Opposition as friendship
Anthony Storr
1975(1984 minus 9) Hans Keller (Dobson £5.50) At first sight, this book gives the impression of that last resort of authors bereft of inspiration, a collection of occasional pieces. What connection can there be between Vienna 1938, a music competition in Prague, a psychoanalytic congress, the problems of modern composers, and international football? But do not be deterred. Hans Keller, Chief Assistant, New Music at the BBC, is not only fertile and wily, but passionately committed, at least to noncommitment. His linking theme is the demise of individuality; its extinction by the grey uniformity of collective expediency. For Keller, 1984 is no futuristic fantasy, but an immediate menace. His own narrow escape from the Nazis, retold in the first chapter, has no doubt made him more sharply aware than most of us of the totalitarian threat; but the other examples he gives from what is happening today make one share his anxiety.
The longest, most substantial chapter is 'Music 1975'. As those familiar with Hans Keller's other writings will know, his theory of music is concerned with the relations between 'background' and 'foreground'. Background is the language we take for granted; the common coin of diatonic discourse; 'the sum total of well-defined exp
ectations which the composer creates in the course of a structure'. Foreground is the way in which composers contradict the expectations which they have aroused; the individual's assertion of his own particularity by not conforming to expectation. It is the tension between background and foreground which makes music meaningful.
While, to my mind, this theory is incomplete (what theory of music is not?) it has the great virtue of explaining in what way Mozart is superior to Clementi or Dittersdorf or Stamitz. Eighteenth-century musical style lends itself to euphonious cliche which the unmusical are unable to distinguish from Mozart's passionate, often tragic, contradiction of convention. Keller's ideas also go a long way to helping one comprehend the disarray in which contemporary composers seem to be. Schoenberg (whom Keller greatly admires), disrupted the general collective language of music to such an extent that composers found themselves without a background against which to assert their individuality, rather as if they were orphans without parents against whom to rebel. Whilst minor eighteenth-century composers wrote predictable music which was nothing but background, post-Schoenbergian composers are all too often narcissists creating their own little foregrounds; isolated patterns of sound
with no accepted conventions aginst which to measure themselves. Keller has sought t° show that Schoenberg's iconoclasm was001 so extreme as issometimes supposed in thato detectable 'background' does exist, even i° his most extreme works. Here, only poi" fessionals will be able to follow him; and would recommend reading his remarks 0° Schoenberg in conjunction with Charles Rosen's little book on the composer in the 'Modern Masters' series (Fontana 1975): The other danger which threatens music's what Constant Lambert, in 1934, called nrs 'appalling popularity'. The instant aci. ailability of great music means that we listeilf less intensely; whilst the soggy pap ° 'Muzak' dulls our aural sensibilities. 11,5 other night! was dining with friends who, hY most standards, would be considered highlY cultured. Yet they found it necessarY 1° underpin conversation with records of soine of Bach's loveliest, profoundest music.1Weids too cowardly to protest; but Keller wow have, and I ought to have done so. 'Prague 1975' describes Keller's PI' ticipation as a judge in an international string quartet competition, in which the need to he subservient to the Russians disposed of all attempt at objective judgment. The der ressing picture he paints of Prague is to soine extent mitigated by some evocative drawings of that beautiful city by Milein Cosnlan' Keller's wife. I do not share the author's passion f°I. football, and will therefore refrain fe0171,. comment on his (mercifully short) chapte,: on this subject except to note that, in tin' sphere also, he sees the 'New Mediocrity' as swamping individual talent. However, I do know something about psychoanalytic meetings, and so, regretful must endorse his amusing account of the on he attended in 1975 as being no nt0,1:6, exaggerated than one must expect from tu" pen of a provocative writer. Although PsY; choanalysis has changed over the past tvi,o decades, and is more successful than it was Freud's day in containing conflicting oPli nions, there is still an air of conformaY, °Ic assent to doctrine, which hangs like a ‘18.1..c and stifling cloud over some psychoanalno gatherings. Moreover, psychoanalysts u use jargon as a weapon of character ass. assination (the pot calling the kettle Ps1; chotic) in precisely the way that Kqe, describes. It is not unexpected that Kehe" who has a considerable knowledge of PsYt-, choanalysis, should be enthusiastic at)°, though not uncritical of, Thomas Szasz, t''' psychoanalyst who can't bear P0 choanalysts. Both are polemical writers Wur, deliberately use exaggeration and ove statement; and both, because of this, aro rated less seriously than they should be.° 5 whereas Szasz's aggression sometimes tufo,. into vicious hostility, as in his attacks
r Freud, Keller's aggression never overste.
the bounds of heart-warming, pugnacioto, argument. In England, disagreements either to be papered over and treated as if th7 did not exist, or else degenerate into pe,". sonal quarrels which cause irreparable rif" We owe a considerable debt to Hitler. Hans keller is only one amongst many refugees ,who, in addition to other enrichments, have floilght with them from the Continent a zest III Controversy which has taught us, in the words of William Blake, that 'opposition is true friendship'.
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