Music for Beginners
The Making of Music. By Cedric Cliffe. (Cassell. 12s. 6x1.)
THE author's admission in his preface to this book that it is " written by an amateur for amateurs " merely makes the reviewer's task more difficult. if he applies to it ordinary standards of criticism he may be unjust ; on the other hand, having been disarmed in advance, he may be tempted to dismiss it in two lines. In this case to do that would be unfair, because the author'S intentions are entirely praise- worthy, and his book will probably give pleasure to the many who listen to music without quite knowing their way about, wandering like travellers in an enchanting yet uncharted land. Mr. Cliffe wants everybody to enjoy music as much as he does, and in his desire to make sure that no beauty spots arc overlooked, no monuments, ancient or modern, ignored, he has written a kind of musical Baedeker for beginners. Unfortunately the approach he has chosen is the " chatty " one ; it is all made to sound very cosy and reassuring in a style, reminding one of nothing so much as a B.B.C. speaker in the Light Programme trying to persuade listeners that " there's nothing redly to be afraid of in classical music . . . just listen to this jolly tune," &c.
The factual, informative parts are the best—for example, the chapters on the orchestra and on the simpler musical forms—but the author's personal judgements are sometimes rather startling. Here, again, however, the critic is disarmed, as he has been warned that the book- is "full of personal prejudices." Nevertheless it is discon- certing to be told categorically that " Richard Strauss is a composer a good deal more to be reckoned with than Liszt," or that Faure resembles Stanford (!) and that his music is " negative " and " blood- less " ; that Debussy's harmonies are " sour," or that all Scriabin's music is " bogus " so that "as a composer for today you can com- fortably write him off." On p. 269 the composer of L'Apprenti
Sorcier, who, by the way, was Paul, not " Roger," Dukas as printed. here (though there happens to be another French composer called Roger-Ducasse), is quite inaccurately described as "a bit of an eccentric . . . and for all practical.purposes a one-work .map." A singularly inapt description, this, of one of the most scholarly and fastidious of all French composersL-author of one of the few great French piano sonatas, an important symphony, the symphonic poem La Peri, and the magnificent opera Arigne et Barbe-Bleue;' However it is reassuring to be told that his "one work" (L'Apprenti $orcier). is "grand fun, and at the same time a piece of jolly gooci•anusic.": (These colloquialisms occur again and again ; e.g. "Tchaikovsky! remains a rattling good composer who Wrote a number of Itatdingt good works," but are surely out of place in a book that is presum-, ably not intended exclusively for schoolboys.) A more serious fault. is the author's attempt to divide the'evolution of music, in a, seMi-ficetions manner reminiscent of ic66 and All That, into three periods: the " Early Queer " (pre-eighteenth cen- tury), "Normal" (eighteenth and nineteenth century) and "New Queer " (contemporary). The whole trend of modem teaching is to stress the essential continuity of music and break down these old bad divisions based on the assumption that the only " normal " music was composed roughly between r7oo and 'goo ; so readers of this book should be chary of accepting unquestioningly this rough- and-ready and over-simplified classification of music into three such
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