14

5

14

( There is nothing sacred about the duration of the second, it is merely a convenient and current measure. A note vibrating 221 and 1/2 times per second is just as conceivable as one vibrating 221 or 222. )

If three notes are sounded at once, their coincidences may be considerably rarer than when only two of them are sounded. You may beat with or against the coincidence; with, to clarify; against, to complicate.

You can use your beat as a third or fourth or Nth note in the harmony.

To put it another way: the percussion of the rhythm can enter the harmony exactly as another note would. It enters as a BASSUS, a still deeper bassus; giving the main form to the sound.

It may be convenient to call these different degrees of the scale the megaphonic and microphonic parts of the harmony.

/////

Rhythm is nothing but the division of frequency plus and emphasis or phrasing of that division.

////

Why, mon contradicteur, have masters of music specified that certain compositions be played at a certain speed.

( Example, in my copy of Le Nozze, one finds: Presto; half note equals 84; Allegro, black equals 144, etc. )

16

16

Naturally percussion in unison can be used higher in
the scale for less simple proportions , than for
more simple proportions ~~of pitch-intervals~~ )

If I can only get the mathematics of these relations
so complicated that composers will become discouraged ;
~~I give up trying~~ to compose by half-remembered rules,
and really listen to sound , I shall have performed
~~my~~ inconsiderable service to music .

NEXT SECTION

Or : various inconvenient items which the ~~bud~~ should
consider before becoming too fixed in its opinions .

GEORGE ANTHEIL #

By FERNA NOLAND

FOR some years, either over my own name, or over the signature William Atheling, I have indicated the paucity of thematic invention in music; that doesn't in the least mean that I anticipated Antheil. I pointed out that music and poetry had been in alliance in the twelfth century, that the divorce of the two arts had been to the advantage of neither, and that melodic invention declined simultaneously and progressively with their divergence. The rhythms of poetry grew stupider, and they in turn affected or infected the musicians who set poems to music.

That observation was natural to me, as poet, working for twenty years with a monolineal rhythm. The horizontal construction (or mechanics of music) had gone, or was, with increasing rapidity going, to pot.

It was ~~possible~~, by study of twelfth-century music, to see that melody wasn't mere improvisation. The Hindoos have given us the terms, *raga* and *tala*, the first for toneless rhythm arrangement, the second for sequence of notes at determined pitches.

Let me say here, in my twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth parentage, that there are two æsthetic ideals; the Wagnerian, which is not dissimilar from that of the Foire de Neuilly, i.e. you confuse the spectator by smacking as many of his senses as possible at every possible moment, this prevents his noting anything with unusual lucidity, but you may fluster or excite him to the point of making him receptive; i.e. you may slip over an emotion, or you may sell him rubber doll or a new cake of glass-mender during the hurly-burly.

The other æsthetic has been approved by Brancusi, Lewis, the vorticist manifestos; it aims at focussing the mind on a

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given definition of form, or rhythm, so intensely that it becomes
not only more aware of that given form, but more sensitive
to all other forms, rhythms, defined planes, or masses.

It is a scaling of eye-balls, a castigating or purging of aural
cortices; a sharpening of verbal apperceptions. It is by no
means an emollient.

The fulcrums of revolution in art are very small, and the
academic recognition of faits accomplis usually tardy, sic;
Marchetto (of Padua, in the fourteenth century, in his Pome-
rium) "shows that the breve can be divided into three, four,
six, eight, nine, and twelve parts, but does not admit that
these new values are anything but semi-breve"; Prosdocimus
de Beldemandis, in the Tractatus Practicus, shows that
fourteenth-century Italians "faisaient suivre à la semi-brève
la minima et la semi-minima et autres notes encores dont la
valeur un peu vague ocillait entre la minima et la chroma."¹

To grasp the modus of Antheil's procedure one must re-
member that the development of musical notation has been
exceedingly slow; that up to the year 1300 the written notes
were *not* an exposition of the melody, they were a mnemonic
device. A man who knew the tune or a man with a very
fine ear for musical phrase could make use of them.

Couperin complains "we do not play as we write"; Dom
Bedos de Celles has to warn his readers against other writers
who "have not said a word about ornaments, nor of the com-
bination of silences, held and touched notes to form articulations
of the music, etc.; of the distinction between first and second
quavers and of the crochets, etc., of their inequality, etc."²

We have all heard of tempo rubato, ad lib., and so forth.
To Igor Strawinsky we owe the revelation: "NO, you will *not*
find any musical geniuses to execute this music. It would
be better for the composer to write down what he wants the
performer to play."

¹ Guido Gasperini, "L'Art Musical Italien au XIV siècle," in Lavignac and Laurencie's *Encyclopédie de Musique* (Delagrave, Paris).

² Arnold Dolmetsch, *Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries*.

GEORGE ANTHEIL 323

Strawinsky's merit lies very largely in taking hard bits of rhythm, and noting them with great care. Antheil continues this; and these two composers mark a definite break with the "atmospheric" school; they both write horizontal music; but horizontal music has been written before; the Arabs have used it for a long time; the troubadours used it; you might have detected horizontal merits in Arnaut Daniel and Faidit.

My own idea is that the horizontal merits faded from music, and from the rhythm of poetry, with the gradual separation of the two arts. A man thinking with mathematical fractions is not impelled toward such variety of *raga* as a man working with the necessary inequalities of words. But the verbal rhythm is monolinear. It can form contrapunto only against its own echo, or against a developed expectancy.

Here we must emphasise the relation of *raga*, *tala*, and harmony. Any note can follow any other, any ten notes can follow each other in any order you like, but if their arrangement, I mean their *tala*, their tone sequence, is of any interest it will *lock* their time intervals, i.e. their individual durations and the rests between them.

When counterpoint slumped into harmony, Lutheran chorals, etc., and progressively into Schönberg, this fundamental drive in music was obscured. The harmonists gave their attention to the perpendicular values, ending in a technical morass, undefined rhythms, tonal slush.

A purist and an archæologist might have revived the precision of *raga*; he probably would have agreed with Dolmetsch's verbal grumble, "No, music didn't begin with Bach, it ended with Bach." (Mr. Dolmetsch didn't mean this literally, but he got something off his chest, and mine, when he said it.)

What I am driving at is that Antheil has not only given his attention to rhythmic precision, and noted his rhythms with an exactitude, which we may as well call genius, but he has invented new mechanisms, mechanisms of this particular age.

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1. His large concerto for piano and orchestra is early work. I have not heard it with orchestra, but the piano part contains at least one good mechanism.

2. In "The Golden Bird" he was not wholly freed of Debussy, but he did succeed in making the "solid object." This term suggests sculpture and is intended to, just as Debussy intended to suggest apparitions in mist.

By solid object "musically," I suppose we mean a construction or better a "mechanism" working in time-space, in which all the joints are close knit, the tones fit each other at set distances, it can't simply slide about. This new quasi-sculptural solidity is something different from the magnificent stiffness or rigidity of Bach's multi-linear mechanism.

3. In the "mechanisms" there are distinct innovations of musical action. An electric power-station has recurrences, differing from those of the minuet.

4. In the series of six piano pieces called "Sonates Sauvages" Antheil gives us the first music really suggesting Lewis "Timon" designs.

Numbers 3, 4, and 5 are interesting experiments, ~~the whole~~ much of this music is still in the experimental stage, which does not mean that there are no definite results. Numbers 1 and 2 are accomplished facts. The first of these sonatas "does it," the base is really a basis, the music rises and acts above it, like a projectile carrying a wire and cutting, defining the three dimensions of space.

The sixth of these sonatas seems, after the others, a retrospect. Every solid artist having made an advance by emphasising some cardinal element, returns to examine the other elements of that art. This sonata is, by comparison with the others, soft and "feminine," by its title.

Antheil has purged the piano, he has made it into a respectable musical instrument, recognising its percussive nature. "It is like the xylophone and the cymballo."

5. In the magnificent violin sonata, the most recent of his works, he has tried something of the same sort with the violin,

GEORGE ANTHEIL

325

I mean he has made the piano sound like a pianoforte, he has used the violin for sounds that you couldn't make as well or better on the flute.

I repeat that the thorough artist is probably more sensitive to the difference between his own art and other arts, than to their resemblances. One of the marks of Antheil's authenticity is his disgust with the term "architecture," and his insistence on the term "mechanism."

Antheil is probably the first artist to use machines, I mean actual modern machines, without bathos.

Machines are not really literary or poetic, an attempt to poetise machines is rubbish. There has been a great deal of literary fuss over them. The Kiplonians get as sentimental over machines as a Dickensian does over a starved and homeless orphan on a bleak cold winterrrr's night.

Machines are musical. I doubt if they are even very pictorial or sculptural, they have form, but their distinction is not in form, it is in their movement and energy; reduced to sculptural stasis they lose raison d'être, as if their essence.

Let me put it another way, they don't confront man like the *faits accomplis* of nature; these latter he has to attack *ab exteriore*, by his observation, he can't construct 'em; he has to examine them. Machines are already an expression of his own desire for power and precision; one man can learn from them what some other man has put into them, just as he can learn from other artistic manifestations. A painting of a machine is like a painting of a painting.

The lesson of machines is precision, valuable to the plastic artist, and to literati.

Prose is perhaps only half an art. The medium of poetry is words, i.e. human symbols, conventions; they are capable of including things of nature, that is, sound quality, timbre, up to a point.

They have interior rhythm, there can be rhythm in their arrangement, even tone leadings, and these with increasing precision; but you can not get a word back into the non-human.

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It is redundancy, and therefore bad art, to use it where a less conventional humanised means will serve. Words are superfluous for certain things and inadequate for others; we have already said that a painter about to paint a sunset needs to know more about it than an author who describes or refers to it.

I am perfectly aware that you can imitate the sound of machinery verbally, you can make new words, you can write

pan-pam vlum vlum vlan-ban, etc.,

there are also mimetic words like bow-bow and mao, miaou, in Greek, Chinese, Egyptian, and other tongues, imitating the noises of animals; but these are insufficient equipment for the complete man of letters, or even for national minstrelsy. The mechanical man of futurist fiction is false pastoral, he can no more fill literature than could the bucolic man. This is perhaps an aside.

I take it that music is the art most fit to express the fine quality of machines. Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them; there would be something weak about art if it couldn't deal with this new content. ~~But to return to the vorticist demands~~

“Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form, it belongs to the art of that form.” #

I ~~am inclined to think that~~ machines acting in time space, and hardly existing save when in action, belong chiefly to an art acting in time space, // ~~at any rate~~ Antheil has used them, effectively. That is a *fait accompli* and the academicians can worry over it if they like.

They are constantly searching for the permanent elements in their art. This is a very different thing from being interested in embroideries and emollients and wanting to keep up electroplates.

The thorough artist is constantly trying to form the ideograph

GEORGE ANTHEIL

of "the good" in his art; I mean the ideograph of admirable
compound-of-qualities that make any work of art permanent.

I think, too, that all thorough artists at the outset try to
put down their ideas about this, verbally, and that their notes
are usually in a fairly unintelligible jargon, having a meaning
for themselves, and for a very limited number of other people.

This metaphysic doesn't always get printed. Its chief char-
acteristics are extreme seriousness, and *reiteration*: n.b.
reiteration of certain sentences which obviously mean more
to the artist than to the reader. This mass of verbiage must
be taken rather as evidence of mental activity than as exposi-
tion of ideas.

The difference between this utterance and similar statements
by lunatics is that the artist does attain precise utterance in
his own medium. And from that precise utterance the
interested reader may interpret, more or less, the artist's
ambiguous, or more than ambiguous, verbal statements about
life, cosmos, being, non-being, time, eternity, etc. (These are,
often, no worse or no more ambiguous than the general and
considered statements of professed philosophers.)

I mean that from such fragmentary and confused writing
the intelligent observer will induce the fact that the artist
is very gravely concerned with the bases of his art, and with
the relations of that art to everything else. This is very different
from preciosity; archæological preciosity; emollients; trim-
mings; connoisseurship; traditions regarding superfices,
or the customs or fashions of the moment.

Hence the permanent resemblances of masterwork, the
"revolutionary" nature of genius, the returns to the primitives,
and so forth.

Antheil is supremely sensitive to the existence of music
in time-space. The use of the term "fourth dimension" is
probably as confusing in Einstein as in Antheil. I believe
that Einstein is capable of conceiving the factor time as
affecting space relations. He does this in a mode hitherto
little used, and with certain quirks that had not been used by

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328

engineers before him; though the time element enters into
engineering computations //, and the only lucid remarks on
economics have, in our day, come from an engineer.

The x, y, and z axes of analytics would appear to me to
provide for what Antheil calls the fourth dimension of music,
the "oblique," but technical mathematical language is almost
as obscure as Antheil's. The first of his piano sonatas shows
perfectly clearly what he means. And a gang of African
savages would probably illustrate what he means by the "hole
in time-space."

As indication of his attempt to form the ideograph of the
art, and de quoi rêvent ces jeunes gens, we turn to Antheil's
criticism of other composers, the turns of phrase, the abruptness
recalling Gaudier's manifestos :

"Despite his great admiration for Strawinsky we find (Der Querschnitt, Sommer, 1923) the failure of Strawinsky, the only man who seemed rhythmically and musically gifted enough to reorganise the machineries of music."

"... event of Strawinsky necessary, ... antipode to the
anæmic and unmusical but marvellously vertically-calculated
music of Schonberg."

"In accepting Satie as a master, . . . we see that he
[Strawinsky] was nothing but a jolly Rossini, a real musician
of terrific verve and musicality in whose hands every musical
machinery had to undergo a transformation . . . a brave and
jolly Rossini in an age where composers were occupied with
improvising rhapsodically on music paper after the manner
of Bartok, Ornstein, Szymanowski, Block, and the too-late-
Rachmaninoffs, . . ." etc.

So much for your idols, and the china shop. There
is in Antheil's notes a constant tirade against improv-
isation.

Then we come to appreciations, tempered: "Debussy great
destructionist, evolved new musical locomotion of time; genius
of French salon, inhabitant of pages of Madame Bovary . . .
ease in which he passes from the ribbon on her dressing-table

GEORGE ANTHEIL

329

to the quietness of outdoors, never more than a mile from her house."

"His piano [Debussy's] breathes and undulates with an-cestral tinkle . . . but soft and persuasive . . . can music be 'impressionistic'? is it not a term for painting alone?"

"Debussy is new and forever a great land-mark in musical composition," i.e. because of his "new propulsion of time-spaces." "A what's-his-name Italian and the juggler Satie discovered and unfolded most of his nuances beforehand."

I take it this "what's-his-name Italian" is Fanelli (Tableau Symphonique, 1883, etc.), to whom justice has long been overdue.

"Debussy, soul of ardent virgin, clear and sentimental im-planted in great artistic nature."

Les Six "charming and fickle people. Everything they imitate with the utmost freshness and understanding."

