Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline , livre ebook

Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline
by Constant Lambert

First published in 1934
This edition published by Rare Treasures
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Music Ho!

A Study of Music in Decline

by CONSTANT LAMBERT

























To
MY MOTHER
Preface
*
This book makes no attempt to be an ordnance survey of modern music ora study of modern composers as individual artists. Many composers ofmerit are not mentioned in it at all, and in the case of othersattention has unfortunately been focused upon their lesser works. Thetask of docketing the outstanding figures of modern music has beenably done by other writers, and as for the purely technical questionsraised by unusual combinations of sound I am of the opinion thatcraft-analysis like craftsmanship itself is of interest mainly as apreliminary. Avoiding both the pigeon-hole and the blackboard I havetried to trace a connecting line between the apparently diverse andcontradictory manifestations of contemporary music.
The theme of the book is modern music in relation to the other artsand in relation to the social and mechanical background of modernlife. It is a study of movements rather than musicians and individualworks are cited not so much on their own account as for being examplesof a particular tendency. When absolutely necessary technicalarguments are introduced, but there are few technical terms and nomusic-type illustrations. [12]
The book as a whole is meant to be a non-technical presentation of theposition the composer (and, for that matter, the listener) findshimself in today, though in order to establish this position clearlyit is occasionally necessary to hark back a bit, as in the sectiondevoted to nationalism.
I hope that this brief study, though inevitably one-sided andincomplete, may lead the way to a broader and more 'humane' criticalattitude towards an art which though the most instinctive and physicalof all the arts tends more and more to be treated as the intellectualpreserve of the specialist.
My thanks are due to Lord Berners, Mr. Cecil Gray and Messrs. J. andW. Chester for the loan of music.
C. L.
December 1933
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 peopleto realize when, through force of time andcircumstance, they have gradually become conservatives.It is scarcely to be wondered at if the publicis very nearly as slow in the uptake. To the public a redflag remains a red rag even when so battered by windand weather that it could almost be used as a pinkcoat. Nothing is so common as to see a politicalupheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because thenames of the leaders and their parties remain thesame. Similarly in the world of music, the fact thatsome of the key-names in modern music, such as Stravinskyand Schönberg, are the same as before the warhas blinded us to the real nature of the present-daymusical revolution. We go on using the words 'revolutionarycomposer' just as we go on using the words'Liberal' and 'Bolshevik'; but between the modernmusic of pre-war days and that of today lies as muchdifference as that between the jolly old Gilbertian'Liberal or Conservat ive ' situation and the presentmingled state of the parties, or that between the clearanarchical issues of the October revolution and the [20] present situation in Russian politics with Stalin at thehead of a frustrated Five Year Plan and Trotsky fumingin exile.
To the seeker after the new, or the sensational, tothose who expect a sinister frisson from modern music,it is my melancholy duty to point out that all the bombthrowing and guillotining has already taken place. Ifby the word 'advanced' we mean art that departs as faras possible from the classical and conventional norm,then we must admit that pre-war music was considerablymore advanced (if that is any recommendation)than the music of our own days. Schönberg's Erwartung for example, still the most sensational essay in modernmusic from the point of view of pure strangeness ofsound, was actually finished in 1909. If your ear canassimilate and tolerate the music written in 1913 andearlier, then there is nothing in post-war music that canconceivably give you an aural shock, though the illogicalityof some of the present-day pastiches may give you'a rare turn' comparable to the sudden stopping of alift in transit.
We are most of us sensationalists at heart, and there issomething rather sad about the modern composer's relapseinto good behaviour. There is a wistful look aboutthe more elderly 'emancipated' critics when they listento a concert of contemporary music; they seem to rememberthe barricades of the old Russian Ballet andsniff plaintively for blood. The years that succeed arevolution have an inevitable air of anticlimax, and it isnoticeable that popular interest in the Russian Soviet [21] films has considerably waned since the directors turnedfrom the joys of destruction to the more sober delightsof construction. With the best will in the world wecannot get as excited about The General Line as we didabout Potemkin , and it is doubtful if any of the workswritten since the war will become a popular date inmusical history, like those old revolutionary war-horses Le Sacre du Printemps and Pierrot Lunaire .
But it is only the more elderly emancipated criticswho have lived through both campaigns, so to speak,and who realize the subtle difference between thetwo. There is a large mass of the public that hasonly become modern-music conscious since the war, andthey are hardly to be blamed if they lump the twoperiods together as 'all this modern music'.
During the war people had sterner things to think ofthan Schönberg, and a concert of his works would havebeen not only impracticable, but unpatriotic. Thegeneral cessation of musical activities during the warresulted in many pre-war works only becoming knowna considerable number of years after they were written.This may seem platitudinous, but it should be rememberedthat it would not necessarily be true of literature.If Joyce, for example, had written and published AnnaLivia Plurabelle in 1913 there would have been nothing,theoretically speaking, to prevent it from becomingfamiliar to every schoolboy by about 1919; but thenumber of people who can read a modern score is fewereven than the number who claim that they can, and themore extreme examples of modern music cannot be [22] grasped without several actual hearings. Moreover,the printing of literature is not the same as theplaying of music. Any printer can print Ulysses (ifthe law lets him), but not every orchestra can play Erwartung . It is regrettable, but hardly surprising, thatthis work had to wait sixteen years for its first performance.
Purely practical and circumstantial difficulties of war,finance, patriotism and musical inefficiency having keptback the actual hearing of contemporary music, thewave of enthusiasm for this music that carried away theintellectual world shortly after the war was, though theintellectuals hardly realized it, mainly retrospective incharacter. It could not be compared for example to thecontemporary interest in Brancusi's sculpture or EdithSitwell's poetry. It was a 'hangover' from a previousperiod, and the famous series of concerts given byEugène Goossens in London in 1920 were historical inmore ways than one. They apparently announced thedawn of a new era, but curiously enough their mostpotent arguments were drawn from the era which weall imagined to be closed. The clou of the concerts wasStravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps —a work which wasmerely the logical outcome of a barbaric outlook appliedto the technique of impressionism.
Impressionism is a loose and easily misapplied term,but one can think of no other that sums up so convenientlythe undeniable connecting link between the variousrevolutionary composers of before the war. The connectinglink may not be obvious, but it is there never [23] theless,and it is something for which we may search invain at the present time.
To put the problem in its most naïve form, a representativepre-war concert of modern works would havestruck the man in the street—if we may conjure up afigure somewhere between Strube's 'Little Man' andErnest Newman's 'Plain Man'—as definitely queer. Hewould have found great difficulty in relating it to hisprevious musical experiences and, giving up all attemptto follow it as form, would probably have relapsed intoa purely passive state in which the strange coloursand rhythms were allowed to make a direct appealto his nerves. His experiences would be unusual,but would assume a certain uniformity and logicthrough the very consistency of their strangeness.
Let us suppose the same admittedly naïve characterat a representative concert of contemporary music.What conceivable connecting link would he find between,for example, Von Webern and Sauguet, betweena cold and mathematical reversal of previous traditionand a deliberate return to its most sentimental and leastvaluable elements? He would find less difficulty in relatingthis music to his previous experiences, for so muchof it would be but a pale reflection of the spirit of formerages; but the only connecting link he would find wouldbe that of indecision and lack of logic.
Experiments may take many forms, but only onegeneral direction, whereas the spirit of pastiche has noguiding impulse. Once invoked it becomes like themagic broom of the s