Twentieth-Century Musicians
Musical Trends in the Twentieth Century. By Norman Demuth. (Rockliff. 35s.) Tins is an ambitiously planned book, covering an enormous field of music, and professing, as the title shows, to trace a number of directions in which music can be said to have moved since 1900. It is a convenience, not much more, to group these various" trends " according to nationalities ; and the author implicitly admits this by adding five studies of " composers in isolation " after his reviews of French, English, German, Austrian and American groups. Of these five singled out for individual treatment, presumably as unclassi- fiables, Sibelius, Bartok and Stravinsky patently deserve their privi- leged position ; but it is difficult to see why Eugene Goossens and Willem Piper could not have been fitted into the English and Dutch sections, the contemporary Dutch being treated particularly hand- somely in the final chapter, where they get half as much space (four pages) as is allotted to our own Rubbra, Tippet; Rawsthorne, Berkeley and Britten. These British contemporaries, in their turn, do not figure in the main English section (sixty-two pages), which starts with Parry and ends with Walton, a compound implicit judge- ment which not all those concerned will relish. In fact many of the judgements of value in this book are implied, either by the space allotted or by the thoroughness of treatment, as in the case of Eugene Goossens.
Mr. Demuth's gift is for collecting rather than interpreting facts, and for musical analysis rather than for literary presentation. He is obviously acquainted with a vast number of twentieth-century works, and, as a working musician, and himself a composer, he has a quick eye for professional skill and originality in the handling of material. These are two qualities in which present-day composers are particularly rich, and it would be possible to describe the main " trend " of music during the last forty years as one towards the same kind of " technocracy " which can be observed in many other fields besides that of the arts. Mr. Demuth certainly salutes this technical address wherever he finds it, and he writes with impartial enthusiasm of Milhaud and Schonberg, though when he finds address and nothing more (as in many works of Hindemith) he says so frankly.
Any presentation of any half-century of music will bear the imprint of the author's personality and predilections, but Mr. Demuth has a catholic taste, and is usually generous in his appreciation. The markedly poor style in which the book is written is not to be regretted so much as a literary failure (though it is that too) but as too often reflecting slipshod or superficial thinking. MARTIN COOPER.
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