"Cataclysms: Wagner, Scriabine, Bloch. It is all a little fat. Bloch however has the memory of other things. He wants to be without fat."

"Sound vibrations are the strongest and most fluid space vibrations capable of a tangible mathematic."

(There are a number of pages full of such abstract statements which are interesting only after one has heard Antheil's music.)

"... in musical history names of great men, eventually discerned only through the necessity which they have apart from others to create a new locomotion for their musicality."

"Music, the adventure of time with space."

"Architecture static . . . impossible term in musical criti-cism . . . impressionism, still more imbecile term."

"Has anyone beyond Strawinsky brought forward a new propulsion of time-space, a new comprehension of musical mechanism?"

"Two men who resemble each other in mechanism but are total opposites in sensibility. . . . Ernest Bloch . . . Debussian-Javanese-Mongolian tonalities . . . essentially Jewish, voluptuous without being sentimental."

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330

“(Szymanowski . . . [his music] ranges from being infinitely precious to the soul-shattering, fat iridescence of Scriabine.”

“Now, emphatically necessary to break forever from the fatness of Wagner.”

“‘Afternoon of a Faun,’ despite his professed enmity toward Wagner, crammed with marvellous alchemised ‘Tristan.’”

“Bartok, while sense of time-space in the violin sonata is essentially masterful and probably his own, has done much bird-stuffing with folksongs of Hungary.”

“Two ways music can not go: first, purely vertical—one is no longer satisfied with static sensuality that lacks adequate machinery to move it. Second, the purely horizontal, organisation of time-spaces in single plane no longer interesting.”

Schonberg “whose musical machinery is based fundamentally upon Mendelssohn.”

All of which appears to me to be very good sense. As to background and general æsthetics, limiting biography to minimum: George Antheil, born Trenton, N.J., July 8, 1901, of Polish parents; taken to Poland at age of four, returned to America at fourteen, already composing canons and fugues, studied with Von Sternberg and Bloch; performing his own compositions with Berlin Philharmonic and other mid-European orchestras in 1922. Possibly the first American or American-born musician to be taken seriously. If America has given or is to give anything to general æsthetics it is presumably an æsthetic of machinery, of porcelain baths, of cubic rooms painted with Ripolin, hospital wards with patent dustproof corners and ventilating appliances. Only when these spaces become clean enough, large enough, sufficiently nickel-plated, can a sense of their proportion and arrangement breed a desire for order, τὸ καλόν, in that arrangement; from which perhaps a beauty, a proportion of painting and architecture. There we must leave it.

But Antheil has made a beginning; that is in writing music that couldn't have been written before. “Interpreting,” as the awful word is, his age, but doing it without

CÉLESTE

By STEPHEN HUDSON

I TURNED the mass of papers lying all over the bed up-
side down, I looked inside the books he had been reading,
though not through the others, for the bed was surrounded
by books of every size as by a rampart which left only a space
just large enough for me to approach. I examined the blue
and the red folios, I had the green one in my hand when my
master called out " But Céleste. It's no use looking there.
I haven't opened the green folio for weeks."

" Well, dear master, I've searched everywhere, I can't find
it."

He lay propped up, sitting almost upright against the
pillows. His enormous eyes under their heavy half-closed
lids followed my movements with the quizzical expression
that came into them when he was going to tease me.

"Have you looked in your own bed?"

"Monsieur, of course not. How should the letter be in
my bed, considering it never was in my hands?" Actually
I had not been inside my bed since before the letter came.

"Have you looked in your chemise ? in your stockings ?"

"Now, Monsieur, you know—"

"But I had it in my hands a few hours ago. When was
that ?"

I tried to remember. It was difficult because our time
wasn't divided into days and nights. There were no clocks.
My master could not bear their ticking. He said he could
hear even if I had one in the kitchen. It was true. Once,
long ago when first I came to him, I went into his room wear-
ing my watch, and almost at once he said, " Céleste, what is
that machine you are carrying about with you?" So I

332

MUSICAL SUPPLEMENT

NOTES FOR PERFORMERS

Foreword by E. P.

"William Atheling" wrote fortnightly in the *New Age* from 1917-20; he was more a secondary personality than a son de plume, that is to say he had a definite appearance (bald-headed) and a definite script (creabbed and with an old fashioned slant); he sympathized with Arnold Dolmetsch' opinions, even when not wholly in agreement therewith. That is to say he might very well have thought that music ended with Bach. He existed in order that I might study the actual sounds produced by performing musicians. He wrote in the hope of making it possible or easier for the best performers to do their best work in public rather than their worst or their middling. By this he meant that he liked hearing Moussorgsky, that he preferred Russian bareness to the upholsteries of XIXth century Europe. He liked music with a strong horizontal action, in preference to music which seemed to steam up from the earth. He shared my own interest in the fitting of *motz el son*; the fitting of words and tunes / a subject for which we were both better qualified than we would have been for a discussion of the higher complications of harmony.

He found the Kennedy-Fraser's Hebridean research of great interest, he approved of Le Roi Renaud and French folk-song, if rigorously selected, as late as Le Pauvre Laboureur, and La Carmagnole. He regretted the lost culture of Henry Lawes. He enjoyed without much audible, though with a good deal of mute, opposition, the writers of Bel Canto; Caldara, Durante, and Carissimi.

In 1922 his marginalia were submitted to a "qualified musician" with the request that any general criticism therein, might be separated from the paragraphs dealing only with the success or failure of particular concerts (à la "Herr Wintergarten im Bechsteinsaal trat auf und wieder ab.", or "At this point the composer has drawn his inspiration from the soda-water font

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of Mendelssohn, in fact several cuckoos have laid their eggs
in Mr. Elgar's nest, and he has patiently hatched them all",
or; "Mr. Mark Hambourg's playing presented no points of
interest.")

In 1923 the siftings were submitted to George Antheil with
the request that he mark any passages with which he disagreed
violently, or which seemed to him too imbecile to be tolerated.

GEORGE ANTHEIL

My opinion of George Antheil is due to appear at some
length in the April "Criterion". He was born in Trenton
N.J., and. d. 1901, parents Polish, of French extraction; he returned
to Poland in 1905; returned to America 1914, at which time
he was composing fugues and canons; studied with Von Stern-
berg, and Ernest Bloch; played his own Piano Concerto with the
Berlin Philharmonic in 1922. Chief works. Golden Bird,
sonata for piano, six sonatas for piano, mechanisms (for pianola)
symphony for five instruments, a ballet, two sonatas for violin
and piano. His scribblings on the edge of my typescript were
intended for my eye alone; but it is sometimes more interesting
to know what a man thinks than to know what he thinks prudent
to say at a given moment. At any rate both M. Antheil and
myself are so fed up with the alleged critics who try ever to
appear omniscient, and who work not to express their thoughts
but to establish their critical position; that we have preferred
this extreme imprudence.

The notes can stay here as a manifesto of our angle of attack.
There is the result of my twenty years' work with monolinear
verbal rhythms, my study of mediaeval music; and Antheil's
solid fugal, contrapuntal, and harmonic training. There are
certain forms of musical padding and rhetoric and mushiness
with which we are both equally bored.

Atheling's notes are badly written; heaven knows they are
in places platitudinous; but this platitude and the necessity
for this platitude may be taken as a measure of certain very
simple things which contemporary performers, and not by
any means the worst of them only, so often, and often so amaz-
ingly, do not know.)

E-P

110

NOTES FOR PERFORMERS

by William Atheling, with marginalia emitted by George Antheil.

I. *The Piano*, February 1918

Why indeed the Piano? Apart from bickering over the tempered scale, though one can hardly accept the argument that it is no use bothering over inaccuracy of pitch that only one person in two hundred can perceive, people without absolute and pitch sense do, and do very often, get a certain very definite pleasure from correct playing, even if they are incapable of detecting a single error, or even a series of errors save by a vague dissatisfaction or by an even slighter and more vague diminution of pleasure.

All keyboard instruments tend to make performers of people not born to be musicians; and the very fact that one can play a keyboard instrument quite correctly without in the least knowing whether a given note is in tune or is correct in itself, tends to obscure the value of true pitch. This perception, the first requisite of any player upon strings is therefore left, perhaps, wholly unconsidered by the piano student. The piano tuner is responsible for all that. His services are inexpensive. This argument might be used also against the earlier keyboard instruments although they were never sufficiently loud to drive out and predominate over the rest of the instruments. And they did not fill the building.

From initial carelessness about pitch, piano-playing has gradually progressed to a carelessness about actual sound. The attention that was centred in earlier music upon purity of tone, upon sound-quality, has been weakened and weakened till I have seen a composer of no small talent utterly impervious to the quality of the noise he was making.

(I presume the "timbre" is meant. G. A.)

The notes were in the right order; they followed each other as he intended he was satisfied.

I long, perhaps not too vainly, for the day when the piano shall be as the hansom, which vehicle it not a little resembles, and when the pianist shall be as the cab-driver, so far as the concert hall is concerned. The instrument will abide with

III

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us yet, for there is the pianola attachment, and if, for some
time, it is necessary to train acrobats to play Bach-Busoni for
pianola records, surely human invention will lead to, and has
already discovered, a means for making the records direct.
The future composer will do his work, not with a pen but a
punch. "You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile," says
Mr. Kipling, but there is always the gramophone.

(I bow gracefully, several years. G. A.)

At least "it took me back twenty years." Have we not all,
with the shades of Murger, with the well-known death mask
gaping at us, and with the plaster cast of the drowned girl
hanging in the other corner, have we not all of us known the
charm? (The Schumann quality that has been read into
Chopin by generations of conservatoire young ladies to the
obscuring of Chopin's austerity.)

It was the studio "mood" as opposed to the piano of Sir Frederic Leighton and the Leightonians, the instrument at which the very young mother sits with her numerous well-washed, fresh offspring clambering about her, receiving the cultural rudiments. The pianist in this case has merite.

I do not say that I am above the studio manner; that I would
not willingly recall the past; forget my bald spot. "Four and
forty times would I," as Mr. Kipling has it, listen to the wailful
note as the more reserved couple wait until it's time to walk
home, and the less reserved, or more "bohemian" couple hold
hands under the sofa cushion,—Jugend, Jugend, Jugend !
and the inefficient illustrator (aged sixty) who once hoped
to paint like Raphael, looks at the ceiling or the performer.

But what has all this to do with the concert-hall? A certain
crop of female pianists always hoped to produce in the concert-
hall the atmosphere of the studio; to bring to the hoarse old
gentleman from the Thames valley and to the large-waisted
lady from Roehampton a "breath of the real meaning," to
"show them that life..." and sometimes the female pianist
succeeded... After the final uncalled for encore, when all
but her dearest friends had left the building. Neverthe·less
the concert-hall is not the studio. Some musicians may actually
play better in studios, they may not force from the "atmosphere",
or the company may merely blurr the critical senses, but these
things do not concern the concert-hall. The magnetic theory
is invalid.

(In fact the concert-hall has nothing at all to do with the studio. It is its enemy, thank God. I prefer the excusable boredom of the classics to the young gentleman who "sketches" Chopin out with the new knowledge of a Cyril Scott. G. A.)

The magnetic theory is invalid. No performer can rely
on emotionalising the audience.

(One must try as hard as Brancusi's bird. Finished! Why worry? The hysteria is there. G. A.)

Music in a concert-hall must rely on itself and the perfection

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(The studio manner is the kindergarten method for young radical
ladies. G. A.)

An era of bad taste probably gathers to itself inferior matter
from preceding periods. An indiscriminate rummaging in
the past does not help to form a tradition.

(A splendid turn for Mr. Casella, Maliperio, Prokofieff, and
the Six. G. A.)

A sense of rhythm covers many defects.

(One might say almost all. G. A.)

The pain caused to the ear by occasional horrid sounds is
quickly obliterated in the succeeding flow of the music. Singers
hoping for platform success will do well to notice this.

(This is the whole thing in a nutshell, not only of singers, but
of all platform artists. Ninety per cent of failures are due to
absolute incapability in the primary rudiments of music—rhythm !
How can they hope to be musicians—not even an excuse ! Printed
notes laid before them and keyboard instruments. Everything
laid out and planned for the unmusical ! Back to the troubadour !
I mean ninety per cent are not musicians, trained, born or any-
thing. G. A.)

A drag, a lack of the wave force, deadens, tires, utterly wears
out the audience. Rhythm-sense is not merely a tempo mesure,
it is not merely a clock-work of the bar-lengths. Measured
time is only one form of rhythm; but a true rhythm-sense
assimilates all sorts of uneven pieces of time, and keeps the
music alive.

I would point out Lawes as an example of how the words
of a poem may be set, and enhanced by music. There are
different techniques in poetry; men write to be read, or spoken,
or declaimed, or rhapsodised; and quite differently to be sung...

(By the way, most songs are written for the wrong kind. G. A.)

Words written in the first manners are spoiled by added
music; it is superfluous; it swells out their unity into confusion.

When skilled men write for music then music can both
render their movement, as Lawes does often, tone by tone,
and quantity by quantity; or the musician may apparently
change the word-movement with a change that it were better
to call a realisation. Music is not speech. Arts attract us
because they are different from reality. Emotions shown in
actual speech poured out in emotion will not all go into verse.
The printed page does not transmit them, nor will musical
notation record them phonographically.

(Ha! The famous Antheil notation to the rescue! G. A.)

But, for all that, a certain bending of words or of syllables
over several notes may give an emotional equivalent.

This is an art by itself, differing from poetry, and from the
art of harmony or of counterpoint. Nevertheless, it has occasionally and triumphantly appeared in the world, and is well worth an effort to recover.

NOTES FOR PERFORMERS

by William Atheling, with marginalia omitted by George Antheil.

(Continued from Musical Supplement in Vol. I, No. 2)

October 1918

The second season must be worse than the first for any critic who designs impartiality. If a performer has once bored you to death it is, in the first place, very difficult to drag yourself to hear him again; and if this reluctance be overcome it is still difficult not to carry with you a touch of resentment for the initial annoyance. Conversely, it is difficult when one has been delighted by a player not to arrive at his second performance with a certain readiness to attribute all his faults to chance. Even so we may take it as unlikely that any performer over 45 is likely to receive a wholly new musical intelligence or to develop a new and ravishing charm. If a man is going to change from an egoistic temperamental impresser of schoolgirls to a serious musician the change should happen before he is much past thirty-five.

(I do not think that young virtuosi should follow the spirit of the older virtuosi either. For instance, the young virtuoso, B., is playing Chopin romantically with both public and critics wildly acclaiming him. Chopin with heavy neo-German-Russian romanticism! Chopin à la Schuman! Chopin in the grand manner! Synthetic calculation that the largest and most colossal manner is the finest! We cannot expect a young man to develop a new characteristic if he is recreating masterpieces, sure-fire, by synthesis. G. A.)

The function of musical criticism is to make it possible for the best performers to present their best work; for them to give concerts under present conditions without making any concession whatsoever to ignorance and bad taste. Beyond that one might have ambitions, both of developing the discretion of a possible public, and of actually enlightening young or untrained musicians (or even elderly amateurs) concerning their own shortcomings, and their possible avenues of improvement. Do bad musicians attend good concerts?

(Yes, but they don't like them. A bad musician will only admit a name so well-known that there can be no question about it. He is a bad musician because he has no "guts" anyway. G. A.)

MUSICAL SUPPLEMENT

In several eases where great proficiency and obviously great experience in public performance are coupled with overmastering dulness, one would suggest that every piece of music worth presenting in public has a meaning. I should suggest a meaning. The composer presumably felt something, and equally wished to express something by his fugue, étude, or sonata. My statement is simple, and platitudinous; but correct detail and even that rather rare thing, correct architectonics, will not hold the better attentions unless the performer have, beyond a concept of the composer's style, and a style for representing it, some intention of express[ing] the unifying emotion or emotions of the particular piece. It is by no means necessary that these emotions be the same as were the composer's, the performer must think both "Bach" and "Ciaconna" if he is to give the piece with effect. He must unite his general feel of the composer to his particular concept of the piece to be given.

(I misread this word for "contempt" at first. Why a "style" and "intention". Why not, instead of an "emotion", a dynamism, a vitality. G. A.)

We might almost lay it down as axiomatic that a song must be sung in its original language... the perfect union of word and note is so subtle and rare a thing that, once attained, no substitute is likely to give satisfaction, unless the translator be a great technician, able to support treble the technical difficulty which faced the original poet.

(Yes, once the words are polished into the music. G. A.)

Moussorgsky has his place beyond all the other Russians. You cannot compare Music since Beethoven with the early thin music which is like delicate patterns on glass. Since Beethoven people have thought of music as of something with a new bulk and volume. Beyond all the floridity and pretence of Wagner are these Russians, and beyond them Moussorgsky, like the primordial granite.

(I think Moussorgsky is the connecting link between Wagner and Stravinsky. Debussy existed somewhere out of the connection, like Chopin. G. A.)

There is a certain satisfaction in a concert which knows its own mind and which gives you some one thing in sufficient bulk to provide basis for an opinion; thus in Rosing's all-Russian programme we had Russia, from Nevstruoff who is so "Russian", who is so the bleak spirit of the steppes that he makes you understand the Russian reaction towards all sorts of gew-gaws and floridities, bright colour for costume, admiration of Wagner, and Parisianism; we had Russian music from this bleakness of Nevstruoff to Moussorgsky who, to my mind at least, lifts Russian music above all other music of the epic tone, Moussorgsky who is of the "heroic" and would without any sham heroics,

371

THE TRANSATLANTIC REVIEW

without Wagnerian padding and rhetoric. We had Russia
from the steppes to the part of Russia which is oriental, a land-
locked people in the main.

November 1918

The Kennedy-Frasers in the Hebridean music gave us equally an epitome of a whole racial civilisation (with whatever deprivation of luxury you like, the people who produced such art must be termed a civilised people.) This music is full of seasplash as the Russian is of plain-bleakness and winter-bleakness. It has the wave-pull and wave-sway in place of the foot-beat of the hopak. It has also its mouth-music for dancing (Hi, hin halla lal a) to match any present-day Jazz that Afro-America has sent over to us.

(I am beginning to get annoyed with Americans who tell me that jazz will be the music of the future. Young prodigy composers from the U. S. writing classic jazz in four-four beat throughout. My God, the African negroes have the American negroes stopped a mile for every kind of rythmic and musical effect. American whites must have a bad effect upon their negroes, don't you think.)

G. A.)

It has its rhythmic validity and variety in labour songs, not to be read by the metronome, but which have their diverse beats and pauses determined by the age-lasting rhythm of the craft, cloth-clapping, weafing, spinning, milking, reaping. And in this connection damn the young gentleman who said, "I don't go in so much for rhythm. I'm temperamental." Another chance phrase in a corridor, "Very interesting, but it needs the Kennedy-Frasers to sing it."

These phrases are a fair summary of the blight of English music since it has been a genteel, suburban accomplishment.

(That is exactly what is the matter with American music. Even jazz has lost its bite, the negroes are upon Broadway and in the Little Review, and everything is becoming genteel. G. A.)

I have walked about London streets before, during and after "peace night". The sense of rhythm is not dead in this island. I have heard costers singing not only with rhythm but also with true tone, as true as you would find among boasted continental singers. An "artistic" nation would have taken its singers from the donkey-barrows and coster carts. Even La Duse still calls herself "contadina", and once wore the Venetian black shawl. But no, the black curse of Cromwell, and the anathema of Victoriana and genteelness have put a stop to that sort of permeation in England, and the concert-performer is chosen from the exclusively eviscerated strata of the community.

(How funny it must be in England. G. A.)

372

MUSICAL SUPPLEMENT

The result is that these women come down here from "North Britain" and drive one to learning Gaelic. These Hebridean melodies are the only "English" music possessed of the needful vigour. Mrs. Kennedy-Fraser's settings are not the vegetarian school of folk-song.

At any rate, we have in these Hebridean songs a music which has escaped the mediaeval ecclesiastical enervation; other modern music in western Europe has had to work its way slowly and indolentia tion from the dominance of "harmless" and innocuous modes.

(So has the music in Africa, but should you bring the negroes to Paris in numbers you would either have them in church or putting little frizzles upon the little French tunes at the "Casino de Paris". Voila, look at America. We have to look for the corners in our own music. G. A.)

And even now the academies which resurrect South-European mediaeval melodies furnish them with proper four-square under-pinnings à la the most approved Johann-Sebastian.

These Hebridean songs, like such Russian songs as Rosing gave us, have subject-matter. They are not cooked up for a concert hall. Every song is about something. Thus there is a difference between one song and the next.

For the auditor seriously concerned with music this question of "performance" is a trifle, but for meeting the practical question of giving the best possible music under today's concert hall conditions these details are worth considering. It is the artist's and critic's place to see that the best can compete advantageously with the vulgarest.

(Dear E. P. Everybody knows that the business of critics of the great music trade journals is to push the vulgarest music possible. They stop only when the game is taken out of their hands by the ragtime publishers. Criticism, musically, is politics and business. G. A.)

For all its virtues, the modern French school of song will not hold its own when sung with really good art of good periods. It glows by comparison with modern Italian and modern English settings.

...In especial we note in the oriental quality of Moussorgsky's "Foire de Sorotchinsky," the light that never was on sea or land, the Coleridge-Keats ambition, the casements on seas forlorn. Moussorgsky has always some mastery to distinguish him in whatever company he is found.

Nevstruoff's "Poor Wanderer" is excellent, but from it one comprehends the Russian desire for foreignness, for French neatness, and even German upholstery. Russian music is not all of music. It has a greater place in world-music than is yet accorded it.

(To be continued)

E. P.

373

9

A NOTE ON POUND

Parentis, Landes

18th March, 1924

To the Editor, the Transatlantic Review

Dear Sir :

I chanced upon Ezra Pound's article (1) at a very agreeable moment. I was in the Landes. I was crossing an immense stretch of mud on stilts when a man also on stilts, who was the postman, gave me the third number of the *Transatlantic Review*. I sought the lower limbs of a pine, not to sit upon, but to lean against. Under my eyes was Pound's article on harmony. I tried to read it; but it was impossible—not that certain literature is not suited to the open air, but that I lacked a paper cutter. Later, at my ease, I read the whole review with a great deal of pleasure.

Ezra Pound brings out admirably that harmony and rhythm in musical phenomena are intimately bound together. In our epoque no one will deny that. He regrets that these two parts are generally explored separately. Nothing is more substantiated than this regret. To the misunderstanding of this fact one must attribute the surfeit of heavy and stupid music which flourished at its ease during the third third of the nineteenth century and which we won't soon be rid of. And it is precisely against this error that advanced music has exercised its energy. But one must confess that this music itself makes us yawn at times. It is not the underlying principles that are at fault; it is the music that is ugly and false. Pound happily avoids this consideration. Except for Schonberg he cites no contemporary: he speaks of Bach or of the great Neapolitan master, Durante. And at once we understand him better. Neverthe- less, be it Bach, be it Durante, or Pergolese, or Puccini, all learnt harmony, as one learns any science—in a state of immobility. Pound has read Sauzay. "Le fameux Durante qui a fait tant d'élèves, ne leur donnait jamais des règles qu'il formulait." I should have liked to have seen that. Possibly Durante never formulated rules. Rules none the less existed. They grew out of musical practice and formulated themselves all alone, that is to say, immobilized themselves in the abstract in the mind. If Bach, Hadyn, Perpera committed, what we agree to call daring deeds, it was that their genius made them see further than others. From that to establish the precept that daring is the elementary principle, is to go far.

Every science is easy to consult precisely because it is immobile. As soon as this consultation ceases and the practice

(1) *Treatise on Harmony*, by Ezra Pound. T.R. Vol. i. No. iii.

February 1919

ATHELING

Tchaikowsky : a certain cheapness is imminent in this
composer. He is not cheap all the time, or even, perhaps, most
of the time but he keeps one in a state of anxiety.

Strawisky imitates him and but then one loses
all anxiety : as says "music need be neither good nor
bad," it must be one thing or the other " - sic. good
or bad.

G.A.

A concert lasts an hour and a half; it is not an organic
composition like the act, or the whole of an opera or a symphony.
The element of main form must be supplied. I have already
written about various means for variety. Beyond them, one should
introduce a certain number of songs with more or less symmetrical
wave lengths; something with a discernible and regular metre....
The element of "regular" rhythm is often (probably without
consciousness or design) supplied by the "classic" numbers
familiar at the beginning of concerts.

... one cannot be expected to ait through the poems of E. Z.
Wheeler Wilcox whoever set them or sing them.

The Weakness of these modern French musicians is that
their music rises and falls in value exactly in proportion with
the literary quality of the words; these composers
cannot hide or improve
a banality in the poetry which they use. You can always tell

from words on the programme whether the music will be in-
teresting; this is not a fatal defect, but it demands a
double care for literature on the musician's part.

" It will be safe to assume " that a KENNEDY-FRASER concert will have certain glorious moments, moments unique in the season's concert-haring. M. Kennedy-Fraser has, definitely, genius. I do not overwork that work in these columns, and I use it, to denote a certain profound intuition and emotional knowledge of the subject.

The music of free period, of a constantly varying
phrase-length and rhythm-length is a freedom from fixed lenghts,
but the symmetry must underlie, and the sense of this
symmetry must be kept fresh and vivid, if not in the cons-
ciousness, at least in the sub-consciousness of the performer.
...The pitfalls of enthusiasm, particularly of irresponsi-
ble other-peoples' enthusiasm are numberless, numberless and
ubiquitous.

The fine great-chested virtuos is are
never enthusiastic without a system.
g. A.

April 1919

to eighteenth century fluster.

... let us admit that it is a good thing for singers to get off the beaten track and hunt up music that is lying in disuetude.

Opera was best in court conditions. It is for an audience that drifts together for social reasons and which wishes the social pressure to be loosened, the necessity for conversation to be diminished. Concert conditions are much more the conditions of song-composition " Preisleid."

> Today the stiffer young crowd are taking up vaudeville in the same way. The most fashionable way is according to the guiding principles in " The Seven Lively Surts".

.. the blunt-wittedness of contemporary musicians, and their general incapacity for literary choice and selection.

"Music in stucco" is certainly the proper designation for a great and damnable category.

May 1919

It requires a certain nerve to appear in religious dimness with a futurist lampshade and to play from the printed page.

Memory is not, however, the supreme faculty; and if a performer
can use printed notes instead of memory without detriment
to his or her performance I see no reason against it [horror
of all academic and established heads of musical
seminaries]

... personality - a quality more apt to enrich one's private life than to draw swift and easy public success.

Anyone with a capacity for grinding
has a "pleasing stage personality".

I have before propounded the theory that Chopin
was *not* the De Musset of music.

Then Franck ran near to the danger zone where music
verges into noise.

Yes, a kind of silvery, angelic,
unbearable noise.

One remarks on his ability, and then, to get into # some
sort of scale and proportion, one thinks that Chopin
would have expressed an equal amount of whatever this

more apparent when taken in contrast with his etiolated contemporaries than when contrasted with authentic wild music.

Tinayre, Stroesco, and Rosing are all, as I have indicated, repeatedly worth hearing and totally different.

Mendelssohn put some sort of melodic line into the "Recit" of "Rend your Hearts" and a deal of sentimentality into the arts and <u>anyway</u> he might be left to the Albert-Hall.

We have already said that there is no reason why Johann Sebastian Bach's processional should be saddled with words stating that he has lost his Jesu. The song results in a fine, jocular, robust proclamation that the obviously bien portant and untroubled protagonist is brought "to despair". Every note calls the author a liar. Bach of course had to play his music in church, and it was but natural that he should enjoy himself . . . , I can still recall a village organist in similar plight doing "Lamb, lamb, lamb !" at a chair practice, it was not the celebrated "paschal lamb" either. Rag-time is quite fine on a pipe organ. Still the ecclesiastical sponsorship does not pertain to music performed in Bond Street, and one might have some honest secular words set to that Guard's march.

-10-

... The best poets have been nature poets only incidentally. Nature appears here and there in their work, but is not singled out for their subject-matter. Whatever "religion and Christianity" may still mean to the populace and to the modern heath-dweller, religion as exploited by artists of the least century has been mostly exploited as convenient furniture and not from any inner necessity.

The first artist to take up any neglected folk element has, historically, nearly always scored a success.

"Le Pauvre Laboureur" said to be of the XVIth century, a finger -re-Marseillaise, with a detached or impersonal, dispasionate passion, a stasis inciting to no action, yet with deepest feeling in its melody.

Le pauvre laboureur
L'a deux petits enfants,
Ils mènent la charrue,
N'ont pas encore quinze ans ! ...

And the magnificent finale :

Il n'est ni roi ni prince,
Ni duc que ni seigneur,
Qui n' vit e de la peine
Du pauvre laboureur.

heavy musical accent on thick and heavy syllables, has furnished
the "lieder" and the lieder were emotionally effective ...
at least people adored them, and I don't know that anybody
has taken the trouble to make a critical examination of their
construction. A few fine poems, folk songs, poems of Heine, served
as a cover for the rest. The modern French ran a counter mou-
vement, but were reputed to suffer etiolation. We want more
discontent with our lyrics, and a stricter examination of claims.

June 1919

Perhaps one most difficult problem is the treatment of music which is not outrageous enough to merit condemnation nor yet quite good enough to stir interest. The finer shades and varieties of this mediocrity :

Yes! they bother
The "ultra modern"
Critics fearfully.

are more bother to the critic than either the execrable or
the excellent.

