LISTENING TO MUSIC

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 141, 16 June 1936, Page 4

LISTENING TO MUSIC

THE lINE OF APPROACH MELODY AND" HARMONY

Most errors of judgment in musical Jj understanding arise from a mistaken ■, line of approach, writes Neville Cardus J in the "Manchester Guardian." It is ? futile to object to Stravinsky's "Le < Sacre du Printemps" because it does not give the melodic satisfaction which j we can get from Mozart, Brahms, and j Elgar. Stravinsky in this work is aj expressing a modern reaction to primi- J tive impulses and emotions; to that J end he uses rhythm and orchestral dy- 4 namics as the main means of com- J municating his conception. To object ■ to his scarcity of tunes would be as j fultile as to complain that no dynamic interest in "Sea Drift" of Delius. The other day a conductor at a concert in London put into Palestrina's "Stabat Mater" a variety of rhythm and harmonic nuance which was irrelevant to the style of the music, to the period of its composition, and to the composer's way of feeling. Palestrina was a mystic; time and its lever and fret meant little to him; moreover, he wrote in an idiom which was formed before tonic and dominant and chromatic harmony were thought of—consequently it was the crudest of mistakes to lend to the music a rhythm and emphasis that grew out of a later development of harmony and melody. MELODY, RHYTHM, .HARMONY. Broadly speaking, the elements by which composers express themselves are melody, rhythm, and harmony and by harmony I mean not only notes simultaneously sounded but the colour ! added by different instruments. In the

■ perfect composition these three ele- a C " ments are to be heard perfectly bal- JjW ; anced—but there are not many works ■ji p that achieve such an ensemble. If a composer is mainly engaged in lynsm O r melody will be the chief fact/r; if J - his purpose is "atmosphere" or char- JT 1 acterisation or a descriptive picture, he JC 1 will draw principally on harmony and A ! ' rhythm. The clue to the proper ap- A j proach to a work is often to be found jji ! in the prominence given to melody or O J rhythm or harmony. The beginnings V 0 of the A major Piano Concerto of V r Mozart is a long-phrased singing theme JK i- which at once tells us that the com- A H poser's mood is' felicitous, serene, lyri- n f cal; there could scarcely be a modu- O [I lation to tragedy or stress without a V e shock which would render the preced- Jr ing music ill-chosen. On the other jc t- hand, Beethoven opens the Fifth Sym- JC phony with two four-note thumpings. A s We need not talk of "Fate Knocking jrji l~ at the Door," but it is obvious that ig F: Beehoven is not trying to get a song g ' into motion. S The listener must be quick to sense ■ k the style of a composition, and, of course, he will not find all the signs as jx plain and unmistakable as in the two JJJ instances I have just quoted. He ■JJi might help himseif by bearing in mind JD that it is the nature of song to go up V or down, and that the lyrical mood V 1 seldom uses marked changes of tempo a or tone volume; it generally avoids JJ reiterated notes. If a composer is JJ heard to be hammering out chords or WJ st emphasising the same note several JC in times, the listener will be foolish to % 11, complain for the lack of tune as ease- % i. ful as "Voi che sapete." The pre- > sence in Beethoven of reiterated notes 111 or chords and contrasts of tone pres- H sure tells us that he was by nature a ij r. man not easily contained by his art. WJ He was a searcher in human conscious- 5 ■ ness. And the general absence in % f' Brahms, especially after the C minor ti ts Symphony, of melodic teriSioii, ana J chordal stress tells us that at bottom J le he is a lyrist, a romantic poet—m ,■

Lite of the classical forms which were «£ nposed on him fdr a varjety of his- J jrical and cultural, JC STYLE. / There are, of course, no hard-and-fast jC lies by which a composer's style and j esthetic intentions may be immedi- J tely grasped by the beginner in lis* :ning." A great work must be origial, and for that reason it lays down , s own laws. But, taking a compre- , ensive view of style, a tolerably safe J ray of approaching music is, I fancy, n the lines I have suggested. If a omposer is representing an external ccurence he will tend to use rhythm s his basis, plus orchestral colour; He Prelude to Act I of "Die Walkure 3 a marvel of bass-fiddle emphasis, ;hich represents the downpour of rain nd the general hurly-burly of the torm; the brass describes passages irhich even on paper seem forked like ightning. This is an obvious example if "programme music" symbolism; I ■ luote it to show "how it is done," but a tlso, and more important, to show with m is much vividness as may be how we , ■an, given certain characteristics of p ixpression, come in & flash to the com- ■ )Oser's intentions. . * Wagner's storm at the beginning of ■ 'Die Walkure" is obviously an exter- ■ lal piece of nature-painting. The f stress of the first movement of the , Seventh quartet of Beethoven, where , he "clue" is terrific sforzando devices, ■ las an internal significance, for never ■ io the dynamics refer by analogy to • the sounds and stress of physical nature. , MUSICAL DEVICES. " There are a number of musical de- J vices to which time and usage have , given an unmistakable if broad aes- | thetic significance. Acceleration of i rhythm nearly always suggests some i happening, physical or emotional, in | the external universe. Rhythmical f varieties and contrasts are the mark of the dramatic writer; Wagner is not dramatic in the particular sense that Verdi is, because Wagner was essentially a dealer in types of emotion rather than in individuals; he himself admitted a certain rhythmical monotony in his work, and it was the consequence of a preoccupation with internal emotion, which is best expressed in harmonic subtlety. The listener will, of course, hunt out many more traits of style than I have been able to mention here. He will learn that there are not only broad, expressive symbols in music as a whole, but that each composer has his own way of using them. Chromatics are sloppy in Spohr, never in Mozart. Reiterated notes do not mean in the "Italian" Lieder of Wolf what they mean in Beethoven s Op. 106, though in each case they do mean that we shall be silly and far from the aesthetic point to expect from the one a melody as lilting as "Auf dem Wasser," or from the other a quartet movement as musical as the allegro moderato of Haydn in G major, Op. 77, No. 1.