And There I Stood with My Piccolo

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FOR SOME REASON OR OTHER, A "modern" trend raised its ugly, cacophonous schnozola along about this time and nurtured a considerable number of noisy neurotics who were particularly active in chamber music. The sounds that are now to be heard in a certain classy tencent store on Forty-second Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, are much more musical than some of the Sunday-night orgies that went on at that same location in the twenties, which was not a ten-cent store in those days but a sedate stainedglass -and-blond-wood little affair known as Aeolian Hall. Certain of those chamber-music concerts from '24 to '29 would curl your hair, curdle your blood, and convince you, once and for all, that music with no melody and no beauty of harmony is just ugly, smart-alecky, contrived noise that should have no place in our solar system at all, let alone in posterity's affectionate bosom. And I hope the 89 1 oblivion that has swallowed up the nerve-racking, junky, mathematical monkey business we had to perform in those days will forever remind some of the great composers who were guilty of that garbage never to confuse trigonometric orgasms with music again. Any of you misguided survivors of those sandy, uninspired, sawdust, barren, barren days—any of you who are within sound of my voice—look back, please, on those miserably involved, cackling, cracking, bloodless monstrosities. Dig them out of their lonely sarcophagi just long enough to compare their termite-filled pages with some of the Respighi and Stravinsky and Gershwin miracles wrought in those same years, and then let your souls fill with remorse that you could have done so much accountless frittering. The only one of those "masterpieces" I can remember was a twenty- or thirty-minute hunk of hideous sniveling called "The Rat and the Death." About halfway through this piece there was a lengthy and elaborate piccolo cadenza representing the rat, which was followed by the death-rattle motif played on an instrument invented by the composer, whose name we charitably omit. This instrument consisted of ten or twelve ginger-ale bottles filled to varying degrees with water and "played" with a xylophone mallet. 90 I was halfway through the cadenza when over my music stand I caught a glimpse of my teacher, Georges Barrere, sitting in the audience. His fastidiously elegant Parisian beard was vibrating. In fact, he was shaking all over on account of he was dying laughing inside and was trying his best not to show it. This struck me as pretty funny, and the farther I got into this idiotic solo, the closer I came to breaking up myself. By this time I was spitting out any kind of note on the piccolo, anything to keep going. But presently I spluttered off into silence after gasping out a few last squeaks that aren't on anybody's piccolo. As I was trying to sneak out the stage door after the concert, I ran into the writer of this so-called composition and he grasped my hand with fervent, ecstatic, grateful thank-you noises, saying that my performance of the piccolo cadenza was the most magnificent interpretation of anything he had ever heard in his life. Way back as early as arithmetic and geography they taught me that we cannot improve on certain "positives"; stuff that is round or square or perfect, for instance, cannot be made rounder or squarer or perfecter. And while they were at it, they could have included the chromatic scale which, as you no doubt know, is Mr. Bach's principle whereby Mr. Steinway and Mr. Baldwin and the different 91 ones arrange those black and white keys on the piano, exactly one half tone apart. But wouldn't you know that somebody thought it would be even better to find some new notes "in the cracks," as you might say; and so back there in those frantic, futile twenties, various groups got to experimenting with one fourth, one sixteenth, and even one thirty-second tones, and one group called "The Thirteenth Sound Ensemble of Havana" got Columbia Phonograph to record a composition written for special instruments that could play those in-the-cracks notes. This piece is called "Cristobal Colon Prelude" and is very interesting as a novelty and collector's item. They overlooked one thing, however: when you tighten up a...