by James Francis Cooke, Editor
THE ETUDE MUSIC MAGAZINE – June 1942
“MUCH
OF THE EXTREMELY unpleasant music we hear these days under the alias of
‘modern’ should be referred to the Narcotic Board for investigation, writes one
ETUDE friend, more bold than those who feel that to condemn any kind of
contemporary music, good or bad, might place on in the class of the critics who
attacked the modernity of Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms in their
time. Our complaint about such music is
that it represents a paucity of talent and a total absence of genius. If there were enough great music being
written at this time, it would be impossible for the highly technical
mountebanks to palm off their cacophonies.
With the exception of a few superior souls, there is very little being
done in these days that seems earmarked for permanence. Editorial courtesy makes it impractical for
us to designate the great contemporaries, lest we be challenged for our
fairness or our understanding.
There is a kind of prevailing
doctrine that if one hears disagreeable music long enough, one will come to
like it. That is, a taste for the
bizarre or the extraordinary may be cultivated, just as tourists in the Orient
are said to become inured, after a few weeks, to the incredible, overpowering stench
of back alleys. Those who live among
such odors for a lifetime are unconscious of them, but that does not make them
perfume for others.
We have no fears that the music of
the future will not be beautiful.
Criteria of beauty do change, it is true. The composers, Daniel Steibelt (contemporary
of Beethoven) and Henry Herz (contemporary of Schumann) were among the most
lauded musical writers of their day.
Their music was for the most part sterile, uninspired, commonplace. It was dated, distinctly dated, but it was
definitely manufactured according to the mathematical musical formulae of the
day. It makes one think of artificial
flowers or artificial fruit, imitations of the real thing but as dead as the
bones in a catacomb.
It is not, therefore, the date that
makes good music or makes it bad; it is the music itself. Music that is worth while is immortal. Age can not destroy it. There are few sincere people in the field of
art who develop as much artistic remorse as those who have aspired to become
creators, but who find, alas, that instead of evolving a style of their own,
they have merely succeeded in making imitations with almost Japanese cunning.
Often, in the great European art
galleries, we have seen professional copyists at work. Some are so adroit in their craftsmanship
that their reproductions are amazing counterfeits of the originals. Many art works are indeed so expertly and
deftly duplicated that they are really forgeries and are peddled around by
racketeers to would-be “collectors.” One
American merchant paid a fortune for a “Titian” which was fabricated by an art
counterfeiter “hack” who eked out a church-mouse existence in a Parisian
garret.
Every work of art is in a somewhat
definite sense “dated.” It reflects in
significant ways the culture, the philosophy, the mores of the age that
produced it. Palestrina takes us very
certainly to those candle-lighted, incense-laden basilicas of the Holy
City. The fugues of Bach reveal the epic
character of the Gothic cathedrals of the early eighteenth century,
stained-glass and all. Haydn and Mozart
reflected the peruked, rococo salons of the nobility of Middle Europe;
Mendelssohn is for the most part a kind of musical picture of exquisite bourgeoisie refinement in which the
objective was perfection: Chopin is a
dream-like aquarelle of the salons of the “City of Light,” executed with an
emotional force and keenly artistic technic that no one has equaled. Thus, Wagner, Debussy, Strauss, Stravinsky,
and every composer worth while leaves a kind of musical signature on his work
which is as unmistakable as the face of George Washington on a dollar bill.
What signatures will the composers
of to-day leave upon the history of music?
What kind of music, indeed, will come out of the present military
volcano? The last war, as we have
repeatedly pointed out in these columns, evidently had a very corroding effect
upon the souls of blossoming composers who survived in the melee. Many of these creative aspirants produced
compositions which were incoherent, strident, discordant, horrific conglomerations
of noise, indicating a pathological and psychological condition too dreadful to
imagine. With all this comes the chorus
of the protagonists of unrest, telling us that the world in the future is
likely to be a very disagreeable place in which to live and that the music
which is dated 1942 must be in a style reflecting the worst in life, rather
than the best.
This art, gone beserk, may indeed be
an interesting reflection of the pathological and neurological effect of this
era of tyranny and world murder. The
result is, in many cases, a sequence of incoherent “burps” bespeaking the
intellectual and spiritual indigestion of the hour.
We have no interest in hearing a
string of sentimental musical commonplaces such as those which made up many of
the popular pieces of yesterday. Yet
there is still a place for these, because there are millions of people whose
musical opportunities have not advanced to a point where they can appreciate
music of a better class. Those who stage
a soul collapse when they hear music of this type, merely because it does not
please them, usually do so because they enjoy posing as very exclusively
sensitive or surprisingly smart critics.
As a matter of fact, they represent a small and insignificant part of
the public which has existed in every generation – squeamish individuals
without the human experience which creates breadth of understanding.
Whether the World War II will have
as drastic an effect upon music as World War I is a matter for speculation.
Again, let us keep our musical sanity in this world of
confusion. We must not let the science
of the perception of beauty, called “aesthetics,” be suffocated by the
repellent miasmas of a mad hour.
Enjoy Philip Martin playing a Nocturne by Henri Herz:
