MUSIC
MUSICAL taste varies in each person, I suppose, with a whole eries of unpredictable and virtually unknowable factors ; temperament or "complexion," state of health, mental background, age all make their various, and perpetually varying, contributions. .The same music will not appeal to the same person, at any rate in the same way, at 21 and at 6o, nor even on every day of the same year. Ernest Newman once wrote a very witty and pertinent essay on the con- nection between food- and musical taste, and there is an obvious parallel between, let us say, the cooking of the Russians with sour cream and the flavour of Petrushka, the French use of butter and mushrooms and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe and—I think we must admit—the generally rather indeterminate character of English cooking, the liberal use of boiling water, and the nourishing bat often rather tasteless productions of English composers, when they do not affect a cuisine continentale. Not that taste is everything, by any means. German music has no strong flavour ; the " taste " of Beethoven is not nearly so pleasant to the musical palate as that of, say, Rirnsky-Korsakov, and perhaps no composer has a stronger personal and national flavour than Albeniz, though no one is for that reason .-going to plead the superiority of his music- to that of ,Brahrns (though that was the main reason for Tchaikovsky's prefer- ring Delibes to Brahms, I feel sure). Flavour is merely an element in music, and some -prefer their music, like their food, with verv little seasoning of any kind.
The question of age is more difficult. (Health, though important, is impossible to discuss or to analyse, as it depends on so many unconscious and shifting factors.; but on the whole it seems tha: the less robust constitutions prefer the richest and least digestible music—Wagner, for instance.) It may be that each man's basic taste is formed when he is first able to analyse his reactions, to think as well as to feel about music, which is for most people in the late teens and early twenties. Natural affinities are at their strongest then, very little clawed by intellectual considerations and untouched by snobbery ; and the passion for discussion, for adopt- ing a position, the spirit of partisanship and, hero-worship force many people at about that age to make their musical gods (partly, at least, in their own image) whom they serve with varying fidelity for the rest of their lives.
Other marthe is asslmilated and appreciated later ; some' gods reveal feet of clay, and, above all, the intellect works ceaselessly and often with increasing strength as youth gives way to middle age. Music is discovered to be "interesting," and the question of whether one " likes " it or not comes to seem secondary or even meaningless. But not many people, I fancy, discover after 25 any music that- thrills them immediately and with the same spontaneous, unreason- ing emotion as that of their first gods. (I am speaking, of course, of that minority who are acquainted, however superficially, with at least some of the works of each main composer and epoch while they are still young ; not of those who " discover " music later on.) That is one of the main difficulties* with "modern" music, and tilc. explanation of the time-lag in the appreciation of a new idiom. Those who, on general grounds of musicianship, knowledge and experience, are best entitled to judge of its worth, are inevitably past the time of life when their reactions can be spontaneous ; they have their gods (perhaps the "moderns" of the preceding genera-t rlon), and their approach to new music is conditioned by their past. It takes time before a. satisfactory balance can be achieved between' the cautious and reasonable attitude of the pundits and the spontaneous enthusiasm of the young. MARTIN COOPER.
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