... the music was played as most of Schubert deserves to be
played, namely with that art of the "better" restaurant or
"usual" theatre orchestra, more or less brisk and more or
less tearfully sentimentalish... with food, or under some
propitious emotional circumstances, the music might have assisted
in keeping one stationary.

- 13 -

One must never be suddenly jarred in one eats food in the first and digests it in the second. We imagine the effect of the Sacre on " The old Gentleman who must be careful. "

The average concert and " better" restaurant music are identical. Food represents the basic problem of the race. G.A

* The whole *lieder* school is wrong, and it needs only a slight unfavourable condition to rub in the fact. The whole *genre* is wrong. This does not prevent there being a certain number of acceptable lieder, but the more one examines them the less satisfactory they appear. The Victorian ballad is the natural result of trying to bring the lieder into English, and a very lamentable result it is, too.

To be popular a song must not only appeal to the silliness of the populace but it must be do-able without skill or effort.

One in the eye for 99 % of the "great" public and their " Great" virtuos.

G.A

There is no copy of Henry Lawe's three volumes of " Ayres and Dialogues" at the little second-hand music shop in Great Turne stile, but the kindly proprietor is good enough to look up old sale catalogues. The last set went for £49. Dolmetsch's arrangements of some of this old music are out

- I4 -

of print. Only in a nation utterly contemptuous of its past treasures and inspired by a rancorous hatred of good music could this state of affairs be conceivable. I have bought Waller's poems for a shilling. Yet Lawe's position in English music is proportionally much more important than Waller's position among English poets.

This condition of things is more eloquent of the debasement and utter contemptibility of British music publishers and the slovenly ignorance of British so-called musicians than the laws of libel permit me to attempt to express in these columns.

This wيلom " nest of singing birds " is apparently on its last roost.

The value of the old instruments, harpsichords, spinets, clavichords, viols da gamba, is more in that they induce the player and hearer really to listen to the quality of sound produced than in that they render the old music with veracity. This latter advantage is, however, far from negligible. No one really understands counterpoint who has heard it only with the blare of modern instruments or the plugging of the piano. Neither is there any means so effective for developing a pianist's sense of sound-quality as practice on the clavichord.

Chopin presumably excels all piano-composers of the nineteenth century because his memory embraced the sound of the earlier keyboard instruments. A person learning

- 15 -

piano-playing on the piano is simply ignorant of a great many
kinds of sound, _some_ of which can be rendered on the piano
by a person whose mind and imagination contain them.

The advantage of ensemble playing is that the
harpsichord and spinet " go with " the strings, whereas the
piano does not, but is practically always an inruption.

Octobre 1919

... a fair test of the real art of the ballet, as distinct
from fortuitous conflict of several arts in one performance,
is whether one does hear the music.

The dancing ought forcibly to draw attention
to the music - or else it is a social affair.

The perfect song occurs when the poetic rhy-
thym is in itself interesting, and when the musician augments,
ilumines it, without breaking away from, or at least without
going too far from the dominant cadences and accents of the
words; when ligatures illustrate the verbal qualities, and
when the little descants and prolongations fall in with the
main movements of the poem.

Were there a really critical audience, it would
insist on each performer doing the thing he does best - at
least in public; one does not wish to interpose with people's

private diversions.

This limitation of one's art is perhaps a french
gift; the artist should find himself in some mode in which he
can use all or nearly all his gifts to the best advantage,
and where his limitations will least affect the complete
presentation of the subject-matter.

Shakespeare put in " Hey -nonny - nonnyd ",
so that the musician might have his fun without upsetting poe-
try. Mozart was mus' more important than his librettist (even
when he had Metastasio to write words for him). But there is
a certain kind of emphasis and these are certain effects of
veracity which cannot be given by music of this school.

December 1919

There is a wealth of fine English poetry unset,
there is crying need for a musician who can think more of the
beauty of the poem than of his pustulent egotism and of his
desire to be the leading " modern British composer ".

A freedom of detail can only be durably effec-
tive if the sense of inner form is strong; one cannot hammer
upon this too often; the musician or verse-writer who has the
sense of form ingrained may take liberties in some safety,

- I7 -

liberties which are fatal if the sense of form is not imminent,
hovering, present without being obvious, but still present.

January 1920

The Pye-ano, Ge-entlemen, the PYE-ano is the largest musical instrument known to man, with the possible exceptions of the Steam Calliope whistle or Fog Signal and the three-barrelled pipe-organ; of which the pipe-organ has one chief and especial merit, namely and to wit, its stability. I mean, "Where it is thare it rests", whereas the pye-ano may, with four fat men and considerable difficulty, be moved from one spot to another ( Mr Kipling to the contrary notwithstanding); all of which is no reason for pye-ano recitals outnumbering all other concerts three to one, or seven to one, or seventeen to one in the damp season.

There is no more fun being a virtuo

g.A.

The future of piano music lies in the Jazz, and we may soon expect a much louder and more varied contraption with xylophone, whistle, and gong attachment in the treble octaves and solid steel bars in the bass. This new and forthcoming implement should, from present indications, present most of the advantages over the pye-ano that the original forte-piano did to its predecessors.

Naturally, the one who screams the loudest is the

- 18 -

greatest genius according to the now American
standards - but don't get out of four - four
time ever - my God, S.A.

... rhythm is made not merely by a correct division of music into bars of equal time-length, but also by a pluck and impact of accent.

We MUST have something we can understand and
that is MODERN.
Paint over the tin-lizzy

Berlioz was indubitably competent, and one
might be interested in his technique if Wagner hadn't buried
him full fathoms fifteen.

Like a Rolls-Royce,

Piano concertos ! At its birth the forte-piano
seems to have turned people's heads; even so sensible a man
as Thomas Jefferson ordered a forte-piano. Apologists claim
that the earliest pianos preserved some of the qualities of
the harpsichord. The present instrument is a sort of cheap
substitute for the orchestra, the only instrument with enough
variety and range to give a sort of shorthand account of
music too complicated for a fiddle.

33.

January 1920

ATHELING

or 'cello or cornet. But to play a piano *with* an orchestra is anathema ☞ it is the sum total of fatuous imbeelity and to prove it there is in Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto, in this Commodus of music, not one *single* and *solitary* motif or melody or salient line given to the piano which would not be more effective if it were played on any other instrument in the orchestra. Violon, oboe, flute, 'cello, tympani, any, absolutely *any*, of these instruments lifting a significant phrase from the body of the orchestral sound would be more effective; and there is demonstration of it whenever any other instrument, or instruments is or are given a phrase to *itself* or *themselves*. Part of the highest praise one can give to a piano soloist is that he or she *praised for their varied orchestral* effects *from the piano*; why the substitute when the richer medium is at hand? If a mania for pianos swept over Europe during an unfortunate period, can we not forgive, or at any rate forget, and let the piano concerto go to the proper scrap-heap of experiment, meritorious in its day, but no longer fit for conservation?

Arne's precision came as an improvement on Schumann. Conventions he had, but after the "conventionalities of the operatic" etc., there was no eighteenth century convention of Arne which was not dew-fresh and full of pleasurability.

33a.

January 1920

ATHELING

The last movement of Korsakov's Scherazade suite is a triumph of orchestration. The mastery is everywhere present, one notes the perfect scale and graduation from one instrument, from the delicacy of the solo violin to the massed thunder of the whole ensemble of instruments; here for once one has the whole demonstration of causes why the orchestra has superseded chamber music, why this huge instrument has swept away so much of the fine work made for instruments of smaller calibre.

Scriabin, "Boeme d'Extase"...Coates showed his realisation of the capacities of his orchestra, but the *extase* is senescent, it is manifestly not the *extase* of youth; the long beginning is like the prose of its era, heavy as Henry James or as Charles Louis Philippe, fin de siècle, of an extreme and laborious sophistication, Coates doing admirably, Scriabin conscientiously avoiding the obvious in everything save the significance, and treating one of the oldest topics with anatomic minuteness, though possibly unconscious of his humour, anatomic even to the notes given on the triangle, spurring one to quotations from Gautier's "Carmen". The double basses superb, but one longed, possibly, for the older spirit of English May-day. It is too late to emend the title; we quarrel with no work of art because of a title lightly or sarcastically given, but we think Scriabin would have been kinder to his audience if he had labelled this poem "Satire upon an Old Gentleman," or possibly "Confessions

33b.

January 1920

ATHELING

an old gentleman in
of a Trrible", supposing all the time he "knew". We entertain
doubts, however, as to just how far his awareness extended.

While the public can find orchestral concerts, (price the
same) it is a little difficult to discover why they go at all
to piano recitals, and with the flow of time one rather won-
ders at young men taking up the piano as a profession. The
onus upon the solo-pianist is very heavy; if he divides his
concert with a vocalist, he becomes, at once, second fiddle;
and to entertain an audience for an hour or more with nothing
but a piano is exceedingly difficult, and it grows more and
more difficult as the public becomes more and more familiar
with piano repertoire.

...the maximum emotional effect of singing is gained by presentation and not by sentimentality.

the Marseillaise is possibly the only national anthem that
can be raised to the status of music by competent singing.

34.

January 1920.

ATHELING

Psychological speculation, or, rather, pathological, the pleasure of playing a piano with orchestra, as opposed to hearing a piano played with orchestra, is explicable on the grounds of exhilaration. The feeling that one is being so accomplishedly agile, so ripplingly and dashingly efficient as to get one's fingers onto all the notes in good time with the conductor probably sustains the player; he gets the same physical pleasure as he might from quick and ckever use of the foils in a fencing bout; he has no attention left for auditory sensation. Parallel cases that of the inebriated or excited talker who imagines he or she is being "brilliant" merely because of rapid trajectory.

February 1920

It is probable that bar-ends should be clearly marked, but this line of demarcation is geometric; it should have no thickness; above all, it should not be a dead stop stock-still, requiring each time a subsequent heave to "start 'er agayne."

As a record of what things have existed, two or three pieces of Mendelssohn's should be played annually by Cernikoff at the Royal College of Music, for, the enlightenment and warning of students. This would be quite enough Mendelssohn for one year, and even a demonstration in alternate years might be sufficient.

35.

February 1920.

ATHELING

The Schumann "Carnaval" was given as literature, and it has the durability of literature..., one definitely sees the "given concentration of knowledge on the given portion of surface." (Put aside quibbles on terms "Knowledge", "intelligence", "etc., one does not get the needful concentration of these without emotion or passion either present or foregoing.)

In estimating the piano (not as played by pyanists, but in its capacity) one must admit that it is the only modern instrument upon which the solo player can exercise so much musical knowledge and comprehension. It is louder than the spinet or clavichord, it has mechanical advantages over the harpsichord, and is probably less trouble to keep in order. It will reign supreme in the parlour until the pianola and the gramophone have democratised it out of existence. It is, from the auditor's point of hearing, inferior to the orchestra. Public demonstrations of the instrument are in great part incubatorial, designed for and attended by people who wish to pianise. A great artist can get music out of this instrument. So can some players from a brass string and a cigar-box. A few piano recitals each year are worth hearing.

36.

March 1920

ATHELING

The average of this modern French stuff is poor; now that the novelty is worn off, one is soon bored with the eternal hurry and slow-up, the continued waste of musical means employed by this school.

The labour lilts illustrate at each Kennedy-Fraser concert the value of some rhythm-base more diversified than English accidental prosody made in not very inspired imitation of mediaeval degenerations from the Latin imitation of Greek quantitative metres. The Oriental and African division of music into raga and tala, i.e., rhythm/tune and pitch-tune, is probably more fond in diversity. The churn, the loom, the spinning-wheel, the oars, all give splendid bases for distinctive rhythms which can never degenerate into the monotony of mere iambs and trochees. They keep their essential difference as even dance tunes cannot. Even so the real feel of moving feet which is so often the soul of thematic invention in Bach and Mozart, is increasingly rare in music.

Words help thematic invention only so long as the musicians are sensitive to shades of different verbal quantity. The charm of Mozart, if one can analyse it, seems often to lie in a rare combination of notes which have musical structure, musical line, but which suggest, beyond these and simultaneously, dance steps and language.

37.

March 1920.

ATHELING

Now if it is imbecile to sing ring-a-round-a-rosy words with
a serious meaning, it is doubly imbecile to sing such words
when they do not even give such, open vowel sounds for the long
notes and ligatures. In the "Ich habe genug" one might, so far
as the notes are concerned, sing, "Two scones and butter were
seen on the plate"; the auditory pleasure would be equal to that
of hearing "There I too with Simeon the joy," etc. If we were
to respect the tradition as some people understand that we
should have to preserve every idiocy of mankind. People
have got used to cantatas and therefore they are, for some peo-
ple, "goods" They remind people of their lost youth. All right;
but there is no reason why succeeding generations should not be
reminded of different lost youths.

The stupid and customary traditionalist always stops at a
set year, i.e., the year where his teacher taught him to stop.
The customary traditionalist never goes to history when history
is likely to trouble his stagnation. We presume that the Sequ-
aire is the ancestor of the Cantata. Mediaeval choirs sang in
descant on "amens" and "hallelujahs," these descants got longer
and longer, it became difficult to remember the long series of
notes on mere vowel sounds, various writers, notably Goddichalk
then wrote in words to fit the notes of the descant. This proved
the Sequaire and the fruit was a justification. But after
the lapse of seven centuries it is no justification of the En-
glish translation of "Ich habe genug," which has no merits and

38.

March 1920

ATHELING

does not fit the music. The statement that the protagonist"has enough" is doubly true of the auditor before the singer has forty-seven times bade him "softly sleep". As it is Bach there is naturally staunch melodic line and fine music.

Rounds and part songs are another matter altogether. In them the word-phrase holds the musical phrase in the minds of the different groups of singers. The Cantata is merely a superstition, a keeping of structure after its function is gone.

April 1920

I have never been able to determine how far various alleged oriental melodies, as concocted for example by Borodine or "recorded" and "arranged" by Salvador Daniel, have been mis-written in our notation, or how far the writing is really sound and would indicate the right tune and rhythm to a performer who knew the right manner of presentation. Salvador Daniel, if I remember rightly, scouts the idea of quarter notes, and argues that what insensitive ears have mistaken for quarter tones are really the odd pitches of Greek modality, modalities perhaps a little worn away with the centuries.

In especially one notes the "extraordinary" length of the rhythm pattern units, comparable to the mediaeval rhyme-scheme of Provençal canzos, where, for example, one finds a rhyme pattern which begins its six-ply repeat after the seventeenth

39.

April 1920

ATHELING

different terminal sound. In this Arabian music, as in the Provençal metrical scheme, the effect of the subtler repetitions only becomes apparent in the third or fourth strophe, and then culminates in the fifth or sixth, as a sort of horizontal instead of perpendicular chord. One might call it a "sort of " counterpoint; if one can conceive a counterpoint which plays not against a sound newly struck, but against the residuum and residenza of sounds which hang in the auditory memory.

In the two cases, Arabian music and Provençal verse, where there was no musical "harmony" and no counterpoint in Bach's sense of the word, this elaboration of echo has attained great complexity, and can give great delight to ears which are either "trained" to it or which have a natural aptitude for perceiving it. In Europe this aptitude or perceptivity lasted at least until Dante's time, and prompted in him several opinions on the relative merit of Provençal artists, which have puzzled thick-eared "modern" philologists.

For the normal concert-goer the first impression of Arabian singing is that a cat is being strangled in the vicinity. After the "fool on the outer ear" has been put to sleep by the rhythm after the ear's rebellion against the first shock to its habit has worn off, the little whiskers of the ear's interior "minature piano" begin to wave quite nicely in the ebb and flow of this different sort of sound current; a nostalgia of the sun overtakes one; the music is, and is rightly, an Enchantment, and would to what gods there be, that European musicians might

40.

April 1920

ATHELING

return to that concept of music.

...the difference between art and life; the necessary scale and proportion required in the presentation of a thing which is not the photograph and wax cast, but a re-creation in different and proportional medium.

One would like the ability to express verbally the exact difference between this "sort of presentation" which is art, and the other sort of presentation, which is just Miss Jones of Peckwell singing a song - being half the time Miss Jones, and half the time something, rather indefinite, but more or less in rapport with the music.

Again, I emphasise the value of these different rhythm-roots as above that of a tired and mechanical accent-metric.

May 1920

I know only too well that the concert platform is crowded, and that the crowd upon it is nothing to the multitude who do not even get on to it, and that, in this multitude, 90 per cent start with something they consider "feeling".

4I.

May 1920

ATHELING

One must, perhaps, find one's ideal artiste in fragments,
never whole and united.

October 1920

French sentiment is perhaps more sentimental than English sentiment, and one never feels it has quite the same excuse (i.e., in unavoidable mental muddle.)

November 1920

A rhythm unit is a shape; it exists like a keel-line of a yacht, or the lines of an automobile-engine, for a definite purpose, and should exist with an efficiency as definite as that which we find in yachts and automobiles.

December 1920

In the finest lyrics the music so comes from the words and enriches, reinforces, illuminates them. We will recapture this art of illuminating only when we have musicians capable of tertiary discrimination, capable of selecting *cantabile* words, and of feeling the fine shades of their timbre, of their minor hurries and delays.

February 1918

ATHELING

THE PIANO.

Why, indeed, the piano? This instrument has many signs on its
keyboard. I leave aside the unending bickering over the tem-
pered scale, even though one interiorly protests against the
argument that it is no use bothering over an accuracy of pitch
that only one person in two hundred can perceive. People with-
out absolute pitch-sense demand do very often, get a certain
very definite pleasure from correct playing even if they are
incapable of detecting a single error, or even a series of er-
ors save by a vague dissatisfaction or by an even slighter and
more vague diminution of pleasure.

All keyboard instruments tend to make into performers people
not born to be musicians; and the very fact that one can play a
keyboard instrument quite correctly without on the least know-
ing whether a given note is in tune or is correct in itself,
tends to obscure the value of true pitch. What is the first
requisite of any player upon strings is therefore left perhaps
wholly unconsidered by the piano student. The piano-tuner is
responsible for all that. His services are inexpensive. This
argument could be used against the earlier keyboard instruments
but they were never sufficiently loud to drive out and predomi-
nate over the rest of the instruments. They did not "fill the
building."

From carelessness about pitch the piano has gradually pro-
gressed to a carelessness about actual sound. The attention
centred, in earlier music, upon purity of tone, upon sound qua-
lity, has been weakened and weakened till I have seen a composer

2,

of no small talent utterly impervious to the quality of noise
he was making. The notes were in the right order; they fol-
lowed each other as he intended, he was satisfied.

I long, perhaps not too vaimly, for the day when the piano
shall be as the hansom, which vehicle it not a little resembles
and when the pianist shall be as the cab-driver, so far as the
concert hall is concerned. The instrument will abide with us
yet, for there is the pianola attachment, and if for some time
if is necessary to train acrobats to play Bach-Busoni for piano-
la records, surely human invention will lead to, and has already
discovered, a means for making the records direct. The future
composer will do his work, not with a pen but a punch. "You
couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile," says Mr. Kipling, but
there is always the gramophone.

At least "it took me back twenty years." Have we not all,
with the shades of Murder, with the well-known death mask gaping
at us, and with the plaster cast of the drowned girl hanging in
the other corner, have we not all of us known the charm? (The
Sghumann quality that has been read into Chopin by generations
of conservatoire young ladies to the obscuring of Chopin's
austerity.)

4.

performer can rely on emotionalising the audience. Music in a concert-hall must rely on itself and the perfection of its execution; it is, as it were, under glass. It exists on the other side of the footlights, apart from the audience. With apologies to the language, the audience are spectators, they watch a thing of which they are not part, and that thing must be complete in itself. They may be moved by the contemplation of its beauty. They are not moved, or at least can be moved only in an inferior and irrelevant way by being merged into the action of the stage

I labour this point rather heavily, but it is not a trifle, and hundreds of musical careers have been muddled simply because the performers have not understood how entirely the music must lead its own life: must have its own separate existence apart from the audience; how utterly useless it is to try to mix up audience and performance.

March 1918

A concert in a concert-hall is a performance, a presentation, not an appeal to the sympathies of the audience. It is, or should be, as definitely a presentation or exhibition as if the performer were to bring out a painted picture and hang it before the audience. The music must have as much a separate existence as has the painting. It is a malversion of art for the performer to beseech the audience (via the instrument) to sympathise with his or her temperament, however delicate or plaintive or distinguished.

5.

March 1918

ATHELING.

From the "studio" manner (in concert-halls), from the domes-
tic manner, from the rural church manner, and from the national
festival manner, may the surviving deities protect and deliver
us! They have no, they do not, but we do not cease to pray
that they may achieve it.

An era of bad taste probably gathers to itself inferior mat-
ter from preceding periods. An indiscriminate rummaging in the
past does not help to form a tradition.

The pain caused to the ear by occasional horrid sounds is
quickly obliterated in the succeeding flow of the music. Sing-
ers hoping for platform success will do well to notice this.
A drag, a lack of the wave force, deadens, tires, utterly wears
out the audience. Rhythm-sense is not merely a temps mesure,
it is not merely a clock-work of the bar-lengths. Measured
time is only one form of rhythm; but a true rhythm-sense assi-
milates all sorts of uneven pieces of time, and keeps the music
alive.

6.

March 1918.

ATHELING

I would point out Lawes as an example of how the words of a poem may be set and enhanced by music. There are different techniques in poetry; men write to be read, or spoken, or de-claimed, or rhapsodised; and quite differently to be sung... Words written in the first manners are spoiled by added music; it is superfluous; it swells out their unity into confusion.

When skilled men write for music then music can both render theri movement, as Lawes does often, tone by tone, and quantity by quantity; or the musician may apparently change the word-movement with a change that it were better to call a realisation Music is not speech. Arts attract us because they are different from reality. Emotions shown in actual speech poured out under some emotion will not all go into verse. The printed page does not transmit them, nor will musical notation record them phonographically; but, for all that, a certain bending of words or of syllables over several notes may give an emotional equivalent

This is an art by itself, differing from poetry, and from the art of harmony or of counterpoint. Nevertheless, it has occasionally and triumphantly appeared in the world, and is well worth an effort to recover. Lawes was English of the English, he was no obscure man in his day, being a King's musician and a man lauded of poets. He was English of the English, but he did not fall a prey to the pig-headed insularity of the British Association of Musicians; he did not shun foreign competition.

19.

March 19, 9

ATHELING

"It will be safe to assume" that a KENNEDY-FRASER concert will have certain glorious moments, moments unique in the season's concert-hearing. M.Kennedy-Fraser has, definitely, genius I do not overwork that word in these columns, and I use it to denote a certain profound intuition and emotional knowledge of the subject.

The music of free period, of a constantly varying phrase-length and rhythm-length is a freedom from fixed lengths, but the symmetry must underlie, and the sense of this symmetry must be kept fresh and vivid, if not in the consciousness, at least in the sub-consciousness of the performer.

...The pitfalls of enthusiasm, particularly of irresponsible other-people's enthusiasm are numberless, numberless and ubiquitous.

The fine great-cherished and virtuous is never enthusiastic without a system.

April 1919

If there is a literate class in England which one is sometimes inclined to doubt, it does not go in for music. And if there are English musicians with anything like general culture, they are screened from the public gaze with an amazing assiduity

20.

April 1919

ATHELING

Thematic invention in music has coincided with periods when musicians were intent on poetry, intent on the form and movement of words. Thematic invention is the weakest spot in contemporary music everywhere. The rhythms of French are less marked, but only in France do we find a careful study of the verbal qualities. I do not think I have shown any delirious or unbalanced appreciation of modern French, but among their song-setters are practically the only contemporary song-setters whom one can respect.

English contemporary poetry is, I suppose, very dull, and there is very little rhythmic invention in it; but even so, writers intent on melody would, if they were serious in their technical intention, make greater effort to combine with musicians, and musicians would attempt to learn something from authors about the meeting-points of the two arts. As it is, the musician's attitude towards the lyric is too apt to be "Get me something that I can end in a high note. Got to make some money. Players will not practice for trios and quartettes; there is no place or company where any number of writers and musicians meet to try new experiments of an "unpractical nature." I recently met a poet who wanted a poem set to cymbals and 'cello in order to develop or illustrate the tonality of his words. The man is "of course" a lunatic. No Chappell-Ballad-minded aggression would tolerate such departure from suburban custom. A "song" is words set to py-ano music. It doesn't matter what words.

20.

April 1979

ATHENING

Thematic invention in music has coincided with periods when musicians were intent on poetry, intent on the form and movement of words. Thematic invention is the weakest spot in contemporary music everywhere. The rhythms of French are less marked, but only in France do we find a careful study of the verbal qualities. I do not think I have shown any delicious or unbalanced appreciation of modern French, but among their song-setters are practically the only contemporary song-setters whom one can respect.

English contemporary poetry is, I suppose, very dull, and there is very little rhythmic invention in it; but even so, writers intent on melody would, if they were serious in their technical intention, make greater effort to combine with musicians, and musicians would attempt to learn something from authors about the meeting-points of the two arts. As it is, the musician's attitude towards the lyric is too apt to be "Get me something that I can end in a high note. Got to make some money. Players will not practice for trios and quartettes; there is no place or company where any number of writers and musicians meet to try new experiments of an "unpractical nature." I recently met a poet who wanted a poem set to cymbals and 'cello in order to develop or illustrate the tonality of his words. The man is "of course" a lunatic. No Chappell-Ballad-minded aggression would tolerate such departure from suburban custom. A "song" is words set to py-ane music. It doesn't matter what words.

21

April 1919

ATHELING

It is not the business of the business-like song-setter to express anything, or to find poems worth further musical developments, or poems in which the verbal rhythm contains the germ of larger musical structure. All of which is very lamentable.

The artist must have a faint touch of fanaticism somewhere in his nature. Heaven knows that fanaticism in excess is worse than garlic in excess, yet both the quality and the herb have their uses.

...we noticed also how STUPID Liszt was, and how little he knew about chords.

Stupidity is not an asset in the arts. Passion is as blind as you like, and it sweeps over intellectual subtleties in the drive upon its own truth, but there is a fundamental stupidity in some natures, and, alas! in many composing and writing natures against which no perseverance or labour is any avail. Liszt was stupid. You can make impressive sounds on the piano while playing Liszt, but you cannot completely conceal his fundamental and congenital and ineradicable lack of intelligence, his lack of susceptibility. He would try to make a watch go by beating it with a potato-masher.

21.

April 1919

ATHRLING

It is not the business of the business-like sang-setter to express anything, or to find poems worth further musical developments, or poems in which the verbal rhythm contains the germ of larger musical structure. All of which is very lamentable.

Stupidity is not an asset in the arts. Passion is as blind as you like, and it sweeps over intellectual subtleties in the drive upon its own truth, but there is a fundamental stupidity in some natures, and, alas! in many composing and writing natures against which no perseverance or labour is any avail. Liszt was stupid. You can make impressive sounds on the piano while playing Liszt, but you cannot completely conceal his fundamental and congenital and ineradicable lack of intelligence, his lack of susceptibility. He would try to make a watch go by beating it with a potato-masher. I am tired of fire-eaters, ten cent stores, cheap voulables, and all of the pretty, pretty, pretty, I fear sheer brilliance alone is about done in for a while. Witness Liszt's tone, poems, strauses "Salome" and "Dissau de Feu." We are gradually tiring.

22.

April 1919.

ATHELING

... the easy tolerance of the operatic era is waning. Opera is a diffuse form; it was made to cover light, after-dinner conversation; the exigeant audience which concentrated its attention on careful Mediaeval canzoni had given way to eighteenth century fluster.

...let us admit that it is a good thing for singers to get off the beaten track and hunt up music that is lying in disuetude.

Opera was best in court conditions. It is for an audience that drifts together for social reasons and which wishes the social pressure to be loosened, the necessity for conversation to be diminished. Concert conditions are much more the conditions of song-competition "Preisleid."

...the blunt-wittedness of contemporary musicians, and their general incapacity for literary choice and selection.

23.

May 1919

ATHELING

It requires a certain nerve to appear in religious dimness
with a futurist lampshade and to play from the printed page.
Memory is not, however, the supreme faculty; and if a performer
can use printed notes instead of memory without detriment to his
or her performance I see no reason against it (horror of all
academic and established heads of musical seminaries!)

...personality - a quality more apt to enrich one's private life
than to draw swift and easy public success.

I have before propounded the theory that Chopin was not the
De Masset of music.

Then Franck ran near to the danger zone where music verges
into noise. One remarks on his ability, and then, to get into
it some sort of scale and proportion, one thinks that Chopin
would have expressed an equal amount of whatever this series was
intended to express with half the number of digital impacts.

Neither Prudhomme nor Victor Marguerite were poets of first
rank; and the modern French composers are utterly at the mercy
of the poems whose words they set.

24.

May 1919

ATHELING

Debussy as I have indicated before, was a glorious heresy. He writes for the excitement of phantasmagoria, for the evocation of visual imaginations, and in just so far as he does this his work is unorthodox and off the true track of music. It is definitely an heresy, a beautiful and bewildering heresy, which should have its own converts and enthusiasts; but it is no mortal use trying to play his music as if it were "pure", as if it were simply "sound" arranged into time and pitch patterns for the expression of emotion. And if the player be not initiate into this realm of evoked images, he or she will never play Debussy as anything but an outsider.

Dupon was an engine-wiper. His work does not take one on first hearing, I am inclined to think that it has a vigour more apparent when taken in contrast with his etiolated contemporaries than when contrasted with authentic wild music.

