TWO MODERNS

Evening Star, Issue 21006, 21 January 1932, Page 11

TWO MODERNS

MASTERS OF MUSIC A CRITICAL SURVEY Recently London lias heard important works by Stravinsky and Schonberg. Little is known about these composers in many parts of England. True, one has heard Stravinsky’s ‘ Petrouchka ’ and Sehonberg’s ‘ Transfigured Night,’ but those works tell us nothing about the men in their latest phases. It is indeed hard to keep pace with Stravinsky even in London, which is nowadays the best place in the world for a broad study and enjoyment of music, says a writer in the ‘ Manchester Guardian.’ By the time that Stravinsky’s newest work has been rehearsed and played Stravinsky himself is likely to have discredited it and exploited a different, not to say antithetical, style. He is the chameleon 6f music, taking colour from the school or period he happens any day to touch; some day he will, in a moment of comprehensive survey of all the works ever written, try to adapt himself to them all at once. And then he may share -the fate of the real chameleon, who chanced to sit on a Scottish plaid and valiantly burst himself attempting to do his duty. Manchester has heard hardly any of the “ contemporary ” music which for the last twenty years has caused so much noise in places between Oxford and Salzburg You do not, of course, classify “ modern ” music merely by referring to the date of composition. Manchester will shortly hear Sibelius’s Seven" h Symphony, but Manchester will not even then be listening to a contemporary work. If Thomas Hardy Were alive and published another ‘ Tess ’ to-morrow the novel would not be as modern or contemporary as Mrs Woolf’s ‘ To the Lighthouse.’ Sibelius belongs to the normal line of musical development, from Beethoven onwards. ITS MARK. The mark of the “ new ” music , is a new synthesis of either melody, harmony, or rhythm. In Schonberg we have-atonalism, a fresh way of conceiving relationships between rivals and chords. (This, of cfourse, is to' put atonalism in very simple and non-tech-nical terms.) The mark of modernism in Stravinsky is a highly sophisticated aesthetic approach and a style of expression which changes with the moon. Both composers' revolted years ago against nineteenth-century romanticism. But with a difference. Stravinsky, after he gave us the reckless primitivism of ‘ The Rites of Spring,’ professed to despise emotionalism outright in music. He set out to write music which would be as objective, as free of human-all too human—significance as the pattern wrought by frost on the window-pane. But to-day, in his ‘ Symphony of Psalms ’ and his ’ Violin Concerto,’ he seems unable to keep out sentiment (and sentimentality). The glittering technique of the man places emotion as though in a glass during the concerto; but there it is all the same and it is weak as Spohr. The ‘ Symphony of Psalms ’ so far abjures ‘ objectivity ” that the composer actually dedicates the work to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the glory of God. At the end the music actually aspires to bo spiritual. But the hard-faced technique ossifies a conventional enough musical substance. Wo are forced to the conclusion that Stravinsky’’ would be wise to get back to his “ objectivity,” because if a composer no longer has anything to say he may as well make a virtue out of necessity by demonstrating to us how skilfully he can express nothing whatever. MORE SINCERE. Schonbcrg’s revolt against romanticism was apparently more sincere than Stravinsky’s; he has not played last and loose with his new a’sthetic principle. Since he turned his back on Wagner and post-Wagnerian influences he has steadfastly and logically developed an harmonic .formula which has taken him farther and farther from the by no moans wholly cerebral artist wlio wrote “ Pellcas.” Schonberg, unlike Stravinsky, is no mere dilettante plus extraordinary talent, and an aptiture for playing the sedulous ape. Whether we like the later Schonberg or not, wc must admit his seriousness of purpose and his power to know his mind and express his intentions. His revolt against romanticism was natural ; he arrived at his most impressionable ago as an artist at a time when German music was steeped neck-high in a certain kind of associative values,

all telling of the same emotional outlook. At that period it was'almost impossible to strike a chord on the piano without calling up visions of death potions, German _ nachtigalls, fate motifs, transfigurations, and redemptions, and what not. Even a simple chord of C major told of some highflown Straussian apotheosis. NEW GROUND. Schonberg determined to escape from the familiar slough, and to find fresh and unworked ground. The only thing to do, as he. saw the problem, was to invent a no(v language, a music that would be chaste, so to say—free of any of the ancient associative values. Then, with a palette full of pristine colours, it might be possible to say things in music new and strange. If that has been the ideal of the authentic Schonberg, be lias not once let his eyes , fall from it. The trouble is that a man cannot invent a new means of expression and at the same time create masterpieces, Eor the masterpiece .the •great and satisfying imaginative conception is latent in a developed material; to put the idea in different terms (and to borrow from Professor Alexander’s illuminating aesthetic) the finished sculpture is implicit in the block of marble; the very touch- of the material to the sculptors’ hands, as.he caresses the surface of it, kindles, the imagination and sets the technique moving But the material must be suggestive enough, and the tools must bo of proven reliability and must be sensitive to their function. Schonberg’s harmonic system, so far, has not acquired the necessary aesthetic imputations; in other words, the total elements have not, by use in inspired.and responsive bands, begun to mean anything. Once on a time , none of the words meant anything which now make up the lines beginning: Absent thco from' felicity awhile. . .

Some day, perhaps, custom, and the genius of other men will bring clear and great significance to the harmonic system fashioned primarily by Schonberg. A big man, writing out of a deep spiritual need, his mind soaked in all that is of excellence in Schonberg. will borrow what is valuable from, the pioneer and drop the rest. .For it is certain that Schonberg will come into an honourable posterity as a pioneer; a chemist of modern music, not an artist—a twentieth-century Rameau