Copland Connotations. Ed by Peter Dickinson (review)

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Copland Connotations: Studies and Interviews edited byPeter Dickinson. Boydell & Brewer, £35.00 (hb).

Anthony Gritten

Tempo / Volume 57 / Issue 224 / April 2003, pp 57 - 58DOI: doi:10.1017/S0040298203220167, Published online: 18 July 2003

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0040298203220167

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Elliott Carter: Harmony Book, edited by NicholasHopkins and John F. Link. Carl Fischer, New York.

‘Carter is certainly not a naive composer...’ StravinskyDialogues and a Diary, p. 48

Sixty years ago (!) Elliott Carter wrote a reviewtitled ‘Fallacy of the Mechanistic Approach’ ofThe Schillinger System of Musical Composition.Joseph Schillinger influenced composers asdifferent as George Gershwin and Earle Brown –and, although you would not expect it from thereview’s title, Elliott Carter. The review startedout harshly:

The point of view comes straight out of middleEurope in the Early twenties.... An elaborate show ofscientific language, of schematic exposition that apesmathematical texts, plenty of graphs, and pseudo-alge-braic formulas, all do about as much to confuse as toclarify. (The Writings of Elliott Carter, pp. 118–119)

But the young-ish Carter soon changes his tune:‘within the covers of these two volumes onefinds the most comprehensive tabulation ofmusical elements, devices, and procedures thatprobably has ever been made’. The review flip-flops. Schillinger’s book ‘falls down’ because thematerial is presented ‘with no particular regardfor when to use what, for whether it sounds goodor bad’. But Carter ends by noting that thesystem has been used successfully by ‘composerswho were already trained enough to distinguishthe musical results from the non-musical ones’.

No need to underscore the ironies here. ElliottCarter’s Harmony Book is also a comprehensivetabulation, and with no discussion of whatsounds good or bad. Although much of it wasdeveloped in the late 1960s (Carter gave me acopy of his manuscript in 1977) Carter had in factbegun to co-opt, or at least establish a dialoguewith the mechanistic approach in the late 1940s.In the opening of the Cello Sonata, Carterturned his ambivalence into a new kind of coun-terpoint by opposing the expressive cello and themechanical piano. This poetic idea, however, wasproduced by the Schillingeresque manipulationof a four-note chord which, unlike the harmoniesin Carter’s earlier music, refuses to sound eithergood or bad. The mechanistic approach was adiving board that allowed Carter to plunge intothe deep, icy waters of atonality; it gave his musica sharp edge it had never shown before.

Harmony Book begins with a brief foreword byMr. Carter, a preface by Mr. Hopkins, explainingthe layout of the book, a short analytic essay andan interview (not especially revelatory) of thecomposer by Mr. Link. These 35 pages, barely tenpercent of the whole book, are the verbal compo-nents of a volume which otherwise consists ofmusical and numerical charts arranged in subsec-tions each with a brief introduction by Mr.Hopkins. The non-verbal content first cataloguesall combinations of tones with principles of iden-tity familiar from Allen Forte’s The Structure of

Atonal Music. Because Forte and Carter arrive atthe same number of combinations but arrangeand display them differently, the editors provide a‘consensus’ of the two. There follows a catalogueof all-interval twelve-tone chords that lists twosub-groups: those made up of hexachords withan identical ordering of intervals and thosewhose hexachordal intervals are the same but inreverse order.

The main body of the book consists of chartsof harmonic synthesis and analysis. Synthesishere means a calculation of, for instance, all thecombinations of single notes and three-notegroups to form four-note ‘chords’ (to use theterm Carter prefers to Forte’s ‘pitch class sets’).Analysis reverses this process, systematicallybreaking down larger chords into their compo-nents. There are three appendices: a list of inter-vals chords and ‘sigla’ (the symbolic shorthandCarter uses to keep track of his calculations), achart with the ‘total number of chords withineach total aggregate’. And a list of ‘Link’ chords:all-interval twelve-note chords each of whichcontains one or more instances of the all-trichord6-note chord (#35: C, C sharp, D, E, G, A flat).Mr. Link, a theorist and composer, developed thislist in 1992 and sent it to Mr. Carter, who thenused the chords in composing his Partita. Idubbed them ‘Link’ chords in the second editionof The Music of Elliott Carter.

This handsomely produced non-book hasprecedents not only in Forte’s austere and influen-tial (at least in American academia) exposition ofatonality in terms of set theory, but in earlierbooks and articles, all referred to here, by, amongothers, George Perle, Alois Hába, and HowardHanson (of all people.) Carter traces his owninterest in such speculation to Hába’s Neue

53Tempo 57 (224) 53 – 68 © 2003 Cambridge University PressDOI: 10.1017/S0040298203000160 Printed in the United Kingdom

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Harmonielehre and elsewhere has cited the influ-ence of Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources.Carter’s need for a systematic catalogue of tonecombinations evolved over the years. The FirstQuartet of 1951 employed one of two all-intervalfour-note chords (numbers 18: B, C, E flat, F) as adefining harmony. For the Second Quartet andDouble Concerto, composed in the late 1950s,Carter developed a chart (not included here butreprinted in my book, The Music of Elliott Carter) ofvarious combinations of the two all-interval tetra-chords, 18 and 23 (E, F, G, B). In the 1960s Cartercomposed two large orchestral works, the PianoConcerto and Concerto for Orchestra, thatrequired a richer harmonic vocabulary. For thesehe developed catalogues of the three-note and five-note chords respectively. But non-serial twelve-tone thinking was also present at least as early asthe Variations for Orchestra. Carter used twelve-note chords as defining sonorities in the concertosof the 1960s, and, characteristically, expanded theiruse systematically later on, particularly in Night

Fantasies, which employs 88 such chords.Carter writes that the Harmony Book was

‘meant for my own use’ and never intended forpublication. Neither editor provides an explicitrationale for publication now, except to point outthat the book has been mentioned in the Carter

literature and so should no longer remain amystery. Professor Link, however, warns theo-rists and composers who might hope to find‘mystical Documents – like Prospero’s books –with power to unravel Carter’s harmonic Magic’that the book is ‘less sensational’; the magicremains, where it belongs, in the music.

The Harmony Book does not present or evenimply a compositional system. Professor Linksays that it reveals Carter both as ‘actuary andartist’ – a neat phrase but misleading since theone would not exist without the other: unlikecomposers such as Milton Babbitt, or GeorgePerle (or Rameau, Hindemith and Schoenberg),Carter has never pursued music theory for itsown sake. Nowhere does this book claim to setforth a general theory of atonal practice whetherfor purposes of analysis or composition. At leastin my experience 25 years ago, Carter never usedhis calculations in teaching student composers; infact he rarely mentioned his own music at allexcept in matters of orchestration. (He wouldexcoriate himself for errors of judgment.) Whenit came to harmony Carter’s teaching camemuch more from Boulanger than Hába andCowell. He showed a great concern with issuesof harmonic motion and line. (‘You need some-thing like a leading tone to get you to this

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Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Limited

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For further information on Carter's works visit our website at www.boosey.com/carter

Elliott Carter at 95Carter celebrates his 95th birthday year with two major world premiere performances

29-31 May 2003Of RewakingSymphony Center, ChicagoMichelle DeYoung, mezzo /Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Daniel Barenboim

3-5 April 2003Boston ConcertoSymphony Hall, BostonBoston Symphony Orchestra / Ingo Metzmacher

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climax.’) And Carter was not just passing on akind of pedantry that he no longer practiced. Isaw him surprise an audience at BrandeisUniversity in the mid-1980s (after the Bostonpremière of Penthode) by telling them that hecomposed by writing chorales (albeit of six-notechords) with great attention to issues ofcommon tones and voice leading. When asked toexplain, Carter went to a blackboard and startedwriting progressions on a hastily hand-drawnstaff – with six staff-lines. After someone politelypointed out the extra line, Carter joked that hewas always trying to expand musical possibilities.

There is no doubt, though, that the charts inthis book have been an essential part of Carter’scompositional process for almost 40 years. Hismountainous pile of sketches (now housed in thePaul Sacher Stiftung in Basel) demonstrates hishabitual reliance on such calculations, not only ofharmony but for rhythm as well. Sketches arecovered with chord numbers and beat numberstoo – as well as dates and occasionally phonenumbers. Nearly every composition begins, atleast on paper, with temporal calculations ongraph paper devoid of pitch ideas or any kind ofmusical notation. These pages look like maps withlongitude lines and latitude parallels, but no land-masses. When Carter begins to fill in the blanks,moreover, he often proceeds non-linearly, jumpingfrom one section to another, keeping track of hisevolving jig-saw puzzle with a library date stamp.

Professor Link’s analytic essay, ‘TheCombinatorial Art of Elliott Carter’s Harmony

Book’ sheds light on some aspects of Carter’s oddmethods. He discusses two short passages: thecoda of Changes for solo guitar, and a phrase fromNight Fantasies for solo piano. In Changes we hear a‘succession of harmonies all based on 6-notechord no. 35 (0,1,2,4,7,8)’ [the all-triad hexachord].Link shows how transposed statements of thechord are connected by common tones to create asense of harmonic movement. He then points usto the chart in the Harmony Book that would havehelped Carter to compose the passage. Oddly,though, Link does not mention that the entirepassage, like many in Carter, employs a fixed-pitchstructure, so that all the statements of the hexa-chord are mapped on to an unchanging twelve-tone chord that anchors the harmonicprogression. The entire coda is, in effect, onesingle harmony, prolonged, as theorists say,through the gradual exposition of the six-notesub-harmony. Carter had used a similar contrast ofstasis and motion in the closing page of Night

Fantasies. The passage Link analyses from thatwork (measures 110–123) is harder to crack. Link’sanalytic reduction demonstrates his claim that

the harmonic succession operates on multiple levels:the surface counterpoint of major thirds and minorsixths against perfect fourths and fifths is deftly wovento produce a limited repertoire of 3-note to 6-notechords. The deployment of smaller chords in thispassage is guided by the slower succession of all-interval 12-tone chords – themselves connected bycommon tones...

Link’s account shows how Carter’s music is atonce arcanely constructivist in some of itsmethods and yet traditional in others; Carteroften uses terms from tonal theory, like commontones and modulation, to describe music whosepitches and rhythms seem light-years away fromBach. Link’s analysis, though, still leaves manyquestions unanswered. He refers to a counter-point of two voices, one articulated by quintu-plet beat divisions and the second by eighths andsixteenths, one based on harmonies of majorthirds and minor sixths, the other perfect fourthsand fifths. But this is not quite what meets theeye. In Bars 115 and 116 the music is notated intwo voices, or at least for two hands, but one ofthe ‘voices’ occasionally sounds two pitches atonce. Because the two hands play the samerhythms the opposition of third/sixth harmonieswith fourth/fifth does not appear as a contrastbetween voices but as a sort of chorale, albeitone that leaps all over the keyboard. The onlyhint that the two harmonies represent differentcontrapuntal voices is in the rhythmic notationthat places some notes on quintuplet division ofthe beat – but this is Augenmusik. The obscurity ofthis lovely sounding passage may stem fromCarter’s desire to represent a state of semi-consciousness. Performers, though, might wantan even more extensive analysis of the passage indeciding how to interpret Carter’s notes, espe-cially since this slow and resonant section is notprovided with pedal indications.

Carter’s embrace of the ‘mechanistic fallacy’he claimed to reject fueled half a century ofcomposing, but it is hard to predict the futureuses of this volume. The Schillinger System,though it stemmed from the radical era of Sovietconstructivism, had its biggest impact onAmerican commercial music; it seemed to offerjingle composers a formula for cranking out newtunes. It also had some influence on the busierpassages in Porgy and Bess, though Schillinger’sclaim to have composed sections of the opera hasnever been substantiated. But it also served theavant-garde. In his December 1952 Earle Browngave perfomers Schillingerian graphs withoutany notes. Strange books have their uses.

David Schiff

55



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Copland Connotations: Studies and Interviews edited byPeter Dickinson. Boydell & Brewer, £35.00 (hb).

The American première – on the radio – ofAaron Copland’s Short Symphony in 1944 was byall accounts not a very good performance of thework. According to Arthur Berger, who wasfollowing with a score, many of the dissonanceswere ‘accidentally interpolated’ (quoted, p.93) –reminiscent perhaps of the American première ofApollo, before which the conductor had appar-ently expunged many of the more interestingharmonic dissonances, thinking them to be copy-ists’ errors.

Mindful of the unforgiving conditions of liveperformance, Copland was led quite early on in hiscareer to the belief that ‘critical commentary wasan essential ingredient to promote the work of itscomposers’ (p.40), and that the audience itselfplayed a crucial part in the acceptance and devel-opment of modern music (pp.74–5). Indeed,acutely aware that ‘industrialisation itself hadentered the framework of what had previouslybeen our comparatively restricted musical life’,Copland came to believe that it was important thatmodern music create for itself an audience ‘thatdemands and rejects music, that acts as a stimulusand brake’ (quoted pp. 95 & 75 respectively), andin 1955 he went as far as to argue that ‘Othermembers of the community – administrators,critics, conductors and listeners – must shareresponsibility for audience development’ (98).Copland, it seems, not merely reacted to the‘social and political imperatives’ of the day (161)but responded to them actively and conscientiously.

If this sounds prescient of current directives inthe arts, then it is interesting to read about theemergence of a particular kind of audience andthe changing relationship between the abstractand the popular elements of Copland’s aesthetic.Emerging in the wake of the rise of the phono-graph and the depression, ‘the middlebrow’ hadthree important effects on musical practice: itconsolidated a mass-market for music making; itbrought into relief the important role within amusical culture played by education; and itplayed a large part in the congealing of a corerepertoire that came to exclude ‘modernist’works (p.91).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the mostfrequent issue to be raised by almost all of thecontributors in this new volume is that of whatCopland himself called, with a certain amount ofcomic irony, his ‘split personality’ (quoted 78):the co-presence, both within and across works, ofcomplementary attributes like ‘abstraction’ and

‘accessibility’ (xviii), ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’(5), ‘simplicity’ and ‘serious modernism’ (15–16),‘popular Americana’ and ‘more difficult abstractpieces’ (57), ‘popular music writing’ and ‘earlierabstract writing’ (64), ‘individuality’ and ‘origi-nality’ (117), ‘pioneer’ and ‘citizen’ (117), ‘spon-taneity’ and ‘inevitability’ (135, cf. 85), ‘lyric’ and‘declamatory’ (138), and so on. How Coplandmanaged these complementary tendencies is ofgreat interest both historically (much space isdevoted to his changes of style) and aesthetically(there are several insightful remarks aboutCopland’s relation to popular musical styles).

One work which virtually all commentatorsagree (including these eleven American and sixBritish authors) drew together the middle- andhigh-brow elements of Copland’s style to perfec-tion, embracing its own Whitmanesque diversity,is the American ‘icon’ (103) Appalachian Spring.One of the richest essays in this volume isWilliam Brooks’s aptly titled ‘Simple Gifts andComplex Accretions’, which documents themany lives of the Shaker melody in (and from)the ballet – Copland’s ‘signature’ (107, 120). AsBrooks summarizes,

Copland represents America because he confronted inhis music certain problems fundamental to the posi-tion of American composers in American society. Hiswork […] steers an uncertain course between art andcommerce, elitism and popularity, innovation andfamiliarity. But the uncertainties result not from hesi-tation or confusion but, rather, from consciousattempts to present the paradoxes intrinsic toAmerican culture. The history of ‘Simple Gifts’ offersa quintessential instance of these. […] As its subse-quent history suggests, ‘Simple Gifts’, transfigured byAppalachian Spring, became for most AmericansCopland’s folk-tune – an oxymoron which perfectlycaptures the implausible conjunction of America’sirreconcilable dichotomies (116–7).

As Stephen Banfield quips, ‘All roads lead toAppalachian Spring’ (161).

Some idea, then, of what’s involved in comingto terms with Copland might be gauged from themajor, recurrent themes running across theauthorial subdivisions in this volume: as well asAppalachian Spring (chs. 3, 4, 10), there are discus-sions of Copland and popular musical styles (chs.2, 5, 7, 13), Copland in the 1950s (chs. 9, 11, 12),his opinion of Ives (chs. 6, 8), American musicalidentity (chs. 3, 5, 7, 9, 13), and of Copland’s useof America’s indigenous musics (chs. 3, 10).Further contributions would have been equallywelcome on Copland’s love affair with LatinAmerica (cf. pp. 24, 42, 68), on his reception andinfluence outside America (the editor’s ownchapter [ch. 14] is the only essay to broach thematter), and on the relation between Copland

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and Stravinsky (cf. pp. 11, 87, 156, 158, 178–9,196). However, Copland Connotations stems fromcentenary conferences in Toronto and Londonand simply collates the papers given at thoseevents, adding to them the transcripts of a discus-sion held at the latter conference and, usefully, oftwo interviews the editor conducted with thecomposer in the mid-1970s.

There are also things to learn about Copland’smelodic style (20, 178), and the issue is phrasedwell by Stephen Banfield. Wary of amalgamatingthe worlds of Broadway and Carnegie Hall (158),he concludes his study of ‘Copland and theBroadway Sound’ thus:

if we are tempted to assume that an American identityin musical sound must take in the popular tradition, itis worth remembering that Copland achieved thatidentity almost single-handedly with hardly a nodtowards Tin Pan Alley […]. He never wrote a show-tune in his life (164).

Indeed, it ought to be remembered thatCopland’s view of popular musical styles was‘colonial’ (xiv, 17), and that his was, wrote hisfriend John Kirkpatrick, ‘a highly stylised variety’of jazz (quoted 60). After all, he was not a ‘dual-citizen’ like Bernstein, Previn, or Schuller (14),and ‘never truly abandoned modernism’ (77).

The issue here is how to go about tracingCopland’s melodic style back to its two dominantsources: the new post-war Parisian instrumentalstyle (Ragtime, La Création du Monde etc.) on theone hand, and genuine jazz and blues on the other(cf. 4 n 6, 12). David Schiff, for example, observesthat ‘The distinguishing trait of Copland’s jazz-inspired music is its sadness: in the age of le jazz

hot, he composed le jazz triste’ (14). And an impor-tant element in this ‘framed’ jazz (14ff ) was, asHoward Pollack notes, the fact that Copland, likeGershwin, had ‘arguably absorbed from the bluescertain emotional ambiguities, involving, quiteoften, a kind of irony and whimsy’ (71). This canbe heard quite easily in seminal works like Music

for Theatre, where the style is closer to wrong-noteharmony than to the blues, the thirds usuallybeing the wrong way around (major on top) (20),and in quite different works like the PianoVariations, the harmonies of which stem directlyfrom the Symphonies of Wind Instrumentsrather than Satchmo’s Hot Fives and Sevens.

There are lots of places throughout thevolume where Copland’s music is compared likethis to other music for traces of influence, such asVarèse (xiii n 1), Bartók (12, 81 n 21), andSondheim (153). This ‘x sounds like y’ syndromemay well be evidence that, as Larry Starr writes,we have yet to ‘take the full measure’ of Copland(82). Given Copland’s enviously far-flung and

formidable influence on subsequent musicalpractices in the technologically advanced West, itwould be only fair not to have too one-sided aview of 20th-century compositional style, soperhaps somebody ought to write a book on The

Copland Legacy which takes into account bothCopland’s scores for and his influential writingson Hollywood, a body of work which ‘helped tolegitimise the industry by applying a criticalperspective that addressed not only the faults ofthe industry as a commercial institution but alsoits merits’ (54).

According to Wilfred Mellers, Copland ‘is avery important composer in the twentiethcentury because he really deals with an essentialtwentieth-century experience – what it is like as ahuman being to live in an industrial technocracyand how you extract from this skeletonic andharsh environment whatever human warmthyou still may’ (quoted 173). If the contemporaryenvironment is as Mellers describes, then this isan apt description of the underlying significanceof Copland’s work. But even if it isn’t, WilliamBrooks is surely right in suggesting that ‘certaincomposers have that attribution of greatnessunder a wider variety of social conditions thanother composers do. And I believe that Coplandhas had, and will have, that attribution’ (184).

Anthony Gritten

Reflections of An American Composer by Arthur Berger.University of California Press, $44.95/£ 29.95.

ARTHUR BERGER: Complete Works for Solo Piano.Geoffrey Burleson (pno). Centaur CRC 2593.

Of the best and most important Americancomposers Arthur Berger is probably the leastwell known. Even people extremely knowledge-able about American music recognize his namemuch less readily than those of his immediatecontemporaries, whose equal he is: Babbitt, Cage,or Carter, for instance. Of those who do recog-nize his name, few actually have heard much, orany, of his music. There are possibly two reasonsfor this unfortunate phenomenon. The body ofhis work, although of a consistently high quality,is not especially large, and he is closely associatedwith both Stravinskyan neo-classicism andAmerican 12-tone music and theory: a sort ofdouble whammy, since both tendencies havebecome fairly unfashionable. I once told anotherteacher of mine that Berger had described hisChamber Music for Thirteen Players as being 12-toneneoclassic music. ‘Oh. Worst of both worlds’, washis response. But as well as being a composer

58



whose music is consistently of the highest quality,Berger composes music which is consistentlybeautiful and constantly engaging and enter-taining to listen to. He is simply one of the best,and people who don’t know his music are missinga very great pleasure.

Berger was born and grew up in New York andstudied at the College of the City of New Yorkand New York University, later pursuing graduatestudies at Harvard. Early on he established apattern in his life: Berger as composer as well asBerger as observer and reporter. He began whenhe was at CCNY, ghostwriting about music aswell current affairs, for a distant cousin whowrote for a Hearst tabloid, eventually beingallowed to initial his work. Despite his being firedfrom that paper due to his radical politics and hisreporting on more obscure musical happeningsrather than the mainstream events put on by thepaper’s advertisers, Berger’s career as a classicalmusic reviewer was begun, and he continued towrite for a host of newspapers and magazines:the Sun, the Tribune and, when he was atHarvard, the Boston Evening Transcript (immortal-ized in an early poem of T. S. Eliot). He eventu-ally joined the music staff of the New York Herald

Tribune along with Virgil Thomson, where for adecade he was one of the most influential criticsin that city. After leaving the paper to join thefaculty of Brandeis University, where he taughtfor over twenty years, Berger became one of thefounders and the first editor of the seminallyimportant journal Perspectives of New Music.

Berger reports that for him the big event of the1930 New York premier, at the MetropolitanOpera House, of The Rite of Spring was not somuch the Stravinsky work as its companion onthe program, Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand. Itwas that music of Schoenberg – which seemed toBerger, particularly by comparison to theStravinsky, delicate, tenuous, and elusive – thatwas the inspiration and model for Berger’s earliestmusic, represented by his Episodes for piano,written in 1933. The influence of Schoenbergeventually led him into what seemed to be a deadend. Committed to a leftist political persuasionwhich demanded that ‘serious’ music appeal tothe masses, and unable at the time to separate themethod of Schoenberg’s composition from theGermanic musical aesthetic which he did not findappealing, Berger stopped composing for severalyears, during which he pursued graduate studiesin theory with Walter Piston and musicologywith Hugo Leichtentritt at Harvard.

The path to Berger’s resumption of composi-tion was made possible by his acquaintance withthe neo-classical music of Stravinsky and by his

association with Darius Milhaud, his fellowfaculty member at Mills College, who became forall practical purposes his composition teacher.After the Second World War, when the idea of12-tone music began to have much greaterinterest for all composers than it formerly haddone, Berger began to re-explore serial tonecomposition. Eventually finding it to be uncon-genially restrictive to his musical inclinations, hedeveloped a style based on the continuous use ofwidely spaced completely chromatic trichords(D, Eb, E, for instance) heavily influenced bytwelve-tone practices, although much morefreely and intuitively organized.

More recently, influenced by the work of hisfriend the visual artist Robert Motherwell, Bergerhas been writing works based on earlier composi-tions, which he considers to be collages. Theserecompositions change the original scoring,usually making them more varied. He may alterthe order of events in the work, obliterate a pre-existing section with new music, laid over itmuch as a painter might paste a new piece ofpaper over an existing image, or juxtapose newtunes over existing music, as an image might bepainted over some detail in a painting. AlthoughBerger’s output is apparently in two styles, theearlier tonal and sounding much like Stravinskyand Copland, the later much more dissonant andrhythmically varied, all of his music is consistentin its use of very wide ranging melodies, itsdistinctive approach to texture, keeping all regis-ters in almost constant motion, its pursuit of dis-continuous continuities (Milton Babbit describedBerger’s neo-classic music as being ‘diatonicWebern’)1 and its ‘slightly disguised sidewalks-of-New York charm’.2

Fortunately much of Berger’s music is avail-able in recordings, and anyone interested inexploring it might particularly look into thefollowing: An Arthur Berger Retrospective (NewWorld Records NW 360–2), containing, amongother pieces, the early Woodwind Quartet(which remains his best known work), and Triofor guitar, violin, and piano (one of his very best);Form (New World Records NW 80308-2),containing the Septet; American Masters: Arthur

Berger (Composers Records, Inc., CD 622),containing the String Quartet, Three Pieces forTwo Pianos, and Chamber Music for Thirteen

Players; and Works for Piano Four-Hands (NewWorld Records NW 80536-2), containing hiscomplete works for that medium.

1 ‘Spotlight on the Moderns: Musical America’s SeveralGenerations,’ Saturday Review 37 (13 March 1954), p.36.

2 Virgil Thomson, American Music Since 1910 (New York: Holt,Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p.123.

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In conjunction with the celebration ofBerger’s 90th birthday, Centaur Records has justreleased a recording of Berger’s Complete Works

for Solo Piano, played by Geoffrey Burleson. Thepiano is Berger’s own instrument and he hasalways written enormously effectively for it. Ithas been predominant throughout his career, andthe output reflects the complete course of all thetwists and turns of his stylistic changes, startingwith the earliest Episodes from 1933 and contin-uing through the neoclassicism of the livelyBagatelles of 1946 and the sweetly lyrical Partitaof 1947, the One-Part Inventions of 1954 (anexample of the interconvertibility of neoclassi-cism and serialism), the post-serial Five Pieces of1969 – and ending with Burleson’s assemblage ofBirthday Cards, pieces written between 1980 and1994 celebrating the birthdays of, among others,Elliott Carter, Gunther Schuller, DonaldMartino, Leon Kirchner, and Aaron Copland.Burleson’s masterly playing of all of these worksunfailingly catches the rhythmic verve andcomplexity, the singing quality, and the wit andcharm they have in common, and is a welcomefilling-out of the available documentation ofBerger’s work.

Also timed to coincide with Berger’s birthday isthe publication of his latest book, Reflections of an

American Composer. For anyone who knowsBerger, reading the book is like visiting with thecomposer himself. Serious reflections onaesthetics and the intellectual life of his times,details of the journalist’s life in New York in the1940s and in Boston and New York now, thehistory of music as an academic discipline inAmerican universities, and keen analytic insightsinto all kinds of music, stand alongside anecdotesabout Thomson, Copland, Stravinsky, Schoen-berg, Koussevitzky, Mitropoulos, Bernstein,Delmore Schwartz and Robert Motherwell,among others.

Berger has had a life-long vital interest in themusic of his time, and it is this interest which isthe first principle of the book. In a chapter enti-tled ‘Composers and Their Audiences’, theauthor of the first major book on Copland’smusic addresses the change in Copland’s idiomfrom his earlier ultra-modernist style to the laterpopulist style of his ballets (about which Berger isnot so enthusiastic). These stylistic matters areexamined in the light of the socialist politicalclimate of the 1930s, the more repressiveMcCarthyite times, and their implications on thedevelopment of American music and audiences.A further chapter discusses Ives, of whom Bergerwas an early champion, and for whom he nowentertains less enthusiasm. Later he examines

and passionately defends the aesthetics and waysof understanding Stravinsky’s music of his neo-classic period. This is music which Berger clearlyloves (he asserts in more than one place in thebook his conviction that Perséphone is the equal ofthe Bach Passions); his understanding of it isprofound and his explanation of it is enlight-ening. His reflections on the ascendancy in the1950s and 60s of 12-tone music in Americanuniversities, if not in America, in the chaptersentitled ‘Serialism: The Composer as Theorist’and ‘Rapprochement or Friendly Takeover’, arefollowed by thoughts about Postmodernism inMusic.

A section entitled ‘Writing About Music’recalls Berger’s days as a journalist in New Yorkas well as the early story of Perspectives of New

Music and his tribute to Paul Rosenfeld andBernard Haggin, two more or less forgottenAmerican music critics whom he admires. Thereare three big articles which represent Berger’scontinuous concern with Aesthetics and MusicAnalysis. One deals in further depth with theOctatonic Scale (otherwise known outside ofAmerica as Messiaen’s second mode of limitedtransposition), which Berger named anddiscussed in an earlier famous article onStravinsky. ‘New Linguistic Modes and the NewTheory’ seems to represent Berger’s determina-tion to prove that he could equal Milton Babbitt’smost dense and complex positivist writings onmusic. A constant theme of Berger’s attitude andteaching about music is encapsulated by the titleof the third article: ‘Do We Hear What We SayWe Hear?’

The final section of the book is more personal,dealing with Berger’s interest in opera, his recol-lections of Koussevitzky and Mitroupoulos (inwhich he also constantly expresses regret that nomajor conductor, in America anyway, is nearly asinterested in or supportive of new music as thosetwo were), and a collection of anecdotes entitled‘From My Diary: Brief Encounters’. Anecdotesare not by any means restricted to this section,however; they abound throughout the book. Myfavorite three concern Thomson at dinner beforethey were both going off to review concerts,encouraging Berger to drink more wine and notto have any coffee so he could sleep better duringthe concert, Stravinsky being the guest from hellat a dinner party given by the harpsichordistSylvia Marlowe, and Schoenberg expressing reliefthat Jordan Hall, site of the first Boston perform-ance of Pierrot Lunaire (‘Such a big hall!’), wasactually only one-third full (‘That’s much better’).

Arthur Berger’s importance to Americanmusic (and to all music) resides primarily in his

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wonderful compositions. Readers who don’tknow his work should avail themselves of theopportunity to do so at the soonest possiblemoment, and will find the new Burlesonrecording an excellent introduction. However,anyone with any interest in American music willwelcome the chance to encounter the reflectionsof a composer, critic, and teacher who has beenin the thick of it for most of the 20th Century –continuing into the present, and (all of us whoknow him hope) for a long time to come.

Rodney Lister

Glass: A Portrait by Robert Maycock. SanctuaryPublishing, London, 2002, pp 191, ISBN 1-86074-347-1(pbk), £9.99.

Barbican Theatre, London: Philip Glass’s ‘Galileo Galilei’

Robert Maycock’s useful Glass: A Portrait hasmany of the characteristics of the music itdescribes: accessible, clearly-organized andassuming little by way of background knowl-edge. It also shares a number of features withGlass’s less successful scores, lacking much narra-tive verve and unconcerned to explore its subjectand any real depth.

Maycock, the London Independent’s erstwhilemusic editor, is more than a fan of Glass’s music– he is a convert to the cause and writes honestlyof the moment his own prejudices aboutcontemporary music were wonderfully over-thrown. Listening to the Philip Glass Ensembleperform at Sadler’s Wells some time in the early1980s he stayed on entranced while it seems therest of the capital’s critical cognoscenti madetheir way without excuses to the door. PeterHeyworth, then critic for The Observer, isdescribed as ‘stomping out before the end in afury of high-camp exasperation.’ Maycock’simpatience with such snooty dismissals of Glass’soeuvre drives his own book into a defence of hissubject that is well-informed but somewhat morerobust than necessary.

Organised thematically rather than chronolog-ically, the book’s seven chapters deal with Glass’sstage works, the symphonies, concertos and filmscores, and draw on the author’s own interviewswith the composer. The final chapter, ‘LookingBack’, traces Glass’s musical education at thehands (or feet, even) of Ravi Shankar, shows theimportance of Nadia Boulanger’s teaching (Glassspent two years with her in Paris, acquiring a‘rock-solid compositional technique’, in his ownwords) and helpfully rubbishes the idea thatAfrican music has had any influence on him.

Glass: A Portrait is brief and up-to-date.Published in late 2002, it refers to Galileo Galilei

(see below) which was given its world premièrein June of that year, as well as the Symphony No.6 and the film score for The Hours, both hot offthe burning nib of Glass’s pen. The book alsomakes some interesting assumptions about itsreader. A potted history of the Second VienneseSchool is given, the better to understand Glass’simpatience with it; but references to such giantsof crossover rock such as David Bowie and BrianEno – themes from whose works Glass used inhis ‘Low’ Symphony – are not put into context.There are no musical examples and little by wayof detailed analysis of Glass’s compositional art.

In fact Maycock sometimes appears to bemore interested in the ‘music politics’ of themoment than in the music itself. His line is notonly that the post-war dream of ‘music foreveryone’ has been corrupted by theBoulez/Stockhausen clique, and what we’re leftwith is merely ‘intricate and unfathomable’, butthat much of the animus directed at Glass isbecause he is the popular (and populist) leader ofa ‘a certain anti-modernist school’. (The otherteachers being Tavener, Nyman, Bryars, Pärt andGórecki). Evidence of Glass’s suffering at thehands of the ruling clique are, Maycock argues,the small number of major concert venues wherehis music is performed and the low esteem inwhich he is held by certain critics – theHeyworths and others of that ilk. To makematters worse, Maycock contends, even his ownsupporters criticize Glass for not remaining trueto his original vision, by which they typicallymean the loft and small-theatre pieces of the1960s and 70s up to and including Einstein on the

Beach, pieces radical enough to place Glassamong his own New York avant-garde.

Much of this is thankfully mistaken. Glass, inBritain alone, has been featured extensively onRadio 3 and BBC 4. Every composer who has notachieved the recognition he thinks he deserves(and what composer thinks he has?) blames aconspiracy against him. Maycock is simply toomuch of an apologist for Glass to admit that notall of his compositions deserve the highest praise.Glass the man can apparently do little wrongeither. Portrait notes its subject’s ‘hard working’and ‘efficient’ qualities, his ‘embrace of new tech-nologies’ and ability to meet deadlines on everyoccasion. He is moreover ‘universally liked’.

Whatever Glass’s personal qualities, mini-malism’s bad press has come only as a result ofsome less-than-distinguished works, Glass’sincluded. For all the praise that Maycockdeservedly gives to – among others – the

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Symphony No. 3, Akhnaten and the ViolinConcerto, the first two symphonies fail becauselumbering orchestral forces bereft of dramaticmomentum will never succeed. The 1987 ViolinConcerto however – which Maycock feels maypoint to a fruitful route forward – works in part,as do the other two works cited, because theorchestration is more transparent and Glass’s giftfor short haunting melodies can come to thefore. Glass’s debt to Romanticism, deployinghigh-register, simple mournful figures playedover gently descending chords, is at theemotional core of all three works and wouldmake another fascinating chapter.

Glass’s latest theatre piece, the chamber-operaGalileo Galilei, ran for eight nights as part of theBarbican’s BITE:02 festival in November, in aproduction by the Goodman Theatre who gavethe first performance. Scored for 10 instrumen-talists, here from the City of London Sinfonia,the 90-minute work uses a small cast to tell thestory of Galileo’s life. Divided into nine scenesand an epilogue, the libretto (by director MaryZimmerman, Arnold Weinstein and thecomposer) focusses on the scientist’s early inves-tigations into planetary motion, his confronta-tion with the Pope – whom he had befriended asa cardinal – and the Inquisition over his heliocen-tric theory, and finally his public recantation. Thedeath of his beloved daughter, who became anun, and an imagined scene from an opera byGalileo’s father Vincenzo frame the scenes.

Although it makes use of the most well-known episodes from its subject’s life, Glass tellsGalileo’s story backwards, opening with the blindastronomer alone on the stage, as images of thenow-invisible heavens are back-projected aroundhim. According to the director, the story-tellingin reverse was evidently Glass’s ‘governing idea’,though she did not explain why. One could see itas another device of theatrical alienation, towhich might also be added the projection of agood deal of the dialogue behind the characters –in elegant calligraphy – as they sing (clearly andin English), so that we are constantly remindedthat all that we see is already history, already partof a formal record. Letters – as in the scene withGalileo’s daughter at her convent – and theInquisition’s deposition also loom large asgorgeously formal evidence of the primacy ofthe word.

Given the slightness of the scoring, whichforegrounds the often intellectual dialogue, thewhole effect is to give the opera the atmosphereof a Peter Greenaway film: elegantly restrained,and one in which the characters eloquently statethe position to one another rather than engage,

love, fight or argue. What does the Pope feelabout having his authority challenged? Whatwere Galileo’s worries about the possibility ofexcommunication? We do not find out becauseGlass is more concerned about the clear state-ment of scientific or intellectual discovery (aswith the earlier portrait-operas); thus few duetsand few harmonic surprises. The most expressivemusic is actually to be found in two short instru-mental episodes: the end of scene 3 (Galileoreflecting on his cloistered daughter) and thedance interlude ‘The Inclined Plane’ where Glassis freed from providing a background for thoughtand the music carries the drama forward itself.

The singing (Carl Halvorson as Galileo,Samuel L Smith as Pope Urban VIII) was franklynot good, but the singers and the ensemble underBeatrice Affron are rarely given music they cando much with. Maycock is right when hecomplains how certain operas have been under-exposed, but let us hope that the recent revival ofThe Voyage in Linz and future performances ofSymphony No. 6, described by Maycock as ‘bysome distance Glass’s most powerful work forthe concert hall’ will give sceptics a better view.

Robert Stein

György Ligeti. Music of the Imagination by RichardSteinitz, Faber and Faber, £25.00.

György Ligeti: Style, Ideas, Poetics by Marina Lobanova,translated by Mark Shuttleworth, Verlag Ernst Kuhn.

During the later stages of Richard Steinitz’smomentous tenure as Artistic Director of theHuddersfield Contemporary Music Festival,cynics were occasionally heard to remark that hewas only persisting with the event as an excusefor not getting on with his long-expected bookon Ligeti. It was even possible to compare thatcombination of promise and delay with theprotracted expectations concerning Ligeti’sTempest for English National Opera – now aban-doned: and there is always the risk of stalenesswhen a project is in the pipeline for so manyyears. But now that the book has at last appeared,in its subject’s eightieth year, it is gratifying todiscover that Steinitz remains as enthusiastic andilluminating an advocate of Ligeti as he was in hisearly article, in Music and Musicians, back in 1973.Even though the story he tells is not exactly unfa-miliar, thanks to quite recent studies by PaulGriffiths, Richard Toop and Constantin Floros, aswell as the myriad interviews with and articles byLigeti himself, Steinitz’s ability to remain excitedand enthralled by the music, his continued

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contacts with Ligeti and, above all, the sheerscope of this gratifyingly substantial volume,combine to make his work outstanding. Here, forthe time being, is the definitive Ligeti.

One reason for the substance is the mix ofbiography and critical commentary – which, asSteinitz notes in his introduction, brings with itthe risk of inventing, not merely rewriting,history. It is not, of course, that the Ligeti whoescaped from Hungary in 1956, only to escapefrom Western modernism a few years later, is awholly fictional creation. But proposals of exactequivalences between life and work need to bedelicately handled when the protagonist is aparadoxical character to whom conformity isanathema but communication vital, and who – asSteinitz’s particularly fascinating final chapterspells out – retains an uncompromising spiritwhich can make him the bane of publishers,players, conductors and record producers.

Sensibly, Steinitz does not totally avoidsuggesting points of contact between life experi-ences and matters musical, rooting the music’sobsession with laments and mechanisms inLigeti’s turbulent early years, and thereforeunderlining the elements of consistency andcoherence in his evolution as a composer downthe decades. One day it is to be hoped that aneven fuller account of that extraordinary earlylife, which planted the seeds of a uniquelyproductive fascination with the nature and possi-bilities of sound itself, will fill out matters whicheven the comprehensive Steinitz text cannotalways cover in depth. But a good sense of thecomplexity and challenges of the Hungarianyears does come across. So does a sense of whatwould and could survive from this backgroundonce the impact of Ligeti’s heady early experi-ences in the West, centred on theStockhausen/Boulez axis around Cologne andDarmstadt, had provoked their own reaction.

Steinitz deftly sketches in the activities ofother composers, from Kagel to Penderecki,whose work Ligeti heard and reacted to, anddescribes his Darmstadt encounters with person-alities as diverse as Luigi Nono and David Tudor.It has long been appreciated that Ligeti’s rejec-tion of the extremes of both serialism and inde-terminacy was probably as much a matter ofintuition as of conscious intention, but it is thespecial blend of the primitive and the sophisti-cated which makes what Steinitz terms that‘mysterious new world of sound and sensibility’found in Atmosphères (1961) so momentous. Fromhere on, the contemporary music scene couldembrace, without shame, a pluralism of stylematching that of the century’s earlier years –

Debussy and Strauss, Stravinsky and Schoenberg– with Ligeti a model of alert responsiveness tothe welter of acoustic and psychological stimuliavailable in a world where minimalism (bothsecular and sacred) and computer-fed electro-acoustics became particularly prominent. Yetwhile Ligeti, with his many allusions to othermusics, might conform to pluralistic ideals up toa point, the increasing tendency to irradiatetextures with thematic elements and thematicworking provides a focus that can be seen aspromoting a new synthesis, and even a return tocertain ‘classical’ values. This has not pleasedeveryone: Michael Finnissy has deemed the laterworks ‘nihilistic’ and inherently unexciting – seethe interview with Christopher Fox and Ian Pacein Uncommon Ground (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997,p.21). But for many there is more than enoughpassion in the patterning to make Ligeti’s musicof all periods endlessly satisfying and absorbing.

Steinitz charts the often tortuous history ofLigeti’s later works very effectively, even thoughrestriction on properly processed music examplesis something of a drawback when scores are hardto find. Ligeti’s need to balance so many differentcomponents in works from Le Grand Macabre

(1974–7, rev. 1996) onwards has evidently notmade composition any easier, and a fuller, moreanalytical study of the later years might considerwhether the absence of large-scale, through-composed forms is a weakness, or whether, bycontrast, it is a triumphant demonstration ofhow rich, satisfying and multivalent relativelysmall-scale structures can be. As Steinitz argues,‘from being in the mist [in Lontano], melodywould gradually return to the foreground, even-tually (in the Horn Trio) bringing with it motivicnarrative’. In turn, this implies degrees of hierar-chic organization, in an approach to harmonywhich, while not reinstating the graded functionsof traditional tonality, plays meaningfully bothwith interacting degrees of consonance anddissonance, and with formal contexts in whichassociations with particular generic traditions(not just the lament) add further levels of signifi-cance and expressive resonance.

Anyone disposed to claim that these laterdevelopments are not all gain may well use theexpressionistic concentration of the SecondString Quartet (1968) as principal evidence.Steinitz’s discussion of this is well-conceived inthe range of issues it introduces, but the exclu-sion of music examples limits its value as a stim-ulus to further analysis. As noted earlier, ontechnical – not to say theoretical – matters moredepth is certainly possible, not least about theextent to which Ligeti’s rhythmic and registral

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mechanisms promote or evade an element ofgoal-directedness in what are often richly strati-fied textures. But to ask for more depth is not toclaim that Steinitz overlooks essentials, and fromnow on no-one undertaking closer readings andfuller analyses will be able to ignore his work.

Steinitz’s last section is called ‘The GrandIllusionist’, acknowledging Ligeti’s delight inBruegelland and Carrollesque Wonderland.These are very different worlds from those asso-ciated with the grand mythic projects of some ofhis near-contemporaries, and it is tempting to seeall Ligeti’s music since the mid-1970s as aprotracted aftershock to the absurdist knock-about of Le Grand Macabre. Steinitz argues that‘the pastiche, verging on quotation, which under-pins so much of the opera’s characterisation, hewould not use again’, and although there is anelement of folkloric allusion in later pieces, thisnever stabilizes sufficiently to suggest some post-Bartókian pastoral Utopia. But allusion, if notpastiche, can take many forms, as Steinitz’s owntreatment of the lament topos demonstrates.

With reference to the Horn Trio, he affirmsthat ‘the aura of tragic grandeur has the stamp ofBeethoven, but its pessimism is Ligeti’s – no facilepostmodernist breast-beating, but a deepeningand darkening of his art which he could notescape’. That deepening and darkening embodieswhat is least Nancarrow-like about the pianoEtudes and the late concertos: yet the Nonsense

Madrigals (1988–93) and the recent Weöressettings (2000) seem not to rule out the prospectof escape, however temporary, to a playful para-dise, and even in the most forceful Etudes disordernever quite breaks free of the sense of organicinevitability that Ligeti’s delight in pattern-making, and pattern-shaping, brings with it.

This is the key paradox Steinitz wrestles within the Piano Concerto (1980–88): ‘what isremarkable is that in music so dynamic, there isno fundamental pulse at all, but rather acompendium of pulses’. Ligeti is at his finest insuch ‘music founded on instability’, where hecomes closest to fulfilling the implications of allthe elements which contributed to the founda-tion of his musical thinking in the first place. Atthe same time, however, Steinitz quotes thecomposer as saying of the Violin Concerto(1989–93) that ‘layers upon layers of consciousand unconscious influences are connectedtogether to form an organic, homogeneouswhole. ... But for this to result in something newand complex, I always strive to melt these exte-rior impulses into my own interior images andideas’. To the extent that this admits an intent toachieve not merely novelty but complexity,

Ligeti’s latter-day organicism has not lost sight ofhis passing contact with avant-garde modernity,and his later music is the stronger for it.

Richard Steinitz’s fine study is certainly notshort of technical specifics, not least about the‘fractal’ features of the later compositions, buthis primary concern, dealing with both life andworks, is with narrative flow. ‘Narrative flow’ isprecisely what is missing from MarinaLobanova’s pages, and although she providesmany more music examples along the way thanSteinitz does, far too many of these are barelylegible, or completely illegible, score reproduc-tions which hinder rather than help the reader,apart from providing graphic evidence of thecomposer’s shapely script. One way or another,more advice and assistance from the publisherswould have been a good thing. Lobanova reportsthat her text was actually completed – in Russian– in May 1993. Mark Shuttleworth’s translationseems to have relatively few serious lapses. Butsense is sometimes hard to tease out, as in ‘theabsence of sound and speech, which had firstbeen discovered as a musical dimension byDebussy, became a functional element in hiscompositions’: and Shuttleworth’s use of ‘theform of the moment’ for Moment-form suggestsmusical inexperience. You soon latch onto thefact that ‘genral’ is not a misprint for ‘general’but equivalent to ‘generic’, and you might feelinclined to forgive Shuttleworth for not seekingout all the available English translations of textscited in their German editions in the notes –Schoenberg’s Style and Idea, for example. But thebook has inevitably been overtaken by morerecent work, like the useful study in German byConstantin Floros (1996), one of Lobanova’smentors, and even more decisively by Steinitz.Given the excellent production values of Floros’svolume, it’s a pity that Verlag Ernst Kuhn seemto have made so little effort to emulate them.

Lobanova’s determination to pursue her workon Ligeti in the light of obstruction from theSoviet authorities (even during the Perestroikaperiod) was truly heroic, and the results of herpersonal contact with the composer pay dividendsin the characteristically vivid interviews withwhich her book concludes. Ligeti is never moredogmatic than when denouncing dogmatism inothers, and his views on Cage, Stockhausen andBoulez are frankly expressed. But the main part ofLobanova’s text is probably best approached as adocumentary workbook. So constantly does shequote Ligeti’s own explanations and judgementsthat her own commentary has to struggle to gainany degree of momentum or personality. It’stempting to conclude that in the time available

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she was not able to get fully inside many of thecompositions she introduces here, and the way inwhich she veers repetitively between general andparticular makes one the more appreciative ofSteinitz’s sustained ability to balance degrees ofdetail with the wider picture. That wider pictureremains paradoxical, even contradictory, as whenLigeti tells Lobanova in consecutive statementsthat ‘I feel a greater affinity for extremism than fortotal balance’ but also that ‘I feel rather moreinclined towards an air of elegance than ofbarbarism’. He also declares, in a familiarformula, that ‘I don’t want to reach a synthesis, Iwant a dirty music, a shimmering music’: and sothe pendulum continues to swing between theaesthetic and technical poles in ways whichshould ensure many more contributions to theLigeti bibliography in the years ahead.

Arnold Whittall

Ex Oriente: Ten Composers from the former USSR edited byValeria Tsenova. Verlag Ernst Kuhn

For the fashion-conscious amongst us, the logofor the hooded top of last year was ‘CCCP’,together with a hammer and sickle motif on thearm. The fact that many were made in (South)Korea is immaterial – it’s the logo for the ‘NoLogo’ generation. Taking Martin Amis’s argu-ment in Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty

Million, perhaps it might not be so fashionable –or at least cause more comment – if the insigniaemblazoned on the chests of the nation’s youthwas a swastika.

It’s now more than a decade since theCommunist regime fell in Russia, and Russia isalready marginalized politically and culturally.Other than an initial flourish in the early to mid-1990s, as music that had been suppressed came tolight, Western interest in Russian music has beenalmost exclusively concerned with the politicalbeliefs of Shostakovich and the capacity forRussian virtuoso performers to attract large audi-ences by reclaiming sovereign understanding ofthe music of Russian nationalism. Russia and ColdWar history seem a world apart from us, andperhaps many would like to keep them that way,even though the current political climate in theWest is virtually unthinkable without them (thecollapse of the political left, the power vacuumbeing filled with surplus armoury and scores tosettle, and the mass migration of labour).

Given that context, this book – which marksthe second volume of introductory essays toRussian composers – is particularly welcome,

providing an opportunity to shed our ignoranceof some of the central figures in new Russianmusic. However this context also leaves its markon the book in a number of unfortunate respects.Whilst Verlag Ernst Kuhn should be thanked forproducing the book in English translation, theproduction values have been squeezed (presum-ably it’s not an anticipated best-seller): the trans-lation is uneven, the editorial control absent, andthe updating (from the 1996 Russian edition)patchy. (The worklists provided for eachcomposer discussed are an improvement on thefirst volume, though no discographies are given.)And although there are advantages in having theessays written exclusively by Russian musicolo-gists, their contributions are almost all partialand often sadly reflect the parlous state of muchconventional Russian writing on music,deformed by decades of restrictions, neglect andideological abuse.

One of the most striking aspects of the essaysin this book is that few contributors refer to themusic’s social and political context. It is ironic thatjust as Russian academics have sought to escapethe narrow interpretations of musical ‘intona-tion’, fixing it to a particular ideology, so Westernmusicology has become increasingly concernedwith music’s social and political context. As anillustration, try comparing Gerald Abraham’sEight Soviet Composers (1943) with RichardTaruskin’s Defining Russia Musically (1997).

As the contributors share a number of thesame preoccupations, several themes do emergethat shed light on the way individual composershave developed and adapted to the times. And itwill come as no surprise to anyone who followsRussian culture that nationalism, and the rela-tionship with the West, is the pre-eminent sub-text here. It is variously seen in the rise of thenew folklore movement, influenced byStravinsky (see the chapters on Sidelnikov,Martynov and Pärt); in Orthodoxy and spiritu-alism (Sidelnikov, Martynov, Pärt, Ustvolskaya);and in fatalism and a naïve belief in the manifestdestiny of Russia to suffer (Sidelnikov,Chaikovsky, Suslin). Thus, for example, BorisChaikovsky is quoted as saying: ‘In general, thegreatness of the people not in the last queue [sic]is defined by the value of the ordeals, endured bythe people. Therefore, despite of all physicaldifficulties, 20th century gave a lot soul [sic] ofRussian people’. And Viktor Suslin argues that

the ‘Platonic idea’ of Russia in the context of the thou-sand-year history of her Christianity begins obscurelyto appear. According to the will of history ChristianRussia was crucified in the 20th century. But aftercrucifixion follows resurrection.

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And yet, curiously, there is also a counter-movement whereby approval by or recognitionin the West has become the mark of success andachievement. For example, a bizarre section inthe chapter on Andrei Eshpai recounts the storyof the composer sending a letter and recording ofhis Saxophone Concerto (premiered by anAmerican soloist) to Bill Clinton, and the greatstore set by the (formally polite) reply hereceived. Similarly, the chapter on Yuri Kasparovshows the composer suddenly gaining credibilityby winning an Italian choral composition compe-tition, and subsequently writing a ‘mono-opera’Nevermore intended for performance in Turin in1992 ‘but the disintegration of the USSRevidently confused the clients, who could notunderstand how to contact forward-lookingRussian composers’. For Dmitry Smirnov, ElenaFirsova, and Suslin, three of the ‘KhrennikovSeven’ (publicly criticised in 1979), acceptance bythe West was perhaps more crucial, though ineach case the pattern follows of Western interestin them being fuelled by their political castiga-tion, and their subsequent neglect in their respec-tive countries of exile (England and Germany).

Another recurring theme is that of a grandnarrative or abstracted approach to composition.Thus we learn that Sidelnikov’s Third Symphonywas ‘influenced by Friedrich Engels’ work The

dialectics of nature’, and that his concertsymphony Duels has movements titled ‘The ratioof uncertainties’, ‘The war between harmonyand chaos’ and ‘The duel between order andchance’. Vladimir Barsky, writing of BorisChaikovsky, is at times barely comprehensible,using poetic and speculative language as if tryingto capture the essence of the music itself, as in:‘What is of permanent value in music neverdefies the eternal progress of musical substancetoward the unknown…’ (119).

On another level, several of the musicalanalyses refer closely to number symbolism: as inworks by Martynov (7 = ‘perfection of our world’,3 = the Holy Trinity, 1 = only God, 8=7+1=‘resurrection / eternal life in Orthodoxy’), Pärt (indefining proportions and overall shape as in theStabat mater), and Smirnov (using magic squares,and translating letters to intervals to encode text).For Suslin, Ustvolskaya’s ‘maximalism’ – heridealism, musical extremism, and ‘even fanaticism’– is ‘a purely Russian phenomenon’.

The best, and most revealing, chapters by farare those on Vladimir Martynov and Arvo Pärt,whose musical careers and development haveremarkable similarities – from early use of dode-caphony to further experimentation (with elec-tronics, rock, early music, polystylistics, Eastern

music, aleatory techniques, and improvisation),then an extended creative break followed by acommitment to liturgical, religious and spiritualcompositions. Both now share a vehement dislikeof the avant garde (a view equally held by thatmost Russian of non-Russian composers, the holyminimalist John Tavener). These chapters are alsothe best written, apart from odd slips (as in‘Michael Neumann who writes the music for thefilms of Peter Greenaway’) and a contender forPseuds Corner (a description of Martynov’s Night in

Galicia wherein ‘the lydo-mixolydian mode is usedonce again, along with hemiola mixtures with anarchaic Slavonic Serbian-Polish-Huzul semantic’).

Ultimately, whilst Russian music is all toooften reduced to its (Soviet) context, the absenceof such a commentary gives the book a veryconventional and dated feel. Post-Sovietcomposers may wish to be judged on purelymusical terms, but in doing so they may riskmarginalizing themselves from some of the mostactive debates in contemporary music.

Edward McKeon

Marina Lobanova and Ernst Kuhn (eds), Ein

unbekanntes Genie: Der Symphoniker Alexander Lokschin:

Monographien – Zeugnisse – Dokumente – Würdigungen,(Studia Slavica Musicologica, Band 26). Berlin: VerlagErnst Kuhn.

There are composers from the lands of theformer Soviet Union whose smallest musicalutterances have the power to stop you in yourtracks – I mean above all, though in no particularorder, Schnittke, Pärt, Ustvolskaya, Kancheli,Terteryan and Silvestrov. But there are others,like the subject of this new book, whose musicworks more like a slow-release medicine for thesoul and which is absorbed almost unnoticeablyinto the nervous system until it produces a subtlebut unmistakable feeling of inner transforma-tion. That is one reason, the main reason for me,why Lokshin as much as any of his better-knownfellow-countrymen deserves a book-length study.

He was the son of a bookseller and a midwife,born in the Russian provinces in 1920, who movedwith the family to Novosibirsk around the age of10 and then on to Moscow, where he studied withLitinsky and Myaskovsky. He became a teacher atthe Conservatoire in 1945, lost his post three yearslater in the aftermath of Zhdanov’s anti-formalism campaigns, then lived in straitenedcircumstances — alleviated somewhat from about1960 until his death in 1987 by the fruits of film-score composition – producing 11 numbered

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symphonies (almost all of them song-cycles toscrupulously chosen texts, mostly with chamberensemble rather than full orchestral accompani-ment) plus a handful of precision-tooled chamberand vocal works. He identified neither with theestablishment nor with the underground, andperformance of his works – often obstructed byofficialdom – relied partly on the good offices ofShostakovich and largely on the initiative ofRudolf Barshai, who continued to championLokshin after his emigration. The respect hegarnered as an independent offered some smallcompensation, so at least one would like to think,for his lack of wider public recognition.

That much was well enough known before theappearance of this book, which fleshes out theskeletal biography with many valuable details ofLokshin’s professional tribulations and of hismusical/cultural interests. As so often with thisseries, Ernst Kuhn, formerly a professional trans-lator, has done an invaluable service by assem-bling and translating documents, both officialand unofficial. These make for fascinatingreading in themselves, above all. I would say, forsuch gems as conductor Vladimir Ponkin’s obser-vation that present-day Russian audiences do notwant to hear works from the Soviet era, irrespec-tive of their provenance, and his reminder that

the early phases of Gorbachev’s perestroyka wereworse for music than the immediately precedingyears. The other priceless contribution is fourpages of reminiscence and assessment fromsinger Aleksey Martynov, who carefully distancesLokshin from the ‘Martyrs of the Soviet Era’(Martynov’s own sarcastically intended quota-tion marks) and whose comment that Lokshinwanted to ‘purge people of self-satisfaction’ ringsabsolutely true.

Musicologist Marina Lobanova, now based inHamburg, supplies an overview of Lokshin’s lifeand works and engages in a revealing dialoguewith composer Manfred Stahnke. Her mainconcern seems to be to establish Lokshin’s statusas victim of the regime, which is reasonableenough and which contributes significantly tothe still-emerging picture of artistic life under theSoviets. But allowance has to be made for acertain amount of settling old scores. For onething, it should go without saying that outra-geous treatment meted out to artists, in anysociety at any time, does not of itself make theirwork interesting (though it may of course be afactor in shaping their frame of mind). Norshould they be denied the right to say things thata commentator may personally disagree with.When Lokshin in the last year of his life

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Holst Birthplace Museum AppealOn the 1 April 2003 the Holst Birthplace Trustlaunched an Appeal to create an endowmentfund in order to secure the long-term inde-pendent viability of the Museum.

The Holst Birthplace Museum inCheltenham, Gloucestershire is threatenedwith closure unless an endowment fund of£600,000 can be raised. The museum wasopened by the composer’s daughter ImogenHolst in 1974, the centenary year of GustavHolst’s birth.

Following the threatened closure of theMuseum in 1999 by the Cheltenham BoroughCouncil the Holst Museum was re-establishedas an independent charitable trust on 1 April2000. At present the Trust receives a small grantfrom the local council but this will ceasecompletely in 2004.

Open Tues – Sat 10am – 4pm, the Museum,which attracts visitors from all over the world,contains unique objects and archival material

relating to Gustav Holst and his family. Thepiano on which The Planets was composed isdisplayed alongside musical scores, photo-graphs, paintings, medals, mementoes andfurniture. The house has been furnished in lateVictorian style and evocatively illustrates thelife of that period. In addition the Museum actsas an important educational facility for childrenand adults in the area and there are regularconcerts and lectures.

All those wanting to make a contribution tothis fund, or who want to help in the form offund-raising concerts and events shouldcontact:

Dr Joanna Archibald – CuratorHolst Birthplace Museum, 4 Clarence Road, Cheltenham, Glos, GL52 2AY

Tel: 01242 524846email: [email protected]: www.holstmuseum.org.uk

expressed doubts about the artistic merits of the1920s Soviet avant-garde, for instance, Lobanovacannot resist casting doubt on the authenticity ofthe statement. She may well be right, of course(and the composer’s son apparently shares herscepticism). Or she may be wrong, because takenat face value Lokshin’s words are entirely consis-tent with the seriousness and avoidance ofgimmickry evident in his music. Or the truthmay lie elsewhere altogether: that in the uncer-tain climate of the mid-1980s the composer feltobliged to offer a point of view which hegenuinely held but which he might otherwisehave kept to himself. But the real point is thateditorial intervention should be disinterested,and Lobanova, as one of the most vociferousadvocates of the 1920s avant-gardist NikolayRoslavets, takes a somewhat black-and-whiteview of the ideological struggles of those andlater times. Nor does she do Lokshin’s cause anyfavours by calling him, in the title of the book, an‘unknown genius’, picking up an enthusiasticpassing remark by Shostakovich to his pupil,Boris Tishchenko. I’ll crusade as fervently asanyone on behalf of Lokshin’s touchingly poeticyet ascetic voice. But the best way to do that issurely not by uncritical hyperbole but by sympa-thetic and searching advocacy of the music.

This is where the three analytical commen-taries at the heart of the book come in, theauthors being Irena Lavrentyeva (writing in

1981), Yevgeniya Chigaryova (updating a studyfrom 1976) and Tatyana Gellis (based on her 1996dissertation). The first two offer generalisedthoughts on style, seeking to show how the prin-ciples of free variation and song-cycle construc-tion are compatible with works that callthemselves symphonies. Gellis examines the‘Songs of Gretchen’ from Three Scenes from

Goethe’s ‘Faust’, from the point of view of their‘Zitat-Replik’ (quotation-reply) construction, bywhich she means, I think, the symphonicexploitation of an idea first conceived as text-illustrative. For all their invaluable passinginsights, these studies suffer somewhat from acertain narrowness of perspective. Lokshin’sMahlerian proclivities and his freedom of move-ment between tonality and atonality are obvi-ously related to Berg, for instance, who goesunmentioned here but whose Wozzeck and ViolinConcerto are mentioned later on by one of hispupils as being among his favourite works.Nevertheless the chapters are sensitive, seriousand dedicated, and as such worthy of the similarvirtues in their subject matter.

The book is the more valuable for its chrono-logical work-list, discography, bibliography andindices. There is even a list of organisationsholding rights in Lokshin’s music, together withaddresses. If there is any justice, somewheresooner or later there will be conductors andpromoters making good use of this information.

David Fanning

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