Constant Lambert—Music Ho! (i)

Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)

---

[21] During the war people had sterner things to think of than Schönberg, and a concert of his works would have been not only impracticable, but unpatriotic. The general cessation of musical activities during the war resulted in many pre-war works only becoming known a considerable number of years after they were written. This may seem platitudinous, but it should be remembered that it would not necessarily be true of literature. ...

[22] Purely practical and circumstantial difficulties of war, finance, patriotism and musical inefficiency having kept back the actual hearing of contemporary music, the wave of enthusiasm for this music that carried away the intellectual world shortly after the war was, though the intellectuals hardly realized it, mainly retrospective in character. It could not be compared for example to the contemporary interest in Brancusi's sculpture or Edith Sitwell's poetry. It was a 'hangover' from a previous period, and the famous series of concerts given by Eugène Goossens in London in 1920 were historical in more ways than one. They apparently announced the dawn of a new era, but curiously enough their most potent arguments were drawn from the era which we all imagined to be closed.

...

[23] To put the problem in its most naïve form, a representative pre-war concert of modern works would have struck the man in the street...as definitely queer. He would have found great difficulty in relating it to his previous musical experiences and, giving up all attempt to follow it as form, would probably have relapsed into a purely passive state in which the strange colours and rhythms were allowed to make a direct appeal to his nerves.

Criminy, I wish I could find a way for music to make this

direct appeal ,

the way it did before I was admonished by its practical exigencies to learn to

follow it as form .

His experiences would be unusual, but would assume a certain uniformity and logic through the very consistency of their strangeness.

I mean,...cool.

(My note scrawled across this paragraph says, double-underlined: OPENNESS.)

...

[23] Experiments may take many forms , but only one general direction , whereas the spirit of pastiche has no guiding impulse . Once invoked it becomes like the magic broom of the sorcerer's apprentice, to whom in-

[24]

deed the average modern composer, with his fluent technique, but lack of co-ordinative sense, may well be compared. It is the element of deliberate pastiche in modern music that chiefly distinguishes it from the experimental period of before the war.

...

[26] Although in his abandonment of linear continuity and symmetrical design Debussy is linked to the impressionist painters, the famous 'harmonic revolution', for which he was supposed to be responsible, has more in common with the Symbolist movement in poetry. The Symbolist poets did not invent new words, nor did Debussy—contrary to general belief—invent new chords. There are very few actual harmonic combinations in Debussy that cannot be found in Liszt; the novelty of Debussy's harmonic method consists in his using a chord as such , and not as a unit in a form of emotional and musical argument.

...in Liszt they [these chords] form a definite point of stress in a continuous line of though, a point of stress that demands a resolution. For that reason we are apt to pass over their actual quality as pure sound. But Debussy takes a certain chord and, by leaving it unresolved, or by putting it under every note of a phrase (in a manner that dates back to Hucbald in the eleventh century), he draws our attention to this harmony as an entity in itself, with its own power of evocation. We do not take it in our stride

[27]

as we do any word in a sentence like 'the ultimate interests of the electors' or a figure in a photographic group, 'reading from left to right'. We examine it separately as we might an Egyptian hieroglyph or Chinese ideograph.

It is not my intention in a non-technical study such as this to trace back the origins of Debussy harmonic vocabulary to Mussorgsky, Liszt, Chabrier or Satie, to the exotic influences of the gipsy music he heard in Russia or of the Indo-Chinese music he heard at the Paris Colonial Exhibition. I merely wish to point out that Debussy's real revolution in harmony consists far more in the way he uses chords rather than the chords he uses. It is a development in harmony more far reaching than any of Liszt's or Wagner's devleopments of harmonic vocabulary.

By suspending a chord in space, as it were, Debussy recalls the methods of the literary Symbolists. There is nothing particularly Symbolist about a greenhouse attached to a vegetable garden with a gardener working near it; but when this greenhouse occurs, deserted and unexpected, in the middle of a forest...it immediately arouses a different and more instictive set of feelings, even though we might be hard put to it to analyze their precise nature.

...but their general nature can nonetheless be pronounced upon?

The difficulty many people experienced on first hearing Debussy's work was not due so much as they thought to any strangeness in the sound. It was created far more by the lack of rhetorical and emotional reasoning in his music.

No doubt many people did have this problem this way. I guess a mastery of rhetorical and emotional reasoning vis-a-vis the sound can cut both ways, eh?

...

