MODERN AUTHORS

Matamata Record, Volume XVII, Issue 1544, 19 July 1934, Page 6

MODERN AUTHORS

LANGUAGE OUT OF HAND

Language has u way of getting out of hand When the writer’s head i 3 wrapped up in music; hence the occurrence of rather strained phrases in tlie literature of our beloved art. “The pendulum has swung full circle 1” was an excited exclamation uttered, in the course of a recent biography; and the collectors of such trifles esteem it second only to the following, from an author ai’duously engaged with the problems of modern music. “Our age is athirst for a new cement” writes Richard Capell in the London “Daily Telegraph." Another book on modern music, i new one —“Twentieth Century Music,” by Marion Bauer, yields a description of an American modernist who is said to possess “the cool Are that consumes and is more deadly than fierce, panting flame.” Hot ice, and wondrous strange snow I

Let it be said at once that the “cool fire” phrase is not Miss Bauer’s own. It is one of the numerous quotations with which she decorates her own simpler and more natural prose. She herself—although she composes in the “contemporary” manner, is published by the Cos Cob Press, and concludes one of her pieces with a cadence calmly consisting of a couple of ninths —is no wild woman. She is not the kind of contemporary who “only does it to annoy, because he knows It teases.” She is a contemporary in a peculiarly sensibly, womanly way, as if to say, “It stands to reason that when something new and gay comes from Paris one does not shut eyes and ears to it simply because grandmother would not have thought it nice." Men and Women. Perhaps it is partly because she is a woman, and therefore so much more accustomed than men are to the idea of changing fashions, that she is able to treat the various phenomena of the new music in a perfectly cool and matter-of-fact wsiy.. Men get indignant or else enthusiastic, but in either case flurried, and —as we have seen—tend to mix their metaphors. But then men are hide-bound creatures; the very shape of their hats cannot be changed without a revolution, while to a woman the very fact that Brahms composed with thirds and sixths may, on the analogy of hats, be in 1 itself a reason why Bartok should compose with minor seconds and augmented octaves. Compared, then with the dishevelled writings of such authors as Lazare Saminsky and Guido Pannain, Miss Bauer’s book—the first work on the new music by a woman to come our way—is singularly level-tempered and concilatory. It was inspired, she tells us, by the complaint of a friend, a music-loving amateur, who, with something like despair, said:—

“What can I do to grow to like modern music? I don’t understand it. I have tried to listen to it, but <t means nothing to me; in fact, it takes away much of my pleasure in going to concerts.”

This friend, after following the competent Miss Bauer’s explanations, is likely to feel on reaching the end that a disproportionate fuss has been made about modern music., It is really simple enough! For instanoe, if Miss Bauer herself writes, in a piano piece, F sharp and C sharp for the left hand, sounding simultaneoulsy with the 6-4 chord on F natural in the treble, the explanation Is merely that this is an extension of the use of the appoggiatura. Over Simple. Now the appoggiatura has been in use for hundreds of years; nothing could be more respectable. A mere extension of the appoggatura idea! — to object to that would surely be as illiberal as opposing an extension of the franchise. The only question remaining is whether Miss Bauer’s friend, having found the name, likes the sound of these new appoggiaturas any the more. “Linear counterpoint” is another such name ;; it is the key that unlocks Hindemith. We would not disparage Miss Bauer’s book, which has been compiled with industry, and is, as far as it goes, generally, though not always, sound. Criticism’s chief and hardest task —one that is more often than not shirked —is to grapple with the contemporary problem Miss Bauer’s courage in essaying a survey of the whole field commands respect, and she has evidently heard and read a good deal It is exceptional for her to be so misinformed as to remark of Hindemith’s choral work “Das Unauf.horlfche” that “It seems to be a return to the type of music Brahms or Mahler might have written." But we feel in this “Twentieth Century Music” a fundamental shortcoming—it lies in an over-simplific-ation. Miss Bauer has tried to make things too easy for her friend. “The change . . . presents a front of progressive and reasonable evolution” is a phrase from her very first page. That blessed word “evolution”! Sometimes the reader could wish that the author would do anything, even mix her metaphors, to show some appreciation of the fact that the new music does really present a problem —that the art. and indeed the arts, are facing conditions for which there is no preoedent.