MUSIC
Messiaen and Seiber MUCH has been written of the French genius for order, clarity, economy, balance and moderation in the arts; aruil probably these are the qualities which most foreigners look for in French art. It is often the French themselves who can best appreciate the great exceptions—Rabelais or Victor Hugo are closed books to many foreigners and Berlioz's music is perhaps the only uncharac- teristic French art enthusiastically admired outside France. Certainly it seems that when the French break with their intel- lectual artistic tradition they do so on the grand scale, if we are to accept the evidence of Messiaen's Turangalila (LSO under Walter Goehr, April 12th). From no work is the characteristically French spirit of mestere and fastidiousness more fantastically lacking. A synthesis of Oriental rhythmic and melodic borrowings with Hollywood's sweetest, most glutinous lyrical language, this music provides a sonorous debauch; and like all debauchery, it soon palls, because the continuous use of extremes soon depraves and finally destroys the faculty of distinction. It would be possible, I suppose, to develop an addiction to Turangalila, a craving for the hot, sweet tension and the hypnotic repetitions of the lyrical passages or the sophisticated suggestions of a Technicolor jungle; but I find it hard to believe that this music can satisfy any informed musical taste. The question of sincerity, too, so difficult in the arts, is here involved. There are degrees of artificiality, of course: no one will quarrel with Ravel, for instance, because he is a more 'artificial' composer than Schubert. But Ravel, the supreme artificer, never wrote a bar of pretentious music, never set out to give an impression of mystery or grandeur by the mere multiplication of instruments and technical complications which barely suffice, in fact, to conceal the poverty of basic musical invention. Messiaen's idea of tender and idealistic love' can safely be entrusted to the Ondes Martenot, an instrument with the unmis- takable Hollywood accent of the cinema organ; and his 'climax of sensual passion,' the 'long and frenzied dance of joy' is expressed in a scherzo theme whose triviality was unmistakable beneath its heavy orches- tral trappings. What distinction, what aristocratic reserve in poor Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy compared with this tawdry Burma gem! the universe—a magic evoked by the incaT1. tations of scientific jargon. The text of this cantata is taken from a passage in Joyce's novel describing Bloom's meditation on the night sky. Much of this is taken up with lists of technical terms ("the moon in invis- ible lunation, approaching perigee," "sex' tuple sun theta" and such like) which plainlY exercise a fascination over Seiber's imaginr tion. Thus he will even set with relish (canonic imitations in the voices) a text-book aside—"such as Nova in 1901"—and finds. abundant poetry, where I find bathos, in Bloom's conclusion that "it was a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its future spectators had entered actual present existence." The vastness of what he knew of these spaces frightened Pascal, it fascinates and exhilarates Seibert and I fear it leaves me cold. One may lose oneself in an 0 Altitudo certainly ; but one light-year will provoke that just as well as ten, and Joyce's "incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible mole' cules" do not stir my interest because theY defeat my imagination. Perhaps the majoritY of us are still unrepentant humanists, for whom scientific incantations have rather less interest than those of the snake-charmer. Seiber's music, then, succeeds for me in spite of his text, though he finds this an unintel- ligible point of view. His atmospheric, evocatory use of the chorus is remarkable oil any showing; but I find the Narrator's rhetorical questions a disturbing feature, hardly more than a theatrical device for giving a spurious human interest to a medita• tion on what the composer would probablY consider super-human and I should prefer to call infra-human aspects of the universe. For to a humanist there will always be something not only more interesting but intrinsically more miraculous in the slightest gesture of human consciousness than in the wastes of interstellar space or the tedious-1 and now sinister—subdivisions of physical matter.
MARTIN COOPER
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