Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)
[201]
(g) The Spirit of Jazz
By jazz, of course, I mean the whole movement roughly designated as such, and not merely that section of it known as Afro-American, or more familiarly as 'Harlem'. The negro once enjoyed a monopoly of jazz, just as England once enjoyed a monopoly of the industrial revolution, but for the negroes to imagine that all jazz is their native province is as if an Englishman were to imagine that all locomotives were built by his compatriots. Even the Harlem section of jazz is by no means so African as might be supposed.
...
[202] ... The European's enthusiasm for so-called negro music is in equal ratio to the negro's appropriation of European devices, and the more the European tries to imagine himself 'down on the Delta' the more the negro tries to imagine himself in an aristocratic salon. In this connection, it is amusing to recall the situation that arose recently when a well-known negro-dance arranger
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was called in to produce a ballet for a highbrow company trained in the classical tradition. While all the Europeans flung aside their carefully won training to indulge in an orgy of pseudo-Charlestons the negro himself was moved to tears, not by his own work but by the classic elegance of Lac des Cygnes.
...
[205] ... The phrase 'barber-shop chord'—which denotes a chord of unusual succulence—dates back to the days when a guitar hung in every negro barber's shop, and a client who was waiting would vamp about on the instrument until at a lucky trouvaile everyone would shout 'Hold that chord'. It need hardly be pointed out that this type of harmonic experiment is as sophisticated in its method as that of the contemporary composers who—deny it hotly though they may—compose 'at the piano'.
...
The superiority of American jazz lies in the fact that the negroes there are in touch not so much with specifically barbaric elements as with sophisticated elements. ...
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The sudden post-war efflorescence of jazz was due largely to the adoption as raw material of the harmonic richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period of highbrow music. ...
... Though popularly regarded as being a barbaric art, it is to its sophistication that jazz owes its real force. It is the first dance music to bridge the gap between highbrow and lowbrow successfully. The valse has received august patronage from Beethoven onwards, it is true, but the valses of the nineteenth-century composers are either
[207]
definite examples of unbending or definite examples of sophistication—sometimes both. ... In the nineteenth century the split between the classical and popular came between a follower of Liszt, let us say, and a follower of Gungl. Today the split occurs between a composer like Kurt Weill and a composer like Jarnach—both of them pupils of Busoni.
The same rapprochement between highbrow and lowbrow—both meeting in an emotional terrain vague—can be seen in literature. [e.g. Eliot] ...
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The words of jazz songs mark the first popularization of that well-known modern vice—the Inferiority Complex. Until recently a certain exuberant self-confidence has usually formed the spiritual background of a popular tune. ... A general air of physical attractiveness, sexual bounce and financial independence is naturally assumed by the writers of pre-war song hits. ...
In modern songs it is taken for granted that one is poor, unsuccessful, and either sex-starved or unable to hold the affections of such partner as one may have had the luck to pick up. ... For the most part...the heroes and heroines of modern songs meet with the rebuffs they deserve and take refuge in the unmute reproach of 'Ain't misbehavin' ', and 'Mean to Me',...
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... The other side of the medal, the series of crazy words, crazy tune numbers, with their assumed galvanic energy has an equally neurasthenic basis. The so-called 'hot' songs are as depressing as the so-called 'sweet'; they spring from no genuine gaiety such as inspires the marches of Sousa, the sardanas of Bou and the valses of Waldteufel—they are a desperate attempt to hide an underlying boredom and malaise.
Well, one does wonder if the author has not badly misjudged all of this simply for ignorance of The Blues as a major tributary.
[210] In point of fact, jazz has long ago lost the simple gaiety and sadness of the charming savages to whom it owes its birth, and is now for the most part a reflection of the jagged nerves, sex repressions, inferiority complexes and general dreariness of the modern scene. ... The negro associations of jazz, the weary traveller, the comforting old mammy, the red-hot baby, have become a formula of expression only, as empty and convenient as the harlequin and columbine of the nineteenth century.
The
reflection
theory rears its ugly head. That is, it's an "ugly" theory when someone else is articulating it. When we ourselves want to appeal to it, it's just obvious And if we are "journalists who can do some advanced math," then it may become sociology.
[212] ...the only jazz music of technical importance is that small section of it that is genuinely negroid. The 'hot' negro records still have a genuine and not merely galvanic energy, while the blues have a certain austerity that places them far above the sweet nothings of George Gershwin.
The difficulty of estimating the contribution of the negro to jazz is largely due to the fact that a jazz record, unlike a valse by Johann Strauss, is rarely the work of one man; more often than not it is the work of three composers and three arrangers plus a number of frills
that are put on by the players at the spur of the moment. Of this synod only one member may be coloured and usually the negro element is confined to the actual arabesques of the execution. These arabesques may be of the most fascinating order; but the fact remains that they are improvisations over an accepted basis and not true composition at all. (It is the greatest mistake to class Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington together as similar exponents of negro music—the one is a trumpet player, the other a genuine composer.)
A difficulty indeed, one which is ever harder to come to terms with as ever more comes to be riding on jazz as a marker of group identity (racial or otherwise) in a big, scary, heterodox social world.
Individualism did eventually establish itself in jazz , and at that point jazz became (predictably so, I would grant; unfortunately so, I would not) significantly less popular until it was no longer popular in either/any sense. As it turns out, genuine composers of any style or race are decidedly unpopular. The rest of this bluster pales in importance to that reality.
[219] It is often suggested that jazz rhythm, though exhilarating at first, ends by becoming monotonous through its being merely a series of irregular groupings and cross-accents over a steady and unyielding pulse. This is true in a way, and certainly nothing is more wearisome than the mechanical division of the eight quavers of the foxtrot bar into groups of three, three and two; yet in the best negro jazz bands the irregular cross-accents are given so much more weight than the underlying pulse, that the rhythmic arabesques almost completely obscure the metrical framework, and paradoxically enough this 'bar line' music often achieves a rhythmic freedom that recalls the music of Elizabethan times and earlier, when the bar line was a mere technical convenience like a figure or letter in a score. On paper the rhythmical groupings of a tune like 'Step on the Blues' (from The Girl Friend) bear a striking resemblance to the irregular groupings to be found in the music of Edmund Turges (circa 1500) who, it need hardly be added, was roundly condemned for his metrical eccentricities by the august Dr. Burney.
We make a mistake in considering these rhythmic arabesques abnormal or artificial. It is the lack of rhythmic experiment shown in the nineteenth century that is really abnormal—at least as regards English music and the setting of English words. Without wish-
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ing in any way to denigrate the magnificent achievement of the German romantic school from Weber to Mahler, we can without exaggeration say that it is remarkably deficient in purely rhythmic interest. Wagner himself was conscious of this failing and admitted it with a deprecatory 'Well you can't expect everything' air.
Yet we in this country have a musical upbringing based on the German classics plus a strong leavening of hymns—'ancient and modern'. We still go on setting English poetry in the totally unsuitable rhythms drawn from the German Volkslied. Actually, had not the course of English music been interrupted first by Handel and then, more gravely, by Mendelssohn, we should probably have found the rhythmic tradition of English music very much more eccentric and more full of 'conceits' than the tradition of jazz. As it is, certain jazz songs show a more apt feeling for the cadence of English speech than any music since the seventeenth century.
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[235] The principal objections to music provided by the now almost universal loud speaker are its monotony and unsuitability. Whereas you can escape from a mechanical piano by going to the next café, you can rarely escape from a B.B.C. gramophone hour by going to the next public house because they are almost bound to be presenting the same entertainment to their clients. The whole of London, whatever it is doing, and whatever its moods, is made to listen to the choice of a privileged few or even a privileged one.
To take a privileged example of Mr. Christopher Stone whose well-modulated voice has doubtless given pleasure to millions. At certain hours of the day, it is impossible for anyone to escape from his breezy diffidence. That he is a benevolent autocrat I am sure is true, just as I am sure that his choice of records is reasonably intelligent and eclectic. But the fact remains that he enjoys a position of dictatorship as fantastic as anything in
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Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
This framing of "mass" culture in capital-P Political terms is apt, and also notably ahead of its time.
McLuhan was familiar with this book by 1951 (but presumably earlier). He later emphasized the temporal ("simultaneous in time") aspect of "mass" culture.
[238] In previous ages, listening to music was a matter of personal choice usually involving either individual skill in joining with other people in singing a madrigal, or at least the concentration, and sacrifice of time and money, required by a cycle of The Ring. But now no one can avoid listening to music... It is even more trying for the musical than for the non-musical; it is impossible for them to escape from their profession or relaxation, as the case may be.
And again, the question of abstention is capital-P Political in a way that no one anymore seems capable of grasping or even noticing. It was more noticable in 1934! Still, this is a notably prescient passage.
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[239] Although excessive sonority has lost its thrill, we still demand it as an ever-increasing factor in our lives. It is noticeable, indeed, that those who business lives are most surrounded by extraneous noises are those who most insist on the continuous support of gramophone and loud speaker during their leisure hours. We live in an age of tonal debauch where the blunting of the finer edge of pleasure leads only to a more hysterical and frenetic attempt to recapture it.
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[240] It is well known that, even in so unintellectual a matter as eating and drinking, people soon acquire a preference for synthetic products. Those who are used to tinned Canadian salmon have little use for fresh Scotch salmon, and those who are used to certain types of London beer would be nonplussed by a drink that was actually brewed from malt and hops. It will, on the same principle, be of the utmost interest to see if the repeal of Prohibition in U.S.A. will lessen the taste for 'hooch' or not.
So it is with canned music. Certain composers, notably Milhaud, make no secret of their preference for the timbres of the tone film. I have heard a woman of some intelligence and musical training actually state that she preferred the magic tone of the oboe over the wireless to the actual sound of it in the concert hall; and I have heard a painter, who prides himself on his modernity, state that the two-dimensional effect of broadcast music was to be preferred because the sound instead of escaping round the hall came straight at you and had 'a frame round it'. These remarks would not be worth quoting were they not typical of a large and increasing class of music-fanciers.
If only he knew how bad it would get! But what can ya do?
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[243] It is doubtful whether the mechanical picturesque is so great an improvement on the romantic picturesque. Honegger's Pacific 231, Skating Rink and Rugby, Mossoloff's Song of the Machines, Martinu's Half-Time and Prokofieff's Le Pas d'Acier are, au fond, as sentimental in conception as the lyric pieces of Grieg. Honegger, indeed, has claimed that Pacific 231 sets out to capture the lyricism of an express train moving at top speed. Unfortunately this lyricism has been overlaid by the mechanically picturesque onomatopœics of the piece, and the nostalgia of the train journey is lost in a study of escaping steam and jolting points. A little more thought might have told the composer that music, which depends on varying degrees of stylized noise and speed for its expression, is, on the face of it, the last medium in which to attempt an evocation of non-stylized noise and speed (there are few pieces more essentially static than Debussy's Mouvement, for example).
The objection to realism in music is not that it makes things too easy for the listener but that it makes them too difficult . Instead of receiving an immediate and incisive physical impression he receives a vaguely visual one, which has to be related back to early associations and personal experience before it produces the emotional reaction which the music should have evoked directly. It is for the composer, not the listener, to digest the raw material of his inspiration.
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There is no reason whatsoever why the composer should not derive inspriration from trains, aeroplanes, moving staircases, penny-in-the-slot machines and other triumphs of mind over matter, provided these sources of inspiration are so absorbed and transformed that the final result produces a directly musical reaction. In a work for the stage this is not necessarily so, for there the eye can implement the oral suggestions. The brilliant realism of Petrushka is thoroughly legitimate when performed, as intended, in the theater. But in the concert hall a work like Debussy's Fêtes produces by purely musical means a far greater effect of speed and gaiety than Stravinsky's onomatopœics.
The place for music of the Honegger type is not the concert hall but the cinema. Those who are bored by Pacific 231 in the concert hall would have been surprised at the brilliant effect it made when used in conjunction with the Soviet film The Blue Express.
The present vogue for mechanical realism, being based primarily on the picturesque aspects of machinery, is bound to disappear as the mechanic more and more comes to resemble the bank clerk, and as the Turner-esque steam engine gives way to the unphotogenic electric train. It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus, and there is already a faint period touch about Pacific 231 and Le Pas d'Acier.
This aesthetic angle is worth keeping in mind re: Mumford's account of the path-dependence by which big, clumsy, inefficient machines were continuing to predominate long after better ones became available. This path-dependence is economic and political, certainly, but perhaps also aesthetic. The electric train is indeed quite puny, unimpressive, sterile, etc. compared to heavy rail, even now. Trainspotting is alive and well, at least in Fullerton, CA. This I can report from ample firsthand observation.
One feels that they should have been written when railways and factories really were beginning to alter our lives; that Prokofieff should have written ballets about the spinning jenny and the Luddite riots; that Honegger
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should have been there to celebrate the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway... Our latter-day mechanical romanticists are indeed only filling in a corner which—save for a few ludicrous exceptions...—was left unexploited by the nineteenth century aesthetic romanticists.
It may seem contradictory to condemn composers like Honegger for basing their work on the contemporary scene after complaining that the neo-classicists are so out of touch with contemporary life. But works like Honegger's symphonic movements are only in touch with certain purely decorative and ephemeral aspects of contemporary living. They have no spiritual foundation even of a meretricious order. Prokofieff's Le Pas d'Acier, for all its realism, tells us less about proletarian Russia than the comparatively stylized and abstract Les Noces.
Ok, well...I really do think that if we had to formally litigate everyone's spiritual foundation in the manner of a U.S. civil trial, there would be not only "a lot of dead copycats" as Mingus said of Parker's imitators, but also "whole prisons full of libelers." Or at least that's how it would start out, and then pretty quickly people would stop saying things like this unless they could really, truly be proven.
In other words, if any of this mattered a lick, no one would dare say such ridiculous things as this. But for better or worse, a composer's "spiritual foundation" matters not a lick to anyone but our writer here and the ocassional odd sociologist.
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[248] Hindemith's technique is indeed a gymnastic technique, and his attitude towards 'expressive' music is reminiscent of an instructor in physical jerks pooh-poohing the poses and affectations of ballet—even though they may demand a higher degree of training than he himself possesses.
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[249] ... As it is felt by some of his followers that Hindemith's music has been somewhat unduly saddled with the description of Gebrauchsmusik—bread-and-butter music, workaday, or utility music are perhaps the best English equivalents—it is as well to quote the artistic credo of the master himself. Hindemith calls himself a craftsman, never a tone poet, and has said that 'a composer should never write unless he is acquainted with the demand for his work. The times of consistent composing
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for one's own satisfaction are probably gone for ever.'
This anti-aesthetic
Notable verbiage here. Notable application too.
no-nonsense-about-me type of argument is so superficially palatable at the present day that few people seem to have given it sufficient attention to realize its patent fallacies. Like most of the decadent movements in modern music, Gebrauchsmusik is based on a misapprehension of the medium in which the composer expresses himself.
In literature, the man who has neither the vision, the imagination, the sense of beauty or the wit that are popularly supposed to go to the production of a poem, novel or play, can turn his literary skill, such as it is, to the production of advertisements, book reviews and crime reports. He is a utility or workaday writer. In painting, the same type of man, able to use a pencil and brush with some skill without attempting to be a Cézanne or a Picasso, can profitably and pleasantly spend his time in such varied ways as the designing of book jackets, the faking of old masters and the painting of presentation portraits. In the three-dimensional arts one can distinguish even more clearly between art and craft, and the carpenter who makes a chair can claim to be satisfying a universal demand which is not met by the sculptor. A chair is undoubtedly more comfortable to sit on that all save a few examples of the sculptor's art. But in music there can be no such thing as a chair as opposed to a painting, or the craftsman opposed to the pure artist.
The advent of "sound design," be it of the conceptual/gallery variety or the entertainment industry variety, in fact reinforces the point rather than contradicting it.
The whole theory of utility music is based on the misconception that one can distinguish between the aesthe-
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tic and the useful in this particular medium. Apart from music for organized and non-aesthetic action such as military marches and foxtrots—which, typically enough, Hindemith has not written— music is only useful if it is good music , whether light or serious. Unless it provides one with some vital experience which no other art can convey it is not only useless but a nuissance. The objective craftsman that Hindemith sets up as an ideal is far more of a sentimental luxury than the despised aesthetic 'tone poet'. His daily covering of music paper is a task as essentially fruitless as those strange tasks assigned to the innocent dupes in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, the man in 'The Red-headed League' who copied out the Encyclopaedia Brittanica or the stockbroker's clerk who was set to making a list of the pottery firms in Paris.
If we examine Hindemith's second statement we find an even more striking fallacy. With an altogether praiseworthy modesty Hindemtith appears to imagine that by ceasing to write for his own satisfaction he is necessarily writing for the satisfaction of others . There is an old and trite saying 'If you don't believe in yourself, nobody else will', and in music it may with equal truth be said that if a composer is not interested in his own music he can hardly expect others to be . Even the most nauseating of popular tunes, that would appear to be written solely with the desire to satisfy the public taste at its least critical and most mawkish, must mean something to the composer, and be primarily written for his satisfaction, if it is to 'get to the public'. Purely 'occasional' music whether deliberately vulgar or deliberately re-
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fined always brings boredom and distrust in its wake. Unless the composer has some definite reason for putting pen to paper, he had far better play patience or do a little gardening.
It is this refusal to make music for its own sake that is responsible for the passionate sincerity and popular success of Puccini's operas, in spite of all their vulgarity. The followers of Hindemith may shudder at this instance, but after all Puccini, as a superb craftsman who certainly satisfied a popular demand, should theoretically speaking be one of their idols; otherwise they are convicted of an antisentimental bias which is the reverse of objective.
Hindemith is equally mistaken when he imagines that the writing of music is governed by the laws of supply and demand. There is no regular demand for musical material as there is for writing material or boxes of matches; there is only a demand for something which creates its own demand —a good piece of music in fact.
He's basically right, but now "permission culture" has contrived a glaring exception, as if desperate to retroactively validate the Marketing Orientation: there is in fact a need for sound-alikes, or if not actually sound-alikes then something functionally the same in that it is called upon to stand in for another more famous and therefore more expensive soundpiece. No one would deny that the original is almost always better. The fact is, when the original is also more expensive to license, a cheaper substitute will be made-for-hire. So, there is in fact "no regular demand" here that has not already been met (nowadays copiously); but there is the "regular demand" (really it's redundant or "contrived" demand) of The Industry for usable material they can own the rights to. And of course, even so, no one should confuse this with Writing For An Audience. You are writing for the producer, who is merely the luckbox gone longest between random failures.
By all means let us have as many new piano concertos as possible, provided they are equal to, or superior to, those in the standard repertory.
The sound-alike paradigm all but guarantees inferiority and redundancy, even where the artists are top-shelf.
There is no specific demand, however, for a new concerto as such, irrespective of quality. A pianist does not ask for a new piano concerto as he does for a new pair of shoes, giving the old one away to an amateur.
Well,...now
he
does
ask
. And this is to everyone's detriment, for all the reasons enumerated above.
Concertos may wear thin in the course of time, but handsewn leather is better than mass-produced cardboard.
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(e) The Disappearing Middlebrow
To return abruptly from the surrealist future to the all too real present, it may be asked in what way Hindemith and his followers are fitted to deal with the
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mechanical mediums as they stand today. There is nothing impertinent in such a question. If a man announces that he has resigned from his job it is only natural, and indeed sympathetic, to enquire 'And what do you propose to do now?' Most modern musical criticism is no more than a futile examination of surface texture for the reason that it stops short of the ultimate and inescapable 'and then what?'
Without wishing to set up an hypothetical criterion, it is only reasonable to ask what future lies in store for the composers of Gebrauchsmusik if they are to live up to their declared convictions. Hindemith having turned his back on the composer as poet for the few, we must see if he is in any way fitted for the post of composer as hack for the many. If a man says he is a craftsman we have a right to ask what he can make. We do not judge a mechanic by the cut of his dungarees but by his manual ability, and it would seem that Hindemith is as little suited to lulling the senses of the stupid as he is to arousing the interest of the intelligent.
The surrealist film is of the future, and the symphonic silent film is of the past. At the present moment the only opportunities for the cinema composer—apart from preludial fanfares, short semi-realistic sequences in shots of machinery, etc.—lie in the definite musical film either of the Eddie Cantor revue type or the René Clair operetta type. Hindemith and his followers are patently incapable of tackling such a task, in that they lack all the geniality of melodic invention that is required of composer of this type of music. There is no test so
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merciless as a 'theme song' —either it is good or it isn't. There's no getting away from failure by describing it as a pregnant thematic fragment. Emotion of some sort is demanded of the least of composers and even synthetic sentiment, the musical equivalent of glycerine tears, is harder to achieve than abstraction. Abstract music is only suited to that dismal and fruitless branch of entertainment, the abstract film.
It is difficult indeed to see what precise function is fulfilled by the composers of Gebrauchsmusik, for all their superficial air of practicality and efficiency. Their technical dexterity is undeniable, but it exists in a vacuum. The poor creatures are all dressed up with nowhere to go.
A composer like Hindemith, although essentially a minor figure, is of considerable importance, however, as a symbol of the modern artist who, having lost or thrown aside the spiritual background of the romantic artist, has signally failed to adapt himself to the physical background of modern life. He is neither a good wife nor an attractive whore—the adjectives are interchangeable. Incapable of the spiritual and technical concentration that has gone to such works as Sibelius' Seventh Symphony, Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, or Van Dieren's Sonetto VII of Edmund Spenser's Amoretti, to name at random three of the masterpieces of our time, he is equally incapable of the melodic fertility and the ability to synthesize popular sentiment that we find in a work like Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins, not to mention such genuinely popular
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pieces as Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo or Cole Porter's Love for Sale. There is hardly a work of his which, to use a hackneyed phrase, does not fall spectacularly 'between two stools'. It is permissible to take as a fair example the Philharmonic Concerto that he wrote for the Jubilee of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. ... Its combination of natural aridity with deliberate virtuosity is indeed most displeasing. Exhibitionism is only to be tolerated in the physically attractive.
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[285] The position in England has...its local vagaries and peculiarities, but it represents roughly the position in which the composer finds himself in every country today. Unable to progress any further in the way of modernity he has not a sufficiently sympathetic or stimulating background to enable him to start afresh or to consolidate his experiments. The stupider composers—to whom, regrettably enough, most of this book
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has been devoted—escape from the situation either by an empty and wilful pastiche of an older tradition or by an equally fruitless concentration on the purely mechanical and objective sides of their arts. The more intelligent composer is forced in on himself and made to over-concentrate on his own musical personality , a process which is inclined to be dangerous and sterilizing.
The premature senility of so many modern composers can mainly be ascribed to this concentration on purely personal mannerisms. Most of the great figures of the past have been content to leave their personal imprint on the materia music of the day without remodelling it entirely. It is only the minor figure whose every bar is recognizable, just as it is only the minor painter, like Marie Laurencin, whose handiwork can be detected at a hundred yards. The number of musical devices, turns of phrase and tricks of rhythm that composer can appropriate to himself alone, is surprisingly few, and a refusal to lose caste by vulgarly moving outside these self-imposed barriers results in a similarly narrow and restricted content.
This can clearly be seen in the case of Béla Bartók. Though one respects the spiritual integrity that has led to his self-concentration, one cannot help feeling that his later works are a warning of the dangers of too great subjectivity on the part of the composer. The austere but impressive line which gave such strength to the opera Bluebeard's Castle has by now been fined down to a barbaric minimum of inflection, while the stark harmonies that supported it have been concentrated into a
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percussive cluster of notes. So much that in certain works the limit of intelligibility and concentration is reached, if not passed.
A composer must, through the very nature of his art, externalize his emotions to some slight degree. He cannot demand collaboration from his audience while deliberately turning his back on them.
If only we could count on them to tell the difference.
The obsession with a narrowly personal world of sound that is to be noticed in some of the later works of Bartók—his fourth quartet, for instance—is the musical equivalent of navel gazing on the part of a philosopher.
What we require from the composer is neither a contemplation of his own navel, nor a frenzied dashing about in sports cars, but an expression of musical personality free from deliberate pastiche—which is escape—or from mechanical revolution—which is submission . The composers, such as Sibelius, Busoni, and Van Dieren, who in different ways represent this spiritual freedom rarely, if ever, form a school and are not usually the most outwardly advanced in style. They are free from the vulgarity of the label, above all the official 'revolutionary' label with which so great a figure as Schönberg has unfortunately been associated.
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[313] The element of formal balance provided by the recapitulation that is an integral part of sonata form is one of the greatest stumbling blocks to a sensitive composer—for although he is dealing with time in the abstract he has to express himself with time in the concrete. We know from his letters that Mozart conceived his symphonies in a moment of time, that is to say from his point of view the recapitulation did not necessarily come after the development, but that does not alter the fact that the audience will have to hear them in that order. The composer's mind must to some extent resemble that of a scientist who can conceive time according to the theories of Einstein and Dunne, whereas the listener probably shares the mentality of those who conceive time as symbolized by the clock face. The composer may see the whole design at once, as in a framed picture, but the listener can only appreciate it as if being shown a long Chinese picture on rollers, of which only a fragment is visible at one moment. He will be conscious of the repetitions as such, and whether these repetitions—admittedly necessary in one form or another for reasons
[314]
of balance—strike him as being redundant and tautological depends not only on the quality but on the nature of the music.
One of my first adolescent theories about all of this was very close to the long Chinese picture on rollers theory.
...
[331] The artist who is one of a group writes for that group alone, whereas the artist who expresses personal experience may in the end reach universal experience. He must not mind if for the moment he appears to be without an audience. He has no right to complain if Cleopatra prefers billiards. There is always the chance that she
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may become bored with billiard also, and when she returns to the musician his song will be all the more moving for having been written to please not her but himself.