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MICHAEL NYMAN
Just picture the scene. Music critic on psychia- trist's couch in an agony of self-accusation. 'My life is nothing but artistic 'tor journalistic] necrophilia,' he moans. The shocked realisation that the music he has to 'deal with' is almost without exception by men long since dead; the appalling necessity of adding his condolences at the graveside of Boris Blacher's Cello Con- certo, stillborn in 1964 and given a most per- suasive kiss of life by the brilliant Siegfried Palm at the Proms last Friday; the loving embalming—to capture for all time, or at least the following day—a performance at Hall A, by performer B, of piece C; the surgical attempt to excise the minute amount of interpretative individuality allowed in western music (setting aside the purely technical area that separates the good, the bad and the superlative perform- ance). Performers need such judgments: lovely voice, enchanting phrasing, super vitality . . . One can even pick holes in Clifford Curzon's Prom performance of the 'Coronation' Con- certo, marred for me in places by lack of balance between left hand and right in scale passages. It's no secret that a note played forte in the bass, sounds louder than one played with equal touch-weight in the treble.
But to return to the living. These past few weeks have witnessed the filling of the 'intellec- tual' Sundays with the consecration-deconsecra- tion of the Beatles and the (almost) emptying of the Albert Hall by major works of Berg, Messiaen, Boulez and Stockhausen—the same hall that had been overflowing both with people and with emotion for the Dvorak Cello Con- certo. There are a number of people who dis- approve of modern music solely because it does not awaken in the listener 'basic' emotions —as though a good wallow was the distinguish- ing factor between good and bad music. The 'War' Requiem is very cunningly conceived in
melodic and harmonic terms, conventionally calculated to evoke the 'right' emotional re- sponse—but to my mind it is still one of Britten's least original, most secondhand works.
This kind of response is undeniably impor- tant in some types of music—I have only to bear the first bar of any Sergeant Pepper song for the familiarity/emotion/identification syn- drome to come into action. But no amount of familiarity with Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maitre seems to induce a like mindless identi- fication. Fortunately, it is a work which refuses to 'settle,' and part of its strength lies in one's perception on each hearing, of something new —new patterns of phrase, new relationships between the parts, even where, as in the Albert Hall, the excellent soprano soloist, Jeanne Deroubaix, sounded as though she were singing into a rather repressive echo chamber.
As his experience as a conductor has de- veloped, Boulez's approach to this piece has, in purely practical terms, become simplified. But to me some of the dynamic levels are still ideal rather than actual, for by analogy with the bass-treble of the piano, a forte guitar or pizzicato viola is less resonant than a forte flute or xylophone, and in some places where the lines seem of equal importance this im- balance is disconcerting. One listens to the Boulez analytically, so to speak, whereas the Epode movement from Messiaen's Chrono- chromie is, like pop and some primitive musics, dream-inducing. Here eighteen solo strings pro- vide a continuous tapestry of birdsong sound, and control of dynamic levels by composer and conductor brings out a sudden flash of sound which then instantly, thrillingly, recedes. Listen- ing to music like this is like staring at the crest of a fountain—you are obsessed with the pat- tern, but recognise the slight changes in the arrangement of the drops of water.
One of the most fascinating aspects of pop music is the way that a perhaps banal tune- and-harmony is transformed, in the recording studio, into the fairly complex 'sound' we hear on record. What is interesting about the Beatles is that within the framework of schoolroom harmony and phrase structure that is pop music they come up with some very un- academic •things. These tend to throw the scholars, because, like folk musicians, their creative invention is completely 'unconscious.' (Where 'musical craftsmanship' is required, Paul McCartney, without the help of George Martin, is left standing—witness the pathetic arrange- ment of Yellow Submarine for brass band.)
The musical system deduced from such analysis seems learned and fussy simply because spontaneous composing obeys no written rules; whereas the systems of Boulez and Stockhausen are highly conscious and are 'applied' in the working-out of the structure. To deduce the 'pre-compositional' system of Le Marteau from the musical result one needs to be armed with Hermann Kahn's The Codebreakers—this, of course, in no way affects your appreciation of the sounds, for the system is really the com- poser's own business. Messiaen, for example, takes a semibreve, divides it into thirty-two different durations, arranges them in a par- ticular order, derives permutations in a simple way, and, in the first strophe, overlays three of them in the form of seven- or eight-part string chords. It's not particularly important for the listener as the strings are more or less inaudible —they merely serve as a discipline, a formal anchor. What is important is whether the com- poser involves the listener in the audible necessity of what he writes. Whether you hear
the silences in Stockhausen's Piano Piece 10 as blanks or something more; whether the nine- teen repetitions of the four-bar phrase at the end of the Beatles new single, Hey Jude, are just nineteen repetitions of a nice tune. On such questions depends, partly, the life of music (and of the critic).
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