TWO CONFLICTING CRITICAL IMPRESSIONS

...For one thing, Rosenfeld's total dedication to Art led him down paths of esthetic mysticism traced out earlier by his mentors, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman...

...Pleasants writes in a genial, informed, sometimes repetitive style which ticks off random points against the musical Establishment, while it builds his case for the developing schism in Western music...

...Thus, attnougn "popular, as employed by most people, refers to anything from the Modern Jazz Quartet to Lawrence Welk," it is a pejorative for most jazz fans...

...and when Rosenfeld did this, he produced sentences as impenetrable and contorted as any Whitman ever wrote...

...Jazz, then, came without proper credentials and, even in its saccharine Paul Whiteman-Vincent Lopez form, was mostly rejected as raw, garish and inferior...

...Rhythmically inert and spiritually narcotic, it is no more than an "entertainment" or escape...

...Pleasants places heavy stress on the role of movies and studio bands as the major Pop purveyors of the Afro-American idiom today...

...Society, he maintains, must rid itself of the "concept of art as a kind of mystery?above and beyond the pleasures of the senses, separate and distinct from, and superior to, entertainment, amusement and diversion...

...And more than once he praises the use of jazz by Aaron Copland and in Darius Milhaud's La Creation du Monde, which is like praising Mantovani to the same end...

...The music remained fairly healthy until at last done in by the adolescent posturing of the Bop movement and its status-seeking neglect of "memorable melody...

...While Schoenberg and the later serialists plunged into theory, and while Stravinsky and "the post-Bach primitives" sought the tonal language of the past, the new American popular music began to make itself felt in the late 1920s and early '30s?except to those whose ears and expectations were formed on European models...

...Further, Pleasants thinks we will stand to benefit-even the musical Establishment-from the commercial influences that are making rock more and more an art music and driving jazz underground again, perhaps for good...

...What we term music, the representative work, say, of Bach and Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, and Brahms, primarily is what jazz from the beginning is not: the product of a sympathetic treatment of the sonorous medium...

...Music like Henry Mancini's, he feels, now forms a mainstream between the new polarities of serious and jazz...

...Jazz, he declares, though "a striking indigenous product," is not music but "a sman, sounding, folk-chaos...

...Music, for Rosenfeld, is to be measured by the extent of a composer's spiritual awareness...

...As one of the first to properly appreciate Ives and do public justice to the work of his friend Varese, he saw American music opening up in endless democratic vistas, affirming the national spirit in everything from barn dances to "skyscraper chords...

...He maintains, for instance, that true American music begins with Edward MacDowell, and then goes on to demonstrate MacDowell's third-rate ability and near-total dependence on European models...

...Wagner, he tells us, discarded the C-major scale systems, based on the natural intervals of the human voice, because he wanted to express man's ultimate identity with the whole of creation -the animals and plants, "the modulations of the noises of wind and water, the infinite gradations and complexes of sound to be heard on the planisphere...

...He is right, but art as a commercial endeavor is not the answer...

...Still, his main point, that the urban blues, and not jazz, has nourished Western music in the last 15 years, is substantially correct...

...Nevertheless, Rosenfeld's is a severely exclusive vision...

...He also oversimplifies the African contribution of a specific beat, and indulges in vague talk about "African musicality" and "African influence...

...it proposed that so-called serious music had reached a technical dead end and that the only viable contemporary alternative was jazz...

...On Music TWO CONRONG CRITICAL IMPRESSIONS BY JOHN GOODMAN Paul rosenfeld, a very highly respected critic of the arts in the 1920s and '30s, has been much neglected since his death in 1946, and it is not difficult to see why...

...Negro spirituals and the folk ballads of Appalachia are only sophisticated derivations of folk songs from other lands...

...There is some truth in this, but I doubt whether he correctly understands the complicated history of Bop and its attendant "decadence...

...Finally, beyond the purple incrustations and the philosophizing, the manner of the cultivated custodian of Serious Music Tradition, which Rosenfeld assumed, does not wear well-principally because it is clearly a dying thing...

...The unity that characterized all Western music 50 years ago, says Pleasants, has disappeared in the transition from a European to an Afro-American "language," a shift as radical as that from Renaissance to Baroque...

...There are signs that his viewpoint is being heard...

...Bristling with passages such as this, his writings on music invariably attempt to shoot feeling into the most recalcitrant images and concepts...

...Impressionist critics, in spite of their widely varying interpretations, always assume such a message is present, and that their verbal fancies can discover it...

...It remained for the Beatles to unify the many strains of the music and give it something of its present shape...

...From this unhappy compromise some of us pray to be preserved...

...Pleasants argues that jazz consistently followed the fashion of serious music and the cult of the artist, forever trying to attract critical notice...

...The book, of course, was hooted down by most of the serious fraternity and largely ignored by the jazz people...

...A similar prejudice against the serious "performer's art" (in favor of the composer's or interpreter's) denigrates improvisation-actually a form of composition-and generally limits the performer to old music with rigidly prescribed conventions of interpretation...

...I think Rosenfeld sensed this, even though he was hemmed in by the past: His best essays are on the modernists-arnold Schoenberg, Varese, Alban Berg, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives -and his best comments are in the historical-analytic vein, which is where music criticism, after all, finds its valid ground...

...In demonstrating the depth of reaction to Wagner in Stravinsky and Debussy, or the interplay of music and mechanism in Schoenberg, or the burlesque of program music by Erik Satie, Rosenfeld spoke with intelligence and authority...

...He was given to musing on subjects like Richard Wagner's appeal to the "superindividual entity," Bela Bartok and the racial subconscious, or "the lure of ready-made Elysiums" in jazz...

...Leibowitz may be pardoned his zeal on behalf of an upright man who judged modern music "of extreme difficulty on the spot with uncanny accuracy," and was something of a force in getting these works before the public...

...And the "New Jazz," with its infantile excursions into nonart, ignores communication altogether, just as avant-garde serious music does...

...For out of urban blues, in combination with certain elements of country music, there emerged the phenomenon of Elvis Presley, the key figure in bringing the early rock style to a white audience...

...Rosenfeld's acceptance of the Serious Tradition, here typically constituted, forces him into some paradoxical assertions...

...In Musical Impressions: Selections from Paul Rosenfeld's Criticism (Hill and Wang, 302 pp., $7.95), Herbert A. Leibowitz has brought together 29 essays and provided a panegyric Introduction containing an interesting review of the critic's career and connections with the literary and artistic circles of Van Wyck Brooks and Alfred Stieglitz...

...That is to say, he is an impressionist...

...If the impressionist is thwarted in his interpretative quest, he will usually turn to abstraction...

...In music criticism, the 19th century dies hard...

...To counteract this hidebound approach, Henry Pleasants wrote a book in 1955 called The Agony of Modern Music...

...Now Pleasants is at it again in Serious Music-and All That /azz/(Simon and Schuster, 256 pp., $5.95), extending his thesis to cover a continuity of "Afro-American" styles, including rhythm-and-blues, cduntry-and-western and those amorphous categories-rock and Pop...

...In expressing the harmonic nature of Edgard Varese's symphonic poem Arcana, he unearthed this gem: "Bristling with overtones as a castle with turrets and a dinosaur with warts, the almost unbearably straining chords shoot feeling tall into distances...

...For example, he shows how the terms "serious" and "popular," or "art" and "entertainment," reflect the dichotomy and the confusions...

...Rosenfeld's difficulties in interviewing and understanding Stravinsky show he was indeed obsessed with questions of interpretation and needed to place composers in the transcendental, humanistic tradition...

...But it won't do to suggest, as Leibowitz does, that the resuscitation of Rosenfeld's spirit may be an antidote to our supposedly sick and cynical culture...

...This he guaged by plumbing his own subjective response to a work and finding imaginative associations (castles and dinosaurs) to render the nature of the spiritual message...

...There remain two further obstacles to the recovery of the Rosenfeld spirit...

...This "implicit acquiescence in the separation of composition and performance goes a long way toward explaining the separation of composer and audience that precipitated the decline, and now documents the fall, of Western music in its European phase...