detention centre has been built at Lilongwe, prospective site of Banda’s‘Brasilia’. Expressions of concern at Malawi’s expanding corpus of‘security’ legislation, the immunities conferred on the Young Pioneers,and the public executions have not prevented Britain from contributinggenerously to Malawi’s annual budget, while Banda forges closer linkswith South African private business interests in the development of thenational economy. The complicity of Britain with the Smith régime inRhodesia and the evident helplessness of the OAU have doubtlessconvinced Banda that it is to his advantage to be linked not onlyeconomically, but also politically to the white power block to theSouth and East of Malawi.

reviews

Exploring Music. Ernest Krenek. Calder & Boyars. 35s.Anton Webern. Friedrich Wildgans. Calder & Boyars. 30s.Darius Milhaud. Notes without music. Calder & Boyars. 12s. 6d.

Krenek’s Exploring Music is a collection of essays written at various timesbetween 1929 and 1956. Krenek, born in 1900, is an Austrian composerand teacher who has lived in the US since 1938. His early theoretical writing,e.g. ‘New Humanity and old objectivity’ (1931) has something in commonwith that of T. W. Adorno.

In the past the composer worked within a ‘cultural collective’, an organicsocial culture in which the use of living conventions gave objective validityto his music for a limited audience. The dissolution of limited culturalgroups into the mass public of modern industrial society is paralleled in thebreakdown of musical conventions. The modern composer is confronted bya ‘general public’ of consumers whose taste in conditioned by mass pro-duction: unless he consents to write stereotyped and easily digestible musicfor leisure consumption, he is forced to withdraw into the isolation of in-dividual subjective expression, without any framework of socially approvedconventions.

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In his own music Krenek has at times tried to bridge the gulf by usingformulae familiar to modern audiences (e.g. those of jazz), but more re-cently he has devoted himself to uncompromising research into the innermusical problems of an advanced serial language, in the belief that musiccan best express the ‘spirit of the age’ and keep alive the ‘freedom of thehuman spirit’ not by complying with the demands of the market but bypursuing its own autonomous development.

Krenek’s writing is marred by the use of such concepts as ‘the generalpublic’, ‘the collective feeling of the age’, ‘modern man’, etc—his un-critical use of these monolithic abstractions makes the thought turgid andinexact. The opposition ‘individual’—’masses’, and the fear of mass cultureas a threat to individual freedom is characteristic of that current of Germanthought to which the writing of Adorno and Marcuse also belongs.

Among later essays in the collection is an outline for a theory of musicalaesthetic (1937) which draws usefully on Gestalt psychology, and the mostrecent (1956) makes some relevant comments on the work of the post-Webern serialists. Krenek is unusually open-minded for his generation inshowing an understanding of these composers. He observes that their useof serialism creates a kind of music no longer analogous to language: thebreaking up of thematic continuity and regrouping of notes in other kinds ofnon-linear pattern gives rise to something more like architecture than dis-course. His analysis is more fruitful than that of Adorno who sees in thismusic only the elimination of the ‘subject’.

Wildgans’ book on Webern includes an essay written by Adorno in 1926which presents Webern’s music as an extreme expression of subjectivity inisolation from society. While Webern’s earlier music may be understoodas an attenuation and fragmentation of traditional thematic music, in hislater instrumental compositions a mutation occurs. Out of the fragmenta-tion of musical elements arose a new kind of non-thematic order, the be-ginning of the non-linear multidimensional musical space explored by hissuccessors. Wildgans’ book reveals no appreciation of Webern’s import-ance in this respect. By concentrating on its traditional features he presentsonly a partial picture of his work. The biographical outline which takes upthe main part of the book is based on memories of his family and friends,and quotes occasionally from Webern’s letters and diary. In the absence ofany fully documented study of Webern’s life it is welcome for muchpreviously unpublished information, especially on his relations withSchonberg and on his difficult early career. A picture emerges of Webern asa simple man who seems to have been largely unaware of the originality ofhis conceptions. A retiring and completely unpolitical person, he lived inobscurity in Austria throughout the Nazi period and was killed accidentallyby an American soldier in 1945.

Milhaud’s book is an autobiography, written in 1947. Perhaps most widelyknown for his early assimilation of jazz in his ballet ‘La Création du Monde’(1922) Milhaud is undoubtedly one of the most prolific composers of thiscentury. While this book contains no outline of aesthetic principles of thekind which makes Stravinsky’s autobiography an indispensible text onmodern music, and while much of it is limited and personal in scope, itslucid and succinct style makes very enjoyable reading: like his music at itsbest, his writing has a notable clarity and fluency. The chapters on Satié areof particular interest and there is some useful background material onFrench music between the wars.

Michael Parsons

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