Music Ho! Ho?

Earlier this summer, I read Constant Lambert’s Music Ho! for the first time. If I were a rich man and a betting man, and if such statelets of affairs were fact-checkable by third parties, I would bet a million American dollars ( or, what would more or less come to the same thing these days, a million British pounds ) that there is no longer interval between my first learning of a book’s existence and my finally getting around to reading it than the one that gapes into the decades behind my eventual reading of Music Ho! For I first became aware of it via the article on Lambert in the encyclopedically organized second edition of the Oxford Junior Companion to Music, which I received as a Christmas or birthday present from my parents in 1982 or 1983 and which accordingly was the first book on “serious” or “classical” music ( or at least prevailingly on that subject, for the second-edition OJCM, although dominated by treatments of such “serious” or “classical”-musical subjects as sonata form, counterpoint, and the great and not-so-great composers perforce contained grotesquely oversized articles on jazz, the Beatles, and rock simply in virtue of being a work of post-1960s provenance [ and although I’m not sure I have ever even glanced at the first edition, I assume that it contains at least a grotesquely oversized article on jazz simply in virtue of being a work of post-1920s provenance ] ) that I was in a position to read at leisure. As to why it took so long for me to get around to reading Music Ho!, the super-prosaic first half of the bipartite answer to that question is that despite being immediately smitten with its title as much because as in spite of its  inscrutability ( for having not yet read a line of Shakespeare at the age of ten or eleven, I did not know it was a quotation from the Bard [ and indeed, despite having read all the lines of Shakespeare several times over by then, at the commencement of this past summer’s reading I thought it a playful misquotation of Twelfth Night’s “Westward ho!” { or perhaps even of Ben Jonson’s use of that Jacobean London boatmen’s exclamation as the title of one of his plays } and was stood corrected only by Lambert’s own helpful reminder within the book’s pages that he had taken the title verbatim from the heroine’s summoning of musicians in Antony and Cleopatra ] ) I never saw the book shelved alongside the public and university library-housed volumes from which I was obliged to derive almost the entirety of my self-education on “serious” or “classical” music over the ensuing decade. The second half of that answer flows not-unpoetically from the efficient cause referenced in the first, which is to say that while roughly the first two-thirds of that decade witnessed a piquing-cum-increasing of my interest in MH! given that the bulk of the meta-musical volumes I was then reading were works that like MH! and the OJCM  were of twentieth-century British provenance and that therefore tended to evince and promulgate the sort of bluffly ecumenical-yet-fundamentally conservative attitude to music en bloc that permeated twentieth-century British musicology, music appreciation, and music criticism ( and that, incidentally, continues to permeate them today at least among the practitioners of these practices who were already active in the year 2000 ) , certain meta-musical writings of non-British provenance that I began reading at about the beginning of the second third of that decade, including certain such writings by Theodor W. Adorno, evinced and promulgated a much more snootily discriminating-cum-fundamentally modernistic attitude to music en bloc and en fine, and as this attitude supplanted the twentieth-century British one as the meta-musical attitude I deferred to by default ( and hence more or less regarded as my own ) , especially in the light of MH!’s subtitle, A Study of Music in Decline, I came to regard MH! as a dedicated vessel of the twentieth-century British attitude and thereby to regard it as most likely-ly unworthy of my attention. In blunt terms, in terming the twentieth-century British attitude ecumenical-yet-fundamentally conservative I mean that while it grudgingly afforded room to the “greatest hits” of post-tonal music like Pierrot Lunaire and Wozzeck and even to some of the “greatest hits” of post-post-tonal music like Le Marteau sans Maitre and Die Soldaten, it basically thought that music history had taken a wrong turn in abandoning tonality and that the only virtuous or aesthetically redeemable living composers were the ones who were still writing ( or had returned to writing ) in a tonal idiom. For me the locus classicus of a polemic embodying this attitude—and perhaps also the culmination thereof ( for in dating from the early-to-mid-1990s it is one of the more recent such polemics I have encountered ) —is one transmitted to me by the cellist Julian Lloyd- Webber ( younger brother of the abominable co-perpetrator of Cats and Phantom of the Opera ) via the trouncing of it in an essay by Charles Rosen ( next to Adorno probably the non-British meta-musical writer to whom my current meta-musical outlook is most deeply indebted ) . Lloyd-Weber argued not only that tonal music was aesthetically superior to post-tonal music but also that declining attendance at concerts of “serious” or music scene was entirely up-chalkable to the refusal of the preponderance of currently active composers to write tonal music owing to their membership of a cabal or mafia of post-tonal composers that had dominated the contemporary “serious” or “classical” music scene for many decades. If, Lloyd-Webber contended, more present-day composers would only follow the example of a heroic tonal outlier like the symphonist Malcolm Arnold ( best known to the public as a film composer, and super-best known thereto for the musical soundtrack of Bridge on the River Kwai with its “iconic” whistled march [ whose “iconicity” perhaps motivated Weber to cite Arnold in particular as a norm, although he must surely have known that the march had actually not been written by Arnold but by a much earlier composer { and he might very well even have known that that composer’s name was F. J. Ricketts } ) , why then then the bums would come rushing back towards the seats of the symphony halls like one’s favorite metaphorical vehicle for a set of entities individually inexorably attracted to more or less any odd member of a set of other entities. ( “Moths to a flame” obviously won’t do because we are talking about multiple seats as well as multiple bums, and “more or less any odd member” must be stipulated because concertgoers are both generally utterly unattached to specific seats and highly choosy about specific tiers of seats. ) To this shopworn kvetchfest Rosen rejoined with age-appropriate crotchetiness ( for he was by then in his seventh or eighth decade and Lloyd-Webber only in his fourth or fifth ) that there was or were no shortage of living professional tonal composers, that to the admittedly small extent that new works were commissioned by current “serious”-or -“classical” music-performing ensembles they were prevailingly works composed by those selfsame sorts of composers, such that if these ensembles were failing to draw bums to seats with contemporary works this could only be because they were happy enough listening to the established pre-ca.-1920-originating tonal repertoire—to the three Bs plus Haydn, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, et a half-dozen al.—and felt no need to have it supplemented with newer works in tonal idioms; and that if it seemed to Lloyd-Webber that the new “serious”-or-“classical” music scene was dominated by a cabal or mafia of post-tonal composers, this was merely because certain works by living post-tonal composers had attracted more enthusiastic advocates among musicians—musicians who championed them by going out of their way to play them—than most works by living tonal composers had done. I expected Music Ho! to propound an argument more or less exactly consubstantial with that promulgated by Lloyd-Webber if slightly more excusable in the light of its axiomatic absence of knowledge of the history of musical performance in the last three-fifths of the twentieth century ( and indeed slightly more redeemable in the light of the incorporation of a sub-handful of tonal composers of the second fifth of the twentieth century [at the moment I can think of only three: Ravel, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich ] into the pantheon of the three Bs et al. ) . And yet I did not dismiss Music Ho! altogether, and indeed I retained a desire and a semi-plan to read it, for in the abovementioned British musicological works it had always been described as a work of impressive if eccentric panache, and as I was coming to appreciate these works more and more for their distinctively British eccentricity even as their value as meta-musical cicerones continued to depreciate chez moi ( I have, incidentally, tried to communicate something of this crescently ambivalent impression in “Weasel Goes the Pop’s” account of the OJCM’s instructions on writing music by hand using conventional notation and score-paper ) , I could not but think of it as a sort of Holy Grail of a time capsule of early-to-mid-twentieth century British eccentricity—for after all, I reasoned, if even these chaps who were as Britishly eccentric as mad cow-afflicted sheepdogs found this Lambert cove a bit loopy, why then by Jove, he could not but be ( or have been ) a full-blown corker of an early-to-mid-twentieth-century British original. So Music Ho! had acquired a sort of ingratiating if slightly gamy period aura in my eyes ( and stomach ) ; I looked forward to reading it with something of the same slightly wincing semi-eagerness with which I looked ( and continue to look ) forward to reading Evelyn Waugh’s wartime novels, which meant that because, like those novels, it did not obtrude myself upon my attention either in the papyral flesh ( to this day I’m not sure I ever espied it in the stacks of the central branch of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, my most recent big library of frequentation [ where one would have expected to find a book as once-famous as Music Ho!, at least until the Pratt went the way of all other public libraries by consigning the bulk of its collection to behind-the-scenes storage { if not the incinerator } ] ) or spiritually, in the form of recommendations from friends or the ubiquitous book-peddling robots of the company that I will not and I daresay need not name, I did not make a priority of seeking it out. But at about the most recent turn of the year, a mention-cum-quotation of MH! in another book both pushed it to the very front of the queue of British eccentricity and thrust it into the near-front of quite a different queue of my readerly curiosity’s jobseeker’s centre ( [ sic ] for we must stick to the British nomenclature, right? ) and thereby—i.e., in transforming it into a hybrid object of readerly curiosity thithterto unknown to me—pushed it quite close to the front of the master-queue of the centre, a.k.a. the list of the four or five books that I planned to read next. The other book was Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, which I believe I started reading for the first time late last autumn ( i.e., that of 2023 ) and finished late last winter or early last spring ( i.e., that of 2023-24 or 2024, respectively ) , a book my lecture of which in relation to that of Music Ho! may be likened to the aftward or more deeply seated member of any number of pairs of entities—say, the viola part in a work of chamber music in which thousands of other inner voices are preposterously interposed between the second violin part ( that part corresponding to the moment when I learned of the existence of IHC ) and the first violin-part, that first violin-part corresponding to the moment when I learned of the existence of Music Ho!; or one of the innermost right curved brackets of a polynominal equation whose leftmost curved bracket corresponds to the moment when I learned of the existence of Music Ho!—in other words, Ideas Have Consequences is both one of the most recent books I have ever heard of and one of the books that I have most recently finished reading, but ( obviously ) not quite as recently as I have finished reading Music Ho!  This belatedness of IHC in my reading-history is “worth mentioning” mainly on account of IHC’s congeniality to my reactionary-cum-pessimistic Weltanschauung and its inevitable points of contact with the writings of one of my most anciently seated favorite latter-day Jeremiahs, Theodor W. Adorno ( whose work I first heard of in the course of the abovementioned first decade of my musicological autodidactic project, specifically via the footnotes of the British music-writer Donald Mitchell’s last book on the music of Gustav Mahler ) . I term these POCs inevitable because IHC, a near-exact contemporary of TWA’s Minima Moralia ( publication dates: 1948 [ IHC ] and 1951 [ MM ] ) self-depreciatingly ( [ sic ] on the first i! ) styles itself “another book about the dissolution of the West” ( avoiding sliding into an abject averral of utterly futile superfluity only via the omission of a prepositive “yet” ) , and TWA’s shoulder-bruisingly frequent cold-shouldering of cold-call offers of a ten-foot pole with which to touch Oswald Spengler & co. notwithstanding, his own corpus is and was effectively one big Jeremiad “about the dissolution of the West,” and when two works comment in the same attitude on the same topic, they are inevitably going to tender sub-topical assertions and arguments that are mutually similar if not always or even ever quite mutually complementary. And so Weaver inevitably proves to be of something of the same mind about music as Adorno. True, unlike Adorno, he finds no potentially redemptive quality in modern “serious” music ( and indeed, as near as I can recall or retrieve, he does not mention by name any composer more recent than Debussy ) , but like Adorno he does not think at all highly of jazz and regards it as inherently and irretrievably regressive, although he also pointedly disparages its “arrangements”—its characteristic treatments of instrumentation—as  “cacophonous,” a word that, owing to its exclusive subjective field of reference, I cannot imagine Adorno’s employing so straightforwardly in his direct appraisal of any musical phenomenon, and indeed a quick digi-search of TWA’s Gesammelte Werke reveals to me that it contains only two occurrences of “cacophonous” or any of its nearly related German and English words therein, both of them being “kakophonisch,” and that one of them is clasped in a pair of nose-clothes-pinning inverted commas keeping TWA at least ten ten-foot-pole lengths from its original employer, his favorite Watschmann, the typical early twentieth-century bourgeois listener, who, says Teddie ( only in German and in the passive voice ) , “defames as ‘cacophonous’ everything that does not conform to the ideal of sonically sensual hedonism”; and in the other he is employing the word with deliberate licentiousness by way of distinguishing his super-refined-cum-super-advanced musical subjectivity from that of the just-mentioned Watschmann ( here again I am translating from a German text ) : “There are modern compositions that insinuate occasional tonal triads into their fabric. It is such triads and not the dissonances that are cacophonous.” Adorno does not really mean here that these triads, these intrinsically consonant chords, are harsh-sounding when he heard on their own; he merely means that at least to a truly up-to-date ear they sound out of place amid so many dissonant chordal neighbors. As regarded jazz arrangements, Adorno would have asserted to Weaver ( and presumably could have asserted to him at some point, what with their both residing in the US at the end of the 40s and TWA’s pal Horkheimer’s having professionally sojourned at Weaver’s academic home base, the University of Chicago [ although I own I don’t know and can’t be bothered to find out whether Weaver was already at the U of C at the start of Horkheimer’s sojurn ] ) that in the main they ought to be regarded as cacophonous only in this polemically licentious sense, that to any truly up-to-date ear they could sound unpleasant only because they had not surrendered unreservedly to “the emancipation of the dissonance.” And even on the questions of what in the tradition of great Austro-German music jazz had regressed from and at what point the regression had begun occurring Weaver and Adorno were not of exactly one mind. For Adorno, the just-mentioned tradition had “in a certain very real” if qualified “sense” reached its zenith in the music of Beethoven inasmuch as via his compositional modus operandi of endlessly ramifying variation within the productive constraints of the tonic-dominant harmonic system, Beethoven had given the fullest authentic scope to the expressive potentialities of the autonomous individual ( a.k.a. the “subject” in the Kantian sense ) while subsequent composers, beginning with Schubert and bottoming out with Richards Wagner and Strauss, had “in a certain very real sense” gone soft in a jazzward direction by reducing self-expression to the expression of sentimental emotions and thereby surrendered to the historical forces that were most perniciously destructive of the individual’s autonomy. For Weaver, by contrast, Beethoven’s self-assertion already marked a moment of decline because the aristocratic hierarchy against which it had asserted itself had itself merited perfect preservation, and the composer whose work had tendered the most eloquent argument in that hierarchy’s favor had been one of Beethoven’s immediate predecessors, Mozart. Perhaps not quite needless if not quite needful to say, Adorno would have blanched at ( and perhaps actually did blanch at ) this characterization of Mozart, whom he regarded as much more of a proto-Beethovenian individual than as a “shoeshine boy for the ruling elite” of the Ancien Regime. Howbeit, it is to the support of this characterization and of his larger aristocratophilic argument that Weaver dedicates his citation of Lambert, which is brief enough that I can quote it in its entirety:

Especially significant was the steady decay of symphonic form, which effectually mirrored the progressive dissolution of the class system. A modern critic [ i.e., Lambert ] has remarked that “the whole framework of society, whose relation to the individual symbolizes the cadences and codas that gently restrain the flow of Mozart’s passionate line, is crumbling away if not already completely dedicated.” We are even told [ by Lambert ] that the symphonic form was repellent to Moussorgsky because its first-movement predominance signified to him aristocratic domination.           

So as I just mentioned, in certain respects this is not very Adornan. But as far as my readerly self of late very late 2023 or very early 2024 was concerned, its degree of divergence from Adorno was more than adequately supplemented by its divergence from the twentieth-century British musicological declensionist party line. For ( so I reflected in very late 2023 or very early 2024 ) that party line had certainly not been signalized by the faintest trace of patricianism: it emphatically had not defended good old-fashioned tonal serious music on the grounds that that music had kept the lower orders in their place; to the contrary, it had evinced unalloyed joy at the general democratization of British society, and even if it had seldom if ever explicitly defended tonality on behalf of the average British prole or peasant, it had made it transparently clear—mainly through its championing of home-grown composers like Holst and Vaughan Williams whose melodic material was drawn extensively from English folksong and hymnody—that it regarded tonal serious music as being fit for consumption by the lowliest of churls as by the loftiest of toffs and that if there was anybody whom it thought deserved to be called a snob in the proper sense that anybody was the composer or champion of post-tonal music with his unstinting disdain for the aural cravings of a mass listenership. The tiny passage from Music Ho! quoted-cum-paraphrased by Weaver suggested that he was a was a specimen of an animal that I had always regarded as entirely chimerical—viz., the “elitist” British twentieth-century music critic, and indeed, my disbelief in the existence of such a creature prompted me to consult the Wikipedia entry on Lambert post-haste by way of reassuring myself that I had not been completely mistaken all those years in assuming he had ( had ) anything whatsoever in common with his spießbürgerlich compatriots, and happily unhappily, I did at ( or in ) that entry find at least darning evidence of a populist streak in his thought—a streak most strikingly streaking ( i.e., exhibitionistically naked ) in his notion that jazz was better suited to the Anglophone singing voice because more attuned to its native rhythms than the Italian arias and German Lieder on which all “serious” writing for the voice by English composers had been patterned. Perhaps not quite needless to say ( i.e., because received opinion is so universal and obdurate in its contention that Adorno completely misunderstood jazz [ i.e., inasmuch as all the music on which he had founded his notion of it supposedly been “fake” jazz { whereas there is abundant evidence that he was as hip (however reluctantly, out of mere professional necessity ) to the hottest jazzmen as most ardent jitterbugger } ] that the reader may very well have assumed that my already-signaled fandom of Adorno excluded fandom of his jazz-execration, such that he or she may have erroneously attributed a mien or in a tone of po-faced disdain worthy of TWA himself to my remark that both TWA and Dick Weaver disliked jazz), as I admired Adorno as much for his disparagement of jazz as for his eulogization of “serious” modern music, I could not  but in the first instance regard this revelation as a strike against Lambert. En revanche, I could not but be sneakingly heartened by the revelation inasmuch as it gratified one of my most ancient, deep-seated, and unubudgeable aesthetic prejudices—a prejudice against “serious” music sung in English ( a prejudice, incidentally, that I [ had ] made public in my blog-posted admission that all English operatic and liederisch singing off-puttingly reminded me of the improvised operas-for-tiny-tots concocted by the professional bass-baritone John Reardon and several unprofessional singers on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ) . What if, I wondered, vis-à-vis jazz Lambert had somehow miraculously squared the circle of meta-aesthetic rectitude without circling TWA as a square—i.e., if he had somehow salvaged certain peripheral redeemable elements ( and only those elements ) of jazz overlooked by Adorno and had consigned the remainder thereof to the same dustbin or ash-heap as TWA had consigned it? By the time I was posing this yearning question to myself, my motives for reading Music Ho! had accumulated to the point of reaching a kind of critical mass of urgency-cum-curiosity that I was resolved to read the blessed book forthwith if it didn’t turn out to be one of those many long out-of-print-yet-non-yet-public-domain volumes that was now only purchasable used for several-dozen dollars or more. Happily it turned out to be one of those few long-out-of-print volumes that were ( and are ) purchasable in a Kindle edition for less than a single-dozen dollars, and so within minutes of forming ( or being formed by ) this resolution, I had the book in my hands and was commencing my Kraszanahorkaian fairground tour of the exhibit-exhausting beast ( the beast still being Lambert, of course, and Music Ho! being an entirely adequate synecdoche for him, at least qua writer [ or, rather, more specifically { for Lambert’s own repeated odd use of “writer” as an alternative to “composer” somehow prompts me to provide such specification at least while treating of his work } writer in natural verbal language ] , inasmuch as it is the only book he ever published ) . And now that I have finished the tour I can in all candor and frankness say that it was more than worth the price of admission whether one defines that price in monetary or chronographic terms, which is to say at no point during my lecture of Music Ho! did Lambert prove pigeonhole-able as just another exponent of this or that position or attitude already familiar to me. Above all, to-his-credit-wise, while being ever-unmistakable as anything other than an English natural-language writer of the late-early twentieth century, he proved un-pigeonhole-able as yet another specimen of Britannicus musicalis amicus vulgorum, as just another one of the abovementioned bluff-and-tweedy British writers on music whose “elitist” conception of Mozart had been a mere momentary twinge of old-school Tory patricianism. This is not to say that Lambert proved to be an altogether intellectually admirable figure, that he shewed himself to be indisputably a man of high genius putting his genius to sound work according to sound principles from the first page of MH! to its last. It is also not to say that Lambert’s abovementioned admiration of jazz and undialectical nostalgia for “the class system” turned out to be fleeting or marginal enough to his argument to make for an effortless assimilation of his overall conception of the recent and prospective fortunes of music to that of Adorno. It is, however, to say that like that of numerous works of cultural criticism ( for lack of a better blanket genre-designation ) by Adorno’s Anglophone contemporaries—notably Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and David Riesman—Music Ho!’s argument complemented and enriched Adorno’s on its topic at so many points as to make me wish that its author had had a lengthy chinwag with Adorno so that the two of them could have hashed out and clarified their differences on the equally numerous other points on which they diverged from each other so that the effort of arriving at a more-or-less adequate understanding of that topic would prove less onerous a job of work for posterity ( or at least the portion of posterity embodied in the present writer ) ; even if, to judge by Adorno’s dismissive appraisal of Riesman’s Lonely Crowd as bearing as much resemblance to his own sociological work as ( effectively [ for although my imperfection of memory and bereavement of access to the source of the remark oblige me to coarsen TWA’s phrasing, the analogy was most certainly framed in oenological-cum-geographical terms ] ) a can of Budweiser to an Achtel of Riesling ( this despite TWA’s citation of The Lonely Crowd in unqualified support of his argument in one of his essays ) , in each such case a chinwag would have proved quite a tough slog from the very beginning on account of the presumptive difficulty of finding a bar or restaurant equipped to supply each conversant his favorite tipple. Anyway, inasmuch as I am from here onwards going to be setting about the intrinsically tricky business of comparing a single book ( Lambert’s ) to a massive corpus of books and essays ( Adorno’s, plus a smattering of the writings of Rosen and perhaps one or two other representative later-cum-non-British writers about music ) , and inasmuch as despite their convergence or quasi-convergence at certain significant points, Adorno’s and Lambert’s lines of thought differ quite radically from each other in their overall trajectories, the safest if not necessarily the most efficient modus operandi is perhaps to address the points of convergence or quasi-convergence from the outset and work outwards and backwards from there. These points seem to be roughly divisible between shared attitudes to specific composers and shared conceptions of the phenomenology of listening—of the sorts of experiences listening to music has exacted and entailed in the course of the ages. As regards to the attitudes to composers, the convergences effectively boil down to a shared qualified admiration of Bartòk qua exponent of an authentically modern “folksiness,” a shared unqualified admiration of Satie qua heroic non-participator in the main trajectory of the evolution of early-twentieth century music, and an unqualified disdain for Stravinsky and Hindemith qua neoclassical “restaurateurs” ( to employ in the plural Arnold Schoenberg’s [ whom I incidentally just thought of including in the list of convergees before concluding that Lambert’s attitude to him was ultimately a sort of grudging respect and hence too distant from Adorno’s qualified adulation ] wittily bivalent term of disparagement for Stravinsky alone ) . As regards the phenomenology of listening, the convergences would seem to require too much “thick description” to be amenable to down-boiling and should therefore perhaps be addressed first, as this un-down-boilability would seem in turn to render them less felicitous as a starting-point for the abovementioned outwards-cum-backwards-working. Being near-exact contemporaries born in the early-to-middle nineteen-oughties ( TWA in 1903, CL in 1905 ) , Adorno and Lambert were both peculiarly historically well-placed to register and document perhaps the most substantial and certainly the speediest transformation of this phenomenology to date ( not only their date but also ours ) —viz., its electrification via radio broadcasting studios and receivers and electric microphones and loudspeakers, a transformation which seems to have taken place over a very short period lasting only from about 1923 to about 1930. If they had been born only a decade earlier, they would have come of age in the heyday of the acoustic gramophone record played through those massive “iconic” inverted ear-trumpets of the type that appears with the dog in the record-company logo; a heyday that was also the heyday of late-stage music hall ( whence the prominence thereof in the poems of T. S. Eliot [ b. 1889 ] ) , the ragtime sheet-music hit, the player piano, and the silent short film accompanied by a live pianist—in short, a microepoch in which while music-listening had been both thoroughly massified and engirded by what Adorno’s friend Walt Benjamin ( b. 1892, and hence exactly too early by the interval now in point ) would have termed aura of urban life, it still had to rely entirely on the unabetted air for the transmission of the music from its source to the listener’s ear. Had they been born only a decade later, they would still have been in short trousers even at the end of the transformation and hence too young to write about it clearly and dispassionately “in real time” and further hence relegated to writing about it many years later in the sort of quasi-Proustian nostalgiograph that Benjamin produced in his Berlin Childhood Circa 1900 ( and shorter examples of which Adorno, taking as his point of reference therefor his own “Frankfurt Childhood Circa 1910,” incorporated into several of his large-form works, notably Minima Moralia ) —a potentially invaluable text in its own right and own way but one that would have been powerless to register the transformation qua transformation of the quotidian life of society at large, ineluctably mediated as it would have been by the subjectivity of a child with all its caprices and limitations. The films A Christmas Story and Radio Days, in each being formally governed by a first-person narrative voiceover and hence “arguably” as much literary as cinematic in essence, convey something of the sort of counterfactual nostalgiograph I have in mind with regard to this specific phenomenon, although of course given that Jean Shepherd and Woody Allen were born even later than my counterfactual Lambert or Adorno, they inevitably incorporate gestalts of electronically mediated listening that would have been out of his historical reach. My counterfactual Lambert or Adorno would have been unable to imagine the characters of radio dramas coming to life à la Shepherd and Allen ( if in such a setting as this one really is supposed to pretend that “Allen” is Mr. Konigsberg’s surname [ for of course on account of all the you- know-whats of the past third of a century no member of the general public any longer feels comfortable referring to him chummily as “Woody” ] ) because there were yet no radio dramas at the dawn of radio, but he might have imagined that Christopher Stone, the first radio DJ, about whom Lambert writes in a tone of extremely grown-up dyspepsia in Music Ho!, was his father’s best friend or his mother’s paramour; and he might have imagined much the same sort of thing about the early singing stars of radio and electronically recorded 78s—Rudy Vallée et al. Anyhow, regarding the transformation of the phenomenology of listening through electrification: as near as I can recall, Adorno’s account of this transformation is entirely subsumable under two concepts—the atomization of listening, i.e., the habituation to hearing and attending to music only in small chunks occasioned by the breaking of even the longest of works into segments lasting less than ten minutes each; and the homogenization of sonority or perhaps, rather, the synthetization of sonority, i.e., the tendency of the timbres of instruments to blend into each other—for example in the non-solo-spotlighting stretches of a jazz arrangement, during which one will hear the trombones, trumpets, saxophones, and clarinets in the aggregate as “the horn section” and hence, effectively, as a single instrument. Of course, a reader who is both gimlet-eyed and reasonably knowledgeable about the history of mechanical music reproduction will be keen to point out that both  of these concepts were already in play during the microepoch of the acoustically recorded gramophone record—and such a reader would be right to point this out. For after all, the records of the acoustic micro-epoch were no wider than those of the early electric era ( [ sic ] , incidentally, on the leapfrogging over “epoch” to “era,” for we are after all still in the period of electrically mediated music reproduction { electronics being after all but a miniaturized electrics } , such that it has been at least a quarter-century since that period surpassed in length the locus classicus of an historical period long enough to be regarded as an era—viz., the Victorian one ) ; nor did they ever spin an RPM-let more slowly unless one forgot to wind them up ( and presumably, although I don’t know enough about the inner workings of acoustic Victrolas to confirm this, a record was as likely to play faster than the prescribed 78RPM through over-winding as slower through under-winding ) . And of course because acoustic recording is intrinsically “lower-fo” than electric recording, the sonorities of the instruments were perforce even more inclined to blend together on records of the acoustic micro-epoch than on these records’ early electric era counterparts-cum-descendants. All the same, I submit ( and I am as sure as one can be about such non-fact-checkable statelets of affairs that Adorno would have concurred with my submission ) that these phenomena were more prevalent in the early electric era than in the acoustic micro-epoch owing to two efficient causes—1) the abovementioned supervention of radio broadcasting, a medium that imposed rather than merely encouraged atomized listening by interspersing blocks of music with spoken announcements of various sorts and that, what with there being only so many hours in a day then as before and since, perforce displaced a goodly portion of the listening-hours formerly devoted to the unmediated audition of records. 2) The supervention of electric amplification, which perforce increased the volume of the reproduced sound by gosh-only-knows how many decibels and thereby perforce drew the listener’s attention gosh-only-knows how much more closely to the sonorities contained therein. Of course, though, the gimlet-eyed and reasonably knowledgeable reader may well be inclined to contest the validity of at least the first of my three “perforces” by asserting that however popular radio proved to be, there was presumably nothing stopping the listener of the early radio era ( which of course I am describing as an era because like electrical mediation, radio is still very much with us, however marginal proper old-school radio stations may have become to today’s phenomenology of listening ) from continuing to get all his mechanically reproduced music directly from records and that even if his first-generation electrically amplified Victrola permitted him to play his discs at a wall-and-floor shaking Level-11 volume, he was presumably free to play them at a Level-1 volume that afforded him seamless continuity with the mercifully low decibelage consistently produced by his last-generation acoustic Victrola. But this demurral fails to take into account an aspect of electrically mediated mechanical era that was if not altogether absent from the acoustically mediated mechanical microepoch then at least much more subdued therein—namely, its frequent if intermittent non-electiveness owing to the obtrusion of electrically amplified loudspeakers into public spaces, and it is in the showcasing of this aspect that Lambert really shines, and shines, at least in my reading experience, both unprecedentedly and unsucceededly, for Adorno in his essays and studies on radio simply treats the non-electiveness as a fait accompli. Lambert, by vivid contrast, shows us what it was like to be “present at the creation” of the musical noise-pollution industry as an intelligent listener accustomed to hearing music only where and when he chose, and he reveals it to have been quite a disconcerting and irritating experience:

What people do in their own homes is fortunately still their own concern, but what takes place in public streets and public houses concerns us all. The loud speaker is little short of a public menace.

In the neighbourhood where I live, for example, there is a loud speaker every hundred yards or so, and it is only rarely that they are tuned in to different stations. If they are playing the foxtrot I most detest at one corner of the street, I need not think that I can avoid it by walking to the other end. At times there is a certain piquancy in following a tune in two dimensions at once, so to speak—to buy one’s cigarettes to the first subject of a symphony, to get scraps of the development as one goes to the newsagent, and to return home to the recapitulation—but the idea of the town as one vast analytical programme, with every pavingstone a barline, soon palls. It would not matter so much were the music bad music but, as the B.B.C. can boast with some satisfaction, most of it is good. We board buses to the strains of Beethoven and drink our beer to the accompaniment of Bach. And yet we pride ourselves on the popular appreciations of these masters.

The concluding three sentences of this passage with their allusion to two of the three B’s naturally recall Adorno’s numerous polemics against the degradation of great music through overexposure on radio and television. But on this matter, too, Lambert affords insight not found in Adorno and presumably unavailable to him—insight that had he been compelled to take it to heart would have at minimum compelled him to be more resourceful in countering the ever-repeated charge that he was an “elitist” in the politically problematic sense. For Adorno’s experience of such overexposure took place in the listening environment provided by American commercial radio of the 1940s and West- German state radio and television of the 1950s and 1960s, an environment wherein the overexposure proceeded in lockstep with what one might term a curatorship of stultification, a system of music programming in which traditional crowd-pleasers were given pride of place in broadcast schedules and even lesser-known works by the most famous composers were rarely heard. ( Somewhere or other Adorno tenders a gripe to the effect that among American radio listeners, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony is regarded as an eldritch obscurity. ) In British radio at the moment of the writing of Music Ho!, musical-curatorship bore an entirely different stamp owing to the near-total domination of the airwaves by the non-commercial governmentally affiliated BBC, which did not scruple to impose on listeners the music it thought they should be listening to, and as Lambert reveals, that music was more than occasionally quite advanced and difficult:

One might have thought that the sturdy British working man entering a public house and being greeted with a talk on the Reclamation of the Zuyder Zee, or a string quartet by Alban Berg, would have requested the proprietor, and not entirely without reason, to ‘put a sock in it’; but actually he just sits solidly there, drinking his synthetic bitter to sounds of synthetic sweetness, not caring whether the loud speaker is tuned into a jazz band, a talk on wildflowers, a Schönberg opera or a reading from ‘The Land’ by the authoress [ i.e., Vita Sackville-West ] . So long as certain waves are set up in the ether to produce a certain reaction on his tympanum he is content.

It was presumably such impositions of high culture on plebian ears as are mentioned in this paragraph that C. S. Lewis had in mind when he had Bill “the Blizzard” Hingest, his mouthpiece in That Hideous Strength, dismiss as “balderdash” the desire of academic sociologists to “make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music.” To the end of his days, Adorno obdurately maintained that the mass listeners were by no means organically incapable of listening appropriately to serious music and that it was merely because they had never been provided with anything than better jazz, pop, and light “classical” favorites by the culture industry that they had come to prefer these inferior alternatives, but Lambert’s observations on the radio-listening habitus of the “sturdy English working man” seems at least tentatively to give the lie to Adorno’s giving of the benefit of the doubt to that man and his American and Continental-European fellows. To be sure, it is fair enough to point out that the results of the SEWA’s exposure to Berg and Schoenberg could have been worse from Adorno’s point of view, that the SEWA could have asked the pub-landlord to “put a sock” in the loudspeaker on hearing the opening measures of the Lyric Suite or Erwartung instead of silently nursing his synthetic bitter ( whatever that is [ I suspect Lambert is merely snootily abusing some perfectly natural mass-produced lager like Watney’s Red Barrel { whose posters with their slogans of “We want Watneys!” Adorno presumably saw during his very brief early-WWII sojourn in England and definitely excoriated as a sort of allegory of the culture industry’s manufactured fandom } ) to them from their first measures to their last. And to be sure, it is perhaps even fairer to point out that Lambert only reports on the SEWA’s audition of these pieces from the outside, presenting no other evidence of his indifference to their distinctness from jazz-band tunes or the poetry of Vita Sackville-West than the “solidness” with which he sits there on his barstool taking them in; that presumably he never even thought to ask the SEWA what he thought of them, and that for all he, Lambert, apparently actually knew, the “solidness” was but a mask for the most rapt attention-cum-ardent appreciation of them and “The Land” ( and, complementarily, for the fiercest aversion to the jazz-band tunes ) . And to be sure, it is perhaps fairest of all to point out that Adorno himself, for all the firmness of his conviction that the common man could be brought to love and understand even the most formidably complex compositions of the Second Viennese School under the right circumstances ( however sketchily he may ever have gotten round to adumbrating those circumstances ) , thought it “schoolmasterly presumption” to “force culture down the throats of an unwilling population,” such that is seems at least not improbable that had he spent as much time studying British curatorship of music as its American counterpart he would have been as dissatisfied with the former as with the latter; a supposition that finds reinforcement in Lambert’s brief stricture on the decidedly schoolmasterly Christopher Stone, the early-1930s BBC’s sole disk jockey ( and, indeed, the UK’s first DJ ever, according to the online reference work of first resort ) :

To take the example of Mr. Christopher Stone whose well-modulated voice has doubtless given pleasure to millions. At certain hours of the day, it is impossible for anyone to escape from his breezy diffidence. That he is a benevolent autocrat I am sure is true, just as I am sure that his choice of records is reasonably intelligent and eclectic. But the fact remains that he enjoys a position of dictatorship as fantastic as anything in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.    

Of course the aural image of an inescapable disembodied voice associated with a specific person for all its disembodiedness and dictatorially telling one what one must listen to wherever one goes is even more evocative of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four than of Brave New World, but Lambert didn’t have Nineteen Eighty-Four to cite in Nineteen Thirty-Three because it hadn’t yet been written then; and indeed the chronological priority of Music Ho! to Orwell’s novel conjoined with Orwell’s own membership of the abovementioned born-in-the-nineteen-oughties club suggests that his ubiquitous Big Brother-broadcasting telescreens were but an audiovisual extrapolation from an unpleasant personal phenomenology of radio listening exactly contemporaneous and sympatric with Lambert’s. ( In-further-deed, when I learn from the online reference work of first resort that in the late thirties Stone expanded his DJ-ing activities into child-orientated programming under the sobriquet “Uncle Chris,” I cannot but wonder if Big Brother owed the faux-familial cast of his name to Stone [even as I cannot but laugh at Stone-qua-“Uncle Chris”’s more vivid anticipation of SCTV’s Floyd Robertson-qua- “Count Floyd” ] . ) Lambert’s remaining animadversions on atomized listening are also very just, but they do not merit singling out and excerpting at length like the above ones because they are centered on the phenomenon of private listening via the gramophone record and therefore do not essentially say anything that has not since been said about such listening via that medium and its technologically enhanced successors. His argument in these passages boils down to an assertion that the abundance and heterogeneity of music available on records tends to lead home listeners either to binge ( as we would say nowadays ) on the music of a particular composer or genre or to mix and match music of many genres and composers, and that both of these tendencies are deleterious to the bestowal of an adequate degree of attention to specific works. And he was of course quite right about this, but, as my above observation of the continuity of format between electrically and acoustically enregistered records makes plain, he would doubtless have been just as right—or nearly just as right ( for the sheer quantity of available repertoire had doubtless increased several-fold in the intervening thirty years ) --had he directed the same shafts of at the home-audition of records at the turn of the century, and he would certainly have been even more right had he lived to direct them at the I-Tunes or YouTube playlist. It would appear that private overlistening is a disease permanently endemic to the era of portable mechanical musical media, and after nearly a century of the macro-socially ineffectuality of eloquent warnings against it like Lambert’s, one cannot but conclude that “therein the patient must minister to himself” ( as the present writer has sedulously attempted to do for at least forty years with admittedly only modest and intermittent success ) . On the matter of the effect of electronic amplification on sonority, though, Music Ho! includes a passage eminently worthy of insertion and exegesis herein:

I have heard a woman of some intelligence and musical training actually state that she preferred the magic tone of the oboe over the wireless to the actual sound of it in the concert hall; and I have heard a painter, who prides himself on his modernity, state that the two dimensional effect of broadcast music was to be preferred because the sound instead escaping round the hall came straight at you and had ‘a frame round it.’

First if least one must remark that this passage particularly eloquently underscores the difference in sonority both between the earliest electrically amplified music and the acoustically amplified music of early gramophones and between the earliest amplified music and electrified amplified music since about the late 1950s. The woman of some intelligence and musical training does not say she prefers the “sound of the woodwinds” or even “the sound of the double reeds” as heard over the radio; she says that she prefers the sound specifically of the oboe heard thereover, so one observes here that advent of electric recording-cum-transmission has coincided with the arrival of a new capacity for spotlighting individual instruments. At the same time she ( or Lambert ) thinks of the radio-transmitted tone as “magic” and hence palpably distinct from the sound of an “actual” oboe. While it is easy enough to imagine a listener of the late 1950s or later saying he prefers hearing the oboe over the radio to hearing it in the concert hall, it is rather difficult to imagine such a listener ascribing that preference to a difference in the tone of the instrument itself rather than to some more peripheral-cum-intangible quality like the ambient acoustics implied by the transmitted performance, for by the late 1950s the world had fully entered the hi-fi-stroke-stereo era wherein ( barring the conspicuous supervention of flaws in the transmitting medium like radio static or scratches on a record ) recorded sounds were generally effectively aurally indistinguishable from their real-world sources and counterparts. And by the late 1950s broadcast music had by and large ceased to be “two-dimensional” and to come “straight at” listeners with “a frame around it” because it had begun to come at them with two frames around it—i.e., the frames provided by the paired speakers of high-fidelity stereo in place of the single frame provided by pre-stereo home listening equipment—and concomitantly acquired a third dimension. But this passage is principally interesting on account of what one might term the perverse dialecticalism ( or dialectality ) of the two preferences described in it—a dialecticalism or dialecticality of a sort particularly keenly relished by Adorno. In this respect the passage recalls Adorno’s account of Alban Berg’s defense of shaving to him on the grounds that while women appreciated hair on a man’s face as an attribute of masculinity, they actually preferred the touch of a clean-shaven face to a bearded one because it allowed them to feel the beard sprouting underneath the skin. But the two preferences also at bear at least superficial comparison to certain well-known counterintuitive but eminently defensible attitudes to mechanically reproduced music—for example to Glenn Gould’s argument that however heavily edited, a studio recording of a given work can present a more authentic and comprehensive aural view of the work than even the best concert performance because it allows the performer to correct all his mistakes; or Adorno’s that older operas are better heard over the gramophone than seen in the opera house because any stage production is bound to foreground the preposterousness of their scenarios in relation to the historical moment of the listener. And so one cannot help asking oneself if Lambert’s derision of the two preferrers is entirely merited. I must admit that the painter’s preference at least receives a half-echo from my bosom, for there are times when I am listening to a really excellent monophonic recording and find myself grateful that the music is all in one frame and coming directly at me and reflect that a stereophonic alternative would only deleteriously scatter it about the room. But the key phrase in the immediately preceding sentence is “really excellent,” for owing to the concurrent shift from shellac discs to magnetic tape as the recording medium at the source, the sound-engineer’s control booth at the studio or concert hall, really excellent monophonic recordings—recordings in which the fidelity of sound-reproduction seriously rivals that of later stereo counterparts—only began to be produced at the dawn of the LP epoch ( which I do not hesitate to term an epoch rather than an era inasmuch as it lasted at most a mere four decades [ for the current vinyl revival in classical music listening is but a picayune offshoot of the uninterrupted fetishization of the medium by fans of “underground” and “indie” pop music ] ) , a dawn that still lay two decades in the future at the moment of Music Ho!’s penning. When listening to even one of the most illustrious recordings of the 78 epoch ( say, one of Artur Schnabel’s renditions of the Beethoven piano sonatas ) I invariably strain to give pride of place to the music rather than to the invariably tinny and unresonant recording medium, and I find the sonorities of the instruments communicated thereby about as “magic” as that of the human voice as heard via an old-school answering-machine microcassette ( a sonority that I concede may sound “magic” indeed to certain younkers [ doubtless the very same younkers whose consumer dollars are fueling the abovementioned picayune classical vinyl revival ] who grew up with digital voicemail ) . But perhaps “that’s just me”—not me qua timeless individual listener with his own idiosyncratic listening preferences, to be sure, but me qua everylistener of the post-78 era, or, rather everylistener thereof too spießbürgerlich to bracket his aversion to the limitations of the medium, for at least if one accepts a certain notion of the quiddity of music that has been espoused by certain highly respectable thinkers-cum-writers on the subject ( e.g., the abovementioned Mr. Gould ) —viz., that a musical composition is essentially reducible to the “structures” delineated or embodied by it—one must be prepared to acknowledge that the transition from the “mid-fidelity” sound-reproduction of the 78 epoch to the hi-fidelity sound-reproduction of the LP epoch made music only marginally ( if at all ) more present to the ears and minds of listeners. For example, I do not find it a jot more difficult to identify the start of the recapitulation of a Beethoven sonata movement as played by Schnabel than I do the parallel moment in the same sonata as played on a state-of-the-digital art recording by a twentieth-first century Beethoven master like Paul Lewis. And despite the famous “X-ray like” sonic image afforded by Glenn Gould’s stereo-era recordings of Bach, I do not find it a jot easier to hear the entrances of the voices of Bach’s fugues as played by him than as played by Schnabel’s contemporary Edwin Fischer ( indeed, I tend to find it slightly easier to hear Fischer’s entrances on account of his old-school predilection for playing them more loudly than the already-active voices ) . To be sure, when listening to pre-hi-fi recordings of orchestral works I sometimes have trouble discerning individual score-parts, particularly in the highest registers. But it might be plausibly argued that such detail is peripheral or even extrinsic to the abovementioned structures, and it is incontestably known that certain composers for the orchestra ( notably Richard Strauss, as Charles Rosen points out in his monograph on Arnold Schoenberg ) have gone out of their way to write orchestral parts that are not meant to be heard note-for-note, parts vis-à-vis which pellucidity of sonic reproduction is a feature rather than a bug, as one says nowadays. In short, although one would really need a ca. 1960-dated postscript to Music Ho! penned by a Lambert who had lived till then to be quite sure of this, it would appear that Lambert’s bemusement by-cum-contempt for the painter and the woman of some intelligence was founded in a notion of music as something not essentially reducible to the abovementioned “structures.” It would therefore further appear that answering the question whether his derision of these people was justified will depend on answering the question whether the notion that music is essentially reducible to those structures is a true and accurate one. Before reading Music Ho! I was more or less sure that the answer to that second question was a firm Yes, and now I am at most or best half sure that it is. And to state this is obviously to imply that at some point or set of points in Music Ho!  Lambert makes a case for a notion of music as something not essentially reducible to the abovementioned structures and that this case is at least partly convincing ( at least to me ) . Such being the meta-case, it would seem that for the sake of addressing the master-question in point, the question of the justifiedness or unjustifiedness of the derision, my very next discursive step should be to summarize the just-mentioned case in as many words as are required for its succinct summarization. “But,” the attentive reader is bound now to query, “given that you have already resolved to make your discourse center on the disentangling of Lambert’s line of thought from Adorno’s, will not the taking of this next step perforce constitute a forswearing of your resolution and an at-minimum-middlingly-massive digression from your discursive center?” And to this query I am happily reply, “By no means, for while Adorno seems never to have maintained that music was reducible to the abovementioned structures, he seems always to have presupposed that such structures merited pride of place in any discussion or audition of a work of music and that all other elements of a work were of subordinate importance to them and significant only to the extent that they served to accentuate those structures or disguise their defectiveness.”  So, for example ( an example that helpfully will allow me to do some backfilling on Adorno’s conjectural attitude to the passage from Lambert about the magic oboe sound and the aural picture frame ) regarding the abovementioned tendency of the timbres of instruments in a jazz arrangement to blend into each other, he effectively held that the blending arose out of and abetted the absence of coherent voice-leading in jazz, out of its lack of regard to the interrelations of chords qua bearers of mutually distinguishable “horizontal” successions of notes—in other words, the basic “horizontal” structural units that allow one to distinguish a main melody from its accompaniment in a prevailingly homophonic passage or a melody from its peers in a prevailingly polyphonic one.

But onto the promised and long-deferred disentangling, a task that is complicated by the fact that Adorno ascribes to both Hindemith and Stravinsky a tendency that Lambert spotlights only in Hindemith, however snugly it may complement ( and in fact does complement ) the shortcomings he detects in Stravinsky. But for the sake of forestalling the generation of elf-locks in my own argument I shall “bracket” or “stick a pin in” this partial mismatch and concentrate for now on the tendency as exclusively Hindemithian. This tendency may be described as “voluntary self-mechanization,” and in his 1941 essay “On Popular Music” Adorno succinctly ( albeit not so succinctly as to dissuade me from omitting some sentences from my transcription of the pertinent passage ) describes the tendency itself and its psychological motivations:

[ Stravinsky and Hindemith ] aimed at musical adaptation to reality—a reality understood by them in terms of the “machine age.” The renunciation of dreaming by these composers is an index that listeners are ready to replace dreaming by these composers is an index that listeners are ready to replace dreaming by adjustment to raw reality, that they reap new pleasure from their acceptance of the unpleasant. [ … ] They take what is called a realistic attitude and attempt to harvest consolation by identifying themselves with the external social forces which they think constitutes the “machine age.” [ ….T ] he machine is an end in itself only under given social conditions—where men are appendages of the machines on which they work. The adaptation to machine music necessarily implies a renunciation of one’s own human feelings and at the same time a fetishism of the machine such that its instrumental character becomes obscured thereby.     

The phrase “men” as “appendages of the machines on which they work” naturally conjures two “iconic” images of the silent cinema—that of young Fredersen crucified to the giant clock-like gizmo in Metropolis and that of Charlie Chaplin caught in the cogs of the assembly lines in Modern Times ( which, yes, I know, has a soundtrack and is therefore technically not a silent film ) and was doubtless partly inspired by both of them. It suggests that Adorno conceives of the typical early-mid-twentieth-century individual as more than figuratively a factory worker and of Hindemith as at least subjectively identifying with or directly pandering to such a person. Lambert’s “take” on the phenomenon is—dare I even commit the blasphemy to virtual paper?—more dialectical than Adorno’s. In the first place, as he points out in completely separate section of the book from the one on Hindemith, a section on contemporary abuses of folk music, he does not conceive of the typical individual of his time as a proletarian but as the “tired and harassed business man wearing a characterless and standardized bowler [ hat ] ,” one of millions of men dispersed among “twelve different European capitals” and “following precisely the same drab occupations, supporting wives or mistresses wearing the same cheap French models and using the same cheap French perfume, going to the same Garbo film, listening to the same kind of motor car”—a decidedly bourgeois type despite his consumption of standardized assembly-line-produced products and despite resembling such products to a model-T turn in his international interchangeability with his fellows. At the same time, he avows that Hindemith’s music is intrinsically and consistently mechanical:

“Lytton Strachey writing of Macaulay says that his style ‘with its metallic exactness and its fatal efficiency was certainly one of the most remarkable products of the Industrial Revolution.’ Hindemith bears much the same relation to the German classics as Macaulay did to the English classics, and his style, with its deadness and monotony of rhythm, its atonal jazzing up of Bach’s sewing-machine counterpoint, is an equally typical product of the present Mechanical Age. It has the hardness of outline and slightly hollow ring that Strachey finds in Macaulay.

Of course Adorno would doubtless have shouted the German equivalent of “Them’s fightin’ words” at the description of Bach’s counterpoint as “sewing-machine”-like. But then of course Macaulay died more than thirty years before Hindemith was born, such that we are obviously not dealing with state-of-the-art twentieth-century machinery in either case.  Perhaps the Bachian sewing machine is actually to be understood here as a non-pejoratively as a comparatively wholesome piece of early industrial technology. Admittedly, the online reference work of first resort informs me that the first sewing machine was invented in 1755, five years after J.S. Bach’s death, but presumably Lambert, like any other self-respecting literate Anglo-Saxon of his day, had as his reference work of first resort the work on which the online reference work of first resort would later be superstructed—viz., eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which, having not yet had any electronic superstructure imposed on it presumably did not include an entry specifically on the sewing machine. ( And perhaps I shall someday even verify this, if I can ever be bothered to dig my own eleventh edition of the EB out of the half-dozen storage crates amongst which it is dispersed. ) In any case Lambert’s point here is that Hindemith’s self-mechanization is an instance of “uneven development,” that through him music is only belatedly catching up with a development that had long since taken place in the mainstream of literary technique as represented by Macaulay’s prose ( and that had indeed long since been left behind by hip post-Victorian men of letters like Strachey ) , and this is a point that gains pointiness when considered alongside a passage of a few pages earlier on Hindemith’s more-literally machine-minded colleagues:

The present vogue for mechanical realism, being based primarily on the picturesque aspects of machinery, is bound to disappear as the mechanic more and more comes to resemble the bank clerk, and as the Turneresque steam engine gives way to the unphotogenic electric train. It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus, and there is already a fain period touch about [ Arthur Honegger’s ] Pacific 231 and [ Sergei Prokofiev’s ] Le Pas d’Acier. One feels that they should have been written when railways and factories really were beginning to alter our lives; that Prokofieff should have written ballets about the spinning jenny and the Luddite riots; that Honegger should have been there to celebrate the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the death of Huskisson with a ‘Symphonie Triomphale et Funèbre.’ Our latter-day mechanical romanticists are indeed only filling in a corner which—save for a few ludicrous exceptions like Marenco’s Excelsior [ Oh, that old thing! { I cannot but wonder if these utterly mystifying references, which occur at a rate of several per page in Music Ho! ( witness the one to Huskisson immediately above ) more eloquently bespeak my ignorance of the points de repère of the “culturally literate” early-mid-twentieth century Anglo-Saxon or Lambert’s mastery of them; or if indeed Lambert himself expected any of his contemporaries to recognize even a substantial minority of his references and was not in fact lobbing most of them at his imagined reader like so many “googlies bowled from the inside skin of the popping crease,” as he doubtless would have described them. } ] —was left unexplored by the nineteenth-century aesthetic romanticists.

Hence, far from finding it almost futuristic in its sinister dystopianism per Adorno, Lambert regards Hindemith’s self-mechanization as retardataire to the point of corniness, and when he describes the scene conjured up by it, the result is neither sinister à la Fritz Lang nor comically fantastic à la Chaplin but simply ludicrously cartoonish ( à la…Friz Freleng, perchance? ) :

Listening to his firmly wright works we seem to see ourselves in a block of hygienic and efficient workman’s flats built in the best modernismus manner, from which emerge troops of healthy uniformed children on their way to the communal gymnasium. Hindemith’s technique is indeed a gymnastic technique, and his attitude towards ‘expressive’ music is reminiscent of an instructor in physical jerks pooh-poohing the poses and affectations of ballet—even though they may demand a higher degree of training than he himself possesses.

Even so, on account of his knack for “discovering dialectics for himself” ( as Adorno characterized Berg’s above-cited apercu about shaving ) , Lambert asserts that while Hindemith’s music may be worthless qua music it has served an historically meritorious purpose:

One can, of course, entirely sympathize with the spirit that has prompted this reaction. When we think of the stranglehold German romanticism had on this country thirty years ago, we can imagine what it must have been like in Germany itself. German romanticism had come to resemble a stuffy and scented drawing-room, overdecorated with silk flounces, and encumbered with vast padded sofas and downy cushions. Hindemith and his followers have thrown open the double windows, torn down the hangings, put sackcloth instead of brocade and replaced the upholstery with glass and chromium plating.  

Uncannily enough, Adorno tenders grudging praise along the very same lines to Hindemith in a hatchet piece on him dating from 1932, the year immediately preceding that of Music Ho!’s publication:

Music-maker’s music has restored one thing to compositional technique: its contact with the manner in which instruments are played. They have loosened up the stereotypical neo-German imagination that has only the finished sonority at its command and has lost control of its production and therefore petrifies the sonority in all its splendor, and they have managed to do this by doggedly listening to the instruments, listening to what they might wish to be playing. Stravinsky’s liberation of the percussion, Hindemith’s woodwind-and-brass campaigns, betoken a genuine breakthrough, and it is no accident that it was precisely here that the criticism leveled by the most recent music-maker’s music most emphatically hit its mark; the “duet kitsch” from [ Hindemith’s comic opera ] News of the Day seals the fate of the neo-German orchestra, and Stravinsky’s Fairy [ i.e., his ballet Le baiser de la fée ] phosphorescently quotes the buried corpse. 

“Music-maker’s music” is my rendition ( for the original passage is in German, and I am its Englisher ) of “Musikantenmusik,” Hindemith’s preferred term for the kind of music he was composing in the above-discussed deliberately mechanistic pieces, and here as in “On Popular Music” Adorno lumps it in with the music contemporaneously composed by Stravinsky. I shall gloss this term at length presently—i.e., in the near present. In the immediate present it is more exigent to point out that by “neo-German” ( “neudeutsch” in the original ) imagination and Adorno means the imagination and orchestra of the late German romanticism” of “thirty years ago” referenced and pilloried by Lambert. And so like Lambert, Adorno believes that for his fundamentally fatal flaws, Hindemith performed salutary work in replacing a certain unsatisfactory quality of late German romanticism with something superior to it. And although Adorno addresses himself to a specific technical facet of composition—instrumentation—and Lambert does not, they would both seem to be objecting to a single effect produced by the late-German-romantic orchestra and single alternative effect produced by Hindemith’s orchestra, for “a sonority” that is “finished” and “petrified in its splendor” in virtue of the composer’s “loss of control of its production” does indeed evoke a sonic environment for which “stuffy and scented drawing room” is a most apt metaphor. According to Adorno, the late-romantic German composers had gotten used to thinking in terms of certain “splendid” but anciently-preset and therefore “petrified” combinations of instruments instead of thinking in terms of the as-yet-untried capabilities and dispositions of individual instruments—a habit palpably analogous to that of an interior-designer of 1903 who stuffs a drawing room with the usual late-Victorian-cum-early Wilhelmine “silk flounces” and “vast padded sofas and downy cushions” instead of considering which pieces of furniture and décor are individually and collectively best suited to the room qua gathering-place of the inhabitants of the century of the newly invented aeroplane, wireless, and motion-picture film. ( Of course, this concluding catalogue of inventions is my own interpolation, but here I am “arguably” but paying condign equivocal homage to Lambert, whose own figurative universe is rather conceptually cluttered in obliging us to think of Hindemith as a belated Victorian on one level and as a cutting-edge Bauhausian on another. ) And of course Adorno’s assertion that Hindemith ( with Stravinsky’s help ) “sealed the fate” of the neo-German orchestra and turned it into “a buried corpse” is but a more lurid way of saying as Lambert does that Hindemith cleared all the old nineteenth-century furniture and décor out of the drawing room—even if Adorno doesn’t seem to envisage the new F&D along quite the same lines as Lambert does, for “quotation” suggests a pastiche of the neo-German sonority rather than the production of an entirely new one, although by the same token I suppose the “phosphorescence” could as readily be traced to state-of-the-art chromium-plated lighting fixtures as to a churchyard glowworm. To return to Musikantenmusik: it rewards glossing chiefly because the gloss opens onto yet another significant affinity between Adorno and Lambert.  The word is obviously analyzable into Musikanten and musik, and as I have already written that Hindemith termed his own Musikantenmusik it may seem to follow inexorably either that Hindemith himself was a Musikant or that he was writing music for Musikanten to perform, but neither such conclusion follows inexorable because the relationship between a Musikant and music is by no means clear-cut or straightforward. Not that the definition of Musikant is by any means murky or circuitous. To be sure, Musikant is one of those Continental words that is often held to be untranslatable into English, albeit not one of the milliard Continental words like Gemütlichkeit, ennui, and sprezzatura, that are so often held because they supposedly denote some emotional state or attitude that is too subtle and exquisite to be accessible to the ham-fistedly positivistic Anglo-Saxon mind; but rather a less common such word, a word that is no less insultingly held to be un-Englishable because it supposedly denotes an entity or institution too geographically and historically organic to be assimilated to the ham-fistedly pragmatic Anglo-Saxon mode of social organization. But at least as near as I can tell from what Adorno writes about the Musikant elsewhere in the essay on Hindemith now in point, it is eminently easy to define Musikant in terms that are eminently transposable into a British or American social-cum-historical context. A Musikant would simply seem to be a musician who lacks accreditation by or affiliation with an official musical institution like a conservatory or municipal orchestra and therefore cannot rightly termed a professional but who makes a living through his music-making and therefore cannot rightly be termed an amateur. The archetype of the Musikant in the Anglosphere would seem to be the nineteenth-century small-town fiddler who supplied the tunes at local dances like the one depicted in Charles Ives’s “Washington’s Birthday,” and Adorno’s job-description of the Musikant is certainly evocative of such a figure:

The Musikant who wandered about the world once upon a time presented himself immediately to the people who listened to him: he would “strike up a tune” for them, and what he then began playing had use-value, whether it served as an accompaniment to dancing or strove to cheer people up; what he supplied was tied to the immediate exigencies of the use to which it was being put; it had not yet taken on the consistency of a specific form; it was inalienable from the moment in which its notes rang out; if it was based on specific melodies, these were dealt with at the Musikant’s discretion through the liberty of improvisation; his improvisatory skill in wielding his instrument mattered more than the question of the shape of what he was offering, because musical performance did not yet exist as a practice with an objective shape.

Hindemith, being an academically trained composer offering nothing but music for objectively shaped performances, obviously could not have conceived of himself as a Musikant in such strictly defined terms. But he did seem to think he was capable of re-embodying the Musikant at least to the extent of providing music that served people’s immediate needs and uses—albeit providing it only mediately by writing musical compositions to be played by other would-be latter-day Musikanten. In his pursuit of this goal, however, he was destined to be thwarted, for

There are no Musikanten today… [ M ] usicians have become fundamentally sedentary, and they remain so even when they are roaming through holiday-camp forests with ornamented lutes in their hands during the summer-vacation season. In actual fact Jonny [ the hero of Jonny spielt auf, { Jonny strikes up } Ernst Krenek’s opera about a jazz violinist ] does not strike up any tunes; [ Paul ] Whiteman gives concerts, and people dance to his concertizing; music has use value only when it is meant to serve to teach other people how to make music, in educational settings; the music that eventually arises from its being put to this use has no use value of its own and therefore even calls the pedagogical value of the educative music into question…

In short, to employ a quasi-metaphor that Adorno would doubtless have found too “on the nose” for comfort, Hindemith was affecting to provide a good or service that could no longer be produced and for which there were no longer any customers in any case.  On this point Lambert is in complete agreement with Adorno:

Hindemith calls himself a craftsman, never a tone poet, and has said that ‘a composer should never write unless he is acquainted with the demand for his work. The times of consistent composing for one’s own satisfaction are probably gone for ever.’ [ But he ] is mistaken when he imagines that the writing of music is governed by the laws of supply and demand. There is no regular demand for musical material as there is for writing material or boxes of matches.

But in immediately going on to propose a positive alternative to Hindemith’s compositional practice he tenders some assertions that at least superficially seem tailor- ( or shoemaker ) made to elicit spluttering demurrals from Uncle Teddie:  

There is only a demand for something that creates its own demand—a good piece of music in fact. By all means let us have as many new piano concertos as possible, provided they are equal to, or superior to, those in the standard of repertory. There is no specific demand, however, for a new concerto as such, irrespective of quality. A pianist does not ask for a new piano concerto as he does for a new pair of shoes, giving the old one away to an amateur. Concertos may wear thin in the course of time, but handsewn leather is better than mass-produced cardboard.

To this Adorno would probably first demur that in the 1930s the very idea of a “good” piece of music has been rendered problematic by the subordination of aesthetic criteria to certain historical forces, and he might very well point to his own example of “music that arises…in educational settings” as a case in point of this unfortunate subordination. He might assert that nowadays people are taught to write music that imitates certain pedagogical models and then go on to compose music that continues to imitate those models and is held to be good because of its adherence to those models, whereas its adherence thereto is in fact proof of its badness in addition to its uselessness. After all, he did not even think that very many of the dozens of people who had had the best living music teacher in the world, Arnold Schoenberg, had produced music of any substantial merit, writing as he did in 1930 that “the list of Schoenberg students worthy of serious attention as composers” was “pretty much exhausted” by Berg and Webern, whom he dubbed “the foremost of the very few,” plus Horwitz, Eisler, Zillig, and Skalkottas ( and given that Eisler is the only one of these last four to have retained even a ghost of a reputation in the early twentieth-first century, one cannot help being inclined to suppose that Adorno’s appraisal of them was if anything too generous [ although of course I remain open to being persuaded that each and every one of them has been criminally neglected by posterity ] ) . But in point of fact Lambert’s notion of aesthetic goodness is thoroughly historically grounded, and we have indeed already seen an instance of this groundedness in his dismissal of Hindemith’s motorism as belated Macaulayism. And yet it is still easy to imagine Adorno’s objecting that this instance is insufficiently historically grounded in reposing solely on an unsubstantiated analogy with a non-musical phenomenon ( even if Adorno himself did not shrink from drawing equally fast-and-loose analogies, as may be seen in his remark in his monograph on Wagner that Wotan’s vaunting of his spear’s indestructability by fire anticipated the advertising copy of twentieth-century manufacturers of flame-resistant kitchenware ) . Fortunately Lambert does show himself capable of substantiating his aesthetic judgments with illustrations drawn from the history of music proper, as is shown by his appraisal of Stravinsky’s neoclassical compositions, the ones exactly contemporaneous with Hindemith’s motoric Musikantenmusik. Of Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto in particular he writes:

The repetition of the [ opening ] theme, by the orchestra, adds even less to the very insignificant content of the opening phrase which, like Stravinsky’s earlier themes, is restricted to a small interval centred round the one note. The second subject strikes a more convincing atmosphere at the outset because, consisting of a little minor phrase repeated three times over a double ostinato, it takes us back to the peasant mentality of the old Stravinsky. But here again the phrase is illogically extended by eighteenth-century passage work, whose origin is not thematic, but harmonic. That is to say in a quick eighteenth-century movement for a keyboard instrument the harmonies are often split up into toccata-like figures thus produced having no significant content as pure melody. Their raison d’être is the harmony that lies beneath them, and to use them as Stravinsky does as melodic material over a totally different base is a complete misunderstanding of their value and function, and a convincing proof, if any such is needed, of the artificial and synthetic quality of his alleged classicism.

And here we are at last arrived at the moment for pointing out the convergence of Adorno’s and Lambert’s respective attitudes to Stravinsky, for in the Hindemith-bashing screed that I have already cited, Adorno tenders an argument against Igor Fyodorovich’s   ( and his lesser contemporary epigones’ ) “alleged” classicism that is at least in none-too-broad outline indistinguishable from Lambert’s:

From the point of view of compositional technique, neoclassicism is nothing but the attempt to resolve these difficulties [ i.e., the difficulties motoric Musikanten have employing time as anything other than an “idling of the technical-compositional understanding” in the light of the “cessation of that dialectically contrastive possibility of composition that could master time” ] through recourse to the old models in which that break between the particular and the whole that torments the Musikanten ( or the more knowing among them ) does not yet hold sway. It is an attempt that is doomed to fail. For within the framework of tonality models of uniform rhythmic simplicity still have power as elementary phenomena, whereas in the new Musikantentmusik they seem primitive and banal because they can no longer be understood as primal phenomena in a prescribed musical space; rather, they are extremely ill-suited to harmonic and intervallic material that places itself at a great distance from the simple interrelations of overtones. It is therefore only logical if Stravinsky eschews this material and finds his footing in stylistic copies that separate themselves from the old models in their dissonant caprice and literary demonism but not in their musical shape itself.

Both Lambert and Adorno vehemently maintain that Stravinsky errs in drawing on ready-made eighteenth century-style rhythmic-cum-melodic patterns because harmonically speaking fings ain’t what they used to be in the eighteenth century; or, to fill out the conjoined argument ever so slightly yet not a jot licentiously: ready-made rhythmic-cum-melodic templates were fine and to a certain necessary from Bach’s to Haydn’s collection of days because back then working out the basic chord progressions and their interrelations was itself a job of work for the listener ( this is what Adorno is getting at in describing the old templates as “primal”: in the eighteenth century the entire “framework of tonality” was still new to composers and listeners alike ) , such that repeated arpeggiated triads and the like helped the listener perceive chordal interrelations that he might otherwise have failed to grasp, but now that chord progressions of the eighteenth-century type are no longer in use, the arpeggiated triads and the like no longer underscore anything and so therefore no longer serve any function for the listener. And yet one can detect a certain tension between the two arguments at the level of what one might somewhat preciously term their “inner voices.” In the first place, Adorno makes it plain that he regards “tonality” in its entirety as a superseded harmonic system, whereas Lambert implies nothing about the current state of harmony eo ipso or its implications for the writing of melodies.  He seems to leave open to Stravinsky the possibility of writing melodies that are conceived in simply a-harmonic terms or that serve a function that is partially harmonic—and partially harmonic in relation to some still extant and vital version of tonality. Adorno, by contrast, maintains that the death of tonality has induced a fundamental change in the “material” available to composers—the material out of which they must construct both their chords and their melodies. As this material “places itself at a great distance from the simple interrelations of overtones”—i.e., apparently, the interrelations on which the chords of tonal harmony are based, the interrelations between the overtones produced by octaves, thirds, and fifths—Adorno presumably would only be satisfied with melodies that not only avoided motoric repetitions but that avoided the repetition of any of the traditional tonal intervals—melodies prevailingly centered on wide leaps delineating intervals other than octaves, thirds, and fifths. But Adorno’s and Lambert’s divergences in meta-musical outlook do not simply boil down to contingently different opinions on the question of whether, in Arnold Schoenberg’s words ( or at least words repeatedly attributed to Arnold Schoenberg, for I have yet to trace them to a credible source ) , “There is still much great music to be composed in C major”; rather, they spring from radically divergent understandings of the history of music and indeed radically divergent notions of music’s most essential aims and elements, of what music is  all about. These divergences coalesce around their respective attitudes to Jean Sibelius, a composer about whom they disagree at least as stridently as they concur regarding Hindemith and Stravinsky. In Adorno’s view, tendered in a 1940 collection of “strictures” on JS that makes his hatchet-job on Hindemith look like a lifetime- achievement Oscar-bestower’s speech, “if Sibelius is good, then the perennial criteria of musical quality from Bach to Schoenberg—the criteria of evocativeness, of articulateness, of oneness in multifariousness, of diversity in unity—are now obsolete.” Lambert in stark contrast regards Sibelius as the only prominent living composer whose work is pointing the way ahead for his younger and future colleagues, as can be seen in his titling of his long section on the composer, the concluding section of his entire book, “Sibelius and the Music of the Future.”  “Hang about,” the reader may here be tempted to interject: “didn’t Adorno himself effectively assert that German music had become obsolete by his own day when he asserted that Hindemith & co. had at least ‘restored’ a kind of instrumentation that German composers had lost their command of? To which interjection I would rejoin: “No, because Adorno asserted that Hindemith & co. had restored a kind of instrumentation that had been lost command of by neo-German composers.” The reader may certainly be forgiven for thinking this correction as point-missing as that of the accountant who on finding John Cleese bemused by his relishing of the Pythons’ satiric jabs at accountants sought to dispel the bemusement by revealing that he was a chartered accountant. But the truth is that Adorno effectively regarded the neo-German composers—composers of blurrily lush orchestral music like Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner—as non-German composers, or at any rate as semi-apostates from the central German tradition qua standard-bearer of “the perennial criteria of musical quality,” criteria that he regarded as being exemplarily maintained by Schoenberg, and before him by the neo-Germans’ exact contemporary, Gustav Mahler. Of course, Lambert in his passage in grudging praise of Hindemith engaged in no “neo”-bandying; he decried the “stuffiness” of fin de siècle Germany and fin de siècle German music tout court. In Lambert’s view, by the end of the nineteenth century all German composers ( including the pre-atonal Schoenberg, whose first masterpiece, Verklärte Nacht, he dismisses as “stodgy” and “academic” ) had “lost the plot” of history, a plot whose chief developments over the course of the nineteenth century had been ( in his view ) the rise of democracy and nationalism, a rise best attested to and embodied ( in his view ) in the work of the Russian Mikhail Glinka and his avowed successors, the five composers known in Russian as the “Kuchka” and in English as “The Mighty Handful” or, more prosaically if helpfully, as “The Five”—Mