1

00 775

MUSIC AMD
IMAGINATION
By Aaron Copland

HARVARD

University

Press

Cambridge

nineteen hundred

fifty-three

and Fellows o] Harvard College Copyright, 1952, by the President

Second Printing

Library of Congress Catalog Card

Number

52-9385

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to the

memory

of

my

brother

RALPH COPLAND
1888-1952

Preface
THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW
year 1951-1952.

comprise the Charles Eliot

Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard University during the academic

They appear here

in substantially the

same form

in

which they were read to the students and general public at Cambridge. The six talks were not intended to be closely reasoned arguments
on a
single subject, but rather a free improvisation

on the general

theme of the
half of the

role imagination plays in the art of music.

treats of the

The

first

book

musical

mind

at

work

in

its

different
dis-

capacities as listener, interpreter, or creator.

The

second half

cusses

more

specifically recent manifestations of the imaginative

mind

in the music of

Europe and the Americas.

The lectures were followed in each instance by short concerts made possible by the generosity of the Elizabeth Spraguc Coolidge
Foundation in the Library of Congress and the Norton Professorship Committee of Harvard University. It is a pleasure to be able
to record here

my

ciative also to the

thanks for their cooperation. I am deeply appremany fine artists who took part in these concerts.
listed at the

Their names will be found

back of

this

book.

Grateful acknowledgment is due the Norton Professorship Committee for their cordial reception during my stay in Cambridge, and
especially to
its

literary

and musical

representatives, Professors Archi-

bald MacLeish and A. Tillman Merritt, friends of long standing, who were ready at all times with helpful guidance.

word

of thanks

is

also

due

to

Miss Eleanor Bates of the

for her keen

edi-

torial staff of the

Harvard University Press

and cogent

criticism

during the preparation of the manuscript for publication.

A.
Cambridge, Massachusetts

May

1952

vii

CONTENTS
Introduction
i

Part One

MUSIC AND THE IMAGINATIVE MIND

1

The

'

Gifted Listener

7
21

2 The Sonorous Image 3 The

Creative

Mind and

the Interpretative

Mind

40

Part

Two

MUSICAL IMAGINATION AND THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE

4
Tradition

and Innovation in Recent European Music

j8

61

Musical Imagination in the Americas

6 The Composer
Postscript

in Industrial

America

96

112

ix

Music and Imagination

Introduction
IT PLEASES

ME

to think that Charles Eliot

Norton might

have approved the appointment, in 1951 for the first time, of a native-born composer to the Poetry Chair established in his memory
a quarter of a century ago.

The

thought that

it

was

myself

who

had been entrusted with

less

this

high

responsibility

made me

sensibly

happy.

To

address the student body at Harvard in the tradition

of the learned scholars

me

as

and poets and composers who had preceded incumbents of the Norton Chair was not an easy task. For-

tunately, this

same

tradition sanctioned a free interpretation of

my

tide as poetry professor, so that I

I profess to

was

able to discuss the

one thing

know something
had
better begin

about: the art of music.

Perhaps
a younger
for poets.

by frankly admitting that when

was

man I used to harbor a secret feeling of commiseration To my mind poets were men who were trying to make
at their

music with nothing but words

exist at all times

command.
that

suppose there
in them,

some few men who have

much magic

but words at best will always seem to a composer a poor substitute for tones if you want to make music, that is. Later on, after I had

had some

slight reading acquaintance

with the poetry of Hart Crane

and Gerard Manley Hopkins, I came gradually to see that music and poetry were perhaps closer kin than I had at first realized. I

came gradually
notes and the

to see that

essence that joins

them

beyond the music of both arts there is an an area where the meanings behind the

meaning beyond the words spring from some comand composers take flight from a similar am more of a poetry professor than I had

mon

source.

If that is true, if poets

impulse, then perhaps I

music of poetry must forever escape me, no doubt, thought. but the poetry of music is always with me. It signifies that largest the part that sings. Purposeful singing part of our emotive life
is

He

what concerns most composers most of

their lives. Purposeful

singing to

me

signifies that a composer has

come

into possession of

musical materials of related orders of experience; given these, the composer's problem then is to shape them coherently so that they
are intelligible in themselves, and hence,
ence. In

communicable
there.

to

an audi-

music the process does not stop

reinterpreted, or better
still,

The

musical

work
of the

must be

re-created in the

mind

performer or group of performers. Finally the message, so to speak, reaches the ear of the listener, who must then relive in his own mind
the completed revelation of the composer's thought.

This very familiar

on, as I
tell it,

musical experience suddenly takes the aspect of a very hazardous undertaking. It is

recital of the

hazardous because at so many points it can break down; at no point can you seize the musical experience and hold it. Unlike that moment in a film when a still shot suddenly immobilizes a complete scene, a single musical moment immobilized makes audible only
itself is comparatively meaningless. This neverof flow music ending forces us to use our imaginations, for music
is

one chord, which in

in a continual state of becoming.

Wystan Auden, who knows a

great deal about verse

and song,

recently

made

this distinction be-

tween the two.

stops to think.

"A

verbal art like poetry,"

is

Music

immediate;

it

he wrote, "is reflective; it goes on to become." This elu-

imagined existence in time, is made the climax of Jean Paul Sartre's treatise on L'Imaginaire. Sartre, in a well-known passage on Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, very nearly
It's

sive quality of music, its

succeeds in convincing us that the Seventh isn't really there at all. not on the page, for no music can be said to exist on the silent

page,

and

it's

and not one can be

not in any one performance, for they are all different said to be the definitive version. The Seventh,
it

Sartre says, can only be said to live, if

docs

live,

in the unreal

world of our imagination. Whatever one may think of Sartre's a fact to which theory, it dramatizes one of the basic facts in music

we shall return more than once in these pages. What I have set down here I have learned from my own

experi

ence in the writing of music and in considering the music of other composers. These reflections, I should add, are not meant to be a
contribution to knowledge: the typical artist cannot be said to function

on the

level of

knowledge.
I

(I use the

word

in

its

usual meaning

can only hope to speak to you on the the plane of immediate or sensiintuitional of perception plane tive knowledge perceptual knowledge, if you like. This is an imof learning and scholarship.)

because it makes clear at least for me it is portant distinction that those of us who are doers rather than knowers expect others
to deduce
say, as

knowledge from the testimony we

is said, is

bear.

This

is

not to

sometimes

that a composer describing a musical state

of affairs
tastes.

doing nothing more than describing his own musical composer's apperceptions need not necessarily be so cir-

cumscribed as that.
that

well-known conductor once confided

to

me

he invariably learned something from watching a composer conduct his own composition, despite possible technical shortcomings
in conducting, for something essential about the nature of the piece was likely to be revealed. I should like to think that an analogous

a composer articulates as best he can the ideas and conceptions that underlie his writing or his listening to music. If my conductor friend was right, the composer ought to
situation obtains

when

bring an awareness and insight to the understanding of music that

critics,

musicologists,

and music

historians

might put

to

good

use,

thereby enriching the whole field of musical investigations. a musically observant comThus it is primarily as a composer a professor of poetry the of in poser, posing temporarily guise
that I have chosen to consider the general topic of the relation of the imaginative mind to different aspects of the art of music.

One

MUSIC AJVD THE

JVLIJVD

CHAPTER ONE

The Gifted Listener

THE MORE i LIVE the
that
it is

life

of music the
that
is

more

am convinced
down
his

the freely imaginative

mind

at the core of all vital

music making and music

listening.

When

Coleridge put

famous phrase, "the sense of musical

ducing
it, is

a gift

delight, with the power of proof the imagination," he was referring, .of course,

to the musical delights of poetry.

But

it

seems to

me even more true

it is

when applied to the musical delights of music. An imaginative mind

is

essential to the creation of art in

any medium, but

even more

essential in

sible vista for the

music precisely because music provides the broadest posimagination since it is the freest, the most abstract,
all

the least fettered of

sentation,

the arts:

no

story content,

no

pictorial repre-

no

regularity of meter,

no

strict limitation

of frame need

hamper
ing

the intuitive functioning of the imaginative mind. In say-

this I

am

not forgetting that music has

its

disciplines: its strict

its

forms and regular rhythms, and even in some cases

program-

matic content Music as mathematics, music as architecture or as

image, music in any
for the lay mind.
static,

seizable

But

as

form has always held a musician, what fascinates

fascination

me

is

the

thought that by

its

very nature music

invites imaginative treatment,

and that the

facts of music, so called, are only

is

meaningful insofar

as the imagination is given free play. It

for this reason that I wish

to consider especially those facets of music that are

tive influences of the imagination.

open

to the crea-

Imagination in the listener

cerns us here. It is

in the gifted listener

is

what con-

so often assumed that music's principal stumit

bling block

is

the backward listener that

might be

instructive to

contemplate for a change the qualities of the sensitive listener.

Listening
it

is

talent,

and

in varying degrees. I

any other talent or gift, we possess have found among music-lovers a marked
like

tendency to underestimate and mistrust this talent, rather than to

overestimate it
ficult to

The

reason for these feelings of inferiority are difis

determine. Since there

is

no

reliable

way

of measuring the

gift for listening, there

no

reliable

way

of reassuring those

who
to

misjudge themselves.
sites

should say that there are two principal requifirst,

for talented listening:

the ability to

open oneself up

musical experience; and secondly, the

that experience. Neither of these
gift. Listening implies an inborn
is

ability to evaluate critically

possible without a certain native

talent of

some degree, which, again

like any other talent, can be trained and developed. This talent has a certain "purity" about it. exercise it, so to speak, for ourselves there is to be alone; nothing gained from it in a material sense.

We

Listening
tests

is its

own

reward; there are no prizes to be won, no con-

of creative listening. But I hold that person fortunate

for there are

who
it.

has

the

gift,

few

pleasures in art greater than the secure

sense that one can recognize beauty

when one comes upon

When I speak of the gifted listener I am thinking of the

cian primarily, of the listener
status. It is

nonmusi-

who

intends to retain his amateur

the thought of just such a listener that excites the com-

poser in me. I

know, or

I think I

sician will react to music.

know, how the professional muBut with the amateur it is different; one
react.

never can be sure

how

he will

Nothing

really tells

him what
suffi-

he should be hearing, no

treatise or chart or

guide can ever

ciently pull together the various strands of

a complex piece of music

that.

only the inrushing floodlight of one's own imagination can do Recognizing the beautiful in an abstract art like music partakes

somewhat of a minor miracle; each time it happens

incredulous.

remain

slightly

The
ister

situation of the professional musician as listener, especially

is

of the composer,

rather different.

He

is

an

initiate.

Like the min-

before the altar his contact with the Source gives

him an

inner

their presence.

understanding of music's mysteries, and a greater familiarity in He possesses a dual awareness: on the one hand of

the inscrutable mystery that gives certain

common
to share.

tones meaning;

on the other of the human

It is

travail that enters into every creation.

an awareness that no layman can hope

There

is

a nicety

of balance in the musician's awareness that escapes the musical

ateur.

am-

too

The amateur may be either too reverent or too carried away; much in love with the separate section or too limited in his

enthusiasm for a single school or composer. Mere professionalism, however, is not at all a guarantee of intelligent listening. Executant
ability,

even of the highest order,

judgment.
dices

The

sensitive

no guarantee of instinct in amateur, just because he lacks the prejuis

and preconceptions of the professional musician,

is

sometimes

a surer guide to the true quality of a piece of music. The^jdeal, listener, it seems to me, would combine the preparation of the trained professional with the innocence of the intuitive amateur.
All musicians, creators and performers alike, think of the gifted listener as a key figure in the musical universe. I should like, if I
can, to track

down

the source of this

gift,

and

to consider the type

of musical experience

which

is

most

characteristically his.

The
self to

ideal listener, above all else, possesses the ability to lend

him-

the power of music.

The power

of music to

move

us

is

some-

intention is not thing quite special as an artistic phenomenon. to delve into its basis in physics my scientific equipment is much but rather to concentrate on its emotional overtoo rudimentary
tones. Contrary to

My

has the power to

what you might expect, I do not hold that music move us beyond any of the other arts. To me the

theater has this

power

in a

more naked form, a power

that

is

almost

too great The sense of being overwhelmed by the events that occur on a stage sometimes brings with it a kind of resentment at the I feel like case with which the dramatist plays upon my emotions.

a keyboard
is

on which he can improvise any tune he

pleases.

There

no

resisting,

my

emotions have the upper hand, but

my mind

do this to me? keeps protesting: by what right does the playwright Not infrequently I have been moved to tears in the theater; never never at music? Because there is something about at music.

Why

music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part
of us. In one sense
arc led
it

dwarfs

us,

and in another

trol. It is

on and on, and yet in some strange the very nature of music to give us the

we master it. We way we never lose condistillation of senti-

ments, the essence of experience transfused

pressed in such fashion that
instant that

and heightened and exwe may contemplate it at the same

by it When the gifted listener Jejids the j^yent!L.anxi .the of himself fcQjft^pqwer music,Jie jgets Jbo&M idealizatiQa.of.tbiP j*event"j,Jie is inside the J^event," jsp jto^speak, even though die music keeps what Edward rightly jejijis

we

are swayed

BjoUough

its

"psychical distance/*

What
seems to

another layman, Paul Claudel, wrote about the listener me to have been well observed. "We absorb him into the

concert," Claudel says.

"He

is

no longer anything but expectation

and attention ..."

I like that,

because expectancy denotes the ability

to fend oneself, to lend oneself eagerly to the thing heard, while

attention bespeaks

an

interest in the thing said, a

is

preoccupation with

an understanding of what
listener in the concert hall

being heard. I've watched the absorbed

trying to

numerous times, half absorbed myself in fathom the exact nature of his response. This is an espepastime

cially fascinating

when

the listener happens to be listening

to one's

own music. At such times I am

10

concerned not so

much with

whatever pleasure the music may be giving, but rather with the question whether I am being understood. Parenthetically, I should like to call attention to a curious bit of
psychology: the thought that my music might, or might not give pleasure to a considerable number of music-lovers has never me. At times I have been vigorously hissed, at particularly stirred
artist

other times as vigorously applauded; in both circumstances I remain should that be? Probably because I comparatively unmoved.

Why

feel in

some way detached from the end

result.

The

gives me pleasure, especially when it seems to come off; out of my hands the work takes on a life of its own. In

writing of it but once

a similar

way

can imagine a father

beauty of a
(or father)
faction
is

no personal credit for the This much admired daughter. must mean that the artist considers himself an unwitting instrument whose satistakes

who

not to produce beauty, but simply to produce. But to return to my absorbed listener. The interesting question, then, is not whether he is deriving pleasure, but rather, whether he

understanding the import of the music. And then I must ask: what has he understood?
is

if

he has understood,

As you see, I am warily approaching one

in aesthetics, namely, the
investigates the

of the thorniest problems

meaning meaning of words, or even

it

of music.
the

The

semanticist

who

has an easy time of

meaning by comparison with the hardy soul who ven-

of meaning,

tures forth in quest of music's meaning.

side-step the issue; aesthetics
is

not his province. His gift

composer might easily is one of

expression, not of theoretic speculation. Still the problem persists, and the musical practitioner ought to have something to say that

would be of

interest to the

mind

that philosophizes about art

I have seldom read a statement about the meaning of music, if seriously expressed, that did not seem to me to have some basis in

truth.

From

this I

conclude that music

is

many-sided and can be

approached from

many

different angles. Basically, however,

two

II

have been advanced by the aestheticians as to opposing theories One is that the meaning of music, if there is music's
significance.

in the music any meaning, must be sought

cxtramusical connotation;

itself,

for

music has no
is

and the other

is

that music

a language

without a dictionary whose symbols are interpreted by the listener of the emotions. The more according to some unwritten esperanto that they are I consider these two theories the more it seems to me

bound together more

and for this generally supposed, of reason: music as a symbolic language psychological and expressive value can only be made evident through "music itself," while
closely

than

is

music which

is

said to

mean

only

itself sets

up patterns of sound

which inevitably suggest some kind of connotation in the mind of the listener, even if only to connote the joy of music making for its

own

it may be, pure or impure, an object or a cannot get it out of my head that all composers derive their impulse from a similar drive. I cannot be persuaded that Bach,

sake.

Whichever

language, I

when he penned

the Orgelbuchlein, thought he

was creating an ob-

Swan La\e ject of "just notes," or that Tchaikovsky in composing was wallowing in nothing but uncontrolled emotion. Notes can be
to

they can be made manipulated as if they were objects, certainly do exercises, like a dancer. But it is only when these exerciselike

patterns of
is

sound take on meaning that they become music. There historical justification for the weighted emphasis sometimes on
side,

one

sometimes on the other, of

too cool

this controversy.

During pe-

riods

when music became

and detached, too

scholastically

conventionalized, composers were enjoined to remember its origin as a language of the emotions, and when, during the last century,

became overly symptomatic of the inner Sturm und Drang of personalized emotion, composers were cautioned not to forget that
it

music

omy

a pure art of a self-contained beauty. This perennial dichotwas neatly summarized by Eduard Hanslick, standard bearer
is

for the "pure music" defenders of the nineteenth century, when wrote that "an inward sipging, and not an inward feeling,

he

prompts

a gifted person to compose a musical piece." But my point is that this dichotomous situation has no reality to a functioning composer.

Singing

is

feeling to a composer,

and the more

intensely fdt the

singing, the purer the expression.

The precise meaning of music is

the literary music-lover

a question that should never have

elicit

been asked, and in any event will never

a precise answer.

It is

mind
is

disturbed by this imprecision. No true troubled by the symbolic character of musical speech;
that
is
it is

on the

contrary,

this very imprecision that intrigues

and

acti-

vates the imagination.

Whatever the

semanticists of music

may

un-

cover, composers will blithely continue to articulate "subtle com-

plexes of feeling that language cannot even name, let alone set forth." This last phrase I came upon in Susanne Langer's cogent chapter,

"On

Significance in Music/' Reviewing the various theories of

mu-

sical significance from Plato to Schopenhauer and from Roger Fry to recent psychoanalytical speculation, Mrs. Langer concludes: "Mua young, vital, and meaningful sic is our myth of the inner life of and in its 'vegetative' growth." Murecent still inspiration myth,

sical

myths

even more than folk myths

is

personalized interpretation, and there

no

are subject to highly known method of guar-

anteeing that

my

interpretation will be a truer

one than yours. I

comprehen-

can only recommend reliance on one's

All this
tent, as
is

own

instinctive

sion of the unverbalized symbolism of musical sounds.

he should

of minor concern to the gifted listener primarily inbe, on the enjoyment of music. Without theories
of

and without preconceived notions

lends himself as a sentient

human

what music ought being to the power

to be,

he

of music.

What

often surprises

me

is

relationship.

From

self-observation

the basically primitive nature of this and from observing audience

reaction I

would be

inclined to say that

consciousness. I

we

all listen

on an elemen-

tary plane of musical

was

startled to find this curi-

ous phrase in Santayana concerning music: "the most abstract of arts," he remarks, "serves the dumbest emotions." Yes, I like

13

and almost brutish respond to music from a primal are we level that firmly grounded. level dumbly, as it were, for on On that level, whatever the music may be, we experience basic rethis idea that

we

a release, density and transparency, its and the music's subsidings, smooth or angry surface, swellings
actions such as tension

and

its length, its speed, its thunders pushing forward or hanging back, and a thousand other psychologically based reand whisperings life of movement and gesture, and our flections of our

physical

inner, subconscious
all

mental

life.

That

is

fundamentally the way

we

hear music

gifted

and

ungifted alike

and

all

the analytical,

historical, textual

material on or about the music heard, interesting

I

and though it may be, cannot that fundamental relationship.

I stress this point,

venture to say should not

alter

forget

it,

because the layman is likely to but because the professional musician tends to lose sight

not so

much

This does not signify, by any means, that I do not believe in the possibility of the refinement of musical taste. Quite the contrary. I am convinced that the higher forms of music imply a listener
of
it.

whose musical

taste has

been cultivated either through listening or

through training or both. On- a more modest level refinement in musical taste begins with the ability to distinguish subtle nuances of
feeling.

Anyone can

tell

the difference between a sad piece

and a

joyous one. The talented listener recognizes not merely the joyous quality of the piece, but also the specific shade of joyousness

whether

it

be troubled

joy, delicate joy, carefree joy, hysterical joy,

and so

forth. I

add "and

so forth" advisedly, for it covers

an

infini-

tude of shadings that cannot be named, as I have named these few, because of music's incommensurability with language.

important requirement for subtle listening is a mature understanding of the natural differences of musical expression to be anticipated in music of different epochs.

An

An

awareness of musical history

should prepare the talented listener to distinguish stylistic differences, for example, in the expression of joyousness. Ecstatic joy as

14

you find

it

in the music o

the operas of Gluck, or even of Mozart.

Scriabin ought not to be sought for in sense of being "at home"

in the world of the late fifteen hundreds

makes one aware of what

not to seek in the music of that period; and in like fashion, being "at home" in the musical idioms of the late baroque period will

immediately suggest parallelisms with certain aspects of contemporary music. To approach all music in the vain hope that it will
soothe one in the lush harmonies of the late nineteenth century
is

common error of many present-day music-lovers. One other gift is needed, this one perhaps the most
at the

difficult and same time the most essential: the gift of being able to see all around the structural framework of an extended piece of music.

Next

to fathoming the meanings of music, I find this point the most obscure in our understanding of the auditory faculty. Exactly in what manner we sort out and add up and realize in our own minds

ments of the music's flowing past us

festations of consciousness.

the impressions that can only be gained singly in the separate mois surely one of the rarer mani-

Here

if

take

fire.

Sometimes

it

seems to

me

anywhere the imagination must that I do not at all comprehend

how

other people put together a piece in their mind's ear. It is a any of the arts, especially those that exist in point of time, such as the drama or fiction. But there the chronology of
difficult feat in

events usually guides the spectator or reader. The structural organization of the dance is somewhat analogous to that of music, but

here too, despite the fluidity of movement each separate moment presents a picture, not unlike that of the painter's canvas. But in

music where there

ture,

nothing to

no chronology of events, no momentary pic"hang on to," as it were, it is the imagination and

is

the imagination alone that has the power of balancing the combined impressions made by themes, rhythms, tone colors, harmonies, textures,

dynamics, developments, contrasts.

I don't mean to make this more mysterious than it is. To draw a graph of a particular musical structure is generally possible, and

but we do not usually help to the cultivated listener; we did, I our in laps. And if wish to listen to music with diagrams concentration of such an idea, for too great question the wisdom of a piece of music might detract from outlines formal on the purely in the piece. elements free association with other back always to the No, however one turns the problem, we come of curious gift that permits us to sum up the complex impressions of absolute music so that the incidents of the harmonic and a

may be of some

piece

melodic and textural flow of the work as

finally in a unified

it

streams past us result

cess in this

conception,
that

sucimage of the work's essence. venture depends first on the clarity of the composer's and second, on a delicate balance of heart and brain

and

total

Our

makes

it

be possible for us to
later in other

moved

at the

same instant that

it

we

retain the sensation of our emotional response, using

for bal-

anced judgment Here, most of

and

different
fall

moments

of response.

all,

the listener must

back upon his

own

gift;

must comhere, especially, analysis and experience and imagination bine to give us the assurance that we have made our own the composer's

complex of
perhaps,

ideas.

Now,

is

the

moment

to return to

one of

my

principal

If anything was underqueries: what has the listener understood? stood, then it must have been whatever it was the composer tried

to communicate.

Were you
for

absorbed?

Was

That, then,

was

it;

what you heard were

your attention held? patterns of sounds that

or that aspect represent the central core of the composer's being of it reflected in the particular work in question. One part of every-

thing

tie is.

and

it is

and knows is implicit in each composer's single. work, that central fact of hisJjeing that he hopes he hasjcpm-

municated.
It occurs to me to wonder: are you a better person for having heard a great work of art? Are you morally a better person, I mean? In the largest sense, I suppose you are, but in the more immediate sense, I doubt it. I doubt it because I have never seen it demon-

16

strated.

What happens

is

that a mastcrwork

awakens in us reactions

of a spiritual order that are already in us, only waiting to be aroused. When Beethoven's music exhorts us to "be noble/' "be compassionate,"

us.

His music cannot persuade:

it is itself

"be strong," he awakens moral ideas that are already within it makes evident. It does not shape
the exemplification of a particular way of looknot a sermon. It is a performance a rein-

conduct:

ing at life. A concert is

carnation of a series of ideas implicit in the work of art. As a composer and a musical citizen I am concerned with one

more problem

of the gifted listener: one that

is special

to our

own

period. Despite the attractions of phonograph and radio, which arc considerable, true music-lovers insist on hearing live performances

of music.

come

unusual and disturbing situation has gradually beall-pervasive at public performances of music: the universal
old music, tends
listening safe

An

preponderance of old music on concert programs.

to

TTiisjii^^ make all music

and unadventurous

since

it

deals
halls

so largely in the

works of the accepted masters. Filling our

with familiar sounds induces a sense of security in our audiences; they are gradually losing all need to exercise freely their own musical

judgment. Over and over again the same limited number of

fide,

bona

guaranteed masterpieces are on display; by inference, therefore, it is mainly these works that are worth our notice. This narrows considerably in the minds of a broad public the very conception of

how

varied musical experience

may be, and

puts

all lesser

works in a

false light. It conventionalizes

programs, obviously, and

overemphasizes the interpreter's role, for only through seeking out new "readings" is it possible to repeat the same works year after
year.

Most

for the

wall space pernicious of all, it leaves a bare minimum of which the without of new of works the composers, showing

supply of future writers of masterworks is certain to dry up. it This state of affairs is not merely a local or national one pervades the musical life of every country that professes love for western

17

music. Nine-tenths of the time a program performed in a concert hall in Buenos Aires provides an exact replica of what goes on in

a concert hall of

London

or of Tel-Aviv. Music

is

no longer merely

an international language, it is an international commodity. This concentration on masterworks is having a profound influence

solemn wall of respectability surrounds the haloed masterpieces of music and deadens their impact. They are written about too often out of a sticky sentiment steeped

on present-day musical

life.

both exhilarating and depressing to think to think that great masses of people are put of them: eidiilarating in daily contact with them, have the possibility of truly taking susin conventionality. It
is

tenance from them; and depressing to watch these same classics used to snuff out all liveliness, all immediacy from the contemporary musical scene.

Reverence for the

classics in
all

our time has been turned into a form

other music. Professor
subject

of discrimination against

Edward Dent
to the

spoke

his

mind on

this

same

when he came

United

States in 1936 to accept

versity.

an honorary doctorate from Harvard Uni-

Reverence for the

the setting

up

classics, in his opinion, was traceable to of a "religion of music," intrinsic to the ideas of

Beethoven and promulgated by Richard Wagner. "In the days of

said, "nobody wanted old music; all audemanded 'the newest opera or the newest concerto, as we now naturally demand the newest play and the newest novel. If in those two branches of imaginative production we habitually de-

Handel and Mozart," he

diences

mand

the newest

invariably

and the latest, why is it that in music we almost demand what is old-fashioned and out of date, while the

music of the present day is often received with positive hostility." "All music, even church music," he added, "was 'utility music,* music for the particular moment"
This
is

situation,

now

intensified

remarked upon fifteen years ago by Professor Dent, through the role played by commercial interests

in the purveying of

music

Professor

Dent was himself aware of

18

that fact, for he pointed out then that "the religious outlook on music is an affair of business as well as of devotion." The big public
is

now

label

"masterwork" stamped on

frightened of investing in any music that doesn't have the it. Thus along with the classics

themselves

we

are given the "light classics," the "jazz classics,"

and

even "modern

classics." Radio programs, record advertisements, all focus attention on a restricted list adult appreciation courses of the musical great in such a way that there appears to be no other

raison d'&re for music. In the

harp upon

the

same way musical references in books names of a few musical giants. The final irony is

that the people who are persuaded to concern themselves only with the best in music are the very ones who would have most difficulty in recognizing a real masterpiece when they heard one. The simple truth is that our concert halls have been turned into

musical

museums
is

auditory

museums

of a most limited kind.

Our

musical era

our composers invalids who exist on the fringe of musical society, and our listeners impoverished through a relentless repetition of the same works signed by a handsick in that respect
ful of sanctified

names.
is

Our immediate concern

unusual
gifts.

the effect

all this

has on the listener of

narrow and limited repertoire in the concert hall results in a narrow and limited musical experience. No true musical enthusiast wants to be confined to a few hundred years of musical
history.

He

his intuitive understanding gives

naturally seeks out every type of. musical experience; him a sense of assurance whether

he
art,

is

confronted with the recently deciphered treasures of Gothic or the quick wit of a Chabrier or a Bizet, or the latest importa-

healthy musical curiosity and a broad musical experience sharpens the critical faculty of even the most talented amateur.
tion of Italian dodecaphonism.

listen to

All this has bearing on our relation to the classic masters also. To music in a familiar style and to listen freshly, ignoring
others have said or written

what

and

testing

its

values for oneself,

19

a mark of the intelligent listener. The classics themselves must be we are to hear them reinterpreted in terms of our own period if
is

anew and "keep their perennial humanity living and capable of assimilation." But in order to do that, we must have a balanced
ters against

musical diet that permits us to set off our appraisals of the old masthe varied and different musical manifestations of more

recent times. For it is only in the light of the whole musical experience that the classics become most meaningful.

The dream of every musician who

listeners

loves his art

is

to involye^giftcd

everywhere
of
rflcfr.

as

an active force in die musical community.

listener,,

The attitude
is

individual listener, especiially the gifted

the principal resource

we have
our

in bringing to fruition the im-

mense musical

potentialities of

own

time.

20

CHAPTER TWO

The Sonorous Image

ONE OF THE PRIME CONCERNS
cither as creator or as interpreter,
is

in the

making

of music,

the question

how it

will sound.

On
it is

any

level,

whether the music

is

abstruse
it

and absolute or whether

intended for the merest diversion,

has got to "sound."

is

The
that

worst reproach you can

make

against a composer

to tell

him

what he has written

is

"paper music."

On

the other hand, one of

is

the quickest ways to recognize talent in the youthful composer

to note the natural effectiveness as

sound of even the most casual

inborn

combination of different tone

sicality.
is

colors. It is a sure sign of

muit,

The way music

sounds, or the sonorous image, 35 I

that floats

call

nothing more than an auditory concept

in the

mind

of

the executant or composer; a prethijiking of the exact napire of the

tones to be produced.

you of a little incident that illustrates the importance of "sound" from a musician's standpoint. A few years ago I haptell

Let

me
to

pened

be in the
I

way out

Radio City studios on business. On my passed by Studio 8H, and hearing a distant music, I

NBC

realized that a rehearsal of the

By peeking through

the glass

Symphony was in progress. to partition of the door I was able

me, and
I de-

NBC

of recognize a famous conductor and a famous soloist in the midst

rehearsing a concerto.

My

curiosity got the better of

cided to stop by for a short time and see

how

things were going.

I slipped quietly

With

the exaggerated care of

an uninvited guest

21

into an orchestra scat at the center rear of the auditorium.

as I could tell I

As

far

was alone; no one had seen

me come

in.

That was

I lucky, for otherwise

ejected.

entirely
five

might very well have been unceremoniously in the thick of it, Soloist, conductor, and orchestra were absorbed with the work in hand. I was there no more than

minutes before the familiar

moment

arrived; I

mean

that

mo-

ment in any concerto when and pauses as the orchestral accompaniment sweeps forward in
ever-mounting passion.
leaped
aisle in

the solo performer reaches a high point

At

that instant, without warning, the soloist

straight

from the platform and headed

down

the center

my

direction. I immediately thought:

he doesn't want

me

here, spying on his rehearsal in this way. But before I could make a move he was upon me. Perspiring and out of breath he fairly shouted at me: "Aaron, how does it sound?" Before I could utter a word in reply he was gone in order to reach the stage in time for
his next entrance,

Yes, the sonorous image

cians.

In that phrase

we

a preoccupying concern of all musiinclude beauty and roundness of tone; its

is

warmth, its depth, its "edge," its balanced mixture with other tones, and its acoustical properties in any given environment. The creation of a satisfactory aural

image

is

not merely a matter of musical

talent or technical adroitness;

You
ties

imagination plays a large role here. cannot produce a beautiful sonority or combination of sonoriwithout first hearing the imagined sound in the inner ear. Once
is

imagined sonority gettably on the mind.

vividness the

this

heard in
this

reality, it
I

impresses

itself

unfor-

To

day

can remember with extreme

I

morning

in 1925

when

time a work of

my own

orchestration.

heard sounding for the For some reason I was

first

late

to the rehearsal so that

at the hall. It excited

my me so

music was in progress

that I
I

when

I arrived

was

afraid I

was

literally

about

to fall over.

More than once

the conductor after

have gone backstage to speak with he has given a first reading to a new orchestral
to discuss changes in balance or interpreta-

work

of

mine in order

22

Often these changes have to do with minute details that depend upon a precise memory of what was heard for only a passing instant at the rehearsal. Neither the conductor nor myself, nor any
tion.

other composer for that matter, would find this feat unusual. The impact of sheer sound on the musician's psyche is so familiar an
idea that

we

tend to take for granted the force

it

represents.

remarkably strong; heard sounds remain in the mind for long periods of time, and with a sharpness that is also remarkable. From the early twenties I still retain an

Most

people's aural

memory

is

impression of fantastic sonorities after a first contact with Schonberg's Pierrot Lunaire, or a little later, the astonishing percussive

imaginings of Edgar Varese, especially in a piece called Arcanes, heard once but not again. Also from the early twenties I recall
hearing the mysterious sound
joining hotel
as

made by

a string ensemble in an ad-

room in Salzburg, a sound which was kter identified an Alois Haba quarter tone Quartet. For me the important thing

me.

was not the quarter tones, but the sonorous image that was left with I can remember too the particular, acid sound of a Mexican small-town band playing in the public square on Sunday mornings

in Tlaxcala. Were they playing out of tune, do you think? Perhaps, but nevertheless they were creating an aural image authentically their own. So was an English choir of boys and men's voices that

heard in a London cathedral. They had a hollow, an almost cadaverous quality; not pretty, perhaps, but certainly memorable. Most
I
all was that ofa massed orchestra and band 0ae thousand Jligh ^o^^^rfor^crs v in an Atlantic City ofjsoroeconvention hall all simultaneously searching for the note A. It is hopeless to attempt to describe that sound. Jericho's walls must have heard some such unearthly musical noise. I do not mean to suggest that sounds in themselves, taken out of

unforgettable sound of

any use to a composer. Interesting sonorities as such are scarcely more than icing on the musical cake. But a deliberately chosen sound image that pervades an entire piece becomes an incontext, are of

23

tegral part of the expressive

meaning o

that piece.

One

thinks

immediately of the two different versions that Stravinsky tells us he made of his ballet Lcs Noces before deciding upon a third and final
solution: the

unusual combination of four pianos and thirteen per-

cussion players.

The

rarefied

timbres of

Anton Webern's

little

string quartet pieces would be meaningless if transcribed for any other medium. In contrast with this are the original effects obtained

from the most ordinary means: for example, the juxtaposition of a loud and vigorous body of strings against a soft and undulant once heard it cannot pair of harps in Britten's Spring Symphony
successfully be rethought for

The

ability to

any other combination. in advance of their being heard in sounds imagine

actuality is one factor that widely separates the professional from the layman. Professionals themselves are unevenly gifted in tbjg

More than one celebrated composer has struggled to produce an adequate orchestral scoring of his own music. Certain performers, on the other hand, seem especially gifted in being able to
respect.

The layman's imagining unheard sound images seems, by and large, to be rather poor. This does not apply on the lowest plane of sound apprehension where, of course, there is no difficulty. Laboratory tests have demonstrated that differences in tone color are the first
call forth delicious sonorities

from

their instrument.

capacity for

Any child is capable of the a sound of human voice from the sound of a distinguishing violin. The contrast between a voice and its echo is apparent to
It bespeaks a fair degree of musical sophistication to be able to distinguish the sound of an oboe from that of an English horn, and a marked degree to imagine a whole group of wood winds sounding together. If you have ever had occasion, as I have, to perform an orchestral score on the piano to a group of nonprowill soon have fessionals, you realized how little sense they have of how this music might be expected to sound in an orchestra.

differences apparent to the untrained ear.

everyone. But

It is surprising to

note

how

little

investigation has

been devoted

24

to this
to

examine the sound

its

whole sphere of music. There are no textbooks solely designed stuff of music the history of its past by
present; or
its

future; or its potential. Even so-called orchestration texts, written ostensibly to describe the sci-

comparison with

steer

ence of combining orchestral instruments, are generally found to shy of their subject, concentrating instead on instrumentation,
is,

that

on the examination of the

technical

and tonal

possibilities

of the individual instrument.

sonorous image appears to be a kind of aural mirage, not easily immobilized and analyzed. The case of the individual sound is rather different since it is more comparable to that of the primary colors in painting. It is the full spectrum of the musician's "color" palette that seems to lend itself much
less

The

well to discussion

and consideration than

that of the painter.

There are many diverse and interesting questions concerning the role of tone color, or sound image, in musical thinking. My contention that tonal

in the composer's
if I

read

my

image and expressive meaning are inter-connected mind is more true today than it was in the past, history books correctly. In the eighteenth century muto

sic

was meant
it

instruments

be played that was the was played by seems often

first

consideration.

What

to

have been dictated by

the requirements of a particular occasion. Bach's arrangements of other men's works, and Mozart's alterations in a Handel score are
paralleled, in the following century,

by

Liszt's piano versions of

Schubert's songs.

Nowadays we tend

to look

upon

transcriptions

with suspicion because we consider the composer's expressive idea to be reflected in a precise way by its tonal investiture. We go even
further:

we assume

that the choice of the sound

medium

itself will

witness

almost certainly influence the nature of the composer's thought, as some of the examples I have already mentioned.

Thought and sound can

as the

The

interact one upon the other only insofar or executant is sensitive to the medium adopted. composer remarkable affinity of certain composers for certain sound

media has been pointed out many

times, but not the corresponding

25

limitation that

sometimes accompanies
is,

this affinity.

The most

fa-

mous example,

ing for the piano.

of course, Chopin's extraordinary felicity in writSuppose he had been born into a world before

the invention of the piano,

posing talent in that case? I frankly don't

his friends tried over

what would have happened to his comknow. I do know that

and over again to persuade him to broaden his tonal range, without success. His reply, as we have it in a letter, was as follows: "I know my limitations, and I know Fd make a
fool of myself
to
if

I tried to climb too

high without having the

ability

symphonies and operas, and they want me to be everything in one, a Polish Rossini and a Mozart and a Beethoven. But I just laugh under my
it.

do

They plague

me

to death urging

me

to write

breath and think to myself that one must start from small things. I'm only a pianist, and if I'm worth anything this is good too ...
I

tMnfe

it's

better to

do only
all

little

but to do that as well as possible,

rather than try to

We
of his

things and do them poorly." thinlc of the younger Scarlatti as an analogous case because genius for the harpsichord; and history shows many other

do

examples of the sympathy of certain composers for specific media: Hugo Wolf! for the solo voice, Ravel for the harp, and Brahms for
the small chamber music ensemble.

And what

of the masters of

the nineteenth century orchestra Berlioz, Wagner, and Richard is it mere chance that they have no Strauss piano music to speak of?

Or

that

chorus and Faure seldom for the orchestra?

amples

it

Debussy composed but seldom for unaccompanied From^ these few _gwould appear that cs^rc&sive purpose is closely allied to
die case of different comquite different in .......... "
.....

"""

a considerable degree, of course, sound images are imposed are born to certain inherited sounds and upon us from without. tend to take them for granted. Other peoples, however, have an

To

We

absorbing interest in quite different kinds of auditory materials. The Orient, for instance, leaves us far behind in sensitivity to the

26

subtle variety of percussive sounds. Dr. Curt Sachs, in writing on oriental music, mentions the "dizzying mass o wooden, bamboo,
stone, glass, porcelain,

and metal implements,

to be

pounded, shaken,

rubbed or struck." Our

are put to

shame

poverty-stricken percussive imaginings by comparison with the richness and diversity and

own

delicacy of the oriental

mind

in this connection.

One wonders what

the comparatively undifferentiated sonority of a string quartet might communicate to a Balinese musician, brought up on the clangorously varied sonorities of a gamelan. On the other hand the complex harmonic textures obtainable from our keyboard instruments are a closed book to the Eastern musician. Dr. Sachs tells us that an Arab,

given a piano, plays in "empty octaves" and the Hindus, "in single,
sustained notes on the harmonium."
tfae.West are both

ftji^de^,jh^
restricted

Jto comparatively Limited gauxuit of, inherited by sound materials. Perhaps this is just as well; otherwise we might be overwhelmed by the too numerous attractions of tonal color pos-

birth

Western musical history is characterized, moreover, by the identification of specific sound media with certain periods, to the
sibilities.

practical exclusion of other possible

sound media, and

it

was because

of this exclusive interest that the

so highly.

medium
is

chosen could be developed

The

cultivation of music for voices, especially choral

music,

a prime example. Virgil Thomson once told me ruefully that he thought composers of that time were so wonderfully adept at exploiting the possibilities of the human

up

to about the year 1600

voice in choral combination that they

really

had

left practically

nothing

new

for us to

do

in that

are concerned.

The

exhaustion

medium of any medium

as far as exceptional effects

forces composers in

other directions; this undoubtedly was partly the reason for the development of interest in purely instrumental writing during the further enrichment in the way period that followed the choral age. of tonal combinations came with the joining of the large choral mass

with orchestra, as in the oratorios of Handel.

The

nineteenth cen-

27

tury, less fascinated

by the choral medium, concentrated on the

new

sounds of the quickly developing, self-sufficient symphony orchestra. are still occupied with that task. But in addition, our own period

We

has shown a preoccupation with sonorities that do not depend upon new emphasis on wood string tone as its principal ingredient.

wind and

brass sonorities, with their drier, less sentimental con-

notations, is characteristic of our time. I

mention

this in

passing as

merely one instance of choice being exercised in respect to felicitous

sound

materials.
far I

Thus

have tried to suggest the musician's concern with the

sonorous image; the endless variety of possible sound combinations; the changing situation with regard to sound media; and the limited

use by composers of different sonorous potentials, either through lack of imagination or through inherited conceptions of desirable sound.

Now let us look a little more

closely at the

sonorous means at the

disposal of the composer in terms of the single instrument. Here again the composer is far from being a free agent; he is hedged about

with limitations

limitations in the manufacture of the

performing

machine
times in
I

(for that is

what an instrument

is),

and

limitations in the

technical proficiency of the performer

who

uses the machine.

Some-

moments

of impatience such as every creator

must have,

have imagined the sweeping away overnight of all our known instruments through the invention of new electronic devices that would end the constraints within which we work by providing us
with instruments that would present no problem of pitch, duration,
intensity, or speed.
string, every

As it is, we must always keep in mind that every wood wind and brass can play only so high and so low,

only so fast and so slow, only so loud and so soft; not forgetting the famous matter of 'treadi-control" for the wind players that is
defied at one's peril.

No

wonder Beethoven

is

reported to have said,

when he heard

Schuppanzigh was complainabout the of his ing unplayability part: "That he should think of his miserable fiddle, when the spirit is speaking in me!"
that his violinist friend

28

Yes, composers struggle with their instruments

and not

infre-

with their instrumentalists. Yet despite restrictions imposed quently by necessity, they do not view this entirely as a hardship. In fact, in
certain circumstances the discipline enforced by the limitations of an instrument or a performer acts as a spur to the composer's imagination. Once, during a visit to Bahia in Brazil, it occurred to me that
I

wouldn't

at all

mind composing for one of their

native instruments

has but one string, on which the two a whole tone apart. It isn't pkycd tones, only player produces with a bow, it is struck by a small wooden stick. The trick that gives
it

called the berimbau.

The berimbau

fascination

is

a wooden

shell,

open

at

one end, which

is

held

against the string and reflects the sound in the

manner

of an echo

kind of

chamber. At the same time, the hand that wields the stick jiggles a rattle. When several berimbau players are heard together they set up a sweetly jangled tinkle which I found completely absorbing. I felt confident that
for the
if I

had

to, I

berimbau that would hold the

listener's attention despite

could compose something the

very limited tonal range it affords. This confidence in the handling of instruments and this natural accommodation to the limitations
of any instrument
the composer's stock in trade. 'I^ejgm^a][jQp^cern of thej:pmoserji$ tp seek pukthc. expressive
is

nature of any particular instrument .and write, with. thatia nun4There is that music which belongs in the flute and only in the flute.

A certain
with the

objective lyricism, a
flute.

kind of ethereal

fluidity

we

connect

Composers of imagination have broadened our conwas possible on a particular instrument, but beyond of what ceptions a certain point, defined by the nature of the instrument itself, even
the most gifted composer cannot go. Think of what Liszt did for the piano.

No

him

not even Chopin

better understood

how

other composer before to manipulate the

keyboard of the piano so as to produce the most satisfying sound

textures ranging

from the comparative simplicity of a beautifully spaced accompanimental figure to the shimmering of a delicate cas-

29

One might argue that this emphasis upon the soundweakens its spiritual and ethical qualities. But music appeal of even so, one cannot deny the role of pioneer to Liszt in this regard, for without his sensuously contrived pieces we would not have had
cade of chords.
the loveliness of Debussy's or Ravel's textures,

and

certainly not the

languorous piano poems transformed the piano, bringing out not only its own inherent qualas orchestra, the ities, but its evocative nature as well: the piano
as brass piano as harp, the piano as cembalum, the piano as organ, be traced to know it we as even the may choir, percussive piano
Liszt's

of Alexandre Scriabin. Liszt quite simply

incomparable handling of the instrument. His pieces were born in the piano, so to speak; they could never have been written
at a table.

Combinations of a few instruments in chamber music ensembles have tended toward conventional groupings over the years. The most usual groups combine instruments of the same family thus we have
:

string trios, quartets, quintets, sextets,

and so forth; and wood-wind

groupings of an analogous kind. The piano, because of its very different sound, has always been a problem when added to any of these and, groups but not an insuperable one when carefully handled

one should add, expertly played.

period has tried to break the monotony of the usual groupings by combining instruments in a fresh way. I might choose, at random examples of imaginary groupings such as viola, saxophone,

Our own

and harp, or two violins, flute, and vibraphone; or quote actual combinations from Bartok such as the music for two pianos and two percussionists, or the Contrasts for violin, clarinet, and piano. Musical literature

would supply numerous other examples. Perhaps the

band had some part in this stimulation of interest in unusual ensembles. At any rate, the first arrival in Europe, around 1918, of American jazz was followed by a wave of interest in chamber orchestra and chamber opera, with emphasis on new tonal experiearly jazz

ments. Stravinsky's Histoirc du Soldat was such a

work and

so

was

30

Milhaud's

La

Creation

du Monde. Manuel de

Falla's

Concetto dates from the same period, and in

its

Harpsichord modest contrast of

and three wood winds against the newly revived harpsichord tone, we get an offshoot of the new sonorous vitality and a
two
strings

new tonal landscape. The apex of sonorous

conceded to be the
of the
called.

imaginativeness in our period is generally ability to compose for the many-voiced concord

symphony orchestra the "grand" orchestra, it used to be There is a natural curiosity on the part of the layman to want
precise a composer's orchestral imagination
is.

to

know how

"Can
is

you

tell in advance exactly

question I

am

often asked.

how The

your orchestration will

sound"

answer

is

that

it

partly depends

on

how
fire

adventurous you are. If the composer

is satisfied

with a sure-

kind of orchestration limited to

tested effects, then certainly a

fairly precise result

can be predicted. It's the calculated risk of an unusual combination that makes orchestral results uncertain at times.

But a

truly brilliant orchestrator,

it

would seem

to

me, must take

chances. Musical history recounts

many

instances of composers

mak-

ing adjustments in their scores after having heard how they sound, in order to approximate more closely the imagined effect; and these
instances concern even those
orchestra.

whom we know

to be masters of the

Arnold Schonberg reported that Richard Strauss showed him several cases where changes had to be made, and- he added: "I know that Gustav Mahler had to change his orchestration very much
for the sake of transparency."

of the principal reasons for this uncertainty in the mixing of tones comes from the fact that each individual tone that we hear is

One

accompanied by a series of partials or overtones. These partials, unheard by most of us, nevertheless do affect the way in which tones
combine. That too makes the acoustical engineer's job a precarious one. In spite of his careful measurements of decibels and frequencies
there
hall.
is still

no guarantee

that

he can design the perfect concertis

The mixing

of sonant vibrations

by

definition a hazardous

31

undertaking. For the composer there are additional hazards in the size and acoustical variety of tone produced by different players, the
properties of the auditorium,

and the

talent of the

conductor

who

supposedly controls the relative dynamic balance of the combined instrumental body.
Nevertheless,

and despite

these difficulties,

it is

quite possible to
is

describe the basic requirements of a

that

good

orchestrator. It

axiomatic

no one can

satisfactorily orchestrate

music which was not con-

ceived in orchestral terms in the

first place.

The music must, by

one can
will appear.

its

nature, belong to the orchestra, so to speak, even before in exactly

that

tell

what kind of

orchestral dress

it

Assuming

one does have orchestratable music, what governs the choice of

how

instruments? Nothing but the composer's expressive purpose. And does one give expressive purpose through orchestral color? Through the choice of those timbres, or combination of timbres, that
closest

have

The modern

emotional connotation with one's expressive idea. orchestra has at its command an enormous wealth
is this

of color combinations. It

embarras de richesses that has proved

the undoing of the typical commercial radio or movie orchestrator. Where there is no true expressive purpose anything goes; in fact,

everything goes, and it all goes into the same piece. The so-called Hollywood orchestration is a composite of all the known tricks in the orchestrator's bag. Stephen Spender points out a like situation

with regard to poets "who allow their imaginations to lead them into a pleasant garden of poetic phrases" and contrasts them with "those who use language as an instrument to hew a replica of their into words." The situation is similar in music; experience

composers

must not allow

their imagination to lead

them into a pleasant garden

it is the expressive idea that dictates to the the nature of his orchestral sound, and supplies a discipline composer the nouveau riche against temptations of the modern orchestra.

of orchestral effects;

But even when the composer's expressive purpose is clearly before him there appear to be two different approaches to the problem of

32

orchestration: one
position, the other
at

is

is

to "think in color" at the very moment of comto "choose color" after a sketch of the work is

hand. Most composers of my acquaintance make a virtue of the first system; that is, they claim to think feat is, of coloristically.

course, implied.

If,

at the instant the

he

at the

same

instant

knows what

composer conceives a melody, its orchestral dress will be, he

has performed two operations simultaneously. Some few composers have told me that they prepare no sketch; they compose directly into score, thinking the timbre and the notes together. I^seems to me,

however^ that there arc ddjjgjtc .advan rages to.be gained from separating these two functions. The method of choosing colors only at
.

the

moment

that one begins deliberately to orchestrate

makes

it

pos-

plan out an entire score in terms of its over-all effect. It counteracts the tendency to orchestrate page by page which is certain to lead to poor results, for the decisions made on any single page
sible to

are valid only in relation to

follow. Since balance
factors in

what has gone before and what is to and contrast of instrumental effect are prime
it

good

orchestration,

follows that any decision as to

timbre, too quickly arrived at, is itself a limitation, since it prevents freedom of action on other pages. This greater freedom of choice, it

would appear, is possible only if the composer deliberately prevents himself from thinking in color until the moment comes for applying himself solely to that purpose. This isn't always possible, for
there are times

when

a phrase or a section suggests

its

orchestral

form
really

so forcibly as not to be ignored. These

moments, when they

impose themselves, act as a

I

catalytic in the general orchestral

scheme. But in general

belong

to the category of instrumentator

detail is carefully

whose

orchestral

framework and

planned so as to

carry out
entirely
it is

more

faithfully the expressive purpose inherent in the

If I stress this

completed ground plan of the work.

unduly

only to counteract

what

is

generally supposed to be normal

procedure in orchestration. Thus far I have been discussing general principles of orchestral

33

technique.

Now I should

like to

examine orchestral ideals as

we

find

them exemplified in the works of different composers at different

periods of musical history.

The

story of the orchestra as

we
to

think

of

it

(and apart from

its

early connection with opera) begins com-

paratively late, after 1750 certainly,

when composers began

mark
to
less

their scores so as to indicate precisely

what instruments were

sounds were more or

play what

notes. Until that happened,

improvised according to the players available, which naturally varied considerably in different times and places. Because the composer was
so frequently involved in the performance himself as instrumentalist,

we

can conclude that the orchestral sounds that were

made

fully

mirrored his wishes, but since these were not indicated in printed scores it leaves us with only a hazy notion of the sonorities, produced.

By

the latter part of the eighteenth century the basis for

what was

be developed into our modern orchestras was established. The constitution of the orchestra at that time was the body of strings,
later to

with plain juxtapositions of a few wood winds and some brass. These
latter instruments, especially,

were limited in the part they could

play by

deficiencies in

manufacture and the technical limitations of

no great problem of orchestral effect was in Each instrument was used frankly for its own sound, so that an oboe sounded like an oboe and a bassoon like a bassoon. A more imaginative application of the same principles may be observed
question.

the players. Therefore,

Haydn and Mozart. Here a delightful clarity of was obtained by showing off in their most grateful registers the natural characteristics of each instrument. This was the age of
texture

in the scores of

innocence in orchestration.

With Beethoven some

were faced for the
first

of the problems of

modern

orchestration

time.

body of instruments

at his

and more complex command and produced a rugged and

larger

He

had a

honest sound, a sound without

much

finesse or subtlety of effect,

from our vantage

point, perhaps, but one that

somehow adequately

34

clothes the
to

music of the symphonies and

field.

overtures. Still

he

left

much

be done in that

It is generally agreed that it was the orchestral genius of Hector Berlioz that was responsible for the invention of the modern orches-

tra as

we think of it. Up to his time composers used instruments in order to make them sound like themselves; the mixing of colors so as to produce a new result was his achievement. Berlioz took advantage of the ambiguity of timbre that each instrument has in varying degrees, and thereby introduced the element of orchestral

magic

as a

contemporary composer would understand

it.

The

bril-

liance of his orchestration

comes

partly

by way of

this ability to

blend instruments

not merely to keep them out of one another's

writing for the individual instruments disclosed the unsuspected characteristics of their different registers. The particular registers chosen for each group of instruments enhances the
skillful

way. His

sheen and sparkle of the combined texture. Add to this his incredible daring in forcing instrumentalists to play better than they knew they
could play.

He paid the price,

no doubt,

in hearing his music inade-

in one's quately performed. But imagine the excitement of hearing inner ear sonorities that had never before been set down by any

other

man.

It is the subtle calculation

of these masterly scores that

starry-

convinces

me

that

Berlioz was more, much more, than the

eyed romantic of the history books. It would be easy to point to specific examples of Berlioz* orchestral daring. The use of the double basses in four-part pizzicati at
the beginning of the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonic also in chordal style, at Fantastique, the writing for four tympani, the use of that the conclusion of the movement precedes the March;

and devilish English horn and piccolo clarinet to typify pastoral Mab with sentiments, respectively; the gossamer texture of Queen mixsensitive the its Debussian harps and high antique cymbals;
tures of

low

flutes

with string tone

at die

beginning of the Love

35

Scene from

Romeo

these

and numerous other examples prove

instinct for orchestral

that Berlioz brought to

music an uncanny

wizardry.

The

lessons to be learned

from Berlioz were incorporated into the

Wagner and Strauss. Wagner's orchestration was and sometimes startlingly original, but nevertheless effective always a heavy German sauce seems to have covered what was once a
later scores of

Gallic base.
trators are

The primary

colors used

by

earlier

and

later orches-

comparatively doubling of one instrument with another produces an overall neutral fatness of sound which has lost all differentiation and dis-

little

in evidence,

and instead a continual

who had edited the well-known Berlioz treatise on instrumentation, continued the Wagnerian orchestral tradition, adding a special brilliance of his own. The scoring of his symphonic
tinction. Strauss,

poems composed around the beginning of the century left our elders breathless. They remain breath-taking in one sense, that is, if one examines them on the printed page and appreciates the mental ingenuity and musical knowledge they represent. But as sheer sound they have lost much of the compelling force they once had, for they

seem over-elaborate and unnecessarily cluttered with a hundred

in-

genious details that are not heard as such in performance, and produce in the cud an orchestral sonority not so very different from
that of a bloated
for Strauss's finest orchestral pages, such as those in
Electra,
It

Wagnerism. Reservations should be made, however, Salome or which are prophetic of what was to follow.

and Rimsky-Korsakoff
Berlioz scores.

was the Russian school of composers especially Tchaikovsky who were most directly influenced by the

Rimsky wrote the textbook on

orchestration that

was

the "bible" of our student days. Although the advice he gave was solid enough, it turned out to be of only limited application, for it

assumed that the elements of harmony, melody, and figuration would retain the same relative positions of importance that they have in a Rimsky-Korsakoff score. But our scores are likely to be

36

more contrapuntally coaceived than Rimsky-KorsakofFs; a bit too schematic in the first place his good advice come less and less serviceable.
orchestral coloring

therefore

has be-

Moreover, a completely new conception of delicacy and magic in had been introduced in France during the early

The scores of Debussy and Ravel not only looked on the different page, they sounded different in the orchestra. What a pity that Ravel never wrote a treatise on orchestration! The first
twentieth century.
precept

would have been: no doubling

allowed, except in the full

orchestral tutti. In other words, discover again the purity of the in-

your pure colors be sure to mix them with exactitude, for only in that way can you hope to obtain the optimum of delicate or dazzling timbres. An instinctual knowldividual hue.

And when you mix

edge of the potentiality of each instrument plus a balanced calculation of their

combined

effect helps to explain, in part, the orchestral

was less delights of the later Ravel scores. Debussy, by comparison, on his orchestral his in personal workmanship, depending precise subtle balances, and as a consequence his for
sensitivity

obtaining

scores

need careful adjustment on the part of orchestra and con-

ductor.

Musical impressionism was superseded by the arrival in Paris in The Fire 1910 of a new master of the orchestra: Igor Stravinsky.

Bird showed what he could do under the influence of the RimskyRavel color scheme. But in the two
hit his stride:
ballets that followed, Stravinsky

exhilaraPetrouchfy had no rivals for brilliance and tion of orchestral effect; and Le Sucre du Printemfs remains, after orchestral achievement of the forty years, the most astonishing

twentieth century.
the

We

must not underestimate the importance

of

new rhythms and

amazing
forces.

orchestral sound.

the creation of this polytonal harmonies in But for the most part it depends upon an

the marshaling of orchestral unprecedented degree of virtuosity in

and piercing wood winds pitting of energized strings of brass, the whole underlined by an against the sharp cutting edge

The

37

explosive percussive wallop, typifies

Le Sacrc, and

inaugurates a

new

era in orchestral practice.

Ten

years later

it

was an

entirely different sound-ideal that held

Stravinsky's interest. In place of brilliance, the neoclassic

phasized the dry sonorities tone added the grays and

works emwind ensembles without the string browns of a new and more sober color

scheme. Later, in the ballets of Apollo and Orpheus, Stravinsky evinced renewed interest in the strings and gave them a texture all
his

own;

especially the string tone of

Orpheus glows with a

rich,

dark hue.

No

other composer has ever

shown

greater awareness of

the natural correlation of tonal

image with expressive content.

In
not

briefly
fail

reviewing the picture of modern orchestration one ought to mention the influence of that remarkable conductor-

composer Gustav Mahler. The orchestral trouvailles of his nine symphonies were highly suggestive to composers like Schonberg and

Alban Berg, as well as kovitch, and Benjamin

substance of his music,
lines,

to the later generation of

Honegger, Shosta-

Britten. Mahler, despite the deeply romantic

composed in long and independent melodic not unrelated to the baroque contrapuntal textures of eight-

eenth-century composers. Scoring these for an orchestra that had no need for "filling in" harmonies of the nineteenth century, and avoid-

ing as far as posisble all use of orchestral "pedaling" effects, Mahler achieved an instrumental clarity that had no model in his time. The

dear contrapuntal
as

lines,

and the sharp juxtapositions of one orchesstrings against brass, for instance

tral section against

another

we find it in

the scores of

to Mahler's influence.

Hindemith or Roy Harris are traceable Schonberg was especially insistent about his

The use of the orchestra as if it were a large ensemble of chamber music players, with the notion of giving each tone in the harmonic complex its solo color was a Schonberg derivadebt to Mahler.
tion by

way

of Mahler.

orchestral mastery has

These are but a few of the results Mahler's had on the composers of our own time.
the future

The

sonorous image-ideal o

even the immediate

38

future
of

seems highly conjectural. In a supersonic age the material

itself is likely to

become less ethereal and ephemeral, more Chavez once envisaged a collaboration of Carlos solidly tangible. musicians and engineers that would produce, as he put it, "a material appropriate and practical for huge electric musical performsound
goes on to imagine a perfect gradation of coloring an incredible variety of timbres; and increased perspective through of sound through more subtle intensities. The possibilities are endances."
less;

He

The sound-wave

the probabilities are that something radical is in the making. instruments of Theremin and Martenot, the

electronic organ, the ability to write

music

directly

on

film, the ex-

perimentations with noise as a musical ingredient in sound films and in the scores of the French composers of the new musique concrete all these and other similar manifestations seern to point to wide

images. But just as in the past, it is perhaps comforting to remember, we, the composers, are the ones who must give meaning to whatever sonorous images the engineers can invent.

horizons of

new sound

39

CHAPTER THREE

The Creative Mind

and

the Interpretative
more

Mind
with the
creation

IN THE ART OF MUSIC, creation and interpretation arc

indissolubly linked,
so than in any of the other arts,

possible exception of dancing.

Both these

activities

and

interpretation

demand an

imaginative

mind

that

is self-evident.

Both bring into play creative energies that are sometimes

times dissimilar.

alike,

some-

By coupling them
and

together

it

may

be possible to

illuminate their relationship

other.

their interaction,

one upon the

Like most creative

artists, I

have from time to time cogitated on

the mysterious nature of creativity. Is there anything

new

to

be said
doubt

about the creative act

it.

anything really new,

mean?

I rather

The idea

of creative

man goes back

so far in time, so

many

cogent

things have been written and said

tions,

acute observations, poetic reflecthat

and philosophic pondcrings,

to the subject anything

terrain.
Still,

more than a

one despairs of bringing private view of an immense

the serious composer

who

thinks about his art will sooner or

later

have occasion to ask himself:

I

psyche that

why is it so important to my own compose music? What makes it seem so absolutely

by comparison,
is

necessary, so that every other daily activity,

lesser

of

significance?

And why

is

the creative impulse never satisfied;

40

why must one

to create

always begin anew?

is

To

the

first

question

the need

the answer

always the same

self-expression; the basic

life.

need to

make

evident one's deepest feelings about

But why

is

the job never done?

Why must one always begin again? The reason

renewed
it

for thejrpmpulsion to

each added

work

brings with,

create in order to

creativity, it seems to me, is that an element of self-discovery. I must know myself, and since self-knowledge is a never-

new work is only a part-answer to the question I?" and brings with it the need to go on to other and different part-answers. Because of this, each artist's work is supremely
ending search, each

"Who am

important
think,
creation of

at least to himself.

But why does the

artist

presume to

and why do other men encourage him to think, that the one more work of art is of more than merely private

import? That is because each new and significant work of art is a unique formulation of experience; an experience that would be
utterly lost if
it

were not captured and

set

down by

the artist

No

other artist will ever

make

that particular formulation in exactly

that way. -&.nd just J*3j3l-- iudividna.1

through his
artists,

rreflt-jnn 3

JQufjy wnrLljaf

Ifl.rgp;

Jcjnro Jtself

discovers the very

namrc^j^jtsjkingjt^

Jacques Maritain has summarized this idea of the necessity and uniqueness of the work of art in these terms: it is the artist's condition,

he

says, "to seize

ofc&ur^y

1^ GWJ^
which

that will not

come

to anytfein^.^ave^iinbeiag -creari.yc^ .and

will not be conceptualised save in

a work made, by ii&jaTOt Jiaads."

Thus

the creator finds himself in a precarious position because, first, the involuntary nature of creation makes the moment of engender-

fear that the conception

ing an art work uncertain, and then, once conceived, there comes the may not be brought to fruition. This gives a dramatic aspect to the composer's situation. On the one hand the

need for self-expression is ever-present, but on the other hand, he cannot, by an act of will, produce the work of art. It must either be

41

entirely spontaneous, or if

gradually perceived

not spontaneous, then cajoled, induced, so that each day's work may spell failure or

triumph.

No wonder many creative artists have been reputed to have

not so

had unstable characters.

Up

to this point, the situation of the musical interpreter is

very different

from that of the

creator.

He is simply the mterniediary

a kin3 of midwife to jhe

that brjing& the composer's

work ,to

life

composition He partakes of the same dedication of purpose, the

same sense of

self-discovery through each performance, the

same

conviction that something unique is lost, possibly, when his own understanding of a work of art is lost. He even partakes of the involuntary nature of creation, for we know that he cannot at will turn

on the wellsprings of

his creativity so that each

performance

may

be

of equal value. Quite the contrary, each time he steps out upon the concert platform we wish him luck, for he shares something of the
creator's uncertain
tion,
art,

even though
of art.
let

powers of projection. Thus we see that interpretait may rightfully be thought of as an auxiliary

does share elements of creativity with the

us consider the essential

mind

that forms the

work

But now

way
r

in

which creation and

^an

interpretation are radically different. Tfre interprctativc^mind

exerase jrtsejf

The making

f^^s^y^j^^^^p^ffi

itself

supply tfaaxob^cct.

of something out of nothing

the creative mind.

recesses of his

The composer is thought he produces, or finds himself in possession

the special province of a kind of magician; out of the

is

of, the generative idea. Although I say "the recesses of his thought," in actuality the source of the germinal idea is the one phase in crea-

we know is that the momoment of inspiration; or to use Coleridge's phrase, the moment when the creator is in "a more than usual state of emotion." Whence it comes, or in what manner it comes, or how
tion that resists rational explanation. All
is

ment of possession

the

duration one can never foretell. Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or of subconsciousness I wouldn't perhaps

long

its

42

know; but

am

sure that

it is

the antithesis of self-consciousness.

described as a kind of

The

inspired

moment may sometimes be

mind: one
listens

hallucinatory state of
dictates
listens

half of the personality emotes

and

while the other half

and

notates.

The

half that

had

better look the other

way, had better simulate a half

is easily disgruntled and too close inspection by fading entirely away. avenges That describes, of course, only one kind of inspiration. Another

attention only, for the half that dictates

itself for

kind involves the personality as a whole, or

rather, loses sight of it

completely, in a spontaneous expression of emotional release. By that I mean the creative impulse takes possession in a way that blots out
in greater or lesser degree consciousness of the familiar sort. Both are genif one can call them types these types of inspiration
erally of brief duration

and of exhausting

effect.

They

are the rarer

kind, the

kind we

wait for every day.

The

less

divine afflatus that

makes it possible for us to compose each day is a as it were species of creative intuition
faculty
is

to

induce inspiration,

in

which the

critical

much more

involved. But I shall

come

to that in a
it is

mo-

ment.

Long works need

intuitiveness of that sort, for

generally

the shorter ones that are entirely the result of spontaneous creativity. Mere length in music is central to the composer's problem. To write a three-minute piece is not difficult; a main section, a contrasting section,

and a return

to the first part

is

the usual solution.

trouble.

But anything

that lasts

beyond three minutes may cause

In treating so amorphous a material as music the composer is confronted with this principal problem: how to extend successfully the

adds up to a rounded experience. Here, too, inspiration of a kind is needed. No textbook rules can be applied, for the simple reason that these genseminal ideas and
to shape the

how

whole so that

it

erative ideas are themselves live things

and demand
this

their individual

treatment. I

have sometimes wondered whether

problem of the

successful shaping of musical

with the strange

fact that musical history

form was not connected in some way names no women in its

43

composers. There have been great women musical no examples of I emphasize, thus jar thus far but interpreters, a is This of the first rank. women composers touchy subject, no
roster of great

historical fact,

doubt, but leaving aside the obscure and various reasons for the it appears to indicate that the conception and shaping

clear boundary between mind. the creative mind and the interpretative In all that I have been saying about creative thinking there is

of abstract ideas in extended forms

marks a

stress this

implied the strongly imaginative quality of the artist's mentality. I now because there has been a tendency in recent times to
artist as

put the emphasis rather on the

craftsman, with

much

talk

of the composer's technique. The artist-craftsman of the past is held up to us as the model to be emulated, there is a possible source of

confusion here: amidst

all

must always remember

that a

the talk of the craftsmanlike approach we work of art is not a pair of. shoes. It

may

from a quite
understood
is,

very well be useful like a pair of shoes, but it takes its source different sphere of mental activity. Roger Sessions
this

when he wrote

recently:

"The composer's technique

.

on

the lowest level, his mastery of the musical language

it

On

a somewhat higher level ...

becomes identical with his mu-

sical thought, and it is problematical in terms of substance rather than merely of execution. On this level it is no longer accurate to speak of craftsmanship. The composer is no longer simply a crafts-

man; he has become a musical

which are primarily
tance."
It is

thinker, a creator of values

values

aesthetic,

hence psychological, but hence, as an

inevitable consequence, ultimately of the deepest

human

impor-

curious that this concern with craftsmanship should have

developed no successful large-scale primitive in the sense that there are accepted primitive painters. practitioners, Music boasts no Henri Rousseau, no Grandma Moses. Naivete
affected

an

art that has

doesn't

work in music. To write any sort of a usable piece presumes rrnmrrmm kind of professionalism. Mussorgsky and Satie are the

44

closest

we have come

in recent times to a primitive composer, and

their

the

mere mention of

names makes the

placed

idea rather absurd.

