1984
1984 83 20 may 1984 Dear Isty, Our books must have crossed in the mail and when yours arrived I spent the rest of the day reading as much as I could—mind you, not every word—but in an effort to get a big design of it and dig into its essential core. Unfortunately I had to put off writing you right away (which was my first impulse) because things were pretty hectic here. Mostly the excitement had to do with Gene’s getting ready for her trip to Russia where she’s been since last Thursday. [ … ] I stayed behind to work on my Fifth Symphony which I’m writing for Solti & the Chicago Symphony.1 It’s beginning to open up and with luck & hard work I hope to have the first mov[emen]t sketched by summer. After that (if that) I’ll aim for its completion by the new year. I keep hearing Solti’s voice saying: “Don’t wait too long!” And just yesterday talking with David Raksin, a Hollywood composer (he “wrote” the scores for Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, City Lights, Laura, The Day After, and others I don’t know about);2 he said when I told him about Solti’s “caveat”: “That’s because he waited eleven years for Lutos5 lawski to finish his Third Symphony!” I was fascinated by your book [Alternative Voices] for a number of reasons, among them the immense reading and scholarship that went into your writing it, the absolutely clear sense of a “chronicle” of an aspect of 20th-century composition, the clarity & elegance of your prose (no easy accomplishment that. Which reminds me: Someone recently raised heated objection to the demand that art criticism needed to be clear, lucid. What they said was: “All this talk about clarity is very| 139 Fascistic … and I don’t like it!!” Talk about politicizing a situation where the “normal” traditional standard for clear thinking and clean prose suddenly becomes suspect! Bloody nonsense). But more than all this something started to rise to the surface as I read—and especially after finishing the “Epilogue”—which came as a bit of a “shock”—though not really a surprise—that is to say, I began to realize something very paradoxical (and I who love paradox was even more drawn in by your book as a whole)—namely, that here we are, you & I, close, close friends for over 20 years which has developed a deep sense in me (and I feel in you) of brotherliness … and we are at opposite ends of the aesthetic poles in re the whole question of values inherent in the works of, especially, the post–WW II period and more generally modernism itself. Frankly the image of two people like ourselves stretching hands across this aesthetic gulf is what produced the “shock.” I don’t think I’m exaggerating; and if I do exaggerate our positions it’s not to separate us in any sense. This is a case where friendship bridges all gaps! But to get to the basic point: aside from the not unimportant fact that you know the vocal repertoire thoroly and I have an absolutely minimal acquaintance with it, we seem to divide on the question of whether the horrors of 20th-century “reality ”—its societal & political evils and ills which continue unabated and may keep boiling until some unspeakable climax we all dread occurs— is fit subject matter for art generally, music particularly. My ultimate reasons for finally rejecting modernism have to do with my intense belief that whatever “realities” an artist or composer deals with they must be transformed such that the pain induced in the social being is raised to a level beyond the phenomenological in the artistic being. No one can doubt the “sincerity” of today’s composers who wish to deal directly with the raw effects of political crimes et al. but “sincerity” is not an adequate substitute for the transformational process which goes into making art. Picasso’s Guernica is a good case in point. Miraculously he turned his personal horror at the bombing of that helpless city & its people into an enormous statement whose meaning is inescapable even to the casual eye. At the same time he produced a painting which satisfies every demand one can make on painting per se. Where you place a high value on Berio and Stockhausen (among others) because you believe they have captured in text and sound the essence of their subject matter...
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