 160, 164, 165, 186, 187, 309

Ruthven, Lord, 194


_Sacre du Printemps, Le_, 21, 22, 24, 40-42, 44, 48, 53, 56, 90, 93, 110, 111, 155, 160, 169, 175, 190, 289

Sardanas, 172, 209

Satie, Erik, 27, 71, 91, 123-137, 194

Sauguet, 23, 67, 86

Scarlatti, 65, 67, 76, 143

_Scheherezade_, 52, 69

Schnberg, 1, 19, 20, 21, 37, 38, 44-46, 54, 55, 198, 237, 271, 287-304, 307, 318, 323, 328, 329, 330

Schulhoff, Erwin, 217

Schumann, 65, 153, 293, 316

Schumann, Clara, 65

Scriabin, 37, 65, 154, 308, 309

_Sea Shell and the Clergyman, The_, 266

_Sea Symphony, A_, 31

Severini, 197

Shakespeare, 167, 253

Sibelius, 37, 136, 143, 148, 152, 183, 226, 254, 258, 270, 287, 304-312, 318-328, 331

Sickert, 107

_Sins, The Seven Deadly_, 225-227, 270, 271

Sitwell, Edith, 22, 54, 200, 285

Sitwell, Sacheverell, 273

Six, Les, 101, 194, 196

_Snow Maiden, The_, 158, 159

Soames, Enoch, 50

_Socrate_, 123, 130-133, 135

_Song of the High Hills, The_, 99

Sorabji, Kaikhosru, 68, 185, 189

Soupault, Philippe, 265

Sousa, John Philip, 208, 209, 218, 221, 236

Spalding, Captain, 77

_Spenser Sonnet_, 270, 330

Stein, Gertrude, 96, 104, 134

Stone, Christopher, 235

_Stone Guest, The_, 58, 131

Stone, Marcus, 107

Strachey, Lytton, 247

Strauss, Johann, 105, 106, 212, 221, 222

Strauss, Richard, 55, 65, 83, 114, 221, 306, 308, 309, 327

Stravinsky, 1, 19, 22, 37-42, 44, 46-49, 52, 60, 65, 68, 73, 76, 82, 84, 85, 87-89, 92-112, 118, 125, 133, 134, 158, 159, 168, 190, 191, 214, 222, 244, 246, 247, 264, 268, 279, 282, 289, 299, 307-309, 310, 318, 325, 328, 331

Strindberg, 259, 265

Strube, 23, 181

_Summer Night in Madrid, Souvenir of a_, 187

Swinburne, 167, 253

_Symphonie des Psaumes_, 107, 328
_Symphonie Fantastique_, 55, 162, 239, 316


Tadema, Alma, 84

Tanguy, Yves, 84

_Tapiola_, 305, 307, 309, 325

_Tapisserie, Prlude en_, 129

_Tarass Bulba_, 161

_Tasso_, 162, 178

Tchaikovsky, 63, 85, 99, 105-107, 164, 307, 309, 311, 314-317

_Thamar_, 165, 192, 316

_Time and Truth_, 143

Tin Pan Alley, 212, 222

Toulouse-Lautrec, 195

Tracey, Lee, 282

Trampleasure, Lady, 79

_Transition_, 49, 77, 266

_Tristan and Isolde_, 28, 178-180, 291, 293, 302

_Trois morceaux en forme de poire_, 125

_Truth, The Half Naked_, 263

Tupper, Martin, 209

Turges, Edmund, 219

Turina, 171

Turner, W. J., 305


_Ulysses_, 22, 72, 295

_Unaufhrliche, Das_, 255

Unco, the, 289

Usher, Roderick, 51, 57

Utamaro, 188


_Valkyrie, The_, 115

_Valse, La_, 198, 221

_Valse Triste_, 304-306

Van Gogh, 81, 114, 169

_Variations for Orchestra_ (Schnberg), 297-302, 328

Vaughan Williams, 31, 37, 143, 150-152, 163, 175, 183, 214, 283, 289, 292, 318

Verdi, 99, 148, 156

Vidor, King, 260

_Vie des Abeilles, La_, 98

Villa Lobos, 192

Villiers de l'Isle Adam, 162

Vittoria, 42, 118, 119, 248

Vivaldi, 103


Wagner, 28, 29, 31, 65, 66, 115, 116, 131, 163, 166-168, 178, 220, 289, 291, 293, 302, 312, 316, 330

Waldteufel, 209

Walton, William, 94, 110, 151, 200, 220, 278, 279, 285, 328

_War and Western Civilization_, 141

Warlock, Peter, 119, 285

_Waste Land, The_, 111, 285

_Weary Heart, None but the_, 107

Weber, 58, 145, 220

Webern, Von, 23, 260, 290

_Week End Book, The_, 174

Weelkes, 119

Weill, Kurt, 194, 207, 224, 225, 227, 247, 253, 270, 273

Whistler, 30, 50, 51

Whitman, 31, 241, 281

Wilde, Oscar, 49, 52, 192

Williams, Francis, 110

Witwoud, Sir Wilful, 142

_Woodes so wilde, The_, 177, 283

_Work in Progress_, 266, 281, 295

_Wozzek_, 301, 302


Yeats, W. B., 174, 285

_Yellow Book, The_, 49


Transcriber's Note:

Some older spelling forms have been preserved to reflect the historicity
of the document.

1. page 164--corrected typo 'Festklange' to 'Festklnge'

2. page 205--corrected typo 'trouvaile' to 'trouvaille'

3. page 282--corrected speling of 'Lee Tracy' to "Lee Tracey'

4. page 335--inserted comma after '(Prokofieff)'

5. page 337--corrected order of cited pages to place 164 before 172

6. page 340--removed period at end of list of pages for Stravinsky

7. page 341--corrected typo 'Unaufrliche' to 'Unaufhrliche'


[End of _Music Ho!_ by Constant Lambert]