No,
man,

I suspect that the stress

upon

the composer as crafts-

especially in teacher-pupil relationships,

comes from a

basic

mistrust of

making

private aesthetic judgments.

There

is

the fear

of being wrong, plus the insecurity of not being able to prove that one is right, even to oneself. As a result an attitude is encouraged
of avoiding the whole messy business of aesthetic evaluation, putting one's attention on workmanship and craft instead, for there

we

deal in solid values. But that attitude, to

my

mind,

side-steps

the whole question of the composer's ness and for making aesthetic

OWA

ueecLfor

.critical

aware-

judgments

at the,

moment

of creation.
it

As

I see

it,

this ability is part of his craft,

it

and the lack of

has

weakened, when
works.

hasn't entirely eliminated,

many

potentially fine

The creative mind, in its day-to-day functioning, must be a critical mind. The ideal would be not merely to be aware, but to be "aware
of our awareness," as Professor
I.

A. Richards has put

it.

In music

this self-critical appraisal of the composer's

own mind

guiding the

composition to
application, for

its

inevitable termination
is

is

particularly difficult of

music

an emotional and comparatively intangible

substance. Composers, especially

young composers, are not always

clear as to the role criticism plays at the instant of creation.

They

don't seem to be fully aware that each time one note

is

followed

by another note, or one chord by another chord, a decision has been made. They seem even less aware of the psychological and
emotional connotations of their music. Instead they appear to be mainly concerned with the purely formal Tightness of a general
scheme, with a particular care for the note-for-note logic of thematic relationships. In other words, they are partially aware, but not fully
aware, and not sufficiently cognizant of those factors which have a controlling influence on the success or failure of the composition as
a whole.

A full_and

equal appraisal of every smallest contributing

45

factor,

elements in d^^giece, without allowingHhis to

u

the controlling and most .essential withanjindcrstanding of cramp one's freedom

oFcreative inventiveaess*isr.bdag, as^it w^^TSsiHe and outside the work at the same time; that is how I envisage the "awareness of
one's awareness.? Beethoven's genius
bert to

was once attributed by Schuto describe the creative

what he termed

his "superb coolness under the fire of crea-

tive fantasy."

What
its

a wonderful

way

mind

functioning at
It is

critical creative mind that almuch the alive to though very component parts of the finished work, it cannot know everything that the work may mean to others.

one of the
it is

highest potential! curiosities of the

parr jp cachjffiork

an element that Andre

Gide
the

called la part de Dieu. I

have often
of

felt familiar,

and

yet again

unfamiliar, with a
first

new work

time
its

as if

mine as it was being rehearsed for both the players and I myself had to accustom

ourselves to

strangeness.

The

late

Paul Rosenfeld once wrote that

he saw the

steel

frames of skyscrapers in

my
apt,

Piano Variations.
but
I

like to t-hinfc that the characterization

was

must

confess
I

that the notion of skyscrapers

was not

at all in

my mind when

was composing the Variations. In similar fashion an English critic, Wilfrid Mellers, has found in the final movement of my Piano
Sonata "a quintessential musical expression of the idea' of immobility." "The music runs down like a clock,** Mellers writes, "and
dissolves

away

into eternity."

tion also, although I

That is probably a very apt descripwould hardly have thought of it myself. Comcriticisms of their

posers often

tell

you that they don't read

works.

As you j^JLj^-aj^exj^tioa, JL admit to a curiosity about the a meaning, slightest cue as to^jtiie meaningpf a piece of mine
throne I. know. I have put there. from Quite apart my own curiosity, there is always the question of how successfully one is communicating with an audience. A
that
is-j

other than

composer

who

cannot in advance calculate to some extent the effect

is

of his piece on the listening public

in for

some rude awakenings.

Whether or not he ought

account at the time o

to take this effect

is

upon an audience

into

composing

another matter. Here again

composers vary widely in their attitude. But whatever they tell you, I think it is safe to assume that although a conscious desire for nnf fre in the forefront of their communication r

may

mjfi<js
fact;

evegy

move toward
tries

logicjanrt robrrencfi-in
It is

composing js in

move

toward communication.

only a slight step when a composer for coherence in terms of a particular audience. This idea of
is

music directed to a particular public

music-lover. It doesn't matter
story of Bach writing each

usually a bit shocking to the

how many

times

we

tell

the familiar

week

for the honest burghers of Leipzig,

or Mozart's relations with the courtly musical patrons of his day; audiences still prefer to think of the musical creator as a man closeted

with his idea, unsullied by the rough and tumble of the world around him. Whether or not contemporary composers think about
this

matter of communication with their audience, they haven't

this are explored in

been signally successful at it. The reasons for greater detail in a later chapter.

The

subject of

naturally to

communication with an audience brings us quite a consideration of the performer's role, and the inter-

action of the creative

to the

and the

interpretative

mind which

is crucial

creation whole musical experience. These two functions and interpretation were usually performed, in pre-Beethoven days,
his

by a single individual. The composer was

as frequently happened, interpreters wrote

own

interpreter; or,
their

music for

own

in-

strument. But nowadays, as we all know, these functions are more usually separated, and the composer is in the position of a man who

has lost his power of speech and consigns his thoughts by letter to an audience that cannot read words. Consequently they both have

need of a middleman, a talented reader who can arouse response in an audience by the public reading of the composer's message. A prime question immediately presents itself: what does the composer expect of his reader, or interpreter? I think I know what one

47

of the

main preoccupations of the

put
life
it

interpreter is: elocutionary elo-

quence, or, to
sounds. All his

in musical terms, the

making

of beautiful

long he has trained himself to overcome all technical hurdles and to produce the most admirable tone obtainable

on

his instrument.

But

there's the rub; the

composer

is

thinking

about something quite different.

acter
else

He

is

concerned not so

much

with

technical adequacy or quality of tonal perfection as

with the char-

and

specific expressive

nature of the interpretation. Whatever

happens he doesn't want his basic conception to be falsified. At any moment he is ready to sacrifice beauty of tone for the sake of a
reading. Every performing artist has something

more meaningful
sound of them

of the elocutionist in him; he wants the words to shine,

to be full

and the

and

right.

Every composer, on the other

hand, has something of a playwright in him; he wants above all to have his "actors" intent upon the significance of a scene, on its import within a particular context, for if that is lost, all elocutionary
eloquence becomes meaningless
the creative
irritating even, since It "hinders"

mind from getting across and purpose of the work of art.

to the auditor the

whole point

Further analogies with playacting exist. The notion of the actress has been hopelessly miscast in a play is familiar to all of us. But musical actors, so to speak, often miscast themselves, and with

who

has the robust, healthy tone of a washerwoman will never successfully invoke from her
less justification.

The woman

violinist

who

instrument the sweet innocence of a jeune

nice person,

file.

The

singer

who

is

and who

possesses

an

excellent voice,

may

have no

inner comprehension for the tragic sense of life, and hence will never successfully communicate that sentiment. One might almost

maintain that musical interpretation demands of the performer an even wider range than that of the actor, because the musician must
play every role in the piece.

At

this point I

there only one

way

can hear the querulous performer asking: But is of reading a piece of music? Aren't divergent

48

readings of the same music possible? Most certainly they are. As a composer I should like to think that any one of my works is capable of being read in several ways. Otherwise a work might be said

meaning. But each different reading must in itbe convincing, musically and psychologically it must be within the limits of one of the possible ways of interpreting the work. It
to lack richness of
self

must have

stylistic truth,

which
is

is

to say

it

must be read within the and

in-

frame of reference that

true for the composer's period

dividual personality. This question of the proper style in playing or singing is one of the thornier problems of music. There have been instances when I

have listened
very
fine,

to

but

I don't

performances of my work and thought: this is all think I recognize myself. It may be that the

performer misses the folklike simplicity I had intended, or that he underplays the monumental tone at the conclusion of a piece, or that

he overemphasizes the grotesque element in a scherzo section. Personally I have always found the finest interpreters most ready to
accept a composer's suggestions. And similarly, it is from the finest interpreters that the composer can learn most about the character of
his

work; aspects of

it

that he did not realize were there, tempi that

are slower or faster than he

ones, phrasings that better express the natural curve of

had himself imagined were the correct a melody.

and
interpreter can

Here is where the most fruitful.

into a discussion of

interaction of composer

be

All questions of interpretation sooner or kter resolve themselves how faithful the performer ought to be to the

notes themselves.

No

suggests
selves

itself:

how

ask this than a counterquestion faithful are composers to the notes they them-

sooner do

we

to

put down? Some performers take an almost religious attitude the printed page: every comma, every slurred staccato, every
is

metronomic marking

taken as sacrosanct. I always hesitate, -at least inwardly, before breaking down that fond illusion. I wish our Dotation and our indications of tempi and dynamics were that exact,

49

but honesty compels

it's

me

to admit that the written page

close the

is

only an

composer was approximation; able to come in transcribing his exact thoughts on paper. Beyond that point the interpreter is on his own. I know that there are some
contemporary composers who have been exasperated by the extreme liberties taken with the notes by romantic artists. As a result they

only an indication of how

have gone to the other extreme and said: "Stop concerning yourselves with interpretation, just play the notes/' That attitude blithely ignores the insufficiencies of musical notation, and thus refuses to
take into account the realities of the situation.

The

only sensible

advice one can give a performing artist is to ask that a happy balance be found between slavish adherence to inadequate signs and a too
liberal straying

from the

clear intentions of the composer.

In order to get insight into the interpreter's mentality it is necessary to be able to bring judgment to bear on the performance. The interpretation itself must be interpreted if we are to evaluate

what the executant

truly musical

is

contributing to a performance. This

is

not

easy for the layman. Observation has convinced

me

that even the subtle distinc-

layman often has

such

difficulty in

making

tions in the judging of musical performance.

criteria necessary for
critical

He

seems to lack the

difficulty arises

judgment. The

from the

fact that the listener, in order to exercise

such

criteria, is

expected to
like before

know

in advance
it

what the performance ought

does sound
like.

to

sound

he hears what
ideal

In other words, he

performance in his mind's ear alongside which he can place the actual performance heard for purposes of comparison. To do this he must understand, first, the style appropriate
to the historical period of the composition

must have an

and

to the composer's

development up to that time; and secondly, he must be able to describe precisely the nature of the given execution so that he can
particularize the qualities special to that performer

and none

other.

To do this well presupposes wide historical knowledge,

50

a great deal

experience in listening, with the admixture ot an instinctive

musicality of one's

own.
I

In interpreting the interpretation, as

put

it,

we must

never lose

sight of the preponderant role of the individual personality of the performer- I like to think that if I were to hear successively three

unidentified pianists behind a screen I could give you a brief personality sketch of each one of them, and come somewhere near the
truth.

This

may

of course be merely an illusion of mine, but no

matter;
is

it indicates what I mean by the thought that a performance both an exposition of the piece and an exposition of the personality traits of the performer. This is particularly true for singers.

Like actors on the

stage, they must be impressive in themselves, even before they utter a sound. Singers are really "on the spot"; unlike the conductor they cannot turn their backs to us; they face

us,

and the song and the

personality are inextricably mixed.

other.

You

can't get at the

one except through the

The same

is

true of

instrumentalists, except that in their case our sight of the instrument and their busy fingers makes less obvious the role played by pera performer lacks personsonality. But it is there nonetheless.

When

ality we call the performance dull; when he has too much personality we complain that he obscures the piece from view. A just apprecia-

tion of the exact part played

by the performer's personality in any

given execution is therefore essential for precise judgment. Now let us get down to cases. Let us observe the interpreter in

purpose of describing certain basic psychological types that are met with most frequently.
action, for the

Great interpretation, as the **big" public understands it, is generally of the fiery and romantic type. Since so much of the music
hear publicly performed comes from the romantic period, many performers are forced to adopt the manner, even though they may not be born to
it.

we

But the true romantic

the interpreter

who

creates

an impression of giving himself in an uninhibited way

has great

51

power over audiences everywhere.

am now

thinking in terms of

the real thing, not merely of the unfortunate individual

making

public spectacle of himself. By only a slim margin a tasteless exhibitionism is separated from an experience that can be deeply moving.

When
if

this

kind of performance doesn't come

off,

we want

to

it

laugh can be infuriating, for the simulation of strong feelings on the part of an interpreter who is really feeling nothing at all strikes us
lie;

we

are charitably inclined; in less charitable

moments

up and denounce it. On the other deeply moved, and who without a shadow of embarrassment can openly appeal to what is warmest and most human in man's psyche, and who in a sense exhibits himas a public

we want

to rise
is

hand, the performer

who

vibrant sympathy before the glazed stare of a that is the performer who really and large heterogeneous crowd communicates with an audience and who usually wins the loudest
self in this state of

plaudits.

ment
there

Another of the truly potent ways of engendering legitimate excitein an audience is for the player or singer to give the impres-

sion that chances are being taken.

To

create this

kind of excitement

must

really

be a precarious element present. There must be

danger: danger that the performance will get out of hand; that the
set himself

performer, no matter how phenomenal his natural gift may be, has a task that is possibly beyond even his capability of
it.

realizing

Nothing

is

so boring as a merely well-rehearsed performance,

well-rehearsed in the sense that nothing can be expected to

happen

except what was studiously prepared in advance. This has vitiated more than one tasteful and careful performance. It is as if the musician, during the execution, had stopped listening to himself, and

was simply performing a duty rather than a

unlikely to
that

piece. It is axiomatic
it is

that unless the hearing of the music first stirs the executant

move an

audience.

A
52

live

performance should be just

live to all

the incidents that happen along the way, colored

by the subtle nuances of momentary emotion, inspired by the sudden insights of public communication. Wonderful performances can
different kinds, but the virtuoso performance that is breathlessly exciting, to mind, always implies this almost-but-

be of

many

my

not-quite out-of-control quality, the antithesis of the well-rehearse^

execution.

another type of performer, whose sphere of action is somewhere in the neighborhood of the romantic, is the musician who
Still

gives a personalized reading of a work. Every performance that has

been logically conceived represents a reading in some sense, but in

this case the

reading

is

more

particularized

and personalized, so

not just the composition, but the composition as our performer on that one occasion understands its meaning and tries to communicate it. In the case of a conductor of this type,
is

that the composition

secondary; instead he is "singing" his the way through composition with a kind of concentration that does not allow for distractions of mere technical details. Such a
all

thoughts of elegance of strumental balance are

style,

perfection of ensemble, delicacy of in-

reading, to be successful,
resistance that

must impose

itself

must break down the

may come from

read the

work

the thought that you or I might There can be no question of "aesthetic differently.

he

contemplation" here, either for the conductor or his listener. strives for is our involvement in a wholeness of experience

What
the

sense that he
portant. This

and
is

his listeners

the kind of performer

have lived through something imwho sometimes takes a mere-

tricious piece and makes it sound better than it really is. The power of conviction behind such a performance tends to blot out critical lend ourselves, and smile about it later. It was a reservations.

We

good show,

our money's worth, and no one was really fooled. But when the work merits it, and the reading is truly convincing, we are left with the impression that whether or not what we have
is

we got

heard

the only possible interpretation,

we have
is

at least

heard one

of the essential ways in

which

that music

to be understood,

53

should like to invoke

now

another category of performer whose

mind seems concentrated on

a quite different artistic end; the per-

former whose approach to interpretation is more impersonal, more classic perhaps. Here the objective is an absolute clarity of texture,
a euphonious ensemble, an infallible sense of timing,

and above

all,

the sense of directional prime concern with continuity and flow movement forward which is intrinsic to the nature and character

not the musical measure being heard that is important but the musical measure to come. It is this concern with forward motion that carries a piece in one long trajectory from its
of
all

music.

Here

it is

beginning to

its

The

interpreter

end and gives an whose attention

interpretation inevitability.
is

focused

on

the road ahead

is

better able than others to give us the long line

of a composition. It

is

useless to explain this

and sculptural shape need for directional

instinct for
it.

movement forward

to performers

who have no

They

may, and often do have

clarity, clarity taken by itself can easily decline in interest to that of a schoolroom demonstration a labora-

but

tory taking-apart of the mechanics of a piece of music.

it

We see how

minutest part. For some reason, however, unless an inner fervor is generated, the performer becomes a schoolmaster
ticks in its

who makes
turn
it

the composition dear for us but neglects

somehow

to

into music.

is another attribute of the classic approach to the re-creamusic that should be mentioned: the species of deep satisfaction to be derived from a performance that has ease and relaxa-

There

tion of

is one of the major joys of music of measure mental confidence and a degree listening: of physical assurance in the of the instrument, whatever it handling may be, that is not often found in combination in one human being.

tion. Effortless
it

singing or playing

indicates a

There are few

qualities more grateful in execution than this sense of ease, the sense of powers completely adequate to the expressive purpose, but few things are more difficult to achieve for the per-

54

former. This

is

not at

all

a matter of the

intellect, for certain per-

formers in the field of popular

in fact, they are

music

also
it

have

this

kind of ease
artists. I

more

likely to possess
It

than are concert

reflect a true

doubt whether
tion, difficult to

it

can be tricked.

must

inner relaxa-

ance,

come by in view of the condition of public performwhich in itself makes for tension. But the master interpreters
left until last

have
I

it.

the question of national characteristics in musical interpretation. Is there such a thing? Is there an American way of performing Schubert as distinguished from an Austrian way?

have

It

seems to

me

that there

most

definitely

is.

The

quickest

way

of

gauging

this is to

compare present-day American and European

orchestral performance.

Our

orchestras,

by comparison with those

abroad, are energized and glamorized: they play with a golden

sheen that

reflects their

material well-being.

The European
less

organ-

ization approaches orchestral performance in a

more straightforward
need to make each

and natural way. There

is less

sense of strain,

execution the "world's greatest." In Europe it gives one a feeling of refreshment to corrie upon the frankly unglamorous playing of a
solidly trained orchestra. I

once heard such an orchestra in America,

about fifteen years ago. It came out of the Middle West and played under a conductor of European origin in such a way that one felt the whole organization had just stepped out of the nineteenth century.

Nowadays, when that approach

is

attempted,

it

generally re-

sults in a businesslike, shipshape rendition, without much artistic conviction behind it. More typical is the glorified tonal approach,

the steely brass peralthough our orchestras still have not reached But attack. fection of a jazz combination's something of the same

compulsion to
magnificence
vitality in

"wow" an
present.

audience through the sheer power of tonal

is

Our symphonic
is

beorganizations, as they
their live

come known in Europe, are admired for

performance. It

sound and

their

be. only right that they should

My

55

object is not to bclitdc the outstanding qualities of our orchestras but merely to stress one factor in their playing which seems to me indicative of national flavor.

National characteristics are most clearly present in interpretation, suppose, when it can be said that the execution is "in the true

tradition."

temporary of the

This comes about when the performer is either a concomposer and has received the correct style of rendi-

tion through association with the composer himself, or when, by birth and background, the performer is identified in our minds with the of the composer in sometimes even the city country and culture

question, I realize that the phrase "in the true tradition"

is

at best

a shaky one. For there is no positive proof that my conception of the "true tradition" is the really true one. Still, we are all mostly ready to concede that the conductor from Vienna has a special insight into

way in which Schubert should be played. Serge Koussevitzky once made an observation to me that I shall always remember. He said that our audiences would never entirely understand American orchestral compositions until they heard them conducted by Amerithe

can-born conductors.

It

seems

clear, then, that if

we

can speak of

national traits of character, inevitably those traits will

interpreter's character as a

form

the

human

being and shine through the

interpretation.

In sketching thus briefly various basic types of interpreter I have naturally been forced to oversimplification. The finest artists cannot
reason
case

be so neatly pigeonholed, as I am afraid I may have suggested. The we remain so alive to their qualities is just because in each

and adjust subtle gradations of interpretative power. Every new artist, and for that matter every new a composite of virtues and defects composer, is a problem child
are forced to balance

we

that challenges the keenness of

I

mind

of the listener.

have mentioned what the composer expects from his interpreter. I should now logically state what the interpreter expects from the
composer.

Too

often, however, the truth is that interpreters are not

56

thinking about the composer at

the past
it

all

mean

was

different.

There

are

numerous

the live composer. In instances of a work

being written simply because some outstanding instrumentalist inspired

it.

Paganini commissioning Berlioz, Joachim helping Brahms

become more legendary as the years pass. course isolated examples still occur, but for the most part a regrettable gulf separates the interpreter and composer in present-day
instances such as these

Of

They are not interacting enough! A healthy musical would include increased opportunities for interpreters and composers to meet and exchange ideas. This should begin at
musical
life.

state of affairs

the school level, as often happened abroad. If I were an interpreter I think I should like to have the sense that I had been a part of the

musical experience of my time, which inevitably means an active part in the development of the composers of my time. Is this too
full

Utopian?
preter

I hope not, because the indissoluble link between interand composer makes their interaction one of the conditions of

a healthily functioning musical community.

57

Part

Two

MUSICAL IMAGINATION IN THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE

CHAPTER FOUR

Tradition and Innovation

in Recent
"MUSIC.
in
i

European Music
"-"T
me
AitTj

WAvr A<KTV MOflf, T

iglv^n qndertfre

the French law nf tradition." That sentence, * from an article by j ____

critic,

Frederick Goldbeck, occurred to

as I

was being shown

3

about the venerable palazzo that houses the Benedetto Marcello

musical conservatory in Venice. "The composer's chords,* Goldbeck

had

written, "are every dead or living composer's chords, never his

is

own. His paper

never a blank; there are so

many

staves
jail

on
..

it,

five prison bars in each, History

and Tradition being the

"

These phrases echoed in

Francesco Malipiero, led
off for

my mind as the conservatory's director, me down the ancient corridors and dusted

examine precious musical manuscripts inherited from other centuries. Suddenly it struck me, in a way it never had before,
to

me

to

what an

extent the

of acting as

European musician is forced into the position caretaker and preserver of other men's music, whether

moment, seemed to symof the dilemma bolize the essential European musician, for he has been both the editor of Monteverdi's complete works and, at the
he
likes it or no. Malipiero himself, at that

same time, one

of the leading composers in Italy's twentieth-century

musical renaissance,

ThcpuJLof tradition
two polar
...
.
.....

as against the attraction of innovation are the

forces that constitute die basic drama gf today's --~ *4. _

.
i.v

European

... M

61

music.
classic

Not

so long ago, especially under the impact o

the neo-

movement

in contemporary music, the impression gained

currency that the "revolutionary" era in music was over, and that the turmoil created by the extensions in harmonic language and

had gradually subsided, leaving us with a musical idiom that held no surprises for any o us. But is this still a true picture of the state of affairs at present? Or is it now time to
the change in aesthetic ideals

reexamine the situation?

is

It

seems to

me

that once again the Euro-

music under the sign of crisis; and in pean composer order to examine the nature of that crisis it will be necessary to look
writing his
closely at those trends in

contemporary music that

stress traditional

values and those that constitute a threat to such values.

It is quite evident that there is no further revolution possible in the harmonic sphere, none, at any rate, so long as we confine ourselves to the tempered scale and its normal division by half tones.

There

is

no such thing any longer

as

an inadmissible chord, or

melody, or rhythm
to tradition, if

given the proper context, of course.

Contempo-

rary practice has firmly established that fact.

it is

As

I see
is

it,

the "threat**

a "threat,"

lies

elsewhere,

and

of

two kinds.

has to do with the assumptions that underlie our ideas concerning the structure and organization of musical coherence.
first

The

Arnold Schonberg was the composer whose work produced the crisis in that sphere. The second has to do with the social import and

and it is a question which was given formal declaration by the publication of a manifesto signed by a group of composers from various countries meeting in Prague in 1948. Both these problems are foremost in the minds of many of Europe's best musical creators
continues to

basic purpose of musical creation today,

hound us

all. It

today.
I shall launch boldly into a consideration of the breakdown in the formal organization of music, in an attempt to find out how such a breakdown came about and, if possible, what it's implications may

be.

62

Music
ally

is.

by nature, the most amorphous of the

n*

arts: it is continu-

dftngrr told in terms o

in

6H*""g *r

ort

The

Stoj

composition might be

the devices employed, always tentatively at first, and then finally in full flower, which produced formal patterns that give some semblance of cohesion to music. The forms of one age are not necessarily those of another, the surprising thing being
inheritors ^ *

that they last as long as they do.

gffl^

At
*

r^n

*"*

far

the present time we are the **** chaconne, the fugue, the

which have served composers for some two hundred years or more. These and other forms provide the composer with an outward mould into which he may pour his
sonata, to

name

a few

ideas with

some assurance

that they will coalesce

and make sense

to the listener. I hasten to add, however, that composers have a special relationship to the set

form which

is

not always clear to the

layman.
as

A composer does not simply "pack his materials" into "prenothing more than a "generalization,** existing moulds." A set form
is

Donald Tovey calls it. As he points out, we must generalize from a detailed experience of the behavior of individual works, and must not try to explain that behavior by the generalization. In
other words, each separate composition is a law unto itself, and only bears a general resemblance to the external shape of whatever form is adopted. This explains, in large measure, the reason for the

on structure longevity of these forms. It also explains why textbooks in music are of only limited usefulness to the music student. For the more closely he adheres to their abstract form-types the further he
will be

from the

truly creative act,

which

gives to the particular

it

material at

hand the shape and cohesion

that only

may

have.

extent are these set question then suggests itself: to what forms a necessity? Without them would music be chaotic? Or are certain time-honored forms a hindrance rather than a help, and

The

that merely a sentimental attachment on the part of composers a conversation the report of keeps them alive? In this connection,
is it

that Ferruccio Busoni

is

said to have

had with a pupil of

his in 1922

63

is

pertinent. Busoni,
lost

completely

by the time he was a mature musician, had patience with the conventionality of "official" Ger-

man

music, the Kapellmei$Urmusi\ o the end of the nineteenth century. In 1907 he published a slim volume in which he envisaged
free, that is, free of any formal plan be characterized as "architectonic," or "symmetric," or might "sectional." "Music," he said, "was born free; and to win freedom

a day

when music would be

that

is its

destiny."

He

thought that composers had come

closest to un-

covering the true nature of music in "preparatory

passages (preludes

and intermediary
felt

and

transitions)

where they

at liberty to

disregard symmetrical proportions and unconsciously drew free breath." In 1922 he was still laboring the point, and this time the

fugue was his

target.

This
to
its

is

how he

put

it:

"The fugue

is

a form,

and

as such

is

bound

time. It

was Bach who found

its

principle

and
I

Today, also, one can write fugues, and would even recommend it; one can even compose them with the
its essential

realization.

most contemporary means

is

But even in such a form, the fugue

no less archaic; it always has the effect of archaizing the music, and it cannot pretend to give it its expression and its actual meaning."

What
become

are

we

to conclude?

Have fugues and

other old forms

Are they so many strait jackets which have finally outlived their usefulness? Whether we answer yes or no, it seems to me that as long as basically tonal music is
hopelessly old-fashioned?

Roger Sessions once summarized these

sion

written certain fundamental controlling factors will be present. as: fast, thcjense of progres-

or

cumulation;

second,

the

association

for

repetition

oi

ideas; third, the feeling for contrast.

Given these

requisites, a piece

of music
set

be constructed without reference to any established form and yet have a tight, precise, and logical shape. In any

may

essentially

tonal piece this

would be accomplished through the

through the
rela-

rational progression of the underlying harmonies,

tionships of melodies or melodic fragments,

through rhythmic unity,

truth.

and through a general sense of dramatic and psychological

My

point

is

that the

working out

of these requirements will pro-

duce a composition whose governing principles will be the same, in essence, whether or not the design is free or well known. It is precisely this possibility of endless variety in

formal coherence that has

made
it

it

applying basic principles of possible for composers in the past,

and seems

likely to

make

possible for

them in the

future, to con-

tinue the writing of passacaglia, scherzo, theme and variations, and so forth without fear of exhausting the value of the generalized

mould.
This tendency toward the conservation of old forms and
their

reinterpretation in modern terms is representative of the pull toward tradition in Europe's music. It was accentuated by the return
to eighteenth-century ideals that characterized the neoclassical

move-

ment

in the middle twenties. Neoclassicism, at the time Stravinsky originated it, acted as a brake on the chaotic postwar period. It
also served as

it is

an antidote to the vaguenesses of impressionism, for interesting to note that some of the composers most intrigued

Alfredo Casella, Manuel de Falla, Albert by neoclassic forms had all Roussel previously written music in the post-Debussy man-

Sooner than anyone thought possible, the Russian whose name had been a symbol of upheaval in music became the stimulus for a
ner.

more

conservative attitude. But, as always, Stravinsky himself

knew

how to remain vitally alive within the confines of any self-imposed restriction. By now, the neoclassic tendency, insofar as it exists as a
general movement in present-day music, appears to be definitely on the wane. It seems to have run its natural course and exhausted
its

usefulness.

The

classicalizing principles involved retain their

specific references to eighteenth-century
lost

validity,

no doubt, but the

mannerisms and turns of phrase have

once had.

whatever interest they

The composer who

is,

has been most outspoken and most consistent

in his attitude toward the conservation of firmly grounded principles

of course, Paul Hindemith.

As

a young

man he was

beguiled by

65

several of the shibboleths of the twenties, but

thirty-five

he had reacted

fectly clear

by the time he was His writings have made perviolently. own compositions; and his the doctrines that he applies to
it is

in his finest pieces

filled

a marvel to behold these same doctrines

out with inspired music. The Hindemithian theories will always have most appeal to those minds that feel comfortable only with a closely reasoned and systematic approach to any problem.

My own
the field

mind

feels

more

at

home with

the unsystematic approach

of writers like

Montaigne and Goethe, let us say; and especially in to me important that we keep.jopen what of music itjecrns

William James
.

. . through, .which calls the "jgatfona] doorways the wildness andjJie pang of life" may be glimpsed. The systematic and the irrational arelmutually exclusive; and that is why Hindemith's tenets, clarified and truthful as far as they go, are

inherently limited

and cannot hope

instinctual drives of the 'creative

-

to encompass the oftentimes mechanism.

It is to

England that one must turn in order to find a whole school

of significant composers who put their faith in tradition. It isn't that England has no dodecaphonic composers, but the men who have

made the strongest impression

citizens,

Ralph Vaughan Williams, William

are all solid musical

Walton, Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett

outlook, each one of

upholders of traditional values. Despite this conformist them has his individual musical style. All are,

in greater or less degree, masters of the rhetorical musical gesture,

especially Britten, the
pecially his operas, are

youngest

among them. His

example
of

music, and

es-

an

excellent

how^by working

within clearly planned forms and by haying a brilliant technical equipment for the carrying out of any possible plan, one can achieve
breadth^ rariety^ richness with a familiar idiom^This greatly gifted Britisher, not yet forty, has every known compositional resource at
his

command, which perhaps explains his unconcerned acceptance of traditional methods and ideals. His work, diatonic and stylized
as
it is,

has placed English music, after a hiatus of

more than two

66

hundred
history.

years, in the

mainstream of present-day European musical

Michael Tipped: is another member of the new generation of British composers with strong sympathy for the traditional approach.
Tippett, unlike Britten whose models are drawn from more eclectic sources, has been attracted by certain procedures of the Elizabethan

composers of the
the opening

late sixteenth century.

Tippett himself describes

movement of his Second String Quartet as "partly derived from madrigal technique where each part may have its own rhythm and the music is propelled by the differing accents, which

tend to thrust each other forward." This fondness for cross-rhythms to American music. gives his music at times a certain relationship

(There are certain melodic sections in Vaughan Williams* Sixth Symphony which seem to me strikingly American also.) Tippett
lacks the sureness of touch that characterizes the

music of Britten

or Walton, but his music exemplifies better than theirs the attempt to contain within conservative limits a naturally effusive temperament. In Sir William Walton we have a child of the hectic twenties

who
left

has been turned into a pillar of British musical society. All are adventuresomeness has completely gone out of his work.

We

with "solid values," but with little else. (I refer to the recent Concerto of works.) In Walton's case we must go back to the Viola excellent the late twenties in order to find an example of the rein compothinking in contemporary language of familiar techniques
sition.

The

roster of traditionally-minded composers

might be

greatly

extended

period of unof the the preceding quarter of a century gains consolidating clear became it last the end of the however, after war, rest. Shortly
that a considerable

Germany

in Honegger in France, Petrassi in Italy, Boris Blacher of one was mainly because the between-the-wars

number

of composers in various countries had beto this

gun

to write a

stability,

and

newly gained the structural organization of threatened especially

music that constituted a threat

music as

it

ber that in

had been formerly understood. It is interesting to rememits origination this threat came from exactly that quarter
least expect it:

where one would

Vienna, the fount of

classical tradi-

tions; and from one man, Arnold Schonberg, who, ironically enough, professed a passionate regard for these same classics. Schonberg used

to refer to himself as

a victim, as a

man who had

reluctantly taken

upon himself the Promethean role of destroying the tonal system, a

system which had required hundreds of years to develop.
serious
It

was

enough Schonberg condemned himself to writing a music that was certain to

9

to have

undermined the

tonal system, for in so doing,

sound, so to speak, "wrong* to

its first listeners.

But the

man who

undermined tonal harmony, was ifso facto undermining the fundamental structure of musical form, for that also is premised on the ordered progression of related tonalities. Schonberg was fully aware
of the enormity of his act, as is proved by the fact that for a long time he composed nothing in the larger forms (his first post-tonal pieces had all been short), after which there followed a silence that
lasted for eight years.

Schonberg was not a man hankering after freedom, like Busoni. Far from it; he was seeking a newjdiscjpline to substitute for the one

he had made obsolete by the abandonment of tonality. After the long silence, during which time he was occupied with tentative
probings toward a solution of his problem, he emerged with a new modus ogerandi, the "method of composing with the twelve tones,"
as

he preferred to name

it.

As

finally perfected

by Schonberg, the

method guaranteed the control of every tone in the musical fabric, since, melodically and harmonically, it was based on a perpetual use
through variation of a chosen arrangement or series of the twelve chromatic tones. Note well that his premise was not a melody; it was an arrangement of tones that could be manipulated in a great number of ways, and yet
rigorous control at every instant.

had the added advantage of being under Even the most radical step, it ap-

68

must be accompanied, in the mind of the German-trained musician, by logic and control. There is no doubt that Schonberg and his followers derived great
pears,

from this new method. Without the evidence of the music one itself might imagine that all ties with tonal music had been broken. But strangely enough, the classicist in Schonberg was not to be so easily downed, and so we _find him writing string quartets
stimulus
in the customary four

movements, each separate movement par-

taking somewhat of the usual expressive content, and the general outlines recognizably those of a first-movement allegro, a minuet, a slow movement, and a rondo. Alban Berg, even before his adoption
of the twelve-tone method, a

had written
is

his opera

WozzecJ^ in such

way

that each of the fifteen scenes

based on some normal set

form

a passacaglia, a military march, a series of inventions, and

so forth.

Anton Webern,

in

many

of his works, wrote canons and

suit.

variations.

Other twelve-tone composers followed

An

extraordi-

narily paradoxical situation developed: despite the rigorous organiza-

tion of the twelve tones according to the dictates of the series

its

and

mutations, and, despite the adoption at times of the outward semblance of traditional shapes, the effect the music makes in actual

performance

is

often one of near-chaos.

We

are faced, then, with

is

two seemingly opposite

its

facts:

on the

one hand the music

the other
it

carefully plotted in

undeniably creates

an anarchic impression.

every detail; and on On the one

hand the musical

journals of every country are filled with articles explaining the note-for-note logic of Schonbergian music, accomabstracts,

panied by appropriate graphs,

and schematized

reductions,

enormous ingenuity being expended on the tracking down of every last refinement in an unbelievably complex texture. (One gains the
impression that it is not the music before which the commentators are lost in admiration so much as the way in which it lends itself to
detailed analysis.)

But on the other hand, when we return to the

concert hall

and

listen

once again

to these

leave with the disturbing

memory

of a music that borders

same compositions we on chaos.

What

are

we

to conclude? Quite simply that these innovators are

more revolutionary than they themselves know or are willing to admit. While appearing to have engineered merely a harmonic revolution, and set up a^n^aLgcthocjgf^composing in its place, they have in actuality done away ...with ..all previous ^sor&gRtions of the
normal flow of music.
having taken so long to arrive at a point that the reader have been willing to concede at the outset. But it is important might the loss of the normal to my argument to establish the fact itself
I regret
fl

Qg

of

nrir

hrrmrrr of the implications

it

carries

with

it.

These implications are most clearly discernible in the music of Schonberg's pupil Anton Webern. More and more the postwar
twelve-tone developments point to
situation
limits.

Webern

as the

key

man

in the

the

man who
that

carried Schonberg's ideas to their furthest

himself wrote, and the influence it has exerted on younger minds is possibly the most singular phenomenon of our times. It is a singular experience also to attempt to read

The music

Webern

Webern's music at the piano.

it

It

so to speak
it

defies

you

to read

the page:

seems wayward
it

way of rebuffing you; has a disconcerting look on and unpredictable, with a rrnm'trmm
it.

has a curious
It

number
notes.

of notes

and a maximum number of

fact, it

rests

between the

On

the face of

the music seems arbitrary

and

planless,
is

but as a matter of demonstrable

can be shown that this

the

most implacably controlled music Europe has ever known. The look of it may be incoherent, but the sound of it I think is fascinating,
although the music's scope and breadth of expression are matters
that have not yet

been

fully tested.

Putting aside the question of expression, there are

two

features in

Webern's music which in

matter of melody.

effect

circumvent

all

tonal practice and

is

suggest unexplored possibilities for the future. First, there

the

When modern
70

music was a term to frighten

people with, an often-heard reproach used to be: the stuff lacks melody. Carefully, we used to explain that it was simply a question of extending one's idea of what a melody might be, and in that
case,

texture,

assuming you could unravel it from the unfamiliar harmonic it would be found that modern music had as much melodic

content as older music. But in Webern's

work the composer

starts

not with a theme, but with a predetermined arrangement of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, from which an immense number
of possible melodies
that although each
skeletal series,

might be subsumed. The thing to remember is melody or melodic fragment relates back to the no one of them need bear any recognizable relation

any other, at least so far as the ear is concerned. As a result no one melody is given predominance; therefore there are no themes as such, and all possibility of even a single repetition of a theme is
to

canceled out. (For purposes of simplification I am ignoring the are faced therefore with a literal repetition of entire sections.)

We

music which

is

at every instant

new. Thus, the old familiar land-

such as thematic relationships marks of "normal" music are gone and the phrase "to recognize a theme" beand developments comes absolutely meaningless. We have arrived at a musical art which is constructed on unfamiliar principles: theworlcLof athcmatic
music.

^^^econd
gestive value

field in
is

that

which Webern's music has had unusual sugof rhythm. This, the most primitive element in
remained comparatively free of
constraint.

music,

has

always

Rhythm was considered to need no justification; it was judged by its naturalness of movement and limited by no laws other than those of unity and variety. A close examination of Webern's later music will show that his passion for logic and control applies also
to the rhythmic factor, for
it

follows that

when melodic

phrases are

subjected to strict treatment, inevitably the underlying rhythmic structure will be under strict control also. In Webern's last works one gets the im-

manipulation and an almost continual canonic

71

no single instant of the rhythmic play is left to chance, becomes possible to envisage a music whose sole structural principle will be that of rhythmic control. Wcbcrn's rhythms prQdqce an effect of calculated digcQfltiflyfo that has no precedent in other
pression that
it

so that

men's music.

New

interest
air,

in purely rhythmic experimentation

for

must have

been in the
theoretical

expounded in the works and exemplified in the music of the French com-

we

find a similar attitude

poser Olivier Messiaen. This Catholic organist-composer has freely acknowledged his debt to a variety of sources, and especially to the

rhythmic

flexibilities

of

inspiration. Messiaen's researches led

Hindu ragas and tolas as a source of rhythmic him to subject rhythms to the

same type of contrapuntal treatment that had usually been applied solely to melodic material, most of these familiar since Bach's day.

Thus we

get rhythmic canons, rhythmic organ points, or

read a rhythm backwards as

in the imitation of

we

used to revert a theme.

we may Above all,

may

rhythms in

different parts,

we may

use not merely

the usual augmentation or diminution of time values, but these

be inexactly imitated by the addition or subtraction of tiny metrical units, thereby guaranteeing an unusual rhythmic conformation.
_ These

suggestive ideas were further developed

by Messiaen's

pupil, Pierre Boulez,

who

peculiarities of Webern The few Boulez scores that I have examined are

took as his point of departure the stylistic and the rhythmic formulas of his teacher.
of a truly formidable

complex a texture, the composer maintained that, given the enormous variety of procedures open to the dodecaphonic composer, he was seeking for a of the frame. Boulez has a keen corresponding "atonality" rhythmic mind, an almost scientific one, I might say, and his investigations
complexity. Questioned
as to the necessity of so

into
trol

new

possibilities

of formal organization through rhythmic constir

have already caused a considerable

Europe.

in avant-garde musical

circles in

72

Boulcz, for a certain time,

composer-critic

came under

the guidance of the French

indefatigable promulgator

Rene Leibowitz, the most

of the Schonbergian viewpoint in recent years. Leibowitz has had occasion, from time to time, to deplore the tendency of certain

Schonberg followers to backslide: that

tonal concepts into

is,

to reintroduce basically

works

that

make

use of the tone

row

in serial

fashion. Schonberg himself,

and

certainly

Alban Berg in

his Violin

Concerto, was guilty of injecting traces of tonality in an otherwise "pure" work. The man who is generally considered to be the leader
in this
Italian

more

conservative

wing

of the dodecaphonic school

is

is

the

composer, Luigi Dallapiccola. There

no reason, Dallapiccola

thinks, for limiting twelve-tone composers to the scholastic dictates

of a Leibowitz.

Now that the three pioneer leaders of the school have

new and unexpected
This
derivations

died

it

seems

likely that

from the

original system will appear.

possibility of freely applying the

its

twelve-tone method, without necessarily accepting

atonal har-

monic

implications, seems to

me

to prove the

power

rather than the

weakness of Schonberg's

initial idea.

What,

then, does

realization

add up to? Are we any nearer to the of Busoni's dream of a "free" music? "Creative power,"
all this

Busoni wrote, "may be the more readily recognized, the more it shakes itself loose from tradition." By that touchstone the innovatorsj
in

Europe have

certainly succeeded in prying us loose

it

from

several

seems to me, is their prime importance. age-old assumptions. That, dislike we like or Whether any one example of their music or con-

demn

their

works in

toto, the fact

remains that they have put into

question the basic assumptions on which were founded all former ideas about the flow and organization of European music. That in
itself is

no small achievement.

began this chapter by saying that Europe's composers today are working under a sign of crisis. Now I wish to discuss the second
I

concern about part of that supposition: namely, the deep sense of

73

the purpose
subject
is

and

objective of

composing today. Surprisingly,

this

not as unrelated to twelve-tone composition and the prob-

lems

it

presents as

might

first

appear.

Professor

Edward Dent, who

has for a good

many

years been an

acute observer of the contemporary composer's activities, dates this the day when the phase of the "crisis" from Beethoven's day
creator of

modern times was thrown back on

his

own

resources,

gaining indubitably in personal independence, but losing at the same time the assurance of an appointed place in society and the

economic security that goes with

the composer uncertain for
Professor

Dent puts
to

it

new independence left was writing his music. he whom, exactly, this way :f 'The choice before the composer
it.

This

mayjtppear the moral choice involved.

his

be a financial one,
Is

fait

th? 1

"

""rfltpH*

""nptH
to.

to

he

to write for himself only,,

express

own

individuality
it

and then throw Jtjn the face of the world

is

with a 'take

or leave it/ or

he to regard his genius

as

something

he holds in

trust for the betterment of bis fejlow-creatures?

That

of

course has always been thOundajnenta^robjein^of all composers the relation^ of the artist to the.xmtside^world." sjjKsJBcethoven

Asljgejt, there are really two questions involved heredirsk that of thc^^rtist and his conscience out of what *np^ r rnnv irjfcl!,fo he
-

Composing; and

what jartjfltEe use in ordcr_tQ r^ark whatffggi audience may potentially be his?

secnnrT, the

anH ki& ^nTpymiQJgation

These matters were, not so long ago, subjects for polite discussion, Nowadays they have taken on an air of grim reality. For the first
time since Beethoven's day composers in certain countries are being told by those in a position of authority and with the ability to provide economic support exactly to whom their music ought to be directed, and in general terms what musical idiom and what forms
best suit the purposes of communication.

These recommendations were embodied in a declaration made by an international group of composers and musicologists meeting at Prague in 1948. It was the

74

first time that composers from Great Britain, France, Holland, Switzerland, and other countries had allied themselves with com-

posers

from communist

states in order to enunciate the so-called

simply states:
fore,

"progressive" point of view. If I read the declaration correctly, it we are entering a new era of human culture; there-

works are wanted that are concrete

in their message, particularly

works that employ words operas, oratorios, cantatas, songs, choruses, written in an understandable style using folk material, in
order to counteract "cosmopolitan'* tendencies. Dissonant contemporary music is out, or as they phrased it: "tendencies of extreme
subjectivism" should be renounced. All this is quite familiar by now, especially in view of the worldwide publicity afforded each fiat of Soviet musical policy. But the

point

is

that
it

Europe

from the perspective of the composer in noncommunist remains a vital issue. The lines are sharply drawn, and the
literary

battle is

being fought out in the

and musical journals of

twelve-tone composer, especially, knows he is under fire; he is no longer writing music to satisfy himself : whether he likes it or not, he is writing it against a vocal and mili-

the various countries.

The

opposition^The composer of communist persuasion is no less concerned, for he has good reason to think that it may not be so easy to find the proper style that will appeal to the popular imagination and satisfy at the same time whatever artistic pretensions he
tant

himself

may

have. Thus, to put

little

it

flatly^

the twelve-toners have a

program, byt

frope
fl

of.jre^ii^^ajv^lar^audience; and the

propresfit/ijtef ,hflYS

andienceT but no guarantee that they can_invent a fresh musical manner appropriate to its needs. In bepntenria^

tween there are large numbers of practicing composers who live in a state of flux and semiconfusion, trying to avoid the brickbats from
both parties. Circumstances, as never before, are forcing every
serious,

European artist to face his conscience and attempt to find an answerJ to the questions of why and for whom his music is being written J Every artist, whatever his convictions, must sooner or later

75

the problem of communication with an audience. The composer who is free to do as he pleases would do well to consider the advice

of Professor

I.

wrote that the

A. Richards, penned some years ago. In substance he artist need not consciously be aware of this problem,

knowing it he is deeply concerned with the matter of communication. If an artist occupies himself exclusively with getit will communi"right" for himself, that is ting a work "right"
for even without
cate,

because communication is part of its lightness. But, one must Professor Richards' artist enjoys the luxury of being right for add,
is
is

himself alone; he

the free

artist.

not free has a great need for being consciously concerned with the matter of communication, for it is crucial to his
artist

The

who

situation.

That

situation has taken

away from him one of the

artist's

most important
to be wrong.
as

rights, namely, the immemorial right of the artist creator often learns as much from his miscalculations

he does from

his successes.
artist

The need

to

be right every time must

under communist supervision. My own weigh heavily is that the Soviet guess regime can hope for 'the kind of music they

on the

demand from their composers only if they develop a new species of artist who has never had any contact whatever with modern
European music. For the artist who has once heard Milhaud or c< Hindemith, the apple of evil has been tasted and the harm," from their standpoint, has been done. No composer who is even partially
cognizant of our contemporary musical idiom will ever be able to fully eradicate its traces from his work. Therein lies the dilemma of
Prokofieff

the present-day Soviet composer, and especially of and Shostakovich.

its

leaders like

The
gests

musical situation as

it

exists

abroad at the present time sug-

no
I

when

easy summary. In 1951 I spent six think back and try to summarize

months

in Europe, and

my

observations of the

creative musical scene I

must

reluctantly

disturbing factors in a situation that is how could it be otherwise? The only possible alternative

admit that there are many anything but clarified. But

would be

for the

composer to remove himself from

to reflect the

all

contact with the

life

about him, and that would be worse. No,

we must

expect Europe's
its

music

many

different tensions that characterize

political
exist.

and

spiritual life, for that is the only healthy

is

way

for

it

to

The

surprising thing
its

picture that
is

many

not the variegated and rather confused divisions create, but the fact that so much that

good and

vital

continues to be accomplished.

77

CHAPTER FIVE

Musical Imagination in the Americas

AN ASTUTE FELLOW MUSICIAN was
gesting to

responsible for sug-

me the difficult subject of imagination in the music of the Americas. He put the question to me in this way: The art of music has been practiced for a good many years now in the Western Hemisphereboth north and south; can it be said that we have exercised
our

own imagination

as musicians

and not merely^reflected what we

if

have absorbed from Europe?

And

we have succeeded

in bringing

a certain inventiveness and imaginativeness of our own to the world of music, what precisely has our contribution been? I protested
that to answer such a question satisfactorily
it

was an almost im-

was in any event too early to possible assignment; that perhaps ask it; and, moreover, that I myself might be a poor judge of the an overanxiety to find favorable answers. present situation, because of
But

my

musical friend persisted.

He

pointed out that everyone

agrees that the

two Americas

are

more grown-up musically than they

were two generations ago; and besides, he added, you have visited South America and Mexico and Cuba and Canada, and have
watched the musical movement in our

own

country develop for

more than

thirty years. Aren't

observers to arrive at

you in a better position than most some conclusion as to how far we have come
music? In the

in

making our own

special contribution td the world's

78

end

found myself puzzling over

this questionit

No

matter

how

wrong-headed

my

reactions

may be,

seemed

likely that

some musi-

cologist fifty years

hence might very well be intrigued to discover

what answers suggested themselves to a composer in mid-twentieth century America.

If the experience of the

music

is

a sophisticated art

Americas proves anything, it indicates that an art that develops slowly. It is about

four hundred years since the first book containing musical notation was published in this hemisphere. That notable event took place in Mexico in the year 1556. In the United States the burgeoning period covers some three hundred years, which is also a considerable time

span for the development of an art. Actually it seems to me that in order to create an indigenous music of universal significance three
conditions are imperative. First, the composer must be part of a nation that has a profile of its own that is the most important;

second, the composer

must have

in his

background some sense of

a basis in folk or popular art; and a of third, superstructure organized musical activities must exist that is, to some extent, at least at the service of the native com-

musical culture and,

if possible,

poser.

In both North and South America it was only natural that from the beginning the musical pattern followed lines which are normal for lands that are colonized by Europeans. In both Americas there

was first the wilderness and the struggle merely to keep alive- Our Latin American cousins were more fortunate than we in their
musical beginnings. Some of the Catholic missionaries from Spain were cultivated musicians intent upon teaching the rudiments of

music to

their charges.

credited with having started the

Pedro de Gante, a Franciscan padre, is first music school in the New

taught the natives to sing

World around

1524.

He

hymns and

to

write musical notation.

The Puritan Fathers, on the other hand, were

reported as downright unfriendly to the musical muse, although this harsh judgment has been somewhat tempered in recent years.

79

Nevertheless,

it is

safe to

psalms there exist

couraged.

few

if

assume that apart from the singing of any signs that music as an art was en-

It was during the later years of the colonial period of both North and South America that the first native, primitive composers raised their voices. These were mostly men who wrote their music in their

spare time, as an avocation rather than as a profession. They, in turn, were soon aided by the initial influx of a certain number of

from abroad. In our own country many of these immigrants came at first from England. As Otto Kinkeldey has pointed out, in those days practically all our music came by way of England: Handel, Haydn, Mozart were known to the
professional musicians
later wave United States because they were known in England. Central shores from our came to Europe, especially Germany; and

as a result

years by Teutonic

our musical thinking was dominated for a great many ideals. In Latin America the immigrant musician

came

principally
later

while a
Italy.

from the Iberian Peninsula, as might be expected, wave brought a large number of musical recruits from

Is there anything imaginative about the music composed in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? So far as we can tell from the preserved records, very little. few hardy

primitives from the Revolutionary

have survived. Billings was a

War period, like William Billings, tanner by trade who ended up as a

composer of hymn tunes and short patriotic pieces that only recently have been rediscovered and republished. They break harmonic rules
occasionally and are sometimes a bit stiff in their contrapuntal joints, but despite that they have a rough honesty about them that keeps them alive for present-day listeners. Mention ought to be made of

two other composers of the middle nineteenth century: Louis Moreau Gottschalk of New Orleans and Carlos Gomes of Rio de Janeiro.
Both of them achieved fame abroad. Gottschalk led the
traveling piano virtuoso in the Lisztian manner.
life

of a

His importance

80

historically

comes from the

fact that he

is

the earliest composer

we

know of who based his compositions on what are loosely

American rhythms.
that
It is

called Latin

only the exceptional piece of Gottschalk's

is of original quality; others are too obviously designed to dazzle the paying public. Nevertheless, he represents the first North American composer who made us aware of the rich source material

to be derived

from music of Hispanic

origins. Carlos

Gomes was a

very successful opera composer, whose best works were performed at La Scala in Milan. His libretti were based on native Brazilian subject
matter, but the musical style in which they were treated was indistinguishable from the Italian models on which they were based. Gomes was, however, the first of his kind and remains to this day
country. national hero in Stephen Foster. He was a song writer rather than a composer, but he had a naturalness and sweetness of sentiment that transformed his melodies into the

a national hero in his

own

We

have our

own

equivalent of folk song. His simplicity and sincerity are not easily imitated, but it is that same simplicity and naturalness that has inspired certain types of our

own music

in the twentieth century. Bill-

ings and Foster have no exact counterparts

in the music of the

southern hemisphere. The closest parallel will be found in the work of two Latin Americans who were active toward the end of the
last

century

in Cuba.

Julian Aguirrc in Argentina and Ignacio Cervantes They both composed a type of sensitive, almost Chopin-

esque, piano piece with a Creole flavor, that was to be followed by so many others in the same manner in Latin America. Aguirre and

Cervantes give us the little piece in its pristine state, with a kind of disingenuous charm, before it was cheapened by the sentimentalities of numerous lesser composers.

music pickings are slim in the field of composed of serious pretensions during the eighteenth and nineteenth cenIf,

as

you

see, the

a compensatory richness of invention when we turn to the popular forms of music making. It is not surprising that
turies, there is

81

this

should be

so.

Popular music

crystallizes

long in advance of

composed concert music. After all, it reflects an unpremeditated and spontaneous welling up of musical emotion that requires no
training

and no musical superstructure. The

human

voice, with

perhaps a drum or a simple folk instrument as accompaniment, is all that is needed to express a wide gamut of feelings. Folk music in the Western Hemisphere awaits some master investigator who can
survey what
ties
is

an immense

terrain,

and

sort

out and collate similari-

and

differences in such a

way

as to illuminate this

whole

field for

us. I myself

vivid

from being expert in this area, but I do retain impressions of an unbelievably rich and comparatively little
far
territory of folk expression in Latin
like, parenthetically, to

am

known
I

America.

briefly a few examples mind- The Cuban guajira is one of these. It is a form of country music of the Cuban farmer. Over the strumming of a few simple guitar chords the singer tells a tale in a singular style of

should

mention

that

come

to

melodious recitative that

is

me it could be listened to for hours

flutes,

drenched in individuality. It seems to on end. The same holds true for

the deeply nostalgic music of the Peruvian Indian, played on ancient sometimes in pairs and with a curious heterophony of an

indescribable sadness.
is

The exhilarating rhythm

and

of the

bambuco

as

it

danced in Colombia epitomizes the

many popular dance

patterns

that alternate six-eight

effect.

three-quarter metrics with delightful

And

cannot mention dancing without remembering the

incredible frevo as I saw it "performed" in the streets of Pernambuco. Musically the jrev o demonstrates what occurs when the naive musical mind seizes upon a well-known form in this case the

ordinary street
figurations of a

march

and transforms

it

into a completely Afro-

Brazilian manifestation.

A similar transformation is worked upon the

Czerny piano exercise when a Cuban composer of popular music writes a danzon. Here pseudo elegance is the keynotean "elegance" of high life in the Havana of 1905. As a final
example
I

must mention the urban tango

as

one hears

it

in Argea-

82

tina,

few

assorted strings.

played in a hard-as-nails manner by several accordions and a This instrumental combination produces a

sonority of knife-edge sharpness, so that even the would-be senti-

mental sections are played without a glimmer of sentimentality. These different forms of folk and popular music briefly listed
here must stand for

many

others. Diverting

and

interesting as they

are, however, they are not

what

my musician friend

was referring

to

inquired after signs of imaginativeness in the music of the Western world. Confining ourselves to serious music, there seems
to

when he

me

no doubt

that if

we

are to lay claim to thinking inventively

in the music

of the

Americas our principal stake must be a rhythmic

one.
years now rhythm has been thought to be a special of the music of both Americas. Roy Harris pointed this province out a long time ago when he wrote: "Our rhythmic sense is less sym-

For some

metrical than the European rhythmic sense. European musicians are

trained to think of

rhythm

in

its

largest
its

common

we

are born with a feeling for

smallest units

denominator, while . do not

.
.

We

employ unconventional rhythms

avoid them
.

as a sophistical gesture;
possible to
it

we

cannot
precise

."

Let us see

if it is

make more

these remarks of Harris*

whether

is

possible to track

down

the source and nature of these so-called American rhythms. Most commentators are agreed that the source of our rhythmic
habits of

mind

are partly African

and

Since the partly Spanish.

was itself a melting pot of many races, with a of Arab culture from Africa, the Iberian and admixture strong African influences are most certainly interrelated. In certain counIberian peninsula
tries

the aboriginal Indians have contributed something through

their

own traditional rhythmic patterns, although this remains rather becomes more and more difficult to conjectural. As time goes on, it
Iberian influence. disengage the African from the

We
in

speak of

Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-American rhythms to circumvent this difficulty. Since Spain and Portugal have, by

an attempt

83

themselves, produced nothing like the rhythmic developments of

the Western countries,

vitality

only natural to conclude that we owe the and interest of our rhythms in large measure to the Negro in
it is

his

new environment.

It is

impossible to imagine

what American
in-

music would have been

stituted in

like if the slave trade

had never been

an

North and South America. The

slave ships brought a

instinctive

precious cargo of wonderfully gifted musicians, with

feeling for the

most complex rhythmic pulsations. The strength of

is

that musical impulse

today in the back streets of

as it

by the fact that it is just as alive Rio de Janeiro or Havana or New Orleans was two hundred years ago. Recent recordings of musical rites
attested to
certain African tribes of today

among

make

perfectly apparent the

direct musical line that connects the

Nanigos of today's Cuba or

Brazil with their forefathers of the African forest.

is the nature of this gift? First, a conception of rhythm not mental exercise but as something basic to the body's rhythmic impulse. This basic impulse is exteriorized with an insistence that

What

as

knows no measure, ranging from

a self-hypnotic

monotony

to a

riotous frenzy of subconsciously controlled poundings. Second,

an

unparalleled ingenuity in the spinning out of unequal metrical units in the unadorned rhythmic line. And lastly, and most significant, a

polyrhythmic structure arrived at through the combining of strongly independent blocks of sound. No European music I ever heard has

even approached the rhythmic intensities obtained by five different drummers, each separately hammering out his own pattern of sound,
so that they

enmesh one with another to produce a most* complex

metrical design. Oriental musics contain subtle cross-rhythms of

polyrhythmic implication, but

we

of the

Americas learned our

rhythmic lessons largely from the Negro. Put thus baldly it may be said, with some justice perhaps, that I am oversimplifying. But even
if I

overstate the case the fact remains that the

rhythmic

life

in the
host

scores of

Roy

Harris, William

Schuman, Marc

Blitzstein,

and a

of other representative

American composers

is

indubitably linked to

Negroid sources of rhythm.

A very different idea of the polymetric organization of pulsations

is

familiar in

European music.
is

How

could
is

it

be otherwise?

Any

music which

contrapuntally conceived

likely to

have melodic

lines that imply different rhythms, and these would naturally be heard simultaneously. But the point here is one of emphasis and degree. Few musicians would argue that the classical composers wrote music that was polyrhythmically arranged, in the sense in which
I

using the term here. Mozart and Brahms were far from being constrained by the bar line, as is made clear by certain remarkable

am

rhythmic ingenuity in their scores, and yet their normal with rhythm implies a regularity and evenness of metrical procedure music. design that we think of as typical of Western
sections of

Other examples of Western music, especially in choral literature, demonstrate an unconventional rhythmic organization. But for the I have in mind it will suffice to confine ourselves to two
purpose kinds of music, before the twentieth century, which appear to

me

to

be exceptional in this respect, that

polyrhythmic texture:

is,

in their concentration

on

composers as these English madrigals of Shakespeare's day. Exceptional I hope to show that American rhvthms_ar jpaniafid JiBPflU
different type ofjaJprf fr * r<L
*

and

Italian

the recently deciphered scores of French at the end of the thirteen hundreds; and the
are,

rnnrppt-inn

.tTifte

is~aowhe*e

duplicated.

The composers of the late fourteenth century some of whose music has recently been made available through a publication of the exhibit in their ballades and Mediaeval Academy of America
virelais

a most astonishing intricacy of rhythmic play. The editor of the volume in question, Willi Apel, suggests that these rhythms may "felt" by their composers, but were perhaps not have been
entirely
1

the result of "notational speculation.* It

is

their quite possible that

85

system of notation provided these composers with a new toy by of which they were enabled to experiment with all manner of unprecedented rhythmic combinations. But even as mere paper

means

and it is certainly doubtful whether they are only that hold great fascination for the present-day musician. they The rhythmic complexities of the Elizabethan madrigalists, on the
rhythms
other hand, were firmly grounded in English speech rhythms.

By

re-

taining these independently in each vocal part a delightful freedom of cross-rhythmic irregularities resulted. And since English is a
strongly accented language
tive values

with qualitative rather than quantitaa rich and supple variety of rhythm was obtained that
that time could match. Curiously

no other European school of

enough,
it is

only in the twentieth century that the rhythmic skill of

the Elizabethans has

come

to be understood

merly the very freedom of their a fault rather than a virtue. Wilfrid Mellers sums this up when he writes: ". . . the sixteenth century, which nineteenth century commentators
considered
rhythmically

and appreciated. Formetrical designs was thought to be

Vague,'

actually

developed

rhythm to the highest point it has reached in European history." And he adds: "Perhaps it is no accident that in England this supreme development of musical rhythm coincides with the develop-

ment
effect

of

from a

mature Shakespearean blank verse, which achieves its delicate tension between speech rhythm and metrical

accent."

important to point out that the polyrhythmic structures of the Elizabethan composers are different in kind from those that
It is

typify

a supple and

American music. They were concerned with the creation of fluid pulse in which no single strong beat dominated

the over-all rhythmic flow.

cally the deliberate setting,

Our polyrhythms

are

more
is

characteristi-

one against the other, of a steady pulse

in the small

with a free pulse.

Its

most familiar manifestation

jazz band combination, where the so-called rhythm section provides the ground metrics around which the melody instruments can freely

86

invent rhythms of their own. Added to this influence from popular sources was the general concentration on rhythmic intensities for

which our century

different kinds

is

notable.

The

interest in national

musics of

Russian, Hungarian, Scandinavian

with their

unconventional, rhythms acted as further stimulus in the breaking down of the tyranny of the bar line. Rhythmic factors became one
of the preponderant concerns of serious music in most European
countries.

In the Americas, however, the

typical feature of

our

own rhythms

was

this juxtaposition of steadiness, either implied or actually heard,

as against
stylistic

freedom of rhythmic invention. Take, for example, the device of "swinging" a tune. This simply means that over a

steady ground

rhythm the

the singer or instrumentalists toy with

beat, never being exactly on it, but either anticipating it or lagging behind it in gradations of metrical units so subtle that our notational

system has no way of indicating it. Of course you cannot stay off the beat unless you know where that beat is. Here again freedom is
interesting only in relation to regularity.

On

the other hand,

when

our better jazz bands wish to be rhythmically exact they come down on the beat with a trip-hammer precision that puts our symphonic
musicians to shame.
is

Thus

afl

awtbiar^cc o^ playing fast ,and .loose

mpmfflged which has tended to separate more wjth jhi. rhythm of lOT^^l pulse. and ^ tb^ AtTlQ1 r^-^^ The European is taught to think of rhythm as applying always to
as the articulation of that phrase. We, on the a phrase of music to thinking of rhythm as disembodied, so averse not are contrary, to speak, as if it were a frame to which certain tones might be added as an afterthought This is, of course, not meant to be taken as our part to think true, but merely indicates a tendency on
literally

of rhythms as separately pulsating quarter or eighth or sixteenth

notes
to

what Roy Harris means when he

says

we

feel at case

with

rhythm's "smallest units." Small units, when add up to musically unconventional totals of

combined, arc likely

five,

seven, or

87

two plus colleagues may protest and claim: "But we too write our music nowadays with the freedom of
eleven by contrast with the
familiar combinations of

more

two, or of three plus three.

Our European

less it is

unequal divisions of the bar lines." Of course they do; but nonetheonly necessary to hear a well-trained European musician

performing American rhythms to perceive the difference in rhythmic

conceptions.

Winthrop Sargeant was making a similar point in terms of the jazz player when he wrote: "The jazz musician has a remarkable
sense of subdivided

and subordinate

even though

it

be the slowest

accents in what he is playing, of sort jazz. This awareness of minute

itself

component metrical units shows

subtleties that are quite foreign to

in all sorts of syncopative

It
is,

European music.

I think,**
'classical'

he adds, "the lack of

this

awareness in most European

musicians that explains their well-known inability to play jazz in a

convincing manner," The special concern with rhythm that is characteristic of American music has had, as an offshoot, a rather more than usual interest
in percussive sounds, as such. Orchestras,
as

constituted in the

had only a comparatively few elementary noisemaking instruments to draw upon. In recent times the native musics of Cuba, Brazil, and Mexico have greatly enriched our percussive
nineteenth century
addition of an entire battery of noise-making instruments peculiar to those countries. Some of these are slowly

gamut through the

finding their

way

into our

more conventional musical

organizations.

New and distinctive sounds and noises have been added to what was

formerly the most neglected department in the departure from routine thinking occurred

symphony

orchestra.

when contemporary

composers began to write for groups of percussion instruments alone. Edgar Varese was a pioneer in that field in the twenties and his

example encouraged other composers to experiment along similar lines. I suppose we may consider Bela Bartok's Sonata for two pianos and two percussion players and Stravinsky's orchestration of

his choral ballet

players as further proof that

cal of

Les Noces for four pianos and thirteen percussion an interest in unusual sonorities is typiit is

our times. But

the musicians of North and Latin America

who come by

this interest

most

naturally,

and from

whom we may
per-

expect a continuing inventiveness and curiosity as to the percussive sound, Villa-Lobos once aroused my envy by me his

showing

sonal collection of native Brazilian percussion instruments. After a visit like that, one asks oneself: how did we ever manage to get along for so long a time with the bare boom of the bass drum and the

obvious crash of the cymbals? Before leaving the subject of rhythm-inspired music something should be said of a specialty of the jazz musician that has been greatly

admired, particularly by the European enthusiast.

to the improvisatory

I refer,

of course,

up the word
be

powers of the popular performer. If one looks "improvisation*' in the music dictionaries, reference will

the ability of composers, at certain periods of musical to history, improvise entire compositions in contrapuntal style. The
to

made

art of improvising

an accompaniment from a figured bass

line

was

an ordinary accomplishment for the well-trained keyboard

instru-

mentalist during the baroque period. But the idea of group improvisation was reserved for the jazz age. What gives it more than passing
interest is the

phonograph, for

it is

the phonograph that

fine flavor of

makes

it

possible to preserve

and thereby savor the

is

what

is

necessarily a lucky chance result. It

especially this phase of

our

popular music that has caused the French aficionado to become lyrical about le jazz hot.

When

you improvise
is

it is

axiomatic that you take risks and can't

foretell results.

When five or six musicians improvise simultaneously

is its

the result

even more fortuitous. That

charm.

The improvising

the very antithesis of that tendency in contemporary performer composition that demands absolute exactitude in the execution of the printed page. Perhaps Mr. Stravinsky and those who support his
is

view of rigorous control for the performer have been trying

to

sit

on the lid too hard. Perhaps the performer should be given more elbow room and a greater freedom of improvisatory choice. young composer recently conceived the novel idea of writing a "composi-

tion"

on graph paper which indicated where a chord was to be placed in space and when in time, but left to the performer freedom
to choose

moment

of execution.

whatever chords happened to strike his fancy at the Most jazz improvisers are not entirely free

because of the conventionality of jazz harmonic formulas, and partly because of over-used melodic formulas. Recent
cither, partly

*examples of group improvisations by Lennie Tristano and some few

other jazz

men

are remarkable precisely because they avoid both

these pitfalls.

