INTERMINABLE
SIR,—Mr. John Amis in his review of Lennox Berkeley's recent opera Ruth speaks of 'those interminable four-bar phrases that modulate in bar three only to creep back to the dominant in bar four.' The opera has 1,706 bars. If we, in Mr. Amis's favour, assume the score to consist of nothing but four-bar phrases, this would add up to 426. Giving Mr. Amis the benefit of the doubt by including some cases of modulation in the second bar of a three-bar phrase and in the seventh bar of an
eight-bar phrase, as well as taking a liberal view of what constitutes a dominant function, I am unable, on close scrutiny, to detect more than sixteen phrases that would meet Mr. Amis's statement, and I challenge him to show me another. This comes to under 4 per cent. of all four-bar phrases, which is much less than in the works of any classical or romantic com- poser. Moreover, nine of the sixteen instances form the successive repeats of a passacaglia bass (Ruth-Boaz duet, last scene) and are as such not only functional but virtually unavoid- able in that closed form. Altogether, the com- pilation of the above figures has proved to me what I had felt before instinctively : that Berkeley's music flows effortlessly from one paragraph to the next; or, to put it techni- cally, that there is the right sort of tension between metres and cadences.—Yours faith- fully,
PAUL HAMBURGER
114 Priory Gardens, London, N6 [Mr. Amis writes : Mr. Hamburger's arith- metic is, I don't doubt, better than my choice of the adjective 'interminable,' but the metri- cal tedium, to my mind, still exists, and the dominant 'creep-back' did seem to me 'inter- minable' in the slow Ruth-Boaz duet and in ' the even slower ensemble 'Behold this maid,' where the even quavers of the 12-8 bars become, at a Lento tempo, indistinguishable, to the ear, from a series of four-bar phrases of 3-4.—Editor, Spectator.]
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