Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
CHAMBERLIN WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Agony of Modern Music My occasional references to music in this column have won me several brickbats from admirers of modernistic...
...Listen to Pleasants explaining why the typical modern symphonic work, in which the composer's ideal seems to be "Every chord a discord," grates on the ears of many music lovers whose taste is broad enough to permit appreciation of composers as different as Bach and Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Brahms: "The difference between dissonance then and dissonance now is that in Monteverdi, as also in Mozart and even in Wagner, the listener is excited by the clash and quieted and rewarded by its resolution in what the listener feels to be a consonance...
...Pleasants also demolishes the widely-circulated myth that new composers are always rejected by an unappreciative public and must wait for future generations to receive their due reward...
...In modern music there is no resolution...
...Twelve policemen and 18 mounted guards were required to keep order in the crowds that turned out for the first performance of Haydn's The Creation...
...Can anyone conceive of Salzburg and Vienna being swept by madness by the tunes of Von Einem's Der Prozess...
...As associate music critic of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin he specialized for many years in criticism of modern music, becoming thoroughly familiar with its idiom and characteristics...
...When the writer, the musician, the artist begins to write for a small esoteric circle, barricading himself behind stylistic affectations and deliberate attempts to achieve obscurity, one can suspect the beginning of an inferior, often of a decadent era in artistic creativity...
...The abuse of dissonance, and generations of light-hearted tampering with key-relationships, have robbed dissonance of its tonal properties of tension and suspense and left it merely a tiresome ugliness...
...There is Brahms on the other side to make sure that it does not get out until the gate-crasher has been heard...
...I have long felt that when communication between artist and audience breaks down, in music, in literature or in painting and sculpture, decadence has set in...
...Chopin was one of the notables of Paris, and etchings of his face were widely sold in Poland...
...But, for the benefit of those who will listen only to a certified music critic, I propose on this occasion to turn over the floor to Mr...
...These are all silly questions...
...The truly great masterpieces, from Homer's Iliad to Tolstoy's War and Peace, are understandable to any reasonably intelligent mind...
...Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which opened a new path in music, was received with the greatest enthusiasm...
...Both composer and listener are left as hapless flotsam on a sea of tonal discomfort...
...The truth is," writes Pleasants, "that every great composer, without exception, has been appreciated, admired, applauded and loved in his own time...
...To me there is something insufferably arrogant in the "papa knows best" attitude of the champions of modern music...
...CHAMBERLIN WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Agony of Modern Music My occasional references to music in this column have won me several brickbats from admirers of modernistic dissonance, on the ground that I am not a technically qualified "music critic...
...Pleasants also hits out with a good shillelagh when he discusses the familiar program technique of forcing the audience to listen to some cacophonous novelty by cunningly inserting it between two great classics: "The familiar spectacle of the contemporary work sandwiched between Beethoven and Brahms exposes the gate-crasher in full silhouette, sneaking into the concert hall under the coattails of the elect...
...Carrying the story from Haydn and Handel to Wagner, Pleasants cites the following significant items, among many others...
...The fact that they are so very silly is the most conclusive proof of the distance by which composers and the public are now separated...
...Is it possible that any critic could write of anything written in the last fifty years, 'Three days have gone by since that enrapturing evening...
...Pleasants lays his finger on what is fundamentally wrong with modern music in the following vigorous bit of polemical prose: "Can anyone imagine twelve policemen and 18 mounted guards being required to clear the sidewalks at the premiere of an oratorio by Honegger or Stravinsky...
...Even those who died miserably died famous...
...Or etchings of any contemporary American composer selling on the streets of New York...
...Henry Pleasants, whose little book, most happily entitled The Agony of Modern Music (Simon and Schuster, •S3.00), gives a remarkably trenchant picture of what has happened to music since the end of the First World War...
...Pleasants studied voice, piano and composition at the Philadelphia Conservatory and the Curtis Institute of Music...
...It is my belief that what might be called the lay music lover, the person who enjoys serious music and is reasonably familiar with its history and development, has a right to his likes and dislikes...
...There is Beethoven on one side to make sure that the audience comes in...
...It also shows the conductor's part in the conspiracy...
Vol. 40 • July 1957 • No. 27