When American musicians

improvise thus

freely,

and

we

are able to rehear their

work through

recordings, the Euro-

pean musician is the first to agree that something has been developed here that has no duplication abroad.
If

Negro and Iberian source

materials have exerted a strong hold

in the Americas, the influence of

on the imagination of musicians

slight. Tragically little

the musical culture of the aboriginal Indians seems to have been

bian civilizations,
instruments,

has survived from the music of pre-Columand what there is comes to us in the form of a few
scales that

and the

may be deduced from some

of them.

they sing and dance, produce a music that is difficult to authenticate. How much of what they do is the result of oral tradition and how much from the circumacquired Indians of today,
stances of their post-Conquest environment
is difficult

The

when

to say.

Their

music has been strongest in those countries where Indian culture was most highly developed and has been best
influence
serious

on

preserved, such as

Mexico and Peru. In our own country, where the

Indian had not reached the cultural level of the Incas or Aztecs, only a few composers were hopeful of finding stimulus in the thematic
materials available to them. Despite the efforts of Arthur Farwell his group of composer friends, and despite the Indian Suite of

and
Ed-

90

ward MacDowell, nothing

standable that the
first

really fructifying resulted It is underattrac-

Americans would have a sentimental

tion for our composers, especially at a time

when

the American

composer himself was searching for some indigenous musical expression. But our composers were obviously incapable of identifying 'themselves
to
sufficiently

with such primitive source materials as

make these convincing when heard out of context. The contemporary Chilean composer, Carlos Isamitt, was more successful in a somewhat analogous situation. The Araucanian Indians of southern Chile are not a highly developed people like the
Incas of Peru, and yet Isamitt, by living

among them and immersing

himself in their culture, was able to draw something of their independent spirit into his own symphonic settings of their songs and
dances.

But the

principal imprint of the Indian personality

its

deepest

is to be found in the music of our hemisphere in the work present-day school of Mexican composers, and especially of Carlos Chavez and Silvestre Revueltas. With them it is not so

reflection in the

much

a question of themes as it is of character. Even without previous knowledge of the Amerindian man, his essential, nature may
scores.

be inferred from their

The music

of

Chavez
it

deliberate, at times almost fatalistic in tone;

strong and bespeaks the sober

is

nothing can be so expressive by virtue of its inexpressivity. Chavez* music To me it possesses an Indian is, above all, profoundly non-European.
quality that
is at

relentstolid and Ethic Amerindian. It is music of persistence and uncompromising; there is nothing of the humble Mexican stark and clear peon here. It is music that knows its own mind and, if one may say so, earthy in an abstract way. There are no frills, extraneous; it is like the bare wall of an adobe hut, which

and

less

the same time curiously contemporary in

spirit.

Sometimes

it

strikes

me

as the most

know, not in the

superficial sense,

I truly contemporary music comes it but in the sense that

91

closest to expressing the

fundamental

reality of

modern man

after

he

has been stripped of the accumulations of centuries of aesthetic experiences.

It is

illuminating to contrast the

countryman, the late Silvestre Revueltas,

sing of a

work of Chavez with that of his whose vibrant, tangy scores

side of the

more

colorful, perhaps a

more mestizo

Mexican

character. Revueltas

was a man of

the people, with a wonderfully

keen ear for the sounds of the people's music. He wrote no large symphonies or sonatas, but many short orchestral sketches with fanciful

names such as Ventanas, Esquinas, Janitzio (Windows, Corners, the last named after the little island in Lake Patzcuaro. }anitzio)
His
list

of compositions

would be longer than

it is,

were

it

not for

the fact that he died

pieces that

when he was

forty years old, in 1940. But the

he

left

a Mexican abundance and

hear.

us are crowded with an abundance and vitality that make them a pleasure to vitality

In seeking for qualities of the

specifically

Western imagination

it

two composers of South and North America who share many traits in common, and especially a certain richness and floridity of invention that has no exact counterpart in
seems to
that there are

me

Europe. I am thinking of the Brazilian, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and of the American from Connecticut, Charles Ives.

Leaving aside questions of relative value, it seems to me one would have to turn to Herman Melville's biblical prose or the oceanic verse
of

Walt Whitman

to find an analogous largess. Is

it illusory

to con-

nect this munificence of imagination in both composers with the scope and freedom of a new world? They share also the main draw-

back of an overabundant imagination: the inability to translate the many images that crowd their minds into scores of a single and unified vision.

In the case of Villa-Lobos there

is

strong temptation to

identify his

crowded imagination with the luxuriance of a jungle landscape; the very sound of the music suggests it. In Ives we sense

92

the strain of reaching for the transcendental and the universal that was native to his part of America.

Do both Ives
de Tocqueville,

and Villa-Lobos

suffer

from an

inflated style? Alexis

who

visited our shores in the eighteen thirties, re-

ported that the "inflated style" was typical for American orators and writers. There must be something about big countries Brazil,
in case you've forgotten,
is

larger than territorial

United

States

something that encourages creative artists yond all normal limits. The lack of restraint made customary by tradition plays a role here. And when that lack of restraint is combined with a copious and fertile imagination they together seem to to engender a concomitant lack of self-criticism. Is it at all possible

to expand themselves be-

be carefully
erence? It

one possesses no traditional standard of refwould hardly seem so. The power in both men comes
selective if

through in
judgment.
that

to exercise critical selfspite of their inability, at times,

It is a

power of

originality of a curiously indigenous

kind

makes

their

music appear

to

be so profoundly of

this

hemi-

sphere.

There

exist several parallelisms

between the work of Ives and of

Villa-Lobos.
sionistic

At one point
to.

in their careers they both used impresrealistic scenes of local life.

methods

suggest

With

this

there

was

the tendency to give their pieces

homespun
is

tides: Ives's

at Stocfyridge symphonic picture of the Housatonic

matched by

Villa-Lobos' Little Train of Caipira. Both

men
n^

ing to make the 'Sp^fir tidily jsyTT^fo both were technically adventurous, experimenting with polytonal and polyrhythmic effects long before they had had contact with

^ nmve^^ They

have^a love JQLJrv-

was especially reEuropean examples of these new resources. (Ives markable in this respect.) And they both retain central positions in
to the history of their country's music because of their willingness

models which for so long had satisfied ignore academic European other composers in their respective lands. And yet, in spite of these

93

many
sonal

similarities, it is characteristic that their

music

is utterly

per-

and

distinct,

one from the

other.

and occasional grandiloquence of Ives and Villa-Lobos, but no less representative of another and different aspect of America, is the music of Virgil Thomson and
In strong contrast
to the floridity

Douglas Moore. There

quite like
it

nothing in serious European music that is nothing so downright plain and bare as their comis

tunes and square rhythms and Sunday-school harmonies. Evocative of the homely virtues of rural America, their work may be said to constitute a "midwestern style" in American

merce with simple

music. Attracted by the unadorned charm of a revivalist hymn, or a sentimental ditty, or a country dance, they give us the musical
counterpart of a regionalism that is familiar in our literature and painting but is seldom found in our symphonies and concertos.

Both these men,

needless to say, are sophisticated musicians, so that

ture of faith in their

their frank acceptance of so limited a musical vocabulary is a gesown heritage. Both have best exploited this

scores.

type of midwestern pseudo primitivism in their operas and film Thomson especially, with the aid of Gertrude Stein's texts in
of

Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother

Us All, has

succeeded

in giving a highly original twist to the disarming simplicities of his musical materials. Here, in a new guise, it should be recalled, is an

idea of earlier American composers like Gilbert and Farwell, who believed that only by emphasizing our own crude musical realities,

and

resisting the blandishments of the highly developed musical

cultures of other peoples, would

we

ever find our

own

indigenous

musical speech.
I realize that there are undoubtedly

among my

readers those

who

disapprove heartily of this searching for "Americanisms** in the works of our contemporaries. Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and

Samuel Barber
"American"

are composers

whose works are not

strikingly

in the special sense of this chapter,

mary of the American

imagination at

and yet a full sumwork in music such as this

94

discussion does not pretend to be would naturally stress the imof their work. There is a universalist ideal, port exemplified by their symphonies and chamber music, that belittles the nationalistic note

and

stresses

"predominately musical values." I myself lose patience

with the European music lover who wants our music to be all new, brand-new, absolutely different. They forget that we are, as Waldo Frank once put it, the "grave of Europe," by which I suppose

he meant to suggest that we have inherited everything they are and know; and we shall have to absorb it and make it completely our

own

before

we

Nevertheless, there

can hope for the unadulterated American creation. is a deep psychological need to look for present

to the

signs of that creation. I know this to be true from my own reactions music of other nations, especially nations whose music is still

makes it characteristically itself. This attitude may be narrow and wrong, but it is an unpremeditated reaction which rightfully should be balanced
unformed, for
inevitably look for the note that

we

by the

limited to

any country are to be an obviously indigenous expression. In a lecture delivered sometime before 1907, the American comrealization that not all the composers of

poser

Edward MacDowell

said:

"What we must

arrive at is the

youthful optimistic vitality and the undaunted tenacity of spirit that characterizes the American man. That is what I hope to see

echoed in American music."

fulfilled

think MacDowell's hope has been

if

partly, at least
is

for

there

is

a school of

American

keynote. But the times have certainly composers, optimism mere and optimism seems insufficient. already caught up with us, If it is not to be mere boyish exuberance it must be tempered, as it is in the work of our best composers, by a reflection of the American
its

man, not as MacDowell knew him at the turn of the century, but as he appears to us with all his complex world about him. Imagination will be needed to echo that

man

in music.

95

CHAPTER SIX

The Composer in Industrial America

is IT

SHEER CHANCE,

sometimes wonder, that no one has

ever published an adequate critical

summary

of the whole field o

American

serious composition?

There

are, of course, several

com-

pendiums containing mostly biographical data and lists of works, but no one has yet attempted to summarize what our composers have accomplished, nor to say what it feels like to be a composer in
industrial

America.

What

sort of creative life the

is

composer

leads,

what

his relation to the

community

or should be
life

these

and

many

other interesting facets of the composer's

have hardly been

explored.

My
to

colleague, the

American composer

Elliott Carter, once said

an imaginative mind could possibly conceive itself a composer of serious music in an industrial comlike the United States. Actually it seems to me that we munity j ** n ^"^^-.'^^^^ .- ^^^ Americans who compose alternate between states ofSuntflftat make
that in his opinion only
,

me

composition appear "txTBe' the 'most natural and ordinary pursuit

and 62ier moo3s wheiTit

seefns completely extraneous to the pri-

mary

interest^ pf^our Industrial environment.

By temperament
community

lean to the side that considers composing in our

as a

natural force

something

to

be taken for granted

rather than

the freakisfi occupation of a very small minority of our citizens.

judging the situation dispassionately, I can see that we not to take it for granted. We must examine the ought place of the artist and composer in our kind of society, partly to take account
yet,

And

of

its effect

on the
is

artist

and

also as a

itself.

The

fact

that

an industrial

commentary on our society society must prove itself capable

of producing creative artists of stature, for

would be a
society.

its inability to do so serious indictment of the fundamental tenets of that

From the moment that one doesn't take composing for granted in our country, a dozen questions come to mind. What is the composer's life in America? Does it differ so very much from that of
the European or even the Latin American composer of today? Or from the life of United States composers in other periods? Are our

and purposes the same as they always have been? These questions and many related ones are continually being written about
objectives

by the

literary critic,
I

but they are infrequently dealt with in the

can best consider them by relating them to my own experience as a creative artist in America. Generalizing from that experience it may be possible to arrive at certain conclusions.
musical world.

This engenders an autobiographical mood, but

avoid
it if I

it is

impossible to

am

to use myself as guinea pig.

My own experience I think

of as typical because I

urban community (in my case, New an environment that had little or no connection with serious music.

grew up in an York City) and lived in

an unsuspected never before heard

My discovery of music was rather like coming upon

city

like discovering Paris or

Rome if you had

excitement of discovery was enhanced because I came upon only a few streets at a time, but before long I began to suspect the full extent of this city. The instinctual drive
of their existence.

The

toward the world of sound must have been very strong in my since it triumphed over a commercially minded environment
so far as I could
tell,

case,

that,

had never given a thought

life,

to art or to art ex-

pression as

a way of

97

* plane which had no parallel in the rest of my daily life T*- " am P ing to a school friend, after hearing one of my first " certs in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in the days bef and recorded symphonies, what a large orchestra sounded rt forgotten my exact description except for the

my early high school v myself digging out scores from the dusty upstairs shelves of tfT C old Brooklyn Public Library on Montague Street; here k* of which my immediate neighbors were completely unawo "tvv<4re. nr^ I. nose 1 r i T were the impressionable years of exploration. I recall night u mC alone singing to myself the songs of Hugo Wolf li

Scenes come back to

me

from

-11

^^

punch

then,

and then,"

I said, after outlining

how

line-

ORchestra came

manifesting T.Jw time I openly admi^ A emitted to another j j i_ human being that I intended to become a composer of set oneself up as a rival of the masters: what a darin !i" ^' heard-of project for a Brooklyn youth! It was

were gradually marshaled little by little, in." This was musical glory
all I
.

instrumental f "and then th

the

\^

Most of
,

remember the

IT-

first

summe
this
"

ti

was

fifteen years old

and the
at

friend

who heard

fession

might have laughed

i

me. Fortunately,
is
r
.,

^ C0n"
T
1
" was Un un-

The
i

curious thing, in retrospect,

-t__

disturbed by the ordinariness of the

didn't occur to
analysis it

L-.^_._I__J

j- ...

the extent to nrf^k wnicti , , r workadav TO^IJ "'uriQ

its

me

about

to revolt against

me
i.
,

It

what
side

it

^^7 ffiY? .W^iPg

had
litde or

was the only world I knew, simply a was. Musk Jor me was not a refuge or o ^ ~ ~~~ -m

crassness, f and I

^
-

ast
.

to

*.

whom
own

^^^^ music and

concern.

.. ?! none, I couldn't help ^ r feeling a iTn-u uc

^

13

own

0-,-^f.^a consolation* it " existence, where th TiT

"
'

tt
-

their

As

ir for

art in general

myself, I could not

meant nothing K * u ^^~^o' out tnat ii><vi-< imagine

years Jati t
w

sorry tor those

"wac
7-

'

^Ut:"

It

seems to

me

now, some

tfairty-five

the

^^
t

life

."

buMngjiat v

about,mgLdid not touch, Musicwas like shut out the street

'

thc*^^ "F^* t -a noises.^Sh^r^r y f ^ ? -S^ ^c tnc noises natu-

ral to a street; but it

was good

to

have the quiet of the great build-

ing available, not as a haven or a hiding place, but as a different

and more meaningful place. Here at the start, I imagine,

is

first

difference

from the European

musician, whose contacts with serious music, even

when

delayed,

must seem
lish,

entirely natural, since "classical music"

is

German, Eng-

has roots, in other words, in French, Italian, and so forth young composer's own background. In my America, "classical" music was a foreign importation. But the foreignness of serious
the

music did not trouble

tions

me

at all in those days:

my

early preoccupaI derived

were with technique and expressivity. I found that profound satisfaction from exteriorizing inner feelings
surprisingly concrete ones

at times,

and giving them shape. The scale on which I worked at first was small two or three page piano pieces but the intensity of feeling was real. It must have been or songs
fhfr

reality nf fhis inner intensity I

speak of whJcbLjproduccd the

was capable of sogif ^ay wn'fi'q^r a longer, and rnnvjffinn perhaps, significant work. There is no other way of explaining a young artist's self-assurance. It is not founded on faith alone (and of course there can be no certainty about it), but some real kernel

th^

there

must

be,

My
me

years in

acutely

later work will grow. the from age of twenty to twenty-three made Europe conscious of the origins of the music I loved. Most of

from which the

the time I spent in France, where the characteristics of French culture are evident at every turn. The relation of French music to the
life

around

me became
n1

increasingly manifest.
;

that
to

flgyLr**rc

^T^^'nn n

iV

*ht r^mrhmy

t"

frft

my own

hark-hnrnfi environment took hold of

me. The convic-

grew inside me that the two things that seemed always to have must music and the life about me been so separate in America write to I wanted music the to make be made to touch. This desire
tion

come out of the life I had lived in America became a preoccupation of mine in the twenties. It was not so very different from the ex-'

99

pcrience of other

young American

artists,

in other fields,

who had
all

gone abroad to study in that period; in greater or lesser degree, of us discovered America in Europe.

we

In music our problem was a special one: it really began when started to search for what Van Wyck Brooks calls a usable past.

In those days the example of our American elders in music was not readily at hand. Their music was not often played except perhaps and even when publocally. Their scores were seldom published,

were expensive and not easily available to the inquiring student. We knew, of course, that they too had been to Europe as students, absorbing musical culture, principally in Teutonic centers
lished,

of learning. Like us, they came home full of admiration for the treasures of European musical art, with the self-appointed mission
of expounding these glories to their countrymen. But when I think of these older men, and especially of the most

John Knowles Paine, George Chadwick, who made up the Boston school Parker Horatio Arthur Foote, of composers at the turn of the century, I am aware of a fundamental difference between their attitude and our own. Their attiimportant
tude was founded upon an admiration for the European art work and an identification with it that made the seeking out of any
other art formula a kind of sacrilege.
tinental art

among them

The

challenge of the Con-

work was

not: can

we do

better or can

we

also

do some-

thing truly our own, but merely, can we do as well. But of course one never does "as well." Meeting Brahms or Wagner on his own terms one is certain to come off second best. They loved the master-

works of Europe's mature culture not like creative personalities but like the schoolmasters that many of them became. They accepted
an
artistic

authority that came that authority.

from abroad, and seemed intent on

do not mean to underestimate what they accomplished for the beginnings of serious American musical composition. Quite the
I

contrary.

Within the framework of the German musical

tradition

100

in

trained, they composed industristandards of workmanship, and enprofessional a o seriousness in their students that long outcouraged purpose

which most of them had been

ously, they set

up

But judged purely on their merits as composers, estimable though their symphonies and operas and chamber works are, they were essentially practitioners in the conventional idiom of their own day, and therefore had little to offei
lasted their
activities.

own

us of a younger generation. No doubt it is trite to say so, but it ii none the less true, I think, that a genteel aura hangs about them.

There were no Dostoyevskys, no Rimbauds among them; no one expired in the gutter like Edgar Allan Poe. It may not be gracious
to say so, but I fear that the

New

England group of composers

of

overgentlemanly, too well-mannered, and their culture reflected a certain museumlike propriety
all their instincts

that time were in

and bourgeois solidity. In some strange way Edward MacDowell, a contemporary of theirs, managed to escape some of the pitfalls of the New Englanders. Perhaps the fact that he had been trained from an early age in the shadow of the Conservatoire at Paris and had spent many subsequent years abroad gave him a familiarity in the presence of Europe's great works that the others never acquired- This is pure surmise on my part; but it is fairly obvious that, speaking generally, his music shows more independence of spirit, and certainly

more personality than was true of his colleagues around 1900. It was the music of MacDowell, among Americans, that we knew
best,

even in 1925. 1 cannot honestly say that

we

dealt kindly with

his

work

at that period; his central position as "foremost

composer

of his generation" made him especially apt as a target for our impatience with the weaknesses and orthodoxies of an older generation. Nowadays, although his music is played less often than it

once was, one can appreciate more

sensitive

justly

what MacDowell had: a

of his

and individual poetic gift, and a special turn of harmony own. He is most successful when he is least pretentious. It

101

seems

likely that for

a long time MacDowelTs

name

will be secure

in the annals of
as

American music, even though his direct influence a composer can hardly be found in present-day American music.
search for a usable past, for musical ancestors, led us to exclosely,

The

amine most

as

was

natural, the

music of the

men who
was
active

immediately preceded our

after the death of

own time

the generation that

MacDowell

in 1908. It

was not until about that

period that some of our composers were able to shake off the allpervasive German influence in American music. With Debussy and
Ravel, France

had reappeared as a world figure on the international musical scene, and French impressionism became the new influence. Composers like Charles Martin Loeffler and Charles T. Griffes
were the
radicals of their day.

But we

see

now

that if the earlier

Boston composers were prone to take refuge in the sure values of the academic world, these newer men were in danger of escaping
to a kind of artistic ivory tower. As composers, they seemed quite content to avoid contact with the world they lived in. Unlike the

poetry of Sandburg or the novels of Dreiser or Frank Morris, so conscious of the crude realities of industrial America, you will find

no

picture of the times in the music of Loeffler or Griffes.

that their

The

dan-

ger was
realities

music would become a mere adjunct

to the

grim

of everyday life, a mere exercise in polite living. They loved the picturesque, the poetic, the exotic medievalisms, Hin-

stressed the "decadent"

duisms, Gregorian chants, chinoiseries. Even their early note in their music.

critics

Despite this fin-de-stide tendency, Charles Griffes

deserves to be remembered.

is

name

that

He

represents a

new

type of composer

as contrasted with the men of Boston. Griffes was just an ordinary small-town boy from Elmira, New York. He never knew the important musical people of his time and he never managed to get

outside Tarrytown,

a better job than that of music teacher in a private school for boys, New York. And yet there are pages in his

music where

we

recognize the presence of the truly inspired

mo-

102

ment. His was the work of a sentient

ing, for
its

human

being, forward-look-

and

to

period, with a definite relationship to the impressionists Scriabin. No one can say how far Grififes might have deif his

veloped

career

had not been

cut short by death in his thirty-

sixth year, in 1920.

What he

gave those of us

who came

after bin?

was a sense

of the adventurous in composition, of being thoroughly alive to the newest trends in world music and to the stimulus that

might be derived from such contact. Looking backward for first signs of the native composer with an' interest in the American scene one comes upon the sympathetic
figure of

Henry F.

Gilbert.

His

special concern

was the use of Negro

material as a basis for serious composition. This idea had been given great impetus by the arrival in America in 1892 of the Bo-

hemian composer, Antonin Dvorak. His writing of the

New World

Symphony
gestive of
eral of the

in the

Negro

world, using melodic material strongly sugspirituals, awakened a desire on the part of sev-

new

color, characteristic of

younger Americans of that era to write music of local one part, at least, of the American scene.

Henry

was a Boston musician, but he had little in common with his fellow New Englanders, for it was his firm conviction that it was better to write a music in one's own way, no matter how
Gilbert

modest and

than to compose large works after a foreign model. Gilbert thought he had solved the problem of an indigenous expression by quoting Negro or Creole themes
restricted its style

might

be,

in his overtures
tive

and

ballets.
level,

What he

and pioneering

but the fact

did was suggestive on a primiis that he lacked the technique

and musicianship for expressing What, after all, does it mean

cowboy tune

his ideals in a significant

to

make

use of a

hymn

way. tune or a

in a serious musical composition? There is nothing inherently pure in a melody of folk source that cannot be effecmaterials ought tively spoiled by a poor setting. The use of such

never to be a mechanical process. They can be successfully handled only by a compose." who is able to identify himself with, and reex-

103

press in his

own

the material.

terms, the underlying emotional connotation of hymn tune represents a certain order of feeling:
is

simplicity, plainness, sincerity, directness. It

the reflection of those

qualities in a stylistically appropriate setting, imaginative

and un-

conventional and not tunes reality

mere quotation, that gives the use of folk and importance. In the same way, to transcribe the
its essential

cowboy tune so that

quality

is

preserved

is

a task for

the imaginative composer with a professional grasp of the problem.

