January 4, 19 2 3
MUSICAL COURIER
18
THE FIFTY-SEVEN VARIETIES OF NEW MUSIC
Professor Weismann Blames the War for Some of It—Twenty-two Year Old Haba Swears Never to Write in Anything Except Quarter Tones—Berlin, Schoenberg’s Home City, at Last
Hears His Five Orchestral Pieces, Played Here Long Ago—Vladigeroff, the Vulgar Bulgar
BY CESAR SAERCHINGER
real ideas as well as formulas—distinctly outstripped him in gaining a favorable hearing; and from what work of the younger men we have heard, it seems as if they were more inclined to hitch their wagons to the Russian star than to the German one. The young men of Berlin whom Mr. Saerchinger mentions are practically unknown here. It is interesting to find one American, George Antheil, among them. And what, by the way, has become of Leo Ornstein, the first American to become known as a treader of the new paths? Mr. Ornstein is still a very young man. Has he recanted—or are there new works on the way?
And speaking of America, Mr. Saerchinger mentions the new dance suite for piano by Hindemith, entitled 1922, and made up of “a march, a shimmy, a Boston, and a ragtime finale.” That may be “1922” in Berlin, but here, where all those dances originated, that nomenclature is already archaic.
What Mr. Saerchinger says of the quarter-tone system is exceedingly interesting; also the fact that one earnest young disciple has made up his mind never to write anything again except in quarter tones. It would seem a self-evident fact that quarter tones are weaker than half tones, and four times as weak as whole tones, just as a dollar is worth one hundred cents, a half-dollar only fifty cents, and a quarter but “two bits.” “Harmonically, however, the quarter-tone system does add new color,” says Mr. Saerchinger. “There were chords—a few of them—that seemed to out-emotionalize Scriabin,” which is no recommendation to those for whom Scriabin’s emotion seems for the most part to be deliberately laid on with a knife, like thick butter on stale bread and for the same purpose—to disguise the real taste. As felt by Scriabin himself, it very likely was real emotion, but to a good many of us it sounds about as sincere as the works of that “Group des Six,” who try to convince the world that “l’etat, c’est nous,” as far as French music of today is concerned—and do not succeed.
Over here, where there is room to get a pretty wide view of what is going on all around Europe, most of those who are waiting for music to quit its present wabbly condition and “jell” once more are rather more apt to cast their eyes toward London and Rome than toward either Berlin or Paris. Arnold Bax and Gustav Holst, for instance—to mention two of the best among the young Britons—and the Italians, Respighi and Piz-zetti, are paying more attention to the way their music sounds than to whether or not it conforms to any pet theories they may hold for a while.
After all it is to the ear that music makes its chief appeal!—The Editor.]
Berlin, December 10.—Prof. Adolf Weissmann has written a book, Music in the World Crisis, in which he attempts to establish a connection between the complications and difficulties in which the World War has left Europe and the confusions and diseases that affect the art of our day. Europe’s sickness, without and within: the cause no doubt is the same, however manifold the symptoms may be. And, if we cannot recognize the cause, we may examine the symptoms, at least. Keynes has done it in an economic way. Weissmann has tackled the musical end. And w»ll he may, sitting here in Berlin, where opposites run together. Nowhere is the confusion greater, nowhere is the crisis more acute.
I make a distinction between music and musical life. There is a crisis in both, but in the second it is an economic one and its cause lies on the surface. The crisis of music itself is not so easily fathomable, but just as real. The casual observer, the transient visitor getting his fill of music at the usual trough, and seeing the delight of the unquestioning, docile mass will notice none of that. But any curious person, unguided by convention, who makes a point of listening to everything he can, must be struck by the apparently headless confusion, the hopeless fortuity of it all. Any fortnight of music in Berlin is a cross-section of the music-crisis of the world.
Has there ever been such a ■time? If one is to believe the history books, no. For whatever the period, music had a direction, a policy of some kind, even if the policy of one period, surviving into the next, stood in opposition, so to speak. The pure classicism of Haydn and Mozart was in close relationship to the expressive classicism of Beethoven; and the ultra-romanticism of Schumann had points of contact with the neo-romanticism of Liszt. Today we have, not a unity or a dualism of schools, but a heterogeneity of “music” that bursts the peripheries of the term.
There are people writing music in the style of Bruckner and Brahms, and in some quarters that music is commanding attention as the music of today. Yet Stravinsky wrote his Sacre du Printemps ten years ago, and Schon-berg his Five Orchestral Pieces in 1909! Debussy and Ravel have meanwhile exhausted impressionism in France and the futurist manifesto has been proclaimed in Italy. Young people are writing music in quarter tones, and in a counterpoint that negates the last laws of harmony. Who, indeed, is to find reason in this maze? Who will redefine music for the critic of today? Whose definition is right?
The Reactionaries Speak.
For my part I do not think that the eclectic romanticists who command the places of “respectable” leadership today —the epigones of Brahms and of Strauss—are the men whose music counts for tomorrow. Two of the latest examples have again confirmed this thought. With the best will in the world, for instance, I cannot recognize music in the In Memoriam of Reznicek, produced for the first time here by Berlin’s largest choral society, under Bruno Kittel, the other night. It has the letter, the recognized language of music, from Mendelssohn to Strauss, but the spirit of music not at all. (I doubt if one man’s (Continued on page 46)
Pierrot Lunaire, due for its first American performance this month, against—so it is said—the protest of the composer; perhaps it is the Five Pieces for orchestra— performed here long before they were given in the composer’s native city, and received neither with enthusiasm nor condemnation, but with that far more deadly thing, indifference; perhaps it is the Chamber Symphony. At least it must be galling to Schoenberg to realize that in all this time it is only those two fine works of his early and scarcely unconventional period, the Verklaerte Nacht and the mastodonic Gurre Lieder, that have won him what favor he enjoys in the world in general.
Mr. Saerchinger calls him “the strongest revolutionary of his time.” This is undoubtedly true in the sense that his own style has undergone an absolute and complete change in the last twenty years. But has this׳ revolution been strong in the sense that it has affected younger men, inducing them to follow in his footsteps? Stravinsky, getting the ear of the world more recently than Schoenberg, has—probably because he works with
[Cesar Saerchinger, the Musical Courier’s general representative in Europe, is very much interested in new movements in music. He is one of the founders of the new International Society for Contemporary Music and will attend its first meeting in London on January 18. In the present article he gives the reader a very clear idea of the diverse currents of modernism in music which are to be found in Berlin alone, not taking into account the movements outside of Central Europe, especially those of the younger men in England and Italy.
To many it seems as if these latter show more of promise—even of accomplishment—than do the German innovators. Even that pioneer, Arnold Schoenberg, has scarcely, so to say, lived up to the advance notices. It is more than a dozen years now since he gave up writing the kind of music his predecessors wrote and went in for something different, and the world is still waiting for him to produce some masterpiece of the new style that will prove his theories are correct. Perhaps the masterpiece is already here, only the world fails to recognize it as one; perhaps it is the weird
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