Gerhard on Music: Selected Writings (review)

Gerhard on Music: Selected Writings. Edited by Meirion Bowen. Aldershot, [Hants, England; Burlington, Vt.]: Ashgate Publishing, 2000. [xiv, 276 p. ISBN 0-7546-0009-2. $84.95.]

The life of Roberto Gerhard (1896- 1970), composer, journalist, theorist, theory-book translator, and music critic, reflects many of the events that shaped the history of twentieth-century music. A pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, Gerhard was one of a number of figures who labored greatly to extend the organizational idea of twelve-tone music from just pitches to rhythms. Like Béla Bartók, he also at times embraced folk music from his native land, Spain, as inspiration for composition, and he celebrated its use in compositions by others. His life also mirrors the cultural tragedies of the century as well: Gerhard was exiled from his native country because of Franco's rise to power. In the years after World War II, he lived and taught in Great Britain, and, on one occasion, taught in America. In order to earn money in the post-war period, Gerhard expanded into new media, such as popular radio (taking a pseudonym to compose lighter "Spanish"-flavored works). And one of his last "sidelines," as he put it, was to experiment with electronic music and musique concrète.

Meirion Bowen's collection of Gerhard's texts--writings, essays, articles, radio addresses, and lectures--is not a complete collection of the composer's words on music. In his early career as a music journalist, the years immediately following his studies with Schoenberg in Vienna and then Berlin, Gerhard wrote a number of articles that Bowen did not include. But it is a collection of Gerhard's definitive writings, concentrating predominantly on the Second Viennese School and Gerhard's own music. Even though Bowen has nominally arranged the essays according to topic rather than presenting them chronologically, the reader often experiences a sort of "Second-Viennese whiplash" from the constant references to Schoenberg and Anton Weben in unexpected contexts. The section entitled "Contemporary Composers" is particularly interesting, as it chronicles the appearance and acceptance of such figures as Bartók and Hans Eisler in Barcelona at the beginning of the 1930s. Bowen has also provided a useful appendix, including a good hand-list of Gerhard's writings (though not listing all by their original titles) and a work list of Gerhard's compositions.

The book is useful for students of the twentieth century for two different reasons. First, Gerhard is a fluid critic and commentator about a small segment of his contemporary scene; he provides a fascinating view of the acceptance of new music, and is very well aware of the ever-diminishing size of the twentieth-century art music audience. Second, Gerhard easily and continually reminds the reader how partisan most of the battles of twentieth-century music have been. Even though his life did not lie within a narrow scope, his writings do. These essays span a large portion of the middle of the century (1918 to 1965), a period of music history that encompasses many schools and philosophies. But aside from a few small essays on the state of musicology and musicological editions in Spain, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Webern are the composers Gerhard discusses most completely. Igor Stravinsky receives a small and well thought-out essay, but only because Gerhard wishes to discuss Stravinsky's use of twelve-tone technique, differentiating it from that of the Second Viennese School. Gerhard grants a small essay to Bartók (because he visited Barcelona while Gerhard was writing regularly for the Mirador), and he discusses briefly composers such as Eisler, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill, whose music he was exposed to as a student in Berlin during the 1920s. As for the other major schools and figures of the twentieth century (hyper-romanticism, popular and jazz influence, most folk-music influences, and a good deal of avant-garde music), Gerhard is silent. He focuses all his energy on his conception of the new, important, and revolutionary: the...