Music, Society, Education

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Plus £a Change... The revolution which has taken place in the technical means of music during the twentieth century may seem to point to a revolution in the conceptual life of western man, yet this revolution obstinately refuses to take place; we remain as tied as ever to the scientific world view. We have examined the kind of thinking that is prefigured by the musical revolution, but that thinking remains latent, a virtuality rather than an actuality, and the majority of those who call themselves music lovers want nothing to do with it. The time-lag for the assimilation of new music grows longer; works of Schoenberg and Webern, for example, written before the first world war, are only now beginning to find tentative acceptance with some audiences. On the other hand, when the work of a composer does become appreciated by a sizeable public it is usually an indication that it has become assimilated into the main stream of middle-class culture, in other words, that it has ceased to disturb. The composer's ideas, however directly antagonistic they may once have been to the values and beliefs of its audience, however passionately and eloquently they may have been expressed, become sterilized. There seems no alternative to this situation; either an artist is unappreciated, in which case he speaks to the empty air, or at most to a group of intimates, or else he becomes a classic, and loses the power to disturb. It is instructive to watch the process occur; the transition from dangerous outsider to tame entertainer and the darling of the superstar performers can take place almost overnight. It happened to Mahler, as far as the British public was concerned, in the early sixties, and to Stravinsky perhaps a little later; that Schoenberg might make the transition at all would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago, when it seemed that he was fated to remain forever more argued about than performed and listened to, to remain a 'composer's composer', yet there are signs that this is about to take place, at least with some of his works. Schoenberg himself, in fact, predicted it when he said that 'The second half of this century will spoil by over-estimation whatever the first half by 7 Plus Ca Change 161 under-estimation left unspoilt.' It can be taken as a sign that the transition has taken place with any work when audiences cease arguing over it and begin comparing performances or, even better, recordings; the work can at this stage be said to have been rendered innocuous, to have ended its task of challengingour sensibilities. It has become a classic. Once a work has made the transition to classic it can never, however we may try, revive its power to disturb our sensibilities. It may continue to delight us, to move us, to astonish us even, but it can never provoke us. This is the reason for our puzzlement at the outrage of even intelligent critics on the first appearance of some of the greatest masterpieces of the western tradition, at Weber, for example, a greater musician than perhaps we realize and certainly no fool, saying of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that its composer was 'now ripe for the madhouse', or at Saint-Saens, saying that he found 'no trace of a musical idea' in the Prelude a I'Apres-midi d'un Faune, or a critic in the London Times who found Chopin's F minor Concerto 'dry and unattractive' - wejust cannot comprehend what could have made them react so. It is possible to multiply such examples indefinitely, not to have easy fun at the expense of critics (who, to be sure, might have enough humility, or at least common sense, to refrain from the categorical damning of what they do not understand), but rather to emphasize the fact that our safe and reassuring concert classics were once dangerous and disturbing. Anton Ehrenzweig has remarked how the music of Brahms, which in his youth sounded 'acid and brittle, and lacking in smooth finish; his intricate and widely-spaced polyphony produced a hollow sound that failed to support the thin flow of the melody,' and which he loved for its masculinity, for its expression of Brahms' 'forbidding and lonely personality', lost those qualities for him in later life. 'As time went by the hard edges of the music were smoothed down. Today there is a luscious velvetiness, an almost erotic warmth about his melody that makes the...