[30] It is legitimate to suppose that Debussy's technical experiments were a means—not an end. That is to say, it is more probable that the static style and harmonic mannerisms of Pelléas are due to his attempt to create a world of half-lights and dimly realized emotions, than that he chose this subject because he felt himself unable to achieve music in another style. At the same time we can see that by his treatment of harmony as an entity in itself Debussy prepares the way for the latter-day unmotivated experiments that have been described by a sympathetic critic as 'objective investigation of aural phenomena', while in his rejection of emotional rhetoric he unconsciously prepares the way for those who would reject emotion itself and throw out the baby with the bath water.

Does this so-called objective investigation really reject emotion itself ? Or does it reject the conceit to communication/conveyance/prescription/imposition of one among many possible emotional responses in the listener?

It need hardly be said that the coldness of much of Debussy's early music has nothing to do with the abstraction aimed at by certain present-day composers; it is a coldness of the natural world, not of the mechanical. This coldness is the most remarkable feature of the orchestral nocturnes, a transitional work halfway between the static and symbolist manner of Pelléas and the more fully developed impressionism of La Mer. These nocturnes, as Mr. Edwin Evans has rightly pointed out, recall Whistler rather than Chopin. They are like an exquisitely wrought Mohammedan decoration in which no human form is allowed to appear .

Funny coincidence here that this particular reference would pop up, because by the time we got done fishing baby emotion out of the sewer into which the objectivists had emptied the preceding European century of its sentimental rhetoric , then quite immediately human forms started appearing and re-appearing in such concentration and frequency as to suggest that something more insidious than mere aestheticized emotion was afoot.

I don't know about everyone else, but I could really use a break, and this recommends the Mohammedan line, actually, albeit for the most un-Mohammedan of reasons.

...

[32] from the purist's point of view it [La Mer] is the most finished and typical of Debussy's works—though, as I have pointed out, this lack of rhetorical emotion is by no means the same thing as abstraction . A picture does not become an abstract design because it has banished all purely literary interest. In its abandonment of formal principles, its lack of continuous melodic line, counterpoint, or development, in the accepted sense of the word, and in the pointillism of its scoring, La Mer represents the apex of Debussy's impressionist manner. Colour and atmosphere have taken the place of design and eloquence, and sounds succeed each other neither in definite continuity, nor in deliberate contrast, but with the arbitrary caprice of nature itself.

...

[45] There are two ways of destroying the significance of the House of Lords—you can either abolish it or you can make everyone a member . We have no sense of modulation in Debussy's music for the simple reason that he doesn't modulate, and we have no sense of modulation in Schönberg's music because the work itself has become one vast modulation.

...

[72] The various elements in painting being less easy to separate from each other than the various elements in music, it is obviously a little difficult to evoke deliberately more than one period at once, or to combine two periods of style, in any given painting. Picasso may change his style every five years, but during that five years each picture is strictly within its limited 'epoch'. Even in literature it is difficult to evoke more than one period in a given paragraph. James Joyce in the medical-student section of Ulysses gives us a brilliant pastiche of successive epochs in English literature, but it is a separate tour de force and does not represent the general texture of the book. As a pastiche it has a symbolic purpose and, moreover, the epochs succeed each other in logical and historical order. It can in no way be compared to the random and scrapbook methods of Diaghileff.

In music, though, the various elements, such as melody, rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint, all taking place in practically the same moment of time can—though it is highly undesirable

!!

that they should—be so dissected and separated from each other, that a composer with no sense of style and no creative urge can

[73]

take medieval words, set them in the style of Bellini, add twentieth-century harmony, develop both in the sequential and formal manner of the eighteenth century, and finally score the whole thing for jazz band. Similarly, in ballet it is possible to have décor, choreography and music in different periods and taste, to throw abstract films on the back cloth while the orchestra turns out a laborious pastiche of Gluck and the dancers revive the glories of the nineteenth-century Excelsior.

It will be seen, then, that by his adoption or even invention of the particular type of present-day pastiche that can conveniently be described as time travelling Diaghileff immediately established a position of mastery again. It was not even necessary that his associates should be time travelers themselves—for by picking on collaborators sufficiently disparate in outlook he could achieve the required effect—but to start with, at least, he required a similar mentality on the part of his associates, and in Stravinsky, whose executive abilities so far outweighed his creative gifts, and who, like himself, was a somewhat déraciné figure, he found the ideal collaborator.

I would probably have landed in this same foul mood had I belonged to Lambert's generation. But right now I actually think it is slightly negligent for a composer not to explore this particular kind of pastiche ; that is, a pastiche of musicians rather of styles. Nominally they amount to the same thing, but procedurally they are not the same. To be sure, there is still, now, a point beyond which this becomes absurd and off-putting; but that conceptual point has been slowly receding as culture fragments and forms de-differentiate. i.e. I think there is a degree of pastiche which was formerly grating which has become tolerable simply by way of acclimation. And one way to get at it is simply to bring musicians together who normally would not be brought together. (That my occasional efforts to this end have not been very successful can be chalked up to my weak executive abilities more so than to the limitations of the concept.)

