Читать книгу Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline - Constant Lambert - Страница 9

Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very nearly as slow in the uptake. To the public a red flag remains a red rag even when so battered by wind and weather that it could almost be used as a pink coat. Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same. Similarly in the world of music, the fact that some of the key-names in modern music, such as Stravinsky and Schönberg, are the same as before the war has blinded us to the real nature of the present-day musical revolution. We go on using the words 'revolutionary composer' just as we go on using the words 'Liberal' and 'Bolshevik'; but between the modern music of pre-war days and that of today lies as much difference as that between the jolly old Gilbertian 'Liberal or Conservative' situation and the present mingled state of the parties, or that between the clear anarchical issues of the October revolution and the present situation in Russian politics with Stalin at the head of a frustrated Five Year Plan and Trotsky fuming in exile.

To the seeker after the new, or the sensational, to those who expect a sinister frisson from modern music, it is my melancholy duty to point out that all the bomb throwing and guillotining has already taken place. If by the word 'advanced' we mean art that departs as far as possible from the classical and conventional norm, then we must admit that pre-war music was considerably more advanced (if that is any recommendation) than the music of our own days. Schönberg's Erwartung for example, still the most sensational essay in modern music from the point of view of pure strangeness of sound, was actually finished in 1909. If your ear can assimilate and tolerate the music written in 1913 and earlier, then there is nothing in post-war music that can conceivably give you an aural shock, though the illogicality of some of the present-day pastiches may give you 'a rare turn' comparable to the sudden stopping of a lift in transit.

We are most of us sensationalists at heart, and there is something rather sad about the modern composer's relapse into good behaviour. There is a wistful look about the more elderly 'emancipated' critics when they listen to a concert of contemporary music; they seem to remember the barricades of the old Russian Ballet and sniff plaintively for blood. The years that succeed a revolution have an inevitable air of anticlimax, and it is noticeable that popular interest in the Russian Soviet films has considerably waned since the directors turned from the joys of destruction to the more sober delights of construction. With the best will in the world we cannot get as excited about The General Line as we did about Potemkin, and it is doubtful if any of the works written since the war will become a popular date in musical history, like those old revolutionary war-horses Le Sacre du Printemps and Pierrot Lunaire.

But it is only the more elderly emancipated critics who have lived through both campaigns, so to speak, and who realize the subtle difference between the two. There is a large mass of the public that has only become modern-music conscious since the war, and they are hardly to be blamed if they lump the two periods together as 'all this modern music'.

During the war people had sterner things to think of than Schönberg, and a concert of his works would have been not only impracticable, but unpatriotic. The general cessation of musical activities during the war resulted in many pre-war works only becoming known a considerable number of years after they were written. This may seem platitudinous, but it should be remembered that it would not necessarily be true of literature. If Joyce, for example, had written and published Anna Livia Plurabelle in 1913 there would have been nothing, theoretically speaking, to prevent it from becoming familiar to every schoolboy by about 1919; but the number of people who can read a modern score is fewer even than the number who claim that they can, and the more extreme examples of modern music cannot be grasped without several actual hearings. Moreover, the printing of literature is not the same as the playing of music. Any printer can print Ulysses (if the law lets him), but not every orchestra can play Erwartung. It is regrettable, but hardly surprising, that this work had to wait sixteen years for its first performance.

Purely practical and circumstantial difficulties of war, finance, patriotism and musical inefficiency having kept back the actual hearing of contemporary music, the wave of enthusiasm for this music that carried away the intellectual world shortly after the war was, though the intellectuals hardly realized it, mainly retrospective in character. It could not be compared for example to the contemporary interest in Brancusi's sculpture or Edith Sitwell's poetry. It was a 'hangover' from a previous period, and the famous series of concerts given by Eugène Goossens in London in 1920 were historical in more ways than one. They apparently announced the dawn of a new era, but curiously enough their most potent arguments were drawn from the era which we all imagined to be closed. The clou of the concerts was Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps—a work which was merely the logical outcome of a barbaric outlook applied to the technique of impressionism.

Impressionism is a loose and easily misapplied term, but one can think of no other that sums up so conveniently the undeniable connecting link between the various revolutionary composers of before the war. The connecting link may not be obvious, but it is there nevertheless, and it is something for which we may search in vain at the present time.

To put the problem in its most naïve form, a representative pre-war concert of modern works would have struck the man in the street—if we may conjure up a figure somewhere between Strube's 'Little Man' and Ernest Newman's 'Plain Man'—as definitely queer. He would have found great difficulty in relating it to his previous musical experiences and, giving up all attempt to follow it as form, would probably have relapsed into a purely passive state in which the strange colours and rhythms were allowed to make a direct appeal to his nerves. His experiences would be unusual, but would assume a certain uniformity and logic through the very consistency of their strangeness.

Let us suppose the same admittedly naïve character at a representative concert of contemporary music. What conceivable connecting link would he find between, for example, Von Webern and Sauguet, between a cold and mathematical reversal of previous tradition and a deliberate return to its most sentimental and least valuable elements? He would find less difficulty in relating this music to his previous experiences, for so much of it would be but a pale reflection of the spirit of former ages; but the only connecting link he would find would be that of indecision and lack of logic.

Experiments may take many forms, but only one general direction, whereas the spirit of pastiche has no guiding impulse. Once invoked it becomes like the magic broom of the sorcerer's apprentice, to whom indeed the average modern composer, with his fluent technique, but lack of co-ordinative sense, may well be compared. It is the element of deliberate pastiche in modern music that chiefly distinguishes it from the experimental period of before the war. The landmarks of pre-war music, such as Le Sacre du Printemps, Pierrot Lunaire and Debussy's Iberia, are all definitely anti-traditional; but they are curiously linked to tradition by the continuous curve of their break-away, comparable to the parabola traced in the air by a shell. But this shell has reached no objective, like a rocket in mid air it has exploded into a thousand multicoloured stars, scattering in as many different directions, and sharing only a common brilliance and evanescence.

It may be said in defence of the present age that the elements of decay are already to be found in the period that immediately preceded it, that the experiments of the pre-war period were of a type to lead inevitably to the present cul-de-sac. Whether this be so or not, it is impossible clearly to grasp the difference between post-war and pre-war modern music, or fully to understand the present situation without a brief review of the impressionist, or disruptive period which may conveniently be placed in time as stretching from the beginning of the century until 1914.