In any event,
efforts of

we

in the twenties were

is

little

influenced by the
after bigger

Henry

Gilbert, for the truth

that

we were

game. Our concern was not with the quotable hyinn or spiritual: we wanted to find a music that would speak of universal things in a vernacular of American speech rhythms. We wanted to write
music with popular music far behind a largeness of utterance wholly representative of the country that
music on a
level that left

envisaged. curious quirk of musical history the man who was a music that came close to approximating writing such a music

Whitman had
Through a

our needs

was

entirely

unknown

to

us. I

sometimes wonder

whether the story of American music might have been different if Charles Ives and his work had been played at the time he was comroughly the twenty years from 1900 to 1920. Perhaps not; perhaps he was too far in advance of his own generation. As it turned out, it was not until the thirties that he was
posing most of
it

discovered by the younger composers.

As time goes

on, Ives takes

on a more and more legendary

poser
is

character, for his career as

com-

surely

unique not only in America but in musical history

I

anywhere. In the preceding chapter tion in the music of Ives,

side,

mentioned the abundance of imaginalargeness of vision,

its

its

experimental

and the composer's inability to be self-critical. Here I want to be more specific and stress not so much the mystical and transcen-

104

dental side of his nature

the side that

makes him most

nearly

akin to

men

like

Thoreau and Emerson

but rather the element

in his musical speech that accounts for his acceptance of the vernacular as an integral part of that speech. That acceptance, it seems
to

me, was a highly

Ives

significant

moment

in our musical develop-

ment.

the region with

had an abiding interest in the American scene as lived in, which he was familiar. He grew up in Danbury,

he graduated in
spent
life

Connecticut, but completed his schooling at Yale University, where 1898. Later he moved on to New York, where he

many years as a successful man of business. Throughout one gets the impression that he was deeply immersed in
roots.

his his

American

He was

fascinated by typical features of

New

England small-town life: the village church choir, the Fourth of July celebration, the firemen's band, a barn dance, a village election, George Washington's Birthday. References to all these things and

many

similar ones can be

found in

his sonatas

and symphonies.

Ives treated this subject matter imaginatively rather than literally.

Don't think for an instant that he was a mere provincial, with a happy knack for incorporating indigenous material into his many
scores.
is

No,

Ives

was an

intellectual,

and what

is

most impressive

not his evocation of a local landscape but the over-all range and comprehensiveness of his musical mind.

formal coherence in the

Nevertheless Ives had a major problem in attempting to achieve Wdst of so varied a musical material. He

did not by any means entirely succeed in this difficult assignment. At its worst his music is amorphous, disheveled, haphazard like
the music of a

man who

is

ferent thoughts. Simultaneity of impression

incapable of organizing his many difwas an idea that in-

trigued Ives all his life. As a boy he never got over the excitement of hearing three village bands play on different street corners at the

same

time. Ives tried a part solution for reproducing this simulta-

neity of effect

which was subsequently dubbed "musical perspective"

105

by one music

critic.

He

of this device.
1907, and, like

It is called

composed a work which is a good example "Central Park in the Dark," dates from
is

many

of Ives's work,

tion of a realistic scene.

The composer thought up a

based on a poetic transcripsimple but

ingenious method for picturing this scene, thereby enhancing what was in reality a purely musical intention. Behind a velvet curtain

he placed a muted string orchestra to represent the sounds of the night, and before the curtain he placed a woodwind ensemble which

made city The effect

perspective

noises.
is

Together they evoke Central Park in the dark. almost that of musical cubism, since the music seems

to exist independently

on

different planes.

This so-called musical

to create

makes use of musical realism in order

an im-

pressionistic effect.

have an opportunity

composer will not be known until we judge his output as a whole. Up to now, only a part of his work has been deciphered and published. But whatever the total impression may turn out to be, his example

The

full stature of Ives as

to

in the twenties helped us not at all, for our knowledge of his was sketchy so little of it had been played.

work

Gradually, by the late twenties, our search for musical ancestors

had been abandoned or forgotten, partly, I suppose, because we that we had none. We became convinced that there were none were on our own, and something of the exhilaration that goes with
being on one's
attitude

own accompanied

our every action. This

self-reliant

by the open resistance to new music that was typical in the period after the First World War. Some of the conservative composers who opposition came from our elders

was

intensified

undoubtedly thought of us as noisy upstarts, carriers of dangerous ideas. The fun of the fight against the musical philistines, the sorties

and

strategies, the converts

critics partly

won, and the hot arguments with

dull-

witted

explain the particular excitements of that pe-

riod. Concerts of

a gamble: who could say whether Acario Catapos of Chile, or Josef Hauer of Vienna, or Kaikhosru

new music were

106

England was the coining man of the future? It was an a time when fresh resources had come to music and were being tested by a host of new composers with enSorabji of

adventuresome time

ergy and ebullient

spirits.

Sometimes

it

seems to

me

that

it

was the composers who were

the very last to take cognizance of a marked change that came over the musical scene after the stimulating decade of the twenties. The

first

change was brought about, of course, by the introduction for the time of the mass media of distribution in the field of music.

First

came the phonograph, then the radio, then the sound film, then the tape recorder, and now television. Composers were slow to realize that they were being faced with revolutionary changes:

trial

they were no longer merely writing their music within an indusframework; industrialization itself had entered the framework

of what had previously been our comparatively restricted musical life. One of the crucial questions of our times was injected: how are we to make contact with this enormously enlarged potential
audience, without sacrificing in any ards?

way

the highest musical stand-

bers.

Jacques Barzun recently called this question the problem of num"A_hugc increase in the number of people* in the number of
rfcsiffg qy^ satisfactions. is the gprat gr fact." Cornpnsrrfi ^ free to ignore this "great new: Jfort". if

nf

new

they choose; no OP** is fnfrjpg the^to^ake_dieja.rge new public into account. But it would be foolish to side-step what is essentially

new situation in music: foolish because musical history teaches that when the audience changes, music changes. Our present condia
tion
is

very analogous to that in the

field of

books. Readers arc

that
is

generally quick to distinguish between the

book

a best-seller

by type and the book that is meant for the restricted audience of intellectuals. In between there is a considerable body of literature
that appeals to the intelligent reader with broad interests. Isn't a similar situation likely to develop in music? Aren't you able even

107

now

to

name

few

best-seller

tejnl^thft complex piece entirely familiar musical manifestation.

compositions of recent vintage? Qcrthe piece that is "born difficult" is an

But

it is

the intelligent

lis-

tcne

with broad interests

who

"lay ^YCj^LIfJi^fflffi ing habits aadjbcopme. xoQrc. rr>n<trT nn ^y AWtf^cf.lh'* ne for whom thg^arf writing.
'

are difficult to define.

Qmp

Hag tasti^ gf jE^priynt time which

ngpr<

W thinkw audience

In the

past,

when

have proffered similar gratuitous advice on

have often been misinterpreted. Composers of abstruse music thought they were under attack, and claimed that complexithis subject, I
ties

were natural to them

I

"born that way," a contention that I

never meant to dispute.

was simply pointing out that

certain

modes of expression may not need the full gamut of post-tonal implications, and that certain expressive purposes can be appropriately
carried out only
I see
it,

by a simple texture in a basically tonal scheme. As music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse
is

than music that

Others took

born simple.

my

meaning

to be a justification for the

watering
accept-

down

of their ideas for the purposes of making their able for mass consumption. Still others have used my
tions to prove that I

works

own

composi-

make

a sharp distinction between those written

in a "severe" and those in a "simple" style. The inference is sometimes drawn that I have consciously abandoned my earlier dissonant manner in order to popularize my style and this notion is ap-

plauded enthusiastically; while those of a different persuasion arc convinced that only my so-called "severe" style is really serious.
there never was so sharp ^dichotomy between the various works I have written. DifFer^pt purppggg p rf >rijirr- / ffiferent kinfo nf wnrlr that i'g all The new mechanization of music's
t

In

my own mind

media has emphasized functional requirements, very often in terms of a large audience. That need would naturally induce works in a
simpler,

more

direct style than

was customary for concert works of

108

it did not by any means lessen my interest in works in an idiom that might be accessible only to culticomposing vated listeners. As I look back, it seems to me that what I was try-

absolute music. But

ing for in the simpler works was only partly the writing of compositions that might speak to a broader audience. More than that
they gave me an opportunity to try for a more homespun musical idiom, not so different in intention from what attracted me in more
hectic fashion in

my

jazz-influenced works of the twenties. In other

in question,

words,

it

was not only musical functionalism that was

but also musical language. This desire of mine to find a musical vernacular, which, as language, would cause no difficulties to ing more than a recrudescence of
connection between music and the

my listeners, was perhaps nothmy old interest in making a

about me.

life

Our

serious

com-

of posers have not been signally successful at making that kind

connection. Oblivious to their surroundings, they live in constant

communion with
rigueur for

great works, which in turn seems to

to attempt to emulate the great

make

it

dc

them

works by writing

equivalent plane. Do not misunderstand me. I entirely approve of the big gesture for those who can^carry it off. What seems to me a waste of time is the self-deceiving "major"

one of

their

own on an

effort

on the part of many composers who might

better serve the

community by the writing

of a good piece for high school band.

Young
to

making

themselves composers are especially prone to overreaching ambitious of the works, the writing gesture by

grand

often in a crabbed style, that have

realistic

no future whatever.

It is

un-

and a

useless aping, generally of foreign models. I

have no

illusion, of course, that this

But

fr* to

riii

nlr

^ qt

good

advice will be heeded by anyone.

?n

my

nwn work

couraged the notion that a composer writes for jlifferent purposes and from different viewpoints. It is a satisfaction to know that in

Kid or in a film score like the"composing of a ballet Iike~B*7/y the

109

Our Town, and perhaps

for

in the Lincoln Portrait, I have touched off

myself and others a kind of musical naturalness that we have

badly needed along with "great" works. An honest appraisal of the position of the American composer in

our society today would find much to be proud of, and also much to complain about. The worst feature of the composer's life is the fact that he does not feel himself an integral part of the musical

community. There is no deep need for his activities as composer, no passionate concern in each separate work as it is written. (I
personal experience, but of my observation of the general scene.) When a composer is played he is usually surrounded by an air of mild approval; when he is not played no

speak

now

not of

my own

one demands

any case are rare events, with the result that very few composers can hope to earn a livelihood from the music they write. The music-teaching profession has
to hear him. Performances in

therefore been their principal resource,

an activity reserved for their spare time.

plaints, I

and the composing of music These are familiar comlittle

know, perhaps immemorial ones; but they show

sign of abatement, and in the aggregate they make composers as a group an unhappy lot, with the outward signs of unhappiness

ranging from open resentment to inner frustration.

On

the brighter side of the ledger there

numerically there are

were. There
dations and
is

many more

active

the cheering fact that composers than there once

is

private encouragement
prizes

on the part of

certain foun-

individuals, and

and commissions are much

more frequently given. An occasional radio station or recording company will indicate a spurt of interest. The publishers have shown
awakening, by future of unknowns. The music
signs of gratifying

a willingness to invest in the

critics

are,

more open-minded in

their attitude,

more ready

generally speaking, to applaud than

they were a quarter of a century ago. And best of all, there appears to be a continual welling up of new talents from all parts of

America that augurs well for our composing future.

no

In the

final analysis the

composer must look for keenest

in the creative act
itself.

satisfac-

tion in the

work

that he does

In

many

important respects creation in an industrial community is little different from what it has always been in any community. What, after all, do I put down when I put down notes? I put down a reflection

An
we

of emotional states: feelings, perceptions, imaginings, intuitions. emotional state, as I use the term, is compounded of everything

background, our environment, our convictions. Art Beparticularizes and makes actual these fluent emotional states.
are: our

cause

it

particularizes

and because
it
it

it

makes

actual, it gives
it

meaning

to la condition humaine. If pose. I

gives

meaning

necessarily has pur-

would even add that

One

has moral purpose. of the primary problems for the composer in an industrial

society like that of

America

is

fication for the life of art in the lite about

tc^achievc integratioi^ to find justimm. Tmust believe in

the ultimate good of the world and of life as I live it in order to create a work of art. Negative emotions cannot produce art; positive

emotions bespeak an emotion about something. I cannot imand that is true agine an art work without implied convictions;
also for music, the
It is this

most

abstract of the arts.

need for a positive philosophy which is a little frightencannot make art out of fear ing in the world as we know it. You can make it only out of affipa^tivc beliefs. This and
suspicion; you sense of affirmation can be
for the rest
it

paiftrom one's inner being; must be continually reactivated by a creative and yea-

had only

in

one. The artist should feel himsaying atmosphere in the life about art self affirmed and buoyed up by his community. In other words, to in the mean something, sense, must deepest and the life of art

the everyday citizen.

When that happens, America will have achieved

artist will

a maturity to which every sincere

have contributed.

Ill

Postscript
THE NORTON PROFESSORSHIP COMMITTEE
Suggested to IHC the

performance of a certain amount of live music after each of my talks. I readily agreed, for I have often envied the art historian his illustrative slides
his lengthy quotations from the works he admired. In music we have the phonograph; but experience has taught me that one uses the phonograph with only moderate success outside the classroom. The idea of a brief

and the poet

posdecture concert seemed worth trying, although the music chosen for performance had, at times, only indirect relevance to the substance of my lecture.

Contact with the

live

satisfactory sensation that follows

sound of music always helps to dispel that vague and unon any mere discussion of music. These short

concerts had the further advantage of forcing me to be as concise as possible, while holding out to my listeners the promise of a dessert to follow on the bare bones of my discourse.

The programs were presented in 1951 on November 13, 20, 27 and in 1952 on March 5, 12, 19. The list here corresponds with the sequence of the six
chapters of this book, although in actual presentation the fifth

program

pre-

ceded the fourth.

Programs
PATRICIA NEWAY, Mezzo-soprano
1 *

ARTHUR GOLD,

Pianist

ROBERT HZDALE, Pianist JOHN LA MONTAINE, Accompanist

(1935)
Igor Stravinsky

CONCERTO PER DUE PIANOFORTI SOU

Con Moto; Notmrno; Quattro

variazioni; Preludio c

Fuga
Hector Berlioz

SONGS
1834);

Absence (1834; revised 1841); La Mort d'Ophclie (1848); La Captive (1832; revised

Au

Cimetiere (1834; revised 1841); Villanelle (1834; revised 1841)

JEUX D'WFANTS
Lai

(1873?) (Excerpts)

Georges Bizet

Toupie, Impromptu; Les Quatre Coins, Esquissc; Petit

Bal,

man,

Petite

femme, Duo;

Le

Galop

112

SYLVIA MARLOWE, Harpsichord WOLFE WOLFINSOHN, Violin GEORGE FINKEL, Violoncello

and Piano

FRANCES SNOW DRINKER, Flute WILDER E. SCHMALZ, Oboe ROBERT C. STUART, Clarinet
(1778) K. 301

SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND HARPSICHORD

Mozart

Allegro con spirito; Allegro (The second movement was repeated with the piano substituted for the harpsichord^

LES PASTES DE LA GRANDE ET ANCIENNE MENESTRANDISE

(Harpsichord alone)

(pub. 1717)

Couperin

Lcs Notables ct Jur& (marche); Les Vielleux et les Gueux (Bourdon); Les Jongleur*, Sauteurs et Saltimbanqucs; Les Invalides; Desordre et deroute de route la troupe

CONCERTO PER CLAVICEMBALO, FLAUTO, OBOE, CLARINETTO, VIOUNO

E VIOLONCELLO

(1926)
(flcssibilc,

de Folia
scherzando)

Allegro; Lento (giubiloso ed energico); Vivace

Q 3

REAH SADOWSKY, Pianist PAUL DBS MARAIS, Ptamst

Schu&ert

SONATA IN B FLAT MAJOR

PIANO VARIATIONS

(posthumous) Molto moderate; Andante sostenuto; Scherzo: Allegro vivace; Allegro

(1930)
(1908)

ma non

troppo

Copland
Ravel

ONDINE

(from

GASPARD DE LA NUIT)

NEW

MUSIC STRING QUARTET:

Violin

BROADUS ERLE,

RAIMONDI, Violin WALTER TRAMPLER, Viola

MATTHEW

GLAUS ADAM,

Violoncello

STRING QUARTET, OPUS 28

(1938)

Anton Webern

Massig; Gemachlicli; Sehr flifjpyrd

STRING QUARTET NO. 2 IN F SHARP

(1942)

Michael Tippett

Allegro grazioso; Andante; Presto; Allegro appassionata

"3

PHYLIJS CURTEN, Soprano GEORGE ZAZOFSKY, Violin

GREGORY TUCKER,
SUITE FOR SOPRANO

Piano
(1924)
Carlos Chavez (Mexico)

SONATINA FOR VIOIIN AND PIANO

AND

VIOLIN

(1923)

Heitor Villa-Lobo* (Brazil)

A Mrnina

c a Canc$o; Quero Ser Alegre; Sertaneja

THREE SONGS
Bito Manue* (1931); sa&to

Alejandro Caturla (Cuba)

Dos Poemas Afro-Cubanos (1930):

(a) Mari-sabel; (b) Jucgo

THE MUSIC OF LENNIE TRISTANO, DAVE BRUBECK, BUD POWELL, AND

OSCAR PETTIFORD
(recorded

ft 6

WILLIAM MASSELOS, Piano NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY ALUMNI CHORUS, LORNA COOKE DE VARON, Conductor ELIZABETH DAVIDSON, Accompanist

FIRST PIANO
i.

SONATA

(1902-1909)

Charles E. Ives

andante con moto allegro risoluto Allegro moderate, 'In the Inn": allegro; 3. Largo allegro 4. Allegro presto (as fast as possible); 5. Andante maestoso allegro allegro moderate ma con brio

Adagio con moto

adagio cantabile;
largo,

2.

come prima;

adagio cantabile

AMERICANA,
(text
I.

chorus of mixed voices (1932) from The American Mercury)

Randall Thompson
3.

May

Every Tongue; 2. The Staff Necromancer;

God's Bottles; 5. Lovcli

lines

LARK, mixed

chorus with baritone solo (1938) (text by Genevieve Taggard)

Copland

Sources
For those readers

who may wish

to

know

the sources of

my

principal quotations

in the text^ I append the following

list.

Page 3
*-3

Introduction

Aaden, Wystan H., "Some Reflections on Opera as a Medium," Partisan Review (January-February 1952), p. n.
Sartre, Jean-Paul,

L'lmaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1940); translation, The Psychology of Imagination (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1948), pp. 278-280,

"4

Page
7 10

Chapter One
Coleridge, Samuel T., Biographia IJteraria, Evcr>uua'i Library edition (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1949), chapter xiv, p. 153. ** BuIIough, Edward, 'Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and as an Aes1

10

12-13
13 13

V (19I2/, part II, pp. 87quoted in Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a Xctv Key [ Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942;, pp. 209-210, 223. Claudcl, Paul, The Eye listens, translated by Elsie Pell (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 209. Hanslick, Eduard, Vont Musfyalisch-Schonen (Leip2ig: R. Weigcl, 1854), p. 103; quoted in Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 238. Langer, Susanne, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Harvard University
thetic Principle," British Journal of Psychology,

n 8,

esp. 91;

18-19
19

Press, 1942), chapter viii, pp, 204-245, csp. 245. Santayana, George, Reason in Art, voL IV of The Uije of Reason (New York, Scribner's Sons, 1905), p. 58. E)ent Edward J., 'The Historical Approach to Music," The Musical Quarterly,

XXHI (January 1937), p. 5. Santayana, George, Three Philosophical Poets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1910), Introduction, p. 3.
Chapter

Two

26

Wierzynski, Kazimierz, The

Schuster, 1949)* P- *97-

Life and Death of Chopin, translated by N. Gutcrman, with a Foreword by Artur Rubinstein (New York: Simon and

27
31

Our Musical Heritage (New York: Prentice Hall, 1948), pp. 9-28. Schdnberg, Arnold, Style and Idea (New York: The Philosophical Library,
Sachs, Curt,

32 39

195) P- 38. Spender, Stephen, World Within World (London:

p. 93-

Hamish Hamilton, 1951).

Wcinstock Chavez, Carlos, Toward a Neur Music, translated by Herbert

(New York: Norton and

Co., 1937), P- 178.

Chapter Three

41

42 44

Matthews (New Maritain, Jacques, Art and Poetry, translated by E. dcP. York: The Philosophical Library, 1945), p. 89. See Coleridge, Samuel T. Biographia JJteraria, chapter xiv, pp. 151-152.
above.

45

The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener 6 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950) > P- 7York: Harcourt, Brace fc Richards, I. A., Coleridge on Imagination (New
Sessions, Roger,

Co., 1935), P- 47-

46

Mcllcrs,

Wilfrid, Music

and

Society

(New York: Roy

t Publishers,

1950),

p. 206.

Chapter Four
61
the International Society of Goldbeck, Frederick, in Music Today, Journal of H. Rollo (London: Denis Dobsoa, edited Myers Music, by Contemporary

1949), p.

no.

115

Page
63 Tovey, Sir Donald F., Musical Textures, voL n of A Musician Talfe (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 45. Busoni, Fcrruccio B., Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, translated from Sfe the German by Dr. Th. Baker (New York: G. Schirmer, 1911), p. 5 also Skulsky, Abraham, 'Wladimir Vogcl," Musical America, vol. LXIX,

64

&

no. 15 (December I, 1949), p. 7, quoting Busoni.

64

Sessions, Roger,

The Musical Experience

As William James

of Composer, Performer, Listener,

pp. 62-66. See above,

66

James, William,

Said, edited by Elizabeth Perkins Aldrich

(New York: The Vanguard Press, 1942), p. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902),
73 74 76
Dent, Edward
Brace

109, requoted from James,

p. 363.

Busoni, Ferniccio B., Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, p. 22. See above. J., in Music Today, p. 102. See above: Goldbeck. Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism (5th ed., New York: Harcourt,

&

Co., 1934), pp. 25-33.

Chapter Five

86
88

Mellers, Wilfrid, Music

and

Society, pp.

195-196, quoting Roy Harris. See

ed.,

above.
Sargeant, Winthrop, Jazz:

Hot and Hybrid (New

New

York: E. P.

Dutton
95

&

Co., 1946), p. 71.

Frank, Waldo, The Re-discovery of America

(New York:

Scribner's Sons,

1929), pp. 56-66 (chapter v, *The Grave of Europe").

95

Howard, John Tasker, "Edward MacDowell," The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, edited by Oscar Thompson (5th ed., New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1949), p. 1058; quoting from a lecture published in MacDowell, Critical and Historical Essays (Boston, 1911).
Chapter Six

'

107

Barzun, Jacques, "Artist against Society: Some Articles of War," Partisan 'Review (January-February 1952), p. 67.

116