...

[83] Strauss, the most accomplished master of photographic suggestion in music, can, it is true, suggest a flock of sheep by a bleating on muted trombones, a couple of monks by a modal passage on two bassoons, and a boat of the water by the usual aqueous devices; but it is highly improbable that by a combination of the three he could bring before our eyes a picture of two monks in a barge with a lot of sheep.

A perfectly apt illustration (pun intended) of the old problem. Let's not waste the opportunity by neglecting to overthink it just a bit:

the point is not
that
representation is impossible,

rather that
it requires
brute force means;

and,
at that,
it can achieve only
fragmentary ends.

And
on the other side of the ledger:

the word
improbable was chosen carefully here,
or at least it is the correct word.

Taleb remarks, somewhere, that his coffee cup could explode if the wrong (or right) coincidence of atomic machinations were to occur, but that he's not too worried about it.

So,
if someone
does claim
to have "heard"
two monks in a barge with a lot of sheep ,
what is the recourse?

...

[86] It may seem that in concentrating so much attention on Diaghileff himself one is treating his collaborators in summary fashion. But Diaghileff was far more than a mere impressario. Though not, strictly speaking, a creative artist he had very much more genius than many of the artists who worked for him,... They were merely the gunmen executing the commands of their Capone, who, like all great gangsters, never touched firearms himself. ... His sensibility, if not always profound, was always rapid,... Being as near to a creative artist as any producer can be he was able to express things that were outside his own experience; but being a creative artist manqué, without a genuine urge or belief round which to orientate himself, he was always liable to become the tool of those whom he had brought into existence, and whose feelings he had formulated for them. He became a victim of the fashions he himself

[87]

had set, and being an older man than his entourage he was correspondingly more afraid of fashionable reaction. When he was young he could afford to attach his name to certain movements, but in later years he did not dare to face the accusation of conservatism that such an attachment would imply.

Most of this could just as well have been written about Disney.

...

[112]
(f) Abstraction in Music

Nothing is more typical of the superficial nature of most modern or rather modernist criticism than its slipshod use of the word abstract, particularly as applied to music.

The word abstract has, of course, a certain definite significance when applied to painting, and it is a tenable hypothesis that the best modern paintings and sculptures have been abstract. Even so it would be reasonable to point out that, by denying himself realism,

Realism
?!

Or "representation(alism)"
?

:^|

the painter, though he thus avoids the pitfalls of anecdotage at the

[113]

same time cuts himself off from the variety and significance of forms that intelligently used realism

Realism??

can provoke. The modified realism of Cézanne can be of far greater interest from the purely formal point of view than the abstractions of Leger, but even though we may grant that the highest form of plastic art consists in a significant organization of shapes devoid of all purely representational

Aha!

sentiment and literary association, it by no means follows that this hasty and sweeping thesis holds good for music. It is all very well to hammer out a theory, however mistaken, that applies to an art functioning in space: it is quite another matter to apply this to an art that functions in time. Most of the modern fallacies about abstraction, literary sentiment, representationalism,

Uh huh...

romantic contamination, etc. in music are due to ignoring this elementary distinction.

A picture with a narrative element in it is vaguely unpleasing not because it is literary, but because it is trying to represent time by cutting a section through it in space. ...rel[ying, e.g.] for its appeal not only on its own representational qualities and arrangement of forms, but on the associative and imaginative powers of the spectator, who is irresistably

Vive la Resistance!

led to reconstruct the events that have led up to this moment of time,

That is, to "unfry an egg."

and to speculate sympathetically on the future.

Rare as sympathy is, it comes far more easily than clairvoyance.

The interest of the spectator is forced away from the scene as it occurs in space to the event as it occurred in time. The picture is, therefore, in the nature of an uncompleted sentence. The artist has only suggested a line of thought and depends for his

[114]

final effect on an element of time that he cannot define in his own medium, that of space. The same incident, however, could obviously occur in a novel and be perfectly satisfactory, for then it would be one of a series of events in time and could balance the other events from this formal point of view, acquiring architectural value, as well as sentimental appeal.

Sure.

Just as long as we agree that the métier is Before rather than After The Fact;

that the métier almost always precedes the urge to portray The same incident;

and that the other way 'round is quite... improbable .

Conversely, a pair of boots painted by a master like Van Gogh is a perfectly finished artistic statement in space, whereas the most detailed literary description of a pair of boots would hardly have much artistic value except, perhaps, as a prelude to the treatment of boots in time, as it were, by attaching to them a series of events like those that befell Andersen's goloshes.

