MUSIC
THE Promenade Concerts are coming to an end this week, and it may be worth while considering one or two points which have sug- gested themselves during the season. The position of new works in the plan of the programmes has never really been quite clear, and some of this year's novelties puzzled me still further. I should per- sonally favour the scheme by which the Proms. were made exclusively " classical," in the sense that nothing should be included that is not, in its own way, an accepted " classic." Critical acumen is not, and should not be expected to be, a characteristic of the Prom, audiences, and to hand them second- or third-rate modern works on the same plate as acknowledged masterpieces is misleading: so that I should in practice exclude works written, say, after 1920 or so. Certainly new works seem to be quite out of place in what is really an educa- tional series for the musically unsophisticated. There is, of course, a danger that the exclusion of contemporary works might give the impression that music is a dead art, but I think even that preferable to feeding the public with the dusty balancer-meal which is all that some of the modern works provided in place of solid musical nourish- ment. Such works as Starokadomsky's Concerto, Chagrin's Prelude and Fugue and—in a different way—Novak's Triptych on a Choral Theme of St. Wenceslas seemed to me as-near-as-makes-no-difference worthless from a musical point of view : and I could discover no reason for their inclusion except a desire to play some " con- temporary " music (though Novak is seventy-seven and can hardly
be counted as a contemporary composer) preferably by composers belonging to States with whom our relations are said to be friendly.
This is not a political article, and I- have no wish to explore the cultural background from which Mr. Starokadomsky and his music spring: but I think it an insult to the public to offer them this shoddy, machine-made noise in place-of music. Francis Chagrin's Prelude and Fugue raise a more complicated and a more interesting question. Music " between the wars " lost all touch with the common man and tended to develop into a number of private languages understood only by the initiated. Each clique claimed that musical salvation was to be achieved only according to its own formula, while the general public was equally bored and puzzled by atonalists, polytonalists, neo-classicists and highbrow folklore. The only characteristic that all these "-isms " shared was their intellectu- ality. Now the intellect has a great and noble role to play in the production of the highest music, just as yeast has in the making of bread : but intellect alone will no more create a great work of art than yeast alone will make a good loaf of bread. A predominantly intellectual, experimental piece of music may be interesting to specialists : but interest is not the same as artistic enjoyment, for which imagination, feeling and sensuous vitality are indispensable. Mr. Chagrin experimented with sonorities (though I personally never heard the vibraphone which I saw in his orchestra), and his fugue followed a rather perversely angular pattern possibly satisfactory to the sophisticated ear but certainly unintelligible to the general public.
The Prom. audiences are generous and undiscriminating in their acknowledgments but why tax their good humour so unwarrantably? These concerts are, it seems to me, not meant for the experimental and the cerebral, and the vast majority of contemporary works are still both. When music has settled down again and found a tongue understandable by the common man let us reconsider the inclusion of contemporary works in the Prom, programmes.
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