13 DECEMBER 1968, Page 30

Now you see it, now you don't ARTS

MICHAEL NYMAN

John Cage he say: 'And what precisely does this, this beautiful, profound object, this master- piece, have to do with life: that it is separate from it. Now we see it and now we don't. When we see it we feel better, and when we are away from it, we don't feel so good.' What then of attempted masterpieces, the near or complete misses? We see it, certainly, but we are uneasy, and don't feel so good. What the hell is the composer getting at? One understands his lingo but not what he says, nor why lie is saying it. One's ears give no-answer, so one tufbns to the score which can often be even more baffling— for you see far more notes than you have actually heard. In desperation one vicariously seeks refuge in the programme-note, written by the composer or someone who is or imagines he is 'in' the secret.

How many reviews there must have been of programme notes, with the music offerin'g little more than support for the printed word. On the sole occasion that I have provided an analytical note for the first performance of a new piece, I found myself the morning after perhaps the most-quoted person in the country. This was not as flattering as it might seem, as the themes and moves I had analysed 'correctly' on paper, were totally inaudible and irrelevant in performance—the music moved differently and somehow the themes had got lost in an overall pattern I hadn't bargainedNfor.

Roberto Gerhard has obviously suffered from this sort of thing and manfully refused to pro- vide a programme note for his Fourth Sym- phony, New York, when it was first performed in America last year, and which reached London for the first time last week at the Fes- tival Hall. Instead he writes for those 'willing to stand uncompromisingly by the sound, un- explained, as conveying its true substance fully enough to—in its own way—add up to a valid experience.' It's a relief to hear a serious com- poser unashamedly talking about sound, and certainly the surface of Gerhard's musk is iridescent, radiant' and glowing with aural goodies such as the two percussion based sec- tions, one chanking—wood percussion and strings played. with the wood of the bow- in irrational rhythms; and the other chinking—soft sounds of pitched percussion, celesta, harp and delicate piano in long sections revolving hypnotically round repeated figurations.

For this is a symphony not of thematic inter- play, or of the striking vertical gesture, but of the sewing together of horizontally elaborated textures, some extensive, others brief, static or dynamic. Its 'traditionalism' (for it is after all a symphony) lies in its dependence on musical causality—Gerhard does not merely place end- to-end self-contained blocks, but arranges that in this stop-go music, the stop passages should grow out of, balance and compensate the go sections. That is the intention, I imagirie, but in _practice it's 'less successful, since the dynamic go music careers at great speed and with bril- liant wind and string writing, without going anywhere in particular, only to be swamped by lengths of rather marvellous time-suspended stop sections. This,. and. the rather inexplicable return of the think-chank passages later on, prevented me from getting to the centre of the score, and eventually from understanding what was going on in a large-scale sense. Perhaps there was no centre, perhaps there was no `point,' but it was a pity not to find the 'true 'substance' 3e composer talked of.

Gerhard's'Third Symphony,- a more success- ful work, is available in EMI's 'Music Today' series, and I hope to review this and other new modern music recordings in -tittle for spending Christmas record tokens. As a trailer, and for those who reckon that nature inspiration died with Beethoven's Pastoral, I append the-follow- ing: Gerhard's Fourth Symphony was conceived while 'flying at about 30,000 feet above a roiling carpet of clouds, broken only by-crevasses and chasms. he saw the sun rise: "It was like the blast of 10.000 trumpets"'; - and. on Stock- hausen's Carre, on Das avant garde: 'the first sketches stemming from 1958, were made in the air during a six week long tour in America, when I daily flew great distances, experiencing above the clouds the slowest times of chance and the widest spaces.'

Down to earth again and to the What's-the- point-of-all-the-notes Department H. The first London performance of Hans Werner Henze's Second Piano Concerto, with Christoph Eschen- bach most brilliantly and devotedly in the hot seat, took my mind back (for my ear was fit- fully and bemusedly occupied with this music which had an undeniable professional authority about it, and my eye with the printed score) to a system of random composition whereby the noteless cornposer takes every third or fourth note from some other piece and uses them as the raw material for his own. This is not Henze's method, yet if a dozen composers had so selected their material and permanently cut those chosen notes out of this score, Henze's rambling parade of near-common places would have been that much the better.

If it kakes forty-five minutes to say so little then something is seriously wrong, and the creative -crisis that Henze is said to be overcoming (at one point, the programme note told us, he 'even questioned the very possibility of com- position itself') is not to be overcome by resort to such a megalomaniac exhibition of musical garrulousness. But if the music sounded at times as though to one part Schoenberg had been added five parts water, there was still an identi- fiable petional voice speaking, even if it was one of disillusioned middle-aged petulance.

Finally What's-the-point-of-all-the-notes De- partment III. Boulez seems to be issuing his works like a Dickensian serial with excessively long gaps between each number, which is a pity. His latest work, Livre pour cordes, is a re- working and expansion of two movements from his Livre pour quatuor of 1948; there might be more than two movements eventually, who knows? Yet only the first, 'Variation,' was played (by the two at the Royal Festival Hall), and knowing Boulez's extreme fastidiousness and craftsmanship and having had a brief glance at the complex thematic workings of score, the end product was disappointing. For what came out was a thick pulsing web of rather un- differentiated sound, a sound limited in register, colour and dynamic. Fortunately the following day at the French Institute, a brilliant perform- ance by Claude Helfer of the 'Constellation- Miroir' section of Boulez's Third Piano Sonata restored one's confidence, and makes one look forward to the projected performance of the completed version of Pli Se/on Pli in the spring.