Neither of the two paintings mentioned above is exactly an ideal subject for musical inspiration. Not even Strauss...could produce the musical equivalent of Van Gogh's boots. At the same time, while the prospect of a Strauss symphonic poem based on Martineau's chef-d'oeuvre may seem too grisly to be envisaged, it is undeniable that he might achieve something by trying to express the underlying emotion of the scene, and by attempting to follow the sequence of implied events in terms of musical form. The impure picture, in fact, is nearer to music because of its emotional appeal, and its time element.

It is highly undesirable, of course, that the time element in musical design should be put to the purposes of sentimental narrative, but the mere fact that it can be so used distinguishes it from plastic design. The

[115]

repetitions of a certain underlying curve in an abstract or representational picture have no dramatic content because they occur in the same movement of time—one's eye can choose which it looks at first, or take in the various statements of the same form simultaneously. But the return of the first subject after the development in a symphonic movement has an inevitable touch of the dramatic, merely through the passage of time that has elapsed since its first statement.

Once again, render drama in its 2020s tweenage-colloquial sense to understand the present reception one can expect for the return of the first subject .

Time, in fact, is rather vulgarly dramatic;

Yep, that is another way of putting it!

it is the sentamentalist of the dimensions,

This guy is a nut, but he is a full-on badass writer.

and small wonder that visuels, like Wyndham Lewis, feel that it is occupying too much space in our lives.

Quite apart from this expressive time element,

Hmm.

Isn't
sentiment
retrospective,

while
expression
is
prospective
?

which grows in effect in direct proportion to the length of the work...there is a naturally expressive element in all types of music, whether primitive or sophisticated, that it would be unnecessary to insist on, or even mention, in any other age but our own. The type of modern composer and critic who would have us believe that the greatest music consists of an abstract succession of tastefully arranged notes is fond of contrasting the pure classicism of the eighteenth century with the decadent romanticism of the nineteenth century, enthroning the pure Mozart as here and casting the impure Wagner in the role of villain. Music—or so we are led to understand—was written in an objective spirit

...which is not even close to the same thing as abstraction ...

until the nine-

[116]

teenth century, when contamination from romantic sources set in,...

...[this cohort has] mistaken the cool restraint of the eighteenth-century masters for a deliberate frigidity and not troubled to look further back than this much-vaunted golden period of music. To borrow a phrase from Edmund Dulac, he is like a man who would write a history of the horse by giving us a list of famous Derby winners.

... Actually, the subjective spirit

...which is not the same thing as expression ...

in which Wagner sat down to write an opera is a far more common attitude in the history of music than the objective spirit in which Bach sat down to write a concerto.

May God save us aesthetes from the more common attitude toward anything in particular.

Emotional and romantic expression in music is not a late and decadent excrescence, but a natural tradition, that only became temporarily eclipsed in a few minor eighteenth-century works.

Music, far from being an abstract art is as naturally emotional as painting is naturally representational.

Yep. Emotional certainly. But expressive ?

If we speak of Mozart as a pure composer it is only in the

[117]

sense that we speak of Renoir as a pure painter. Figaro is pure compared to Elektra, just as La Première Sortie is pure compared to When Did You Last See Your Father? but that does not mean for a moment that Mozart or Renoir believed in abstraction in art.

On point, sir.

But what the artist
believed
about art
(theirs or anyone else's)
is
usually irrelevant
and
always elusive
.

Mozart's best music, as is well known, was found unpleasing by many of his contemporaries because of its intensely melancholy and romantic nature. Those present-day critics who see in Mozart nothing but a glorified craftsman making a concord of sweet sounds in a spirit of angelic detachment offer convincing proof of their complete insensitiveness to all save the purely stylistic aspects of music.

I would hope that this point has finally become inarguable. Still, I find detachment something of a strawman here. The question is whether, materially and/or phenomnelogically and/or any other -(ic)-ally(-ical) you want to offer up, creator and auditor can in any reasonable sense be said to be attached to (or detached from) the same thing?

The romantic and emotional nature of music is latent in its origins. The earliest forms of music were, as far as can be ascertained from history and from the examination of still primitive races, unaccompanied folk songs and ritual drumming. A folk song, it stands to reason, is expressive and even programmatic. The best examples represent in embryo, as it were, the balance between emotional and formal content that has been struck by the greatest symphonists. As for primitive instrumental music, need one point out that the negro beating a tomtom is aiming not so much at an abstract dissection of rhythm in the manner of Stravinsky, as at the creation of an altogether unobjective state of physical excitement?

