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MUSICAL COURIER
June 22, 19 22
age. It is one of the most popular forms of criticism to denounce something for not being something else. Our dramatic critics constantly revile vaudeville because it is not "King Lear.” The method affords opportunities for an impressive demonstration by the critic of his cultured awareness of “King Lear”; and it bravely ignores the falsetto protest of the librettist that had it been his intention to write "King Lear,” it would have said so on the program. But it is bad criticism; that is why one sees so much of it about.
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Dr. Eliot, of Harvard, is quoted as having said to one of the graduation classes: “Young gentlemen ; they say that honesty is the best policy—that is wrong. Honesty is the only policy.”
Dr. Eliot, who has said many self evident things about books, book shelves, and other matters, also said something very self evident when he uttered this truism about honesty as a policy. Of course honesty is the only policy, because it is the right one and because dishonest policies are wrong ethically and practically, for in the end they defeat themselves.
Honesty is the only policy that should dominate all personal and business endeavors, and this applies to music papers as well as to commercial lines of activity. The standard of honesty is a singularly hig־h one in the field of musical journalism, even though in some antiquated quarters a hoary head is shaken dubiously, together with a muttered: “I don’t know.” There are some old fashioned folks who still believe that it is unethical to advertise anything musically artistic, and that it is better for musical performers to wait until they are discovered and exploited than to let people know that they are in the field and have something to offer to the public in return for paid admissions.
Methods of advertising are a matter of taste, and as human tastes differ in everything in this life, they differ also in the methods of advertising as practiced by various individuals. Every artist has his own ideas as to publicity and how it should be displayed and utilized. Musical newspapers have their own ideas on musical advertising and somewhere between what they deem proper and modest and what the artist deems proper and profitable, lies the real and happy medium of what should constitute the best kind of publicity as advertising.
It is a true and tried maxim in business that the fellow who makes the most noise about his own honesty usually is the one who has something to hide and creates a great clamor to confuse the issue and to prevent too close an examination of his methods. In the olden days each newspaper in its own line, daily or weekly, and even the trade publications used to proclaim its own virtue and to infer that it was the only honest journal and that all the others were not to be trusted. That sort of thing disappeared as men came to understand the nature of the newspaper business more thoroughly, and in reputable journalistic circles very little of that kind of boasting and bunkum is to be found these days
JNo musical newspapers that are not honest’toward their readers and advertisers would be able to survive very long without a serious financial struggle in their practically fruitless endeavor to secure circulation. _ Musical Courier advertising is honest advertising because it brings results to the advertisers, and when all is said and done, advertisers do advertising in order to secure benefit in the shape ot added fame and consequent increased financial return Any newspaper that accepts advertising on any other basis, or makes any other kind of representations to its advertisers, is not acting honestly.
ractically all the artists and all the musical mana-gers, great and small, are advertisers in the Musical Courier, and as this paper receives no complaints from them, we imagine that they must be very well
for i .CC ’ and ^'S *S a su®cient badge of honesty
Incidentally, as we do not know a dishonest musical paper, we cannot exactly form an idea of what such a journal would be like. For one thing we imagine that it would fail to bring results to its advertisers, in which case they would appear to be paying money for something they do not receive fs that honest?
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T Thendlj?erence between France and America • The June 9 Quatre Arts Ball, in Paris, was the most nude affair of the kind ever held, according to re-hable accounts On June 9, in Houlton, Me., Mr. and Airs. Carl A. Sutter were arrested and fined for going about in the woods as “Adam” and “Eve ” in nature’s costume.	’
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Puccini is the composer Mascagni thinks he i!
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One wonders whether any composer alive to may m the strict sense of the word be called a gen
Leonard Lieblinc
VARIATIONETTES
By the Editor-in-Chief
ise of the possible disbandment of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.”
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I he next thing will be a piano whose strings act as antennae in catching radio music. It will be easy for a pianist to sit at home and play a piano concerto accompanied by an orchestra at the broadcasting station.
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And at about the same time will come the most astounding thing of all. Ebenezer Crackerbarrell, a rank amateur, gives a concert and uses wire strings on his violin. Somewhere else Heifetz or Kreisler plays for broadcasting purposes. The amateur makes fake movements with his bow, his violin picks up to the other performance and reproduces it faithfully to the surprised delight of the unsuspecting audience.
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However, the critics will remark just the same: “Young Ebenezer Crackerbarrell, an ambitious but as yet unripe violinist, essayed a task utterly beyond his powers in the Bach chaconne, the Mendelssohn concerto, and Paganini’s ‘Witches’ Dance.’ An insufficient technic, a hard, dry tone, incoherent phras״ ing, and utter lack of musical comprehension were the chief characteristics of the newcomer’s renderings. I he violin field is overcrowded and it is difficult to understand why a young man of such limited attainments should venture before the public when there are artists like Heifetz and Kreisler to publish the proclamations of the masters who have written for the violin. Ebenezer Crackerbarrel should go back to Kennebunkport, Me., or wherever he comes from, practise hard for five years, and then give a
concert in his home town, and in his home town
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If people ever behaved in real life as they do In grand opera, they would be considered somewhat soft in the head, to say the least.
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.Frank Morton, an Australian writer, says, however, that in order to be a good music critic, one must be a good critic of life. But what has grand opera to do with music? “Very little,” you answer, and you are right.
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Balm for those who are not going to Europe this summer: Robert Hilliard, the actor, returned from there a fortnight ago and said that the restaurateurs and shopkeepers abroad are “perfect bandits” toward Americans. Mr. Hilliard added: “I am going to my summer home at Nantucket to recover "from the foreign trip.” Alma Gluck, also a recent home-comer from European shores, told a “touching” tale about Germany and its present building laws. She went to the other side to purchase and furnish a home in Leipsic for the parents of her husband, Efrem Zimbalist. Mme. Gluck reported: “I found that if I bought a house outright, under present German laws, I was required to build a home to house the owners. I compromised by having a roof apartment built which will revert to the Government at the end of ten years.”
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‘‘Observer” observes very acutely in our morning s first mail: “I notice that whenever artists go to Shanghai, Calcutta, or Fiji to play, the cables always report ‘triumphant successes’ there. Who could disprove it?”
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When we read in the Evening Post about Geraldine F. Tellegen we had to think several times before we remembered who she is, so fast does romance fade and life move on.
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From “Songs in the Common Chord,” by the late Amelia E. Barr:
May brought golden sunshine,
May brought silver rains,
Buttercups and daisies In the woods and lanes;
Lily bells and lilacs,
Apple blooms like snows,
Pinks and purple pansies—
But June brought the Rose!
And the rose always brings several dozen new composers writing songs about it.
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Refer back to the paragraphs by Tean Cocteau and then read what Philip Guedalla says in the Evening Post (June 10) about current criticism in literature :
The critic should not condemn the literary output of one age because it is lacking in the literary virtues of another
“The hand is quicker than the eye,” with the pres-tidigitateurs. With the pianists, too.
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Josef Hofmann claims that the ability to put the hand in the right place at the right time is almost a sixth sense with persons who have the real piano instinct and natural technic. Their sense of aim, movement and direction is unerring. With hands poised in the aif, Hofmann himself swoops down upon a chord like an eagle in its swift, sure drop. The eagle might miss some time; Hofmann never. He calls it “the innate keyboard feeling.” Many great pianists do their chords with more grope, more calculation, more caution. Schelling and Rosenthal are two pianists who never appear to measure or gauge in their chord playing but attack them with brilliant confidence, like Hofmann. Chord technic is a whole department of piano art in itself. If you are interested in it, do not fail to study what Alberto Jonas has to say about chords in his newly published “Master School of Piano Playing.”
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Jean Cocteau was a good critic of music and of life, according to Morton, and to substantiate his claim he quotes passages from the Frenchman’s “Cock and Harlequin,” a book not known to us. They really are such piquant and meaty pasages that we requote them gratefully here, even if at some length:
Art is science in the flesh.
A young man must not invest in safe securities.
Do not confound those unknown worlds which we are continually visiting on unknown feet with the kingdom of dreams. We are not dreamers, but realistic explorers.
\Vith us there is a house, a lamp, a plate of soup, a fire, wine and pipes at the back of every important work of art.
After a hundred years everybody is on the best of terms; but otic has to do a lot of fighting in order to gain one’s place in the Creator’s Paradise.
The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.
When a work of art appears to be in advance of its period, it is really the period that has lagged behind the work of art.
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
We should be men during our lifetime and artists for posteritic
Truth is too naked ; she does not inflame men.
Beethoven is irksome in his developments, but not Bach, because Beethoven develops the form and Bach the idea.
Beethoven says : “This penholder contains a new pen ; there is a new pen in this penholder ; the pen in this penholder is new”—or “Marquise, vos beaux yeux, etc.”
Bach says : “This penholder contains a new pen in order that I may dip it in the ink and write,” etc., or “Marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir d’amour, et cet amour . . . etc.”
There lies the difference.
The beautiful looks easy. That is what the public scorns.
The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.
Debussy missed his way because he fell from the German frying pan into the Russian fire. Once again the pedal blurs rhythm and creates a kind of fluid atmosphere congenial to short-sighted ears. Satie remains intact. Hear his “Gymnopedies,” so clear in their form and melancholy feeling. Debussy orchestrates them, confuses them, and wraps their exquisite architecture in a cloud. Debussy moves further and further away from Satie’s starting point and makes everybody follow in his steps. The thick lightning-pierced fog of Bayreuth becomes a thin snowy mist flecked with impressionist sunshine. Satie speaks of Ingres ; Debussy transposes Claude Monet “à la Russe.”
However, while Debussy was delicately bringing to flower his feminine grace and parading Stéphane Mallarmé in “Le Jardin de l’Infante” (Albert Samain), Satie continued to follow his little classical path. He reaches us today as young as any of the “younger” men, having at last found his place after twenty years of modest labor.
When I speak of the “Russian trap” or “Russian influence,” I do not mean by that that I despise Russian music. Russian music is admirable because it is Russian music. Russian-French music or German-French music is necessarily bastard, even if it be inspired by a Moussorgsky, a Stravinsky, a Wagner, or a Schônberg. The music I want must be French, of France.
Concerning a certain acrobatic tendency. Our musicians have avoided the Wagnerian torrent on a tight-rope, but a tight-rope cannot be considered, any more than a torrent, a respectable mode of locomotion.
Musical bread is what we want.
The public only takes up yesterday as a weapon with which to castigate today.
The extreme limit of wisdom is what the public calls madness.
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Lovely stuff, is it not, that this Cocteau writes? For those who would like to know, “Cock and Harlequin” may be had in an English translation by Rollo FI. Myers, published by The Egoist Press. London. No doubt some American publisher handles the work, too.
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A Bostonian writes us that there is more drunkenness in his city than ever before, and he does not know “whether to lay it to the threat of a permanent opera contemplated for Boston, or to the prom-