A Blissful Musical Genius

...A Blissful Musical Genius_ Bach and the Dance of God By Wilfred Metiers Oxford 324 pp $39 95 Reviewed by Barry Gewen Writer/Researcher, ILGWU Political Department Anyone wishing to write seriously about music today must address a crucial issue the apparent dissolution of our musical tradition as embodied in the great masters down to Stravinsky To state this as music criticism's fundamental task is hardly to circumscribe The subject is so huge, so multifaceted, that it can be dealt with in myriad ways A critic might, for instance, attempt to develop a framework that somehow encompasses Handel and Louis Armstrong, Monteverdi and Fred Astaire Or he could make one more stab at the long-standing problem of modern composition's isolation from a general audience Or he might go anthropological, looking at Western music against a backdrop of other cultures, or sociological, describing music's place and function in modern society—is the musician an entertainer or inspirer, a performer, philosopher or priest9 Almost any approach is valid, so long as the writer is willing to take up the gauntlet If he is not, if he pursues a "business-as-usual" approach, he will find himself struggling to say something interesting about the 843rd recording of Beethoven's Violm Concerto, turning off readers and probably himself, lowering his bucket into a well that ran dry long ago Too many practicing critics operate in precisely this manner, which is why music criticism in magazines such as the New Yorkeris currently quite boring Wilfred Mellers, professor of music at the University of York, England, is fully aware of the pitfall Moreover, he comes equipped with a vast erudition of the kind, it seems, that can be acquired only through a good English education —or at least not an American one Besides a mastery of his specialty, he is conversant with philosophy, anthropology, history, psychology, the fine arts Early in his career he was a contributor to F R Leavis' Scrutiny, that flinty journal of literary taste, and his work teems with cross references to Shakespeare, Milton and Blake Yet Mellers is no dry academic, forhe treats his subject with the passion of a partisan He stands at the opposite pole from those who regard music as arcane game-playing, from the crabby canonists who celebrate complexity for its own sake Nor is he sympathetic to those who would dismiss music as a pleasant but trivial diversion Very much the traditional humanist, Mellers assigns the art a central role in our culture, recognizing that it touches something deep and necessary in all of us He did not need the '60s to teach him that music has the power to move masses, to influence everything from politics to haircuts Most appealing of all is Mellers' open-mindedness, his willingness to listen and respond enthusiastically to music of every shape and size When he writes about America's musical accomplishments, he devotes as much attention to jazz and Broadway as to the classical composers If his subject is contemporary work, he merrily juxtaposes Karl-heinz Stockhausen and Bob Dylan With all of his knowledge, he is not afraid, as he indicates in his discussion of Carl Orff, to admire simple things Mellers is probably best known for his brave tour de force, Twilight of the Gods The Music of the Beatles (brave, because he could scarcely have enhanced his reputation among his professional colleagues by writing an entire volume on the Fab Four) The main thesis was pure Mellers "The Beatles' 'significance, as part of social history, is inseparable from the ambiguity of their function As pop musicians they are simultaneously magicians (dream weavers), priests (ritual celebrants), entertainers (whihng away empty time), and artists (incarnating and reflecting the feelings—rather than thoughts—and perhaps the conscience of a generation) " The book owed its success as much to its form as its message To buttress his argument about the Beatles' importance, Mellers brought the full weight of his scholarship to bear, employing close, highly technical analyses of the group's songs Thus he could write of She Loves You ("Yeah, yeah, yeah") "Although its key signature is the E flat beloved of Tin Pan Alley, the opening phrase is pentatonic, or perhaps an aeo-lian C which veers toward E flat, and although some of the effect depends on contrast between upward tending sharp sevenths and the blue flat sevenths of folk tradition, no conflict is generated, and the song has little sense of a beginning, middle and end " Of the millions of words that poured out about the Beatles during their heyday, there was nothing that compared to this And a special delight in reading Twilight of the Gods, even if one was not fully prepared to follow the author down his labyrinthine analytic paths, came from the titillating conjunction of his dissections' abstruse rigor with the pop immediacy of the songs themselves With his latest work, one might say that Mellers has made a full 180-degree turn, since Bach's place in Western music, unlike the Beatles', is of course already secure Mendelssohn saw to that more than a century ago, and perhaps Mellers might best have proceeded by producing a mirror-image of his earlier book writing about this most abstract of composers in an immediately accessible manner, bringing his interesting version of Bach to a wide audience just as he brought his thoughts on the Beatles to the professors Unfortunately, this is not what Mellers chose to do Instead, Bach and the Dance of God is written in the severest of styles Approximately seven-eights of its 324 pages are given over to dense analyses of Bach's music A layman will find it very heavy going indeed, not helped any by the retention of English music terminology Add to this the $39 95 price on a rather ordinary-looking volume one would normally expect to be tagged at $15-$20, virtually restricting sales to libraries and specialists, and there can be little doubt the book will be read by very few people (In fairness to Oxford, it should be noted that in setting the price it had to make a reasonable calculation about likely returns from bookstores, especially since Mel-lers has not put himself out to attract readers ) What a waste For amid the minims, crotchets and hemidemisemiquavers, Mellers has constructed a portrait certain to appeal to anyone who has ever been charmed, transported, ravished, or smitten by music's magic His is a bacchanalian Bach, a "supreme religious composer" whose faith rested on a passionate, total, all-consuming commitment This Bach was a pious ecstatic, practically a holy roller, and his emotional beliefs found expression in every piece of his music The lengthy analyses in Bach and the Dance of God are devoted to showing how the compositions exploded all boundaries, how the secular work was no less grounded in fervid spirituality than the religious masterpieces Problems that other composers considered mere technical difficulties had theological implications for Bach He was the heir to the Martin Luther, who can be said to have liberated music along with the individual conscience The Medieval Church, which had always looked with suspicion upon music-making, was replaced in the Germany where Bach was raised by a creed whose founder adored the art, urged its instruction in schools, and declared "Experience proves that next to the love of God only music deserves being extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart Even the Holy Spirit honors music as a tool of His work " Therefore, by composing music, the Lutheran Bach was performing the most sacred of tasks, little lower than that of the theologians themselves He could draw on every resource available to him, he could let his feelings run wild Whatever he did, Bach's belief assured that his music remained an expression of God This creative license was extraordinary, and for appropriate parallels Mellers reaches over into the world of anthropology, to primitive tnbes of Di-onysiac revelers who use song and dance as a way of merging with the cosmos Bach retrieved this joyous paganism for the West Mellers says of the work that its appeal is "almost primeval," its rhythms "as unremittent as the turmng earth, as continuous as the surging sea " Bach's successors in our own time are not the singers of pnm Protestant hymns but the unrestrained gospelers of Southern black churches Like theirs, Bach's is a deity who dances By putting everything he had into his work, body as well as soul, Bach bewildered the church fathers who employed him They wanted orderly ritual, he gave them fertility rites, Jesus as Orpheus-Dionysus, sensuality in the choirs, orgies in the aisles (Inevitably, Bach's large family springs lasciviously to mind) Mellers mvites us to watch Bach in rehearsal, and to listen to the skeptical comments of rectors whose imaginations were too limited to be properly scandalized "The rhythm takes possession of all his limbs I believe that my friend Bach must have many men like Orpheus within him " It is just as well, Mellers declares, that Bach never got to perform his B-minor Mass for these goodmen The wild, exhilarating aban-donofits"Cumsancto" mighthave gotten him chased out of church No critic has come closer than Mellers to drawing a Bach who is our contemporary A century that has witnessed cakewalks, flappers, jitterbugs and the frenzies of rock might embrace this man as one of its own—as might anyone who has ever become Pavarotti in the shower, conducted ghostly orchestras in his head or danced naked in his apartment to the sounds of the Rolling Stones Like his music, this Bach breathes In fact, given the musical history of our era, Mellers' blissful magician, summoning forth the full rangeot human emotions, mav be the onK Bach that fits our experience and makes sense to us If I have a disagreement, it is only with the final section of Mellers' book, his discussion of such late work as the Art of Fugue, Goldberg Variations and Musical Offering These are among the most abstract compositions in all of music, certainly among the most austere Mellers is very good at presenting the context out of which they were created, explaining Bach's disenchantment with Enlightenment Europe and his retreat into a musical world of pure mathematical law Yet Mellers writes "Bach's musical mathematics in his last works may be as exact as an exercise in dialectical logic of Leibniz or Spmoza, but it is 'truer' in that its intellectual ngor encompasses the total range of human experience ' This judgment, it seems to me, is false Bach believed in the completeness, the "hermetic truth," of his musical system To him it represented the voice of God as sanctioned by his fervent Lutheranism, and he strove to explicate that belief in his late music But here he ceased to be our contemporary and became a sectarian product of his own age Modern ears, acquainted with a wide musical area Bach could not have been familiar with—the polyrhythms of Africa, the microtones of the East, the pentatorucism of China and the Andes, and folk music from just about everywhere—do not hear God or the universe m the late work We cannot perceive this music, as Bach did, as absolute truth We can merely admire it as nonbelievers confronted by an ambitious archaic endeavor, much as one admires an ancient temple that, though it was constructed to honor a god other than our own, impresses by demonstrating the awesome wonders mankind is capable of Mellers says ot the Goldberg ^ ana-tions that they "contain the world" within them We are aware, howe\er, as Bach was not, that a world ot music exists bevond the lariations, outside ot Europe, still waiting to be explored, and it we mav be said to ha\ e progressed in the more than 200 \cars since Bach s death, it is through possession ot this knowledge...