There will be plenty more (i.e. too much) of this kind of thing to reckon with later on here. Speaking for myself, I can only confess that while I would rather listen to Stravinsky than to the negro beating a tomtom , what I'm looking for in either case is precisely an altogether unobjective state of physical excitement , and so reducing things thusly certainly doesn't settle anything as far as I'm concerned.

Without in any way wishing to link the primitive origins of secular music with the primitive origins of religious music, one may recognize that in spite of its

[118]

deliberately restricted manner Gregorian chant still remains one of the most moving expressions of the musical spirit. As befits religious music, the emotion is to some extent impersonal , that is to say it embraces the individual in a communal feeling . But there is a world of difference between this impersonal expression of a devotional spirit and a cold objectivity . If it be pleaded that an unaccompanied vocal line, whether sacred or profane, hardly provides a parallel to the later complications of instrumental and choral music, one has only to look at the great period of choral writing to realize the folly of those who would hold up pure music as the classic norm.

It's not the norm . The question is, What does it do?

The religious music of the sixteenth century displays a great concentration on technical device, but this concentration is not objective, it is adapted to deeply expressive ends. The emotion may vary from the serenity of Palestrina to the passion of Vittoria...but it is an integral part of the music. To suggest that these masters were merely fabricating musical material in the spirit of Hindemith and later Stravinsky, would be pure impertinence.

...

[119] Objective pattern making is, roughly speaking, a product of the eighteenth century and it marks not an artistic progress, but a social and spiritual decline. Those who listened to a motet such as Vittoria's O Vos Omnes took part in it spiritually if not actually; those who listened to a madrigal such as O Care thou wilt despatch me as likely as not were all actually performing it—they each took a part and the part was worth taking. The same is true of the seventeenth-century consorts of viols whose decline is so lamented... With the advent of the professional violinist, and the decline of the amateur viol player, part writing gave way to fireworks and pattern making. Music ceased to be a vital

[120]

and spiritual experience

Could this vitality ever have been a fact for more than a trifling minority of those who took a part in music-making, no matter how much the part itself was ( objectively!) worth taking ?

and degenerated into a mere aural decoration—as which it is defined by that typical child of his time, Dr. Burney.

If you play music in your home, then you choose music of emotional content and technical interest; but if you are going to treat music as a background or ornament to social life in general, such qualities would be a positive disadvantage and all you require is something that is brilliant, easy and consonant. The eighteenth century produced a mass of occasional music with nothing to recommend it except a certain elegance of style. It is only this elegance combined with an absence of actual vulgarity that entitles it to any more serious consideration than the average present-day foxtrot. ...

Although the greatest achievements of the eighteenth century have probably never been surpassed, the general level of everyday music has probably never been lower. There is a certain distinction about the minor composers of earlier periods, but the minor eighteenth-century

[121]

composers are merely garrulous and perfunctory.

Sounds perfect for Rush Hour.

The same is true of the minor works of even such great masters as Mozart and Haydn. The trouble with modern enthusiasts for the purity of eighteenth-century music is their apparent inability to distinguish between romantic and subjective masterpieces, like Mozart's G Minor Quintet and G Minor Symphony, and the many divertimenti that he cynically turned out in order to pay for the rent and a little champagne.

The pièces d'occasion of this period are sufficiently lacking in intellectual and emotional content to justify the admiring epithets of abstract and objective applied by the present-day exponents of purity in music. But they also achieve the well-known combination of purity and dullness. In fact, it may safely be said that the only classical music that is abstract is bad classical music. The Romantic movement which is still held by a certain school of critics to have dethroned purely musical interests in favour of dramatic expression and literary association actually was a perfectly reasonable reaction back to the true tradition of music,

Well, a tendency does not make a tradition . Tradition arises from (self-)conscious awareness of history, personal and collective alike. That's why the concept is more often applied to various purisms than to the true (meaning...the normal??) practices of expression, of narrative, and of what Becker calls "the causa-sui project" of self-immortalization. Indeed, as Becker and Rank make clear, "traditions" per se just as well stand in the way of self-elevation (i.e. in their "collective aspect") as do they potentially serve as its very means.

To wit, the failure of the written score to fully capture sentimental and technical aspects alike extends in fact to the causa-sui issue, wherein one may apply Lambert's brand of skepticism: without modern individualism, modern communications, or indeed even modern standards of discrete authorship and rights in intellectual as well as material property, what was in it for the eighteenth-century composer? Becker suggests that the urge to self-immortalization and the conflict between individual and collective needs has been greatly heightened by modernity, but he also finds it, to some degree or other, endemic to the human condition.

It is easy to find contemporary evidence of a widely dispersed fight for psychic survival via increasingly desperate measures to reclaim and assert some (any) form of individuality or distinction. Perhaps it is too easy, actually, to locate such evidence given that we are all participant-observers. Still, the difference between, on one hand, a handwritten score whose authorship can still, centuries later, defy conclusive determination by renowned experts, and on the other, a computer file with hard-coded authorship and rights infomation, this difference should not be lost sight of. I doubt the latter cohort has lost sight of it, given that a seemingly minor administrative oversight now could easily result in all of this redundantly overwrought metadata becoming permanently unintelligible to new generations of machines. The provenance of so much otherwise "anonymous" work would then be lost. Living memory of the artists themselves would eventually die away. And then, suddenly, it would not be possible to tell just by examining the documents themselves that their creators in fact lived in a distinctively "modern" state of profound desperation, atomization, and insecurity rather than in the secure grip of a benevolent community to which they were useful. The community which, indeed, more properly deserves "authorship" credit than do any of its individuals, for once might actually receive more than its fair share.

This is highly speculative of course, but it's worth considering the possibility that at least in this narrow respect these eighteenth-century composers lived closer to the ideal than to the modern nightmare. One result is that the relative paucity of metadata, so to speak, gives to modern observers the strong appearance of abstraction; whereas for Lambert (and he does make a good case), there are two booby traps set for us here: the intellectual and emotional content does not cease to exist simply because we do not find evidence of it in the critical discourse or in the minor works or (I am adding this one myself) notated in the score; and the very concept of abstraction is a contemporary one, and therefore it is anachronistic to project it upon the distant past.

The question I would ask here (with Rank and Becker, perhaps, if I have understood them well enough) is whether this wasting away of authorial metadata is not itself essential; and in both senses of that word: essential as in "needed," and essential as in "unavoidable." Given the inevitable descent of competing causa-sui projects into destruction and violence, is this abililty of time to scrub the metadata from the artworks not in fact something on which we depend for long-term social stability? Is time perhaps the sentimentalist of the dimensions only on the individual scale? And is it, conversely, ruthlessly Darwinistic (i.e. "the great equalizer") on the historical scale? Or, is it supposed to be that way, is it actually better for all of us in the long run if it is that way, but in the short run of things are we simply too terrified of our own finitude to just let it be that way?

a tradition of far greater force and a far greater duration than the elegant divagation provided by all but the finest eighteenth-century masters.

Well, this is just the fallacy of imcomplete evidence.

The reaction inevitably took an extreme turn with the result that perfunctory sentiment was apt to take the place of perfunctory pattern making. Classical technique became confounded with classical coldness, and the desire to achieve romantic atmosphere and warmth at all costs led to an unnecessary overthrowal of formal devices and to the creation of a false distinction

[122]

between classicism and romanticism that has lasted to this day.

We are still apt to regard formalism and emotional expression as opposed interests instead of as an inssoluble whole.

Well, for my part I regard the first as tractable and the second as intractable. That is all.

That is why at the present time even sympathetic critics are sometimes puzzled by the combination of mathematical methods and melodramatic atmosphere to be found in so much atonal music. ... Berg's music itself would have sounded strange to seventeenth-century ears, but his aims were much the same as theirs. ... The atonal school, whatever its faults and in spite of its superficial air of mathematical frigidity, can in no way be described as abstract.

...

[133] We may well ask ourselves if, to obtain the static abstraction of Satie's best work, it is worth while throwing over the dynamic movement and expressiveness which has hitherto always been considered an essential part of music. ... A statement...is not necessarily valuable because it is complete [e.g. Satie has "achieved a more complete objectivity" than Stravinsky, whose "essential dynamic qualities keep breaking through" even in his most "abstract" work], and although Satie is of great interest

[134]

both as an individual figure and as a curious anticipation of the post-war Zeitgeist he can hardly be said to be a major composer. In spite of his intensely musical faculties it is impossible not to feel that the mentality that directed these instincts would have found truer expression in one of the plastic arts.

Suddenly Lambert's gambit becomes clear: the conceit to abstraction in music gets filed under the rubric of dedifferentiation. But rather than finding that painters have infringed upon music, he finds revisionist music critics projecting upon the eighteenth-century a distinctively twentieth-century concept of abstraction; and at that, a concept which properly belongs to painting rather to music.

This is a novel maneuver. It's easy to see (already) why this book caught McLuhan's attention despite its rather specialized and occasionally technical bearing on matters of marginal interest to the latter's overall project. But how does Lambert expect to get away with this having already quite forcefully (and correctly) dispensed with the possibility of true representation in music aside from the very most vulgar methods? He expects that the ostensible emotional content of music, which arises from its temporal quality rather than from any representational sentiment and literary association , is sufficient to shatter the conceit to pure abstraction.

As previously, I can't help but agree with the last part, or at least with its broad outlines. The quip that time is the sentamentalist of the dimensions is brilliant writing and passable metaphysics, but it seems also in this context to presuppose a listener who can be counted upon to keep score of unfolding motivic development in a way which we know only trained musicians can (and not always happily, I hasten to add). For most other people, there is nothing to be sentimental about unless the recollection is made unavoidable by way of brute force repetition or exceptionally strong memory prompts. It seems Lambert could only agree that this is why sentimentality as a temporal phenomenon attaches itself most readily to the smallest, smoothest granules of musical experience, i.e. to pop songs, which certainly have no monopoly on emotional appeal that would explain their outsized dominance in Market conditions. That said, it's also possible that for today's non-initiates there is no Mozart or Beethoven or Stravinsky but rather The [My Location's] Orchestra (more likely The [My Clique's] Streaming Service, Tuned To An Orchestra Playlist).

Actually, forced to choose, this the kind of paradoxical dual victory for both sentiment and abstraction that I would rather see, as against the crude flattening of distinction between Berg and the seventeeth century, which I'd rather not see at all, even if it can be made to sound very reasonable.

As for Satie as a plastic artist manqué, when an artist verbally states their aesthetic objectives and everything about the statement makes more sense in some other métier and little-to-no sense in the métier at hand, then this sort of quip becomes fair game. But otherwise I think not.

This warping of the medium to use it for a form of expression best suited to another art is by no means confined to composers, amongst modern artists. While Satie and Stravinsky may be said in their objective compositions to be taking up the work of the painter, the surrealist painters are working on lines which would obviously find more convincing and fluid expression in writing, while transitional writers like Gertrude Stein are aiming at rhythmic patterns and formal arrangements of sound that would have far more weight if expressed in musical form.

Ditto.

Given the overall conservatism evinced throughout this book, starting even with the title, it's hard to imagine that Lambert really believes this, or would believe it given the chance. I guess it depends on what exactly weight means.

By working out of focus with one's medium one can undoubtedly achieve results of the utmost experimental interest; but it is rarely that these experiments have led to anything but a technical and spiritual cul-de-sac.

Yep, that is the nature of true experiments . We need experiments! Experiments are not the problem. The problem, rather, is that "true" experiments are not half as numerous as the Uptown bloat of "experimental" composers would suggest; also that most experiments need not be conducted on an audience; yet it is precisely this latter desire (Becker's causa-sui rides again, perhaps) and not any kind of disinterested exploration which motivates the vast majority of "experimental" music. (Yep, this was precisely the response of one of these younguns when I raised the audience question in a class at CalArts: the presence/involvement of the audience is an indispensible part of the experiment, period. Next question. So, the next time you're trapped watching a musical "experiment" unfold whose outcome was completely predictable from the outset, blame yourself. You and your willingness to show up are the reason it needs to be unspooled anyway.)

[136] One cannot erase the results of nationalism any more than one can erase the results of Romanticism. What the eighteenth century achieved with ease and by traditional means we must achieve with difficulty and in our own individual way. When we look at Sibelius' Finlandia, and then at his Seventh Symphony, we may well agree with George Moore that art must be parochial in the beginning to become cosmopolitan in the end.

Internationalism, like simplicity, is a desirable end but, like simplicity, it is found only in the highest and the lowest forms of art . The paintings of Giotto speak an international language and so do lavatory drawings. We must beware lest in aiming at one we produce the other. It is fatally easy for the modern composer, reacting against the pssionate nationalism of recent musical movements, to rid himself of parochialism not by intensifying his thought but by denuding it, and to reach universality through nullity.

...

[164] It is important to emphasize once more the spiritual conflict that lies at the back of the obvious technical conflict between the folk song and classical form.

To put it vulgarly, the whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder .

My note says:
It's actually a problem even in commercial music...it arises on MANY gigs!

[178] There is no possibility of a modern Tristan..., because this particular type of romantic feeling has crumbled away just as much as the national feeling of Mussorgsky's time. There was nothing forced about Wagner and Liszt's romanticism . It was the most natural thing in the world for Liszt to take his young countesses on Lake Como and read them Tasso and Victor Hugo. If anyone still thinks this spirit exists let

[179]

him visualize himself taking his young woman on the Serpentine and reading her T.S. Eliot. I don't want him to dismiss the argument as facetious or trivial, I just want him to spend a minute or two visualizing the scene. The various inhibitions, social and personal, which would prevent this scene taking place, or being in any way moving did it improbably take place, exactly explain why the modern composer cannot hope to write a movement like the Gretchen section in the Faust symphony.

If we go back further in history for a great opera that owes much of its greatness to its firm spiritual and social background, we find that Mozart's operas are not a symbolic but an exact reproduction of the spirit and society of his day. He himself could have walked into one of his own operas,... The essential falsity of modern attempts to revive the delicious formality of the Mozartian period of opera lies in the fact that the whole framework of society, whose relation to the individual symbolizes the cadences and codas that gently restrain the flow of Mozart's passionate line, is crumbling away if not already completely dessicated.

Yep. But these modern attempts to revive are a parochial issue. On the reception side, the fact that anyone still listens to these operas at all, by whatever pathway, is made more vexing rather than less by the question of social context. It would seem that this participation is not a revival but rather a finding of something new (or perhaps it would be better and more simply put: finding something else). And even so, the desire to revive can in fact be widely observed here and elsewhere, which, again, raises more questions than it answers. Why would we ourselves want, actually, to walk right into someone else's opera?

The only explanation is that even the most "dated" of artworks can, potentially, hit upon something that has legs.

If we take Figaro, Tristan, and Boris, as representing three of the highest peaks in the history of music, we see that they symbolize three phases of human thought without which background they would have taken on a very different shape and quality. ...

[180]

... Mozart represents the aristocratic internationalism of the eighteenth century, Wagner the passionate individualism of the romantic movement, Mussorgsky the equally passionate democratic nationalism of the nineteenth century... The people who, in effect, say to the modern composer 'Why don't you stop making those beastly noises and write lovely tunes and pleasant harmonies like those in Figaro, Tristan and Boris, etc.', may not realize that even were a modern composers sufficiently endowed with invention and technique he is totally lacking in the artistic faith, conscious or unconscious, that these phases of thought provided .

My note says:
The question is, though...WHY+HOW TF are so many LISTENERS NOT "lacking in the artistic faith" of a time they never lived in?? This suggests a mere lag, to be sure, but also something like the aestheticism and transcendentalism that Tomlinson, e.g., decried.

...

[188] We can say without falsity that we prefer the design of a Utamaro print to that of a Puvis de Chavannes panel, or that we admire Maya carvings more than those of Mr. Moore; but we cannot say that we think that classical Indian music shows a more highly developed sense of form than classical Italian music, because the whole basis of thought and principle of construction is so entirely different. Nor can we compare the orchestration of Chinese theater music with the orchestration of European theater music, for there is hardly an instrument common to the two. Any attempt of a Western composer to approximate to oriental instrumentation by the use of exotic drums, bass flutes, etc., is monstrously crude when compared to the genuine article, partly because it is impossible to rival the virtuosity of the oriental performer, and partly because the melodic instruments cannot execute the minute and subtle divisions of the scale found in non-European music.

More important, however, than these technical considerations is the fact that while we can appreciate oriental plastic art without altering our angle of approach, or adopting a different criterion, we cannot appreciate oriental music without a violent dislocation of our usual critical processes, if indeed we can appreciate at all an art that lives in so different an emotional world and depends to so great a degree on improvisation. Exoticism in music is therefore more artificial than exoticism in literature or the plastic arts, and for this

[189]

reason it might be expected to produce even fewer works of ultimate importance and architectural value than self-conscious nationalism. But actually its artificiality is in its favour, for it induces in the composer a certain degree of stylization that is often to be preferred to the verism of the nationalist composer. Moreover, the imitation of the arabesques of oriental melody—though appalling at its worst—can, in the works of a composer of sensibility...produce themes of a far greater plasticity than the rigid folk songs which the nationalists plump down in the middle of a symphony.

Sorabji, himself an authority on oriental music, has spoken of the Asiatic affinities shown in the suppleness of rhythm, the richness and delicacy of colouring, and the flexibility of melodic line in Debussy's best works. A tune of an exotic type, unless it is to be accompanied merely by a Maskelyne and Devant tom-tomming, compels an equally unconventional and supple formal treatment, and thus exoticism, though even more disruptive of the eigtheenth-century spiritual tradition than is nationalism, has produced a greater variety of valuable architectural experiment.

My note says:
Dizzying perhaps to try separating out the racialism from the plain-facts here...but perhaps the general thrust is worth taking seriously; or, perhaps it merely boils down to a determinism which can be problematized as such. Anyway, this "exoticism" is unfortunately still with us, and occasionally hijacks Multiculturalism like a parasite.

[197] There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this

[198]

limit is obviously reached by Ravel towards the end of La Valse and towards the beginning of Bolero).