MODERN COMPOSITION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21698, 13 January 1934, Page 10 (Supplement)

MODERN COMPOSITION

ARNOLD BAX'S METHODS CHORDS BUILT ON SEVENTH It is interesting to learn how a modern composer such as Arnold Bax gets his results in composition. A critic writing of the music of Arnold Bax says that in compositions by this composer there is a fluid interchange of chords built on the seventh. The possible permutations of this chord are, in Bax's music, seemingly endless, and the subtlety with which they melt and flow into each other is further enhanced by the use of ornamental overtones. The logic of the relationships is often determined by chromatic movement of either the base or a middle part. Although Bax's music and Sibelius', for example, differ so greatly in actual sound, yet the two are comparable in one particular, namely, their fundamental acceptance of harmonic relationship consecrated by generations of composers from Bach to Wagner. There is no conscious intellectual search for methods remote from traditional usage; the musical impulse alone is responsible for the enormous harmonic expansion. When, however, occasion demands, Bax borrows freely from exotic sources; often his tunes and ornamentations follow the outline of a pentatonic or modal scale. Not that any kind of scholasticism ever affects tho free flights of his fancy. Everything in Bax's music subserves the mood; this alone is the agent that instinctively selects from the available mass of scales, harmonics and forms those which, will best express the underlying idea. This accounts for the seemingly bewildering varictj' of idioms in Bax's music, ranging in harmony from bare consecutive fourths or fifths, suggestive of mediaeval " organum," to a chromaticism that goes considerably further than that of Delius, and in scales from the simpler modal and pentatonic to those of Eastern derivation, via the more familiar diatonic. In the hands of a lesser composer such eclecticism would result in confusion, but Bax succeeds in unifying this discreet material by means of a highly personal yet logical, harmony. In classical forms the tension between the subject matter is usually expressed by difference of key, but Bax takes this farther by sometimes opposing two or more scales as well as tonalities, and sometimes by opposing differences of register. The cloudiness that results from low registration is reflected also in the subject matter, which usually only attains definite tonality when raised to the middle or upper registers. To the eye the differences in melodic structure —which occur throughout most of Bax's works—are not reconcilable with unity of idiom. Unity is, however, achieved by the v harmonic treatment of these diverse melodic shapes. Further than this outline of the characteristics of Bax's music it is impossible to go without copious illustrations, and at the same time more illustrations, instead of clarifying, might only confuse, and the essential framework be lost. Bax's music is not the sort that yields up its secret in analysis; it must bo lived with, and only gradually then will the magic of its seductive and brooding imagery assert itself.