Tinayre, Strøesco and Rosing are all, as I have indicated repeatedly, worth hearing and totally different.

Mendelssohn put some sort of melodic line into the "Recit" of "Rend Your Hearts" and a deal of sentimentality into the aria and _anyway_ he might be left to the Albert Hall.

24.

May 1919

ATHELING

Bravo!

Dupn was an engine-wiper. His work does not take one on first hearing, I am inclined to think that it has a vigour more apparent when taken in contrast with his etiolated contemporaries than when contrasted with authentic wild music.

Tinayre, Stradeco and Rosing are all, as I have indicated repeatedly, worth hearing and totally different.

Mendelssohn put some sort of melodic line into the "Recit" of "Rend Your Hearts" and a deal of sentimentality into the aria and anyway he might be left to the Albert Hall.

25.

May 1919.

ATHELING

We have already said that there is no reason why Johann Sebastian Bach's processional should be saddled with words stating that he has lost his Jesu. The song results in a fine, jocund, robust proclamation that the obviously bien portant and untroubled protagonist is brought "to despair". Every note calls the author a liaf. Bach of course had to play his music in church, and it was but natural that he should enjoy himself...I can still recall a village organist in similar plight doing "Lamb, lamb, lamb!" at a chòir practice, it was not the celebrated "paschal" lamb either. Rag-time is quite fine on a pipe organ. Still the ecclesiastical censorship does not pertain to music performed in Band Street, and one might have some honest secular words set to that Guard's march.

...The best poets have been nature poets only incidentally. Nature appears here and there in their work, but is not singled out for their subject-matter. Whatever "religion and Christianity" may still mean to the populace and to the modern heath-dweller, religion as exploited by artists of the last century has been mostly exploited as convenient furniture and not from any inner necessity.

25.

Mayn1919

ATHRLING

We have already said that there is no reason why Johann Sebastian Bach's professional should be saddled with words stating that he has best his Jesu. The song results in a fine, jocund, robust proclamation that the obviously bien portant and untroubled protagonist is brought "to despair". Every note calls the author a lief. Bach of course had to play his music in church, and it was but natural that he should enjoy himself...I can still recall a village organist in similar plight doing "Lamb, lamb, lamb!" at a chéir practice, it was not the celebrated "paschal" lamb either. Rag-time is quite fine on a pipe organ. Still the ecclesiastical censorship does not pertain to music performed in Bond Street, and one might have some honest secular words set to that Guard's march.

26.

May 1919

ATHELING

"Le Pauvre Laboureur," said to be of the XVIth century, a
finer re-Marseillaise, with a detached or impersonal, dispas-
sionate passion, a stasis inciting to no action, yet with
deepest feeling in its melody.

Le pauvre laboureur
L'a deux petits enfants,
Ils menent la charrue,
N'ont pas encore quinze ans!..

And the magnificent finale:-

Il n'est ni roi ni prince,
Ni ducque ni seigneur,
Qu'il n>vive de li peine
Du pauvre laboureur.

The poignancy and the simplicity of poetic statement are
matched with the formulation of the music and when I compare
this with the utter tosh of sentimentality in four out of five
of the lyrics set by Brahms I can but wonder again at the vogue
of XIXth century favourites. I have been forced to look anew
at Brahms during the past few weeks, and I can only suppose
people have accepted them because they have always heard them
in a foreign tongue and taken no account of verbal meanings.
But they are really much worse than I had ever suspected. with
exceptions which can be very fine.

26.

May 1919

ATHELING

"Le Pauvre Laboureur," said to be of the XVIth century, a
finer re-Marseillaise, with a detached or impersonal, dispass-
sionate passion, a stasis inciting to no action, yet with
deepest feeling in its melody.

And the magnificent finale:-

Il n'est ni roi ni prince,
Ni duque ni seigneur,
Qu'a n'vive de li peine
Du pauvre laboureur.

The poignancy and the simplicity of poetic statement are
matched with the formulation of the music and when I compare
this with the utter tosh of sentimentality in four out of five
of the lyrics set by Brahms I can but wonder again at the vogue
of XIXth century favourites. I have been forced to look anew
at Brahms during the past few weeks, and I can only suppose
people have accepted them because they have always heard them
in a foreign tongue and taken no account of verbal meanings.
But they are really much worse than I had ever suspected.. with
exceptions which can be very fine.

E.P. most of the poems which Brahms set were
German poems

27.

May 1919

ATHELING

The Laboureur song dated the XVIIth century reminds us, or
might remind us, that democracy did not begin with the French
Revolution; and that earlier authors had thought of the labour
problem, for this song is not a song by a labourer, but by an
observing and indignant poet of no mean attainment. Even Spain
was not always a land of inquisitions, and there was democracy
south of the Pyrenees, before the suppression of the Cortes in
the ill days of Charles V.

I return again to the apparent insensitiveness of the modern
audience to the word value of songs. Since Lawes and Waller
collaborated, the technique of English settings has been appall-
ling. German, with its capacity for taking extremely heavy musi-
cal accent on thick and heavy syllables, has furnished the "lie-
der" and the lieder were emotionally effective... at least people
adored them, and I dont know that anybody has taken the trouble
to make a critical examination of their construction. A few
fine poems, folk songs, poems of Heine, served as a cover for
the rest. The modern French ran a counter movement, but were
reputed to suffer etiolation. We want more discontent with our
lyrics, and a stricter examination of claims.

27.

May 1919

ATHLING

The Labourer song dated the XVIIth century reminds us, or
might remind us, that democracy did not begin with the French
Revolution; and that earlier authors had thought of the labour
problem, for this song is not a song by a labourer, but by an
observing and indignaht poet of no mean attainment. Even Spain
was not always a land of inquisitions, and there was democracy
south of the Pyrenees, before the suppression of the Cortes in
the ill days of Charles V.

I return again to the apparent insensitiveness of the modern
audience to the word value of songs. Since Lawes and Waller
collaborated, the technique of English settings has been appal-
ling. German, with its capacity for taking extremely heavy musi-
cal accent on thick and heavy syllables, has furnished the "lie-
der" and the lieder were emotionally effective... at least people
adored them, and I dont know that anybody has taken the trouble
to make a critical examination of their construction. A few
fine poems, folk songs, poems of Heine, served as a cover for
the rest. The modern French ran a counter movement, but were
reputed to suffer etiolation. We want more discontent with our
lyrics, and a stricter examination of claims.

28.

June 1919

ATHELING

Perhaps one's most difficult problem is the treatment of music which is not outrageous enough to merit condemnation nor yet quite good enough to stir interest. The finer shades and varieties of this mediocrity are more bother to the critic than either the execrable or the excellent.

...the music was played as most of Schubert deserves to be played, namely with that air of the "better" restaurant or "usual" theatre orchestra, more or less brisk and more or less tearfully sentimentalish...with food or under some propitious emotional circumstances the music might have assisted in keeping one stationary.

The whole *lieder* school is wrong, and it needs only a slightly unfavourable condition to rub in the fact. The whole *genre* is wrong. This does not prevent *there* being a certain number of acceptable lieder, but the more one examines them the less satisfactory they appear. The Victorian ballad is the natural result of trying to bring the lieder into English, and a very lamentable result it is, too.

28.

June 1919

ATHELING

One must never be suddenly jarred in the first digest of the second. Imagine the effect of the Sacre on "the old gentleman who must be careful."

The whole liedery school is wrong, and it needs only a slight-

The average concert and "better" restaurant music is of acceptable liedery, but the more one examines them the less identical. Food is satisfactory they appear. The Victorian ballad is the natural represent result of trying to bring the liedery into English, and a very basic lamentable result it is, too.

One in the eye for 99% of the "great" public, and their "great" public-virtuosi.

29.

June 19, 9

ATHELING

There is no copy of Henry Lawes' three volumes of "Ayres and
Dialogues" at the little second-hand music shop in Great Turne
stile, but the kindly proprietor is good enough to look up old
sale catalogues. The last set went for £49. Dolmetsch arrange-
ments of some of this old music is out of print. Only in a na-
tion utterly contemptuous of its past treasures and inspired by
a rancorous hatred of good music could this state of affairs be
conceivable. I have bought Waller's poems for a shilling. Yet
Lawes' position in English music is proportionally much more
important than Waller's position among English poets.

This whilom "nest of singing birds" is apparently on its
last roost.

The value of the old instruments, harpsichords, spinets, cla-
vichords, viols de gamba, is more in that they induce the pla-
yer and hearer really to listen to the quality of sound produ-
ced than in that they render the old music with veracity. This
latter advantage is, however, far from negligible. No one real-
ly understands counterpoint who has heard it only with the blare

29.

June 19-9

ATHELING

There is no copy of Henry Lawes' three volumes of "Ayres and
Dialogues" at the little second-hand music shop in Great Turne
stile, but the kindly proprietor is good enough to look up old
sale catalogues. The last set went for £49. Delmetsch arrange-
ments of some of this old music is out of print. Only in a na-
tion utterly contemptuous of its past treasures and inspired by
a rancorous hatred of good music could this state of affairs be
conceivable. I have bought Waller's poems for a shilling. Yet
Lawes' position in English music is proportionally much more
important than Waller's position among English poets.

This whilem "nest of singing birds" is apparently on its
last roost.

30.

June 1919

ATHELING

of modern instruments or the plugging of the piano. Neither is
there any means so effective for developing a pianist's sense
of sound-quality as practiced on the clavichord.

Chopin presumably excels all piano-composers of the nine-
teenth century because his memory embraced the sound of the
earlier keyboard instruments. A person _learning_ piano-playing
on the piano is simply ignorant of a great many kinds of sound,
some of which can be rendered on the piano by a person whose
mind and imagination contain them.

The advantage of ensemble playing is that the harpsichord
and spinet "go with" the strings, whereas the piano does not,
but is practically always an inruption.

October 1919

...a fair test of the real art of the ballet, as distinct from
fottuitous conflict of several arts in one performance is whe-
ther one does hear the music.

The perfect song occurs when the poetic rhythm is in itself
interesting, and when the musician augments, illumines it, with
out breaking away from, or at least without going too far from
the dominant cadences and accents of the words, when the liga-
tures illustrate the verbal qualities, and when the little des-
cants and prolongations fall in with the main movements of the
poem.

30a.

October 1919

ATHELING

Were there a really critical audience, it would insist on each performer doing the thing he does best- at least in public, one does not wish to interfere with people's private diversions

This limitation of one's art is perhaps a French gift; the artist should find himself in some mode in which he can use all or nearly all his gifts to the best advantage, and where his limitations will least affect the complete presentation of his subject-matter.

Shakespeare put in "Hey-nonny-nonnys," so that the musician might have his fun without upsetting the poetry. Mozart was much more important than his librettist (even when he had Metastasio to write words for him.) But there is a certain kind of emphasis and these are certain effects of veracity which cannot be given by music of this school.

30a.

October 1919

ATHRLING

Were there a really critical audience, it would insist on
each performer doing the thing he does best- at least in public
one does not wish to interfere with people's private diversions

Shakespeare put in "Hey-nonny-nonnys," so that the musician
might have his fun without upsetting the poetry. Mozart was
much more important than his librettist (even when he had Metas-
tasis to write words for him.) But there is a certain kind of
emphasis and these are certain effects of veracity which cannot
be given by music of this school.

31.

December 1919

ATHELING

There is a wealth of fine English poetry unset, there is crying need for a musician who can think more of the beauty of the poem than of his own pustulent egotism and of his desire to be the leading "modern British composer."

A freedom of detail can only be durably effective if the sense of inner form is strong; one cannot hammer upon this too often; the musician or verse-writer who has the sense of form ingrained may take liberties in some safety, liberties which are fatal if the sense of form is not imminent, hovering, present without being obvious, but still present.

January 1928

The Pye-ano, Ge-entlemen, the PYE-ano is the largest musical instrument known to man, with the possible exceptions of the Steam Calliope Whistle or Fog Signal and the three-barrelled pipe-organ; of which the pipe-organ has one chief and especial merit- namely and to wit, its stability -I mean, "Where it is there it rests," whereas the pye-ano may, with four fat men and considerabke difficulty, be moved from one spot to another (Mr. Kipling to the contrary notwithstanding); all of which is no reason for pye-ano recitals outnumbering all other concerts three to one, or seven to one, or seventeen to one in the damp season.

32.

January 1920

ATHELING

The future of piano music lies in the Jazz, and we may soon expect a much louder and more varied contraption with mylophone whistle, and gong attachment in the treble octaves and solid steel bars in the bass. This new and forthcoming implement should, from present indications, present most of the advantages over the pye-ano that the original forte-piano did to its predecessors.

...rhythm is made not merely by a correct division of music into bars of equal time-length, but also by a pluck and impact of accent.

Piano concertos! At its birth the forte-piano seems to have turned people's heads; even so sensible a man as Thomas Jeffer- son ordered a forte-piano. Apologists claim that the earliest pianos preserved some of the qualities of the harpsichord. The present instrument is a sort of cheap substitute for the orches- tra, the one instrument with enough variety and range to give a sort of shorthand account of music too complicated for a fiddle.

33a.

January 1920

ATHELING

The last movement of Korsakov's Scheherazade suite is a tri-
umph of orchestration. The mastery is everywhere present, one
notes the perfect scale and graduation from one instrument, from
the delicacy of the solo violin to the massed thunder of the
whole ensemble of instruments; here for once one has the whole
demonstration of causes why the orchestra has superseded cham-
ber music, why this huge instrument has swept away so much of
the fine work made for instruments of smaller calibre.

Scriabin, "Poeme d'Extase"...Coates showed his realisation
of the capacities of his orchestra, but the *extase* is senescent,
it is manifestly not the *extase* of youth; the long beginning is
like the prose of its era, heavy as Henry James or as Charles
Louis Philippe, fin de siecle, of an extreme and laborious so-
phistication, Coates doing admirably, Scriabin conscientiously
avoiding the obvious in everything save the significance, and
treating one of the oldest topics with anatomic minuteness,
though possibly unconscious of his humour, anatomic even to the
notes given on the triangle, spurring one to quotations from
Gautier's "Carmen". The double basses superb, but one longed,
possibly, for the older spirit of English May-day. It is too
late to emend the title; we quarrel with no work of art because
of title lightly or sarcastically given, but we think Scriabin
would have been kinder to his audience if he had labelled this
poem "Satire upon an Old Gentleman," or possibly "Confessions

33b.

January 1920

ATHLETING

of Trouble", supposing all the time he "knew" We entertain
doubts, however, as to just how far his awareness extended.

While the public can find orchestral concerts, price the
same it is a little difficult to discover why they go at all
to piano recitals, and with the flow of time one rather won-
ders at young men taking up the piano as a profession. The
onus upon the solo-pianist is very heavy; if he divides his
concert with a vocalist, he becomes, at once, second fiddle;
and to entertain an audience for an hour or more with nothing
but a piano is exceedingly difficult, and it grows more and
more difficult as the public becomes more and more familiar
with piano repertoire.

34.

January 1920.

ATHELING

Psychological speculation, or, rather, pathological, the pleasure, of playing a piano with orchestra, as opposed to hearing a piano played with orchestra, is explicable on the grounds of exhilaration. The feeling that one is being so accomplishedly agile, so rippingly and dashingly efficient as to get one's fingers onto all the notes in good time with the conductor probably sustains the player; he gets the same physical pleasure as he might from quick and clever use of the fingers in a fencing bout; he has no attention left for auditory sensation. Parallel case that of the inebriated or excited talker who imagines he or she is being "brilliant" merely because of rapid trajectory.

February 1920

As a record of what things have existed, two or three pieces of Mendelssohn's should be played annually by Cernikoff at the Royal College of Music, for the enlightenment and warning of students. This would be quite enough Mendelssohn for one year, and even a demonstration in alternate years might be sufficient.

35.

February 1920.

ATHLETING

The Schumann "Carnaval" was given as literature, and it has the durability of literature...one definitely sees the "given concentration of knowledge on the given portion of surface." (Put aside quibbles on terms "Knowledge", "intelligence", "etc.", one does not get the needful concentration of these without emotion or passion either present or foregoing.)

36.

March 1920

ATHELING

The labour lilts illustrate at each Kennedy-Fraser concert the value of some rhythm-base more diversified than English accidental prosody made in not very inspired imitation of mediaeval degenerations from the Latin imitation of Greek quantitative metres. The Oriental and African division of music into raga and tala, i.e., rhythmbase and pitch-tune, is probably more found in diversity. The churn, the loom, the spinning-wheel, the ears, all give splendid bases for distinctive rhythms which can never degenerate into the monotony of mere iambs and trochees. They keep their essential difference as even dance tunes cannot. Even so the real feel of moving feet which is so often the soul of thematic invention in Bach and Mozart, is increasingly rare in music.

Words help thematic invention only so long as the musicians are sensitive to shades of different verbal quality. The charm of Mozart, if one can analyse it, seems often to lie in a rare combination of notes which have musical structure, musical line, but which suggest, beyond these and simultaneously, dance steps and language.

37.

March 1920.

ATHELING

Now if it is imbecile to sing ring-a-round-a-rosy words with
a serious meaning, it is doubly imbecile to sing such words
when they do not even give such, open vowel sounds for the long
notes and ligatures. In the "Ich habe genug" one might, so far
as the notes are concerned, sing, "Two scones and butter were
seen on the plate"; the auditory pleasure would be equal to that
of hearing "There I too with Simeon the joy," etc. If we were
to respect the tradition as some people understand that phrase
we should have to preserve every idioey of mankind. People
have got used to cantatas and therefore they are, for some peo-
ple, "goods". They remind people of their lost youth. All right;
but there is no reason why succeeding generations should not be
reminded of different lost youths.

The stupid and customary traditionalist always stops at a
set year, i.e., the year where his teacher taught him to stop.
The customary traditionalist never goes to history when history
is likely to trouble his stagnation. We presume that the Sequ-
aire is the ancestor of the Cantata. Mediaeval choirs sang in
descant on "amens" and "hallelujahs," these descants got longer
and longer, it became difficult to remember the long series of
notes on mere vowel sounds, various writers, notably Goddardchalk
then wrote in words to fit the notes of the descant. This prod-
duced the Sequaire and the fruit was a justification. But after
the lapse of seven centuries it is no justification of the En-
glish translation of "Ich habe genug," which has no merits and

38.

March 1920

ATHELING

Rounds and part songs are another matter altogether. In them the word phrase holds the musical phrase in the minds of the different groups of singers. The Cantata is merely a superposition, a keeping of structure after its function is gone.

April 1920

I have never been able to determine how far various alleged oriental melodies, as concocted for example by Berodine or "recorded" and "arranged" by Salvador Daniel, have been mis-written in our notation, or how far the writing is really sound and would indicate the right tune and rhythm to a performer who knew the right manner of presentation. Salvador Daniel, if I remember rightly, suggests the idea of quarter tone, and argues that what insensitive ears have mistaken for quarter tones are really the odd pitches of Greek modality, modalities perhaps a little worn away with the centuries.

In especially notes the "extraordinary" length of the rhythm pattern units, comparable to the mediaeval rhyme-scheme of Provençal canzes, where, for example, one finds a rhyme pattern which begins its six-ply repeat after the seventeenth dif-

39.

April 1920

ATHELING

different terminal sound. In this Arabian music, as in the
Provencal metrical scheme, the effect of the subtler repetitions
only becomes apparent in the third or fourth strophe, and then
culminates in the fifth or sixth, as a sort of horizontal in-
stead of perpendicular chord. One might call it a "sort of "
counterpoint; if one can conceive a counterpoint which plays not
against a sound newly struck, but against the residuum and resi-
dua of sound which hangs in the auditory memory.

In the two cases, Arabian music and provencal verse, where
there was no musical "harmony" and no counterpoint in Bach's so
sense of the word, this elaboration of echo has attained great
complexity, and <u>can</u> give great delight to ears which are either
"trained" to it or which have a natural aptitude for perceiving
it. In Europe this aptitude or perceptivity lasted at least un-
til Dante's time, and prompted in him several opinions on the re-
lative merit of Provencal artists, which have puzzled thick-
eared "modern" philologists.

For the normal concert-goer the first impression of Arabian
singing is that a cat is being strangled in the vicinity. After
the "fool on the outer ear" has been put to sleep by the rhythm
after the ear's rebellion against the first <u>shock to its habit</u>
has worn off, the little whiskers of the ear's interior "minia-
ture piano" begin to wave quite nicely in the ebb and flow of
this different sort of sound current; a nostalgia of the sun
overtakes one; the music is, and is rightly, an Enchantment, and
would to what gods there be, that European musicians might

40.

April 1920

ATHELING

One would like the ability to express verbally the exact difference between this "sort of presentation" which is art, and the other sort of presentation, which is just Miss Jones of Peckwell singing a song - being half the time Miss Jones, and half the time something, rather indefinite, but more or less on rapport with the music.

Again and again I emphasise the value of these different rhythm-roots as above that of a tired and mechanical accent-metric.

May 1920

I know only too well that the concert platform is crowded, and that the crowd upon it is nothing to the multitude who do not even get on to it, and that in this multitude 90 per cent start with something they consider "feeling".

4I.

May 1920

ATHLETING

October 1920

November 1920

December 1920

In the finest lyrics the music so comes from the words and enriches, reinforces, illuminates them. We will recapture this art of illuminating only when we have musicians capable of literary discrimination, capable of selecting *cantabile* words, and of feeling the fine shades of their timbre, of their minor hurries and delays.

I

BREVIARY ( in parenthesis ) FOR COMPOSERS

Nothing but the main form of a work will resist the
vicissitudes and calamities of presentation. For your
detail you are at the mercy of the executant, and the
executant is at the mercy of his endocrines; your
melody is at any gland's mercy, but your main structure
defies even an orchestra or an operatic soprano.

Sharp-cut rhythm is at the mercy of a singer
who fails to observe the exact duration of one note, or
who misplaces an ictus; a poor estimate of a carefully
figured direction can reduce the whole line to banality ...

ON THE READING OF MUSIC

The young violinist stood here beside my chair playing
aria from Le Nozze, and adding such accompaniment
as the instrument permitted.

I thought of the horror of concerts; both for the
audience packed into rows; and for the performer tortured
to the point of perfect production, the bother of memor-
izing; and for the starting musician the, so often false,
examination, the accidental collapse. To say nothing
of the financial bother, etc.

And I thought that here was a perfectly simple way for
intelligent musicians to earn a small independence from
people who are interested in the extent of music, but
who are as stupid as I am about playing an instrument
or who read the music page slowly and painfully as
a child reads a primer. Lord X used to pay ...
S. to read him books and the morning paper.

were committing an incomprehensible act. They assume
expressions of awe and bewilderment. Yet I have put
into writing poetry, twenty years of work which they
do not in the least understand; and in music, apart
from accomodating notes to words, I am an incompetent
amateur.

## PROGRESS OF NOTATION

... from the times when written music was merely a
mnemonic device, through Couperin's complaint :" We do not
play as we write" to the modern " composers " who
mark it: " rit. " , " allargando " , etc, and leave
their harmony# to the feel of the players .

(N.B. they call it "movement")

Even with the best devices there will be enough left
to the feel of the ~~great interpreter~~. A
great performer will always have chance enough to
show his superiority in the _mise_ _au point_ or in
the comprehension of his authors.

III:

Le Livre de
La Vérité de Parole

Transcription des Textes
Egyptiens Antiques par le
Dr J. C. Mardrus

“ Si jamais vous nous donniez une synthèse
“ de ce Livre, une parcelle de ces richesses,
“ la face du monde ancien s’en trouverait
“ transfigurée.

Elysée Reclus

(Extrait d'une lettre au Dr J. C. Mardrus)

Un grand in-quarto Jésus, 120 pages, texte composé
en elzévir romain et italique du XVII<sup>me</sup> siècle,
corps 36, préface composée en corps 24 romain.

La couverture est en parchemin imprimée en noir
et repliée, la Rose est coloriée en rouge.

Justification du Tirage :

1 Chine numéroté 1 au prix de 1500 frs.
10 Japon numérotés de 2 à 11 au prix de 900 frs.
200 Arches numérotés de 12 à 211 au prix de 300 frs.

On peut souscrire à la Galerie Barbazanges
et Cie ou chez François Bernouard, 73, rue
des Saints-Pères. Fleurus 18-13 à Paris (6e)

SALLE du CONSERVATOIRE

2, rue du Conservatoire — Paris

Mardi 11 Décembre à 21 h.

OLGA RUDGE

violoniste

GEORGE ANTHEIL

compositeur

Donneront le programme suivant :

1. Plainte pour la mort du roi Richard
   Cœur de Lion XII siècle Gaucelm Faidit
   air déchiffré par Ezra Pound du manuscrit
   R, 71 superiore, Ambrosiana

2. Gavotte J. S. Bach

3. Sujet pour violon (resineux) Ezra Pound
   Olga RUDGE

I

1re Sonate pour violon et piano G. Antheil
allegro moderate; andante moderato, funèbre, presto

Première audition, l'auteur au piano
violon, Olga RUDGE

II

Concerto en la majeur
allegro-aperto, adagio, rondo,
Olga RUDGE et George ANTHEIL
Mozart

III

2me sonate pour violon et piano G. Antheil
allegro - mechanico

IV

Prix des billets: 25, 45, 10 et 5 francs

DIRECTION: Bureau International des Concerts,
C. Kiesgen & E. C. Delaet, 47, rue Blanche, Trudaine 20-62

On trouve des billets

Salle du Conservatoire, 2 bis rue du Conservatoire; Durand & Cie,
4, place de la Madeleine; Bureau Musical, 32, rue Tronchet
Guide-Billets, 20, avenue de l'Opéra; Roudanez, 9, rue de Médicis;
C. Kiesgen & E.-C. Delaet, 47, rue Blanche; Typographie François
Bernouard, 73, rue des Saints-Pères.

SALLE du CONSERVATOIRE

Mardi 11 Décembre à 21 h.

OLGA RUDGE

violoniste

GEORGE ANTHEIL

compositeur

2. Gavotte

J. S. Bach

I

Ire Sonate pour violon et piano G. Antheil
allegro moderate; andante moderato, funèbre, presto
Première audition, l'auteur au piano
violon, Olga RUDGE

II

III

2me sonate pour violon et piano G. Antheil
allegro - mechanico
Première audition, l'auteur au piano
violon, Olga RUDGE

IV

MUSICAL SUPPLEMENT

begins, there is no further immobility. The fault of musicians deprived of genius, is to remain in a static state.

The difficulty is to determine who have the right to see beyond rules and who have not.

For certain, who are only of small stature, imitators, daring is called an elementary principle—thus the swamps and weary atmosphere of all they stir with their senses. Others are quite at home with nothing. They have studied wisely in Paul Wachs or elsewhere a harmony, static, inoffensive. All they write is charming. If they transgress laws, they do so with right.

By definition the sciences should be immobile, as a train should stop for a passenger to enter. But the object of this passenger is not to remain still. If, once on board, the train does not move, he grows angry.

Thus is it with harmony.

Aristoxenes, the first who conceived for the advantage of observing, or, if you prefer, of dissecting—the conditional immobility of parts of music, warns us of this danger. There is, be says, a difference between rhythm and rhythmopeiia. The rhythmopeiia is the practice of the rhythm—"Rhythmopoeia est numeri factura"—says Remy d'Auxerre. In the rhythm the time is not divided; in the rhythmopeiia it can be divided in a thousand ways. And it is the same with melody and melopeiia. But there is something Aristoxenes did not think of, the fusion of rhythmopeiia and melopeiia. This fusion was without doubt practiced by goat sheperds on their flutes without having any knowledge of theory—a practice which Aristoxenes despised.

Still Aristoxenes was right in immobilising and dividing. Values are better for having stopped and concentrated themselves.

Thus is it with wine.

What more interesting from a psychological point of view than drunkenness!

Drunkenness is mobility itself. Our mind, by the force of our blood in such moments, is invaded by the fumes of a grape juice separated and immobilized long ago. If this separation had not taken place, drunkenness and a whole dyonisian universe would never have come about. But one can not for that pretend to shut up drunkenness by itself, drunkenness without wine, in bottles.

Einstein, in short, has not succeeded in proving to us that time and space when they penetrate each other become a single idea.

I am of those who persist in seeing between harmony and rhythm a differentiation which only genius has the gift, not of confounding, but of attenuating.

Sincerely yours,

H. Z. K. T.

375

LE SECRET DE L'ART PALESTRINÉEN

by CHARLES-ALBERT CINGRIA.

Il faut, je crois, revenir sur une conception erronée et se
représenter le contrepoint non comme une science qui s'apprend
mais comme un fait humain antérieur à toute écriture.

On peut lui assigner ce processus :

Le motif est un air, un air complet comme est cela qu'est
le refrain d'une chanson à la mode. Le refrain dans l'état que
nous lui connaissions (l'état contemporain) cesse comme pour
marquer une satieté et autorise une sorte de diversion mélo-
dramatique ou l'esprit (une narration) a plus de part que la
musique. Dans l'état palestrinéen — état de jeunesse excluant
une lassitude — cette diversion n'est pas nécessaire. La joie
du refrain exige qu'il ne cesse pas. Mais je dirai plus : à peine
est-il émis qu'aussitôt, avant même que sa conclusion s'annonce
il recommence : non au même état, mais à l'harmonique (à la
quinte) ; et cela, ce recommencement qui d'autre part est un
milieu et une fin tout ensemble dans l'ivresse d'une multitude
de voix, résume tout ce qu'il y a à dire sur l'art palestrinéen.

Cet art a, par la suite, été écrit (*universalia post rem*), mais
conditionnellement, c'est-à-dire en laissant à l'improvisation
toute faculté d'amplifier ou de restreindre selon le temps, le
lieu, l'air, les gens, la tête des gens.

Les messes de Palestina et aussi celles d'Anerio, d'Orlando
Lasso, du Carpentrasso ou d'autres maîtres de cette époque
sont surtout cela : des instantanés merveilleusement saisis mais,
aujourd'hui, bien difficiles à revivre, de la joie collaboratrice
de tout un peuple à entendre et à réentendre, dans toutes les
variétés de son renouvellement possible, un simple air à la
mode.

L'air « *Douce mémoire* » fait la messe « *Douce mémoire* », l'air
« *Puisque j'ai perdu* » fait la messe « *Puisque j'ai perdu* », l'air
« *A l'ombre d'un buysonnet* » fait la messe « *A l'ombre d'un buyson-
net* » qui fut, en Avignon et ailleurs, le grand frisson de quatorze
cent.

On comprend que Palestrina et la musique contrepointique
réalisent, autant qu'on peut employer ce mot pour décrire
des phénomènes de cette époque, un analogue à l'état dionysien
pur.

C'est évidemment de l'art religieux comme tout ce qui est
juste et conforme à l'essence de la vielle terre que Dieu a faite

376

MUSICAL SUPPLEMENT

bonne est religieux, mais ce n'est pas de l'art *mystique* au sens
d'une contrainte quelconque à une marche d'ensemble ou à
des expressions repliées.

Je dirai aussi autre chose : pour bien entendre Palestrina,
il faut s'imaginer des voix et des têtes répondant à ces voix.

Palestrina est, de nos jours, presque impossible.

Dès que les soprani tremblent et révèlent, en même temps
qu'un sexe, des préoccupations domestiques (le gaz, une crainte
du terme, etc.) c'en est fini. Il ne faut pas non plus de *monsieur*
*en redingote* ni de gestes d'apaisement aux finales. Les finales
doivent être comme le reste, c'est-à-dire fortes et presque
criées.

J'entendis une fois une messe entière bien exécutée. C'était
à Pise. Je n'étais pas dans la cathédrale. Je ne savais rien. J'étais
allongé dans le trèfle fatigué par toute une matinée de marche
dans la forêt.

Mais les belles portes de bronze étaient ouvertes.

A un moment donné tout le clergé s'avança et sortit sur
le seuil. Les chantres étaient dans le cortège. Il y avait huit
enfants de différents âges et des adultes à moustaches ; tous
étaient vêtus d'aubes blanches serrées à la taille par un cordon
de chanvre. Pas de maître de chœur ou, s'il y en avait un, il ne
l'était que par le prestige et ne faisait, si ce n'était par la fermeté
du regard, aucun geste qui le mit en évidence.

Les voix, tout à coup, éclatèrent comme une fanfare. C'était,
je l'appris, un motet sorti des archives de la cathédrale : une
sorte d'apostrophe de bienvenue pour un personnage éminent.

Il y eut à ce moment, une minute d'attente.

L'émeraude, par terre, était vive. Des bicyclettes bleues
gisaient dans l'eucalyptus. Une Lune rapide, une Lune de onze
heures du matin, sortie du baptistère, entrait dans la tour penchée.

On entendit un bruit de gravier et, d'une assez modeste
voiture, un prélat drapé sortit.

Les voix, de nouveau, avec la même justesse extrême, éclatè-
rent et le cortège se remit processionnellement en marche derrière
les portes fermées.

J'entrai par un portillon latéral.

Le kyrie d'une messe que je reconnus tout de suite, venait
de commencer. C'était la messe *Lauda Sion* dont le motif,
qui est un timbre grégorien, a dans l'édition médicéenne cet
aspect :

RE-SOL SOL LA SOL DO SI LA SOL

Lau - da Si - on Sal - va - to - rem

C'est une messe des plus limpides du répertoire palestrinéen.

Après l'émission presque hoquetée tellement elle était sûre
du thème par les soprani, repris aussitôt, dès la seconde note,
par les alti comme pour l'empêcher de tomber, un ravissant
jeu d'anges — d'anges en brodequins dans un parterre de

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lévriers — s'exerça, à quoi le ténor et la basse vinrent apporter,
plus qu'une participation, leur présence.

Palestrina, à mon sens — et c'est du reste bien chez lui comme
chez ses précurseurs, une intention — réalise, au plus haut point,
ce que l'on peut appeler l'équilibre harmonique. Il n'y a pas,
chez lui, cette symétrie vocale — cet appui juste au milieu
d'une chose qui tient déjà — qui rend antipathique notre harmo-
nie moderne. Dans le temps qui immédiatement va suivre —
Rinuccini, Caccini, Monteverde et un peu plus tard, en France,
et en Allemagne, Lully, Rameau, Gluck — l'on recherchera
les harmonies pleines ; mais déjà au temps de Rameau il se
trouvera une voix pour dénoncer le péril. On se rappele dans
les lettres sur la musique cette petite histoire que rapporte Rous-
seau. Il va souvent au théâtre des Italiens. Il est étonné, un soir,
de ne pas entendre l'accompagnateur ordinaire. Ce qu'il entend
est beaucoup mieux : « *Je cherchai* — dit Rousseau — *aussitôt*
*la raison de cette différence, car je ne doutais pas que le sieur Noblet*
*ne fut bon harmoniste et n'accompagnât très exactement* ». Voici
ce qui s'était passé. Le sieur Noblet avait, pour quelques jours,
été remplacé par le fils de l'entrepreneur italien, jeune enfant
de dix ans, qui, instinctivement, jouait avec l'épargne qu'il
faut dans le grand art. « *Quelle ne fut pas ma surprise en observant*
*les mains du petit bonhomme, de voir qu'il ne remplissait presque*
*jamais les accords, qu'il supprimait beaucoup de sons... Quoi!*
*disais-je en moi-même, l'harmonie complète fait moins d'effet*
*que l'harmonie mutilée, et nos accompagnateurs, en rendant tous*
*les accords pleins ne font qu'un bruit confus, tandis que celui-ci,*
*avec moins de sons, fait plus d'harmonie!... Ceci fut, pour moi,*
*un problème inquiétant, et, j'en compris encore mieux toute l'impor-
tance quand, après d'autres observations, je vis que les italiens*
*accompagnaient tous de la même manière... et que, cette épargne...*
*devait tenir aux mêmes principes que celle qu'ils affectent dans*
*leurs partitions.* »

Rousseau n'avait évidemment pas en vue le style contrapoint-
tique. Il parle de l'opéra contemporain ou légèrement antérieur,
mais remarquons avec quelle justesse ce qu'il dit peut s'appliquer
à ce qui fait un des caractères les plus attachants de l'art pale-
trinéen. On sait ce que je veux dire : ces plénitudes indiquées
et pourtant soigneusement évitées par la fusion d'une voix
dans une autre : ces accords parfaits qui ne se réalisent pas,
laissant, entre la quinte et la fondamentale un merveilleux vide.

Il y avait précisément cela à la fin du *kyrie* et du *gloria* (aussi
je crois du *sanctus*) de cette messe *Lauda Sion*.

Le *benedictus* à trois voix seulement fut d'une grande suavité.
Jamais je ne compris mieux ce que dit Pietro delle Valle quand,
à propos de la fugue et du style contrapointique il dit que c'est
un art de galanterie (... *le fughe, i cannoni, le perfidie ed altre*
*galanterie...*). Lui, en raison de son époque — il vit 50 ans après
Palestrina — n'aime pas cela. De nouveaux goûts expriment
alors des tendances littéraires bien antérieures que la musique

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restée primitive avait totalement méconnue. On aurait tort de voir en Palestrina, Michel-Ange, Raphael, une expression semblable avec des moyens différents des mêmes tendances. On a bien trop souvent parlé d'une fraternité des arts. On peut être gré à Walter Pater (La Renaissance) d'avoir un des premiers, essayé de dévisser ce triptyque, car, en général, mais surtout en ce qui concerne cette époque, il n'est rien de plus contraire à la réalité. La musique de quatorze cent était seule à continuer des sentiments que l'humanisme sculptural ou littéraire avait depuis longtemps laissés de côté. Aussi devait-elle se buter à une méchante incompréhension. On reprochait à l'art contrapointique et, surtout, dans cette forme, à l'art vocal, d'être inapte à traduire un sentiment ou une pensée ; « Con le fughe — dit Pietro della Valle — non si sente mai quello che si dice che e l'anima del canto. » On lui faisait un grief de suivre sa logique — une logique musicale — et non celle des paroles — une logique discursive — : « ...ha necessita la fugha di seguitare nelle sue note l'ordine suo proprio ». L'étrange alangissement de voix confuses (quello strano mormorio di voce non intese) qui a, précièrement, pour nous tant de charme, est tourné en dérision.

L'art contrapointique autrement dit continue la vaghezza des primitifs tandis que les arts plastiques et la littérature, en plein dans le dithyrambisme descriptif, vivent une phase de morale, de sentiment et de raison. L'humanisme veut ce que Beethoven réalisera : l'exacte description par des sons d'un sujet harmonieusement conçu : le chaud, le froid, la tempête, les rires, les pleurs, les adieux, le retour, etc. L'art Palestrinéen mécontente au plus haut point cet idéal. « Avec toutes ces subtilités du contrepoint (c'est toujours P. della Valle) on en arrive à faire des mélodies ou ce qui devrait être mélancolique a, tout au contraire, un air joyeux : ou le bizarre ou l'équivoque se substitue au religieux : ou l'esprit et le ton plaisant à ce qui doit être grave et réciproquement. De ce défaut les compositions des maîtres du temps passé sont pleines ».

Ce que veulent, immédiatement après Palestrina Rinuccini, Monteverde, Caccini, Marco Gagliano, Severo Bonnini et ce que, en réalité, ils réaliseront dans le mélodrame ancêtre de nôtre art moderne est le complet asservissement de la musique à la pensée.

Il est intéressant de voir qu'ils s'autorisent de Platon génie anti-dionysien par excellence.

« Il faut — dit Bonnini — s'en tenir à cette manière tant louée de Platon et d'autres philosophes pour qui la musique est d'abord une conception (intellectuelle) ; vient ensuite le rythme et en dernier lieu, le son (il suono per ultimo) ».

Il est vrai que le rythme a plus d'importance que le son, mais un processus allouant à la raison (Apollon) un rôle généraleur est ce qu'il y a de plus opposé au fait musical et poetique humain.

Charles-Albert Cingria.

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MUSIC IN LONDON

The Opera Comedy

Englishmen, when they take to the arts, seem to have an incorrigible faith in their own powers of improvisation, and even glory in their lack of technical competence. When Mr. Rutland Boughton was organizing his Glastonbury Festivals, he boasted of his incapacity as a business man and cared nothing about the provision of adequate accommodation for visitors to his "Bayreuth" —a strange contrast to the detailed calculations of Wagner as to the number of ham sandwiches his patrons would require. This deliberate lack of preparation may give to the work of real genius an air of freshness which more considered methods might not produce. But, where average intelligence is in question, it cannot achieve good results. That is the burden on the back of music in England; it has been that there many years, gradually bearing it down to the ground.

During the last three months we have had a striking example of this incompetence and mismanagement. I have called it the Opera Comedy; but with the laughter have been mingled tears, not of amusement or pity or sentiment, but of rage and exasperation. The facts are worth recording, briefly. An arrangement was made to bring to London for the summer season the personnel of the Viennese State Opera—singers, orchestra, conductors and, I presume, scenery. A trade-union, the great majority of whose members are employed in theatres, restaurants, dance-bands and cinemas, protested against the importation of the orchestra. I have good reason to believe that the members of the big London orchestras, the only persons likely to be affected, did not support the union's action. That is to their credit. But one wishes that they had made their voices heard in public; it might have changed the whole sequel. Strikes were, of course, threatened, with sympathetic action on the part of scene shifters, electricians, dressers, call-boys, cosmetic makers, pit-queues, brewery hands and Heaven knows what other infinite fleas upon the backs of the fleas on the theatrical profession. If Vienna came, London should go unentertained, I may add, in parenthesis, that no such action was taken when an American jazz-band—and a very good one—visited us, though its activities were restricted, as indeed would have been those of the Viennese orchestra.

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NOTES FOR PERFORMERS

Foreword by E. P.

"William Atheling" wrote fortnightly in the *New Age* from 1917-20; he was more a secondary personality than a nom de plume, that is to say he had a definite appearance (bald-headed) and a definite script (crabbed and with an old fashioned slant); he sympathized with Arnold Dolmetsch' opinions, even when not wholly in agreement therewith. That is to say he might very well have thought that music ended with Bach. He existed in order that I might study the actual sounds produced by performing musicians. He wrote in the hope of making it possible or easier for the best performers to do their best work in public rather than their worst or their middling. By this he meant that he liked hearing Moussorgsky, that he preferred Russian bareness to the upholsteries of XIXth century Europe. He liked music with a strong horizontal action, in preference to music which seemed to steam up from the earth. He shared my own interest in the fitting of *motz el son*; the fitting of words and tunes; a subject for which we were both better qualified than we would have been for a discussion of the higher complications of harmony.

He found the Kennedy-Fraser's Hebridean research of great interest, he approved of Le Roi Renaud and French folk-song, if rigorously selected, as late as Le Pauvre Laboureur, and of La Carmagnole. He regretted the lost culture of Henry Lawes. He enjoyed without much audible, though with a good deal of mute, opposition, the writers of Bel Canto, Caldara, Durante, and Carissimi.

In 1922 his marginalia were submitted to a "qualified musician" with the request that any general criticism therein might be separated from the paragraphs dealing only with the success or failure of particular concerts (à la "Herr Wintergarten im Bechsteinsaal trat auf und wieder ab.", or "At this point the composer has drawn his inspiration from the soda-water font

THE TRANSATLANTIC REVIEW

GEORGE ANTHEIL

My opinion of George Antheil is due to appear at some
length in the April "Criterion". He was born in Trenton
N. J., a. d. 1901, parents Polish, of French extraction; he returned
to Poland in 1905; returned to America 1914, at which time
he was composing fugues and canons; studied with Von Stern-
berg, and Ernest Bloch; played his own Piano Concerto with the
Berlin Philharmonic in 1922. Chief works. Golden Bird,
sonata for piano, six sonatas for piano, mechanisms (for pianola)
symphony for five instruments, a ballet, two sonatas for violin
and piano. His scribblings on the edge of my typescript were
intended for my eye alone; but it is sometimes more interesting
to know what a man thinks than to know what he thinks prudent
to say at a given moment. At any rate both M. Antheil and
myself are so fed up with the alleged critics who try ever to
appear omniscient, and who work not to express their thoughts
but to establish their critical position; that we have preferred
this extreme imprudence.

E. P.

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