T alking of bookishness
All that jazz
1/enny Green „,much taken last week by the rich comedy `Readers' Letters' pages of this journal. Or among those epistles a small outrage was ha-:,.'ultted, and what tickles me is that though I 141Qeen awaiting that outrage for years, rneen it finally turns up it is committed not on at all but on someone else, almost as though a Christian martyr, having garnished himself witIi mint sauce, were to turn round in the
arena and see the lions dining on his bank manager. The crime in question concerns two professional writers called Constantine FitzGibbon and Laddy Adler, both of whom seem far more concerned about the mental and moral condition. of American politicians than I am. I do not propose to go into the finer points of their dispute, partly because it does not seem to have any finer points, but mainly because I am not qualified to do so. I will therefore offer no opinion as to whether Mr FitzGibbon is the sole custodian of objective truth when it comes to Mr Adler, or whether Mr Adler is the last bastion of dispassionate justice when it comes to Mr FitzGibbon. All that interests tile is that Mr FitzGibbon appears to have picked up from somewhere the peculiar idea that there is something intrinsically frivolous about blowing a mouth organ, something indeed so frivolous as to disqualify the blower from holding valid opinions on anything but blowing a mouth organ. I will not waste precious space by proving the dubiety of a stance whose dubiety is already so piteously apparent, but I will say once again what a puzzle it is to me that the man who parses sentences for a living should assume such a lofty contempt for the man who resolves discords for a living. Speaking as one of the very few gentlemen on the premises capable of performing both those feats for money, I have to say that resolving a discord demands at least as much cerebral coherence as parsing a sentence and that on balance the resolver will probably end up imparting more joy to more people than the parser. I dislike comparative judgements of this kind, but certainly there is something much less combative about rendering a good tune than there is about rending a literary opponent limb from limb: Professional musicians are never really bothered by this sort of thing, for the working zigeuner very soon digests the worldly wisdom that in Britain, so far as musical enlightenment is concerned; literary gentlemen are just as thick as the rest of the population, which has in its time endorsed my despondent view of its musical powers by asking me questions like "Which hand do you play the tune with?" and "Do you think jazz is going to get any faster?" I do believe that this type of musical imbecility is congenital and is beyond all the powers of education to change it. But what sometimes worries me is that hand in hand with this boneheadedness there goes a silly snobbery which will squeeze a cheap laugh out of Gershwin on a mouth organ but will pay lip-service to Beethoven on the piano, even though the virtues of the one performance are as inscrutable as the virtues of the other. As I say, musicians find this sort of thing amusing rather than distressing, and what amuses them best of all is this assumption by the parser that the long years of diligence which are obligatory if a man is to master an instrument, the drudgery, the endless digestion of knowledge, the eternal logging of hours of practical experience to fortify a man against the dangers of performance, that all this should mysteriously render a man incapable of knowing anything else about anything else. Music is a language just as English is. It has its grammar and its syntax, its vocabulary and its stylistic conventions, its Joyces and its Turgenevs, and it is a drunken impertinence for the parser to assume that the man who plays 'The Man I Love' as Coleman Hawkins or Art Tatum could play it is some kind of cultural beggar. Here we have the erudite and sophisticated Mr FitzGibbon attempting to win a debating point by invoking the mouth organ in his opponent's pocket. More fatuous dialectical lunacy is hardly to be conceived. And yet having read some of Mr FitzGibbon's literary mouth organ playing, I have to admit that he is undoubtedly an artist of talent, compassion and imagination. So why the brainstorm? Over the years, in the course of masquerading as a musician among writers and as a writer among musicians, it has dawned on me that the
scribbler who thinks he has the advantage of the blower has simply not bothered to think out his position first. Were he to do so he would see that I can without hesitation tell him all about the ramifications of the second inversion of the Tierce de Picardie, lecture him interminably on the parallels between infinity and the cycle of resolving seventh chords, bore him to apoplexy with a discourse on the commercial applications of the enharmonic change. Of course none of this quackery has anything to do with the real knowledge which I and thousands of other musicians possess, but it will do as a stick to beat that element of the literary gentry which is impressed by polysyllables. As for the case in hand, having read Mr FitzGibbon's fiction and alsoheardMr Adler play `Rhapsody in Blue,' it is only my loyalty to the literary cause which stops me from saying which of the two aesthetic experiences concealed the seed of greatness.
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