MUSIC
A RECENT Third Programme talk on contemporary poetry, entitled " The Petrified Muse," developed an argument whose relevance to the sister art of music was often striking. Poetry today, said Mr. Francois Duchene, is rooted in philosophies that accept the stress and strain of violent change ; but the poetic impulse is enfeebled because the revolutionary will and the confident belief in freedom through action is dead. What, in effect, is the use to the creative artist of a philosophy which, like Carlyle's visitor, accepts the universe as it momentarily finds it, if far below the level of conscious- ness at which philosophies are elaborated the springs of feeling and of will are running dry ?
Philosophies are more obviously relevant to poetry than to music ; but as far as the artist is concerned a philosophy is a moo of feeling, and it is not difficult to see, from their music alone and with no knowledge of musical history, that Bach and Beethoven had very different philosophies of life or that the modes of feeling of, say, Delibes and Berg were in fact dictated by fundamental attitudes to life whose difference was much greater than can be accounted for merely by the difference of nationalities. In fact, Delibes has much in com- mon with an Austrian contemporary such as Johann Strauss, and the " philosophy " of Berg's Wozzeck is still reverberating through the music of all Western Europe.
The technical development of music—from monody to polyphony, from the' modes to the major-minor key system—has been no more than the surface disturbance caused by gradual but radical alterations in the artist's attitude not simply to the materials of his craft but to life itself, a change in what may be justly called his philosophy of life, however unconscious or unformulated. Marxists, accepting this basic truth, have tried to explain these granges entirely in terms of economics, as though economic changes were primary data and not themselves dictated by still more fundamental shiftings due to the '. development of the only primary datum, the human spirit—an untidy, amorphous and largely mysterious entity which obstinately resists all attempts to demarcate, simplify or pigeon-hole its motions.
Contemporary music, then, is as rooted as contemporary poetry in an acceptance of change ; but does it suffer from the same enfeeble- ment of the will, the same " petrification " of initial impulse as Mr. Duchene finds in poetry ? The technical address and the easy volubility of much contemporary music would seem to contradict such a supposition, unless they are the purely superficial patter of fundamentally empty-hearted jugglers. There is, of course, much of ' this more or less fashionable patter in the music of this, as of every other, age (think only of minor Italian operatic composers of the eighteenth century or the imitators of Mendelssohn a hundred years ago), but in the nest contemporary music there is no sign of radical disease, no petrification of human impulses.
Relaxed good-humour and instinctive tenderness are rare, and high tragedy or deliberate frivolity are the genres most often attempted by composers who are not engaged in constructing " abstract " patterns ; but though we may deplore the absence of many lovable qualities from contemporary music, we cannot expect to find them in any art which is a true reflection of contemporary life. Those who deplore the temper of contemporary music must logically—and most often do actually—deplore the temper of contemporary life (as most sensitive and thoughtful people over -forty have done in every age), and music gives little more cause for alarm, shows no more signs of radical enfeeblement than it showed a hundred or two hundred years ago. An age of rapid change'in the fundamental attitude of human beings to each other and the external world does not provide a favour- able climate for the arts. Patience is, as usual, the virtue most needed and least displayed' MARTIN COOPER.
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