Evening capital and Maryland gazette. (Annapolis, Md.) 1910-1922, 1922-02-13
MUSIC LOVER CALLS
WORK OF MODERNS
HIGHLY OvERRkTED

II any rich lover Of music wants t.
do the art real service. says Ernest
Newman in The Manchester Gu1rlian
he might contribute $50 or so In every
big orchestral concert in the calu,ry
on condition that the program con
tanned at least one modern work Of
this type There is very little IA any
of them that is worth discussion. and
hardly one of them has the chos, Of
chance OF survival but until they
are heard people cannot help :hlnk
ing there must be something in taCm
The only way to put them in their
proper place in the scheme of things
is to let them be heard two or three
| times. lie Sacre Ecu du Printemps"
is case in point. For seven years
the musical public had been told that
here was work that had revolu
tionized music; and as people did not
know it. no one could say the enthus-
lasts nay. Three or four perform
ances of it in the last few months
have been enough To show the public
| that, in the main, il is music of the
| past rather than of the future. and
pretty commonplace music at that.
And this is the condemnation of
most of the music OF today that aims
anxiOusly at being advanced or revu-
lutionary. 1t is mostly the work of
second-rate minds; indeed. one would
be hard put 10 il TO find a thorough
bred among them: the Stravinsky OF
today certainly is not one. nor is the
Schonberg OF today. nor is Malipiero.
nor Casella, nor Honegger. nor Pou-
lenc, nor Milhaud. nor Ornstein, nor
Prokoviev. They are all second or
third raters. richer in negative than
in positive qualities. They know
quite well what il is they do not want
to do; they do not want to be no
mantle" or to write like a German.
or to develop their musical texture
on the ordinary lines. Perhaps. as
matter of fact, they know also what
they want to do; but they cannot
do il.
Ones quarrel with them is not that
they are audacious but that they are
banal. A banality is not less a banal-
ity for being harmonized out of the
key or megaphoned at us by big
orchestra. This "Horatius Triumph
ant" of Honegger is simply the see
ond-rate symphonic poem of the sos
translated into the more turbulent
idiom of 1921; all the noise Of it and
the fury of il cannot disguise it's basic
ordinariness of idea. The truth seems
to he that a good deal of this music
is carrying us not forward but back
ward; much of il is the sort Of music
that primitive man might make had
he modern technique Of compost
ton and OTchestration Stravnsky's
mind. for instance, is simply that OF
the Russian peasant with a veneer of
civilization His music. even at its
best, has all the faults of Russian folk
music. Nothing has so wearied us OF
Russian music during the last few
years as its practice of merely re-
peating itself where we want it TO get
oh to something new. The profes-
sors of this method. of course. affect
TO despise the ordinary development"
methods of the great composers as
being mechanical or mathematical.
What they seem to have overlooked
is that at any rate the older methods
do keep big musical design contin-
ually interesting. while the new Rus
sian method cannot put together
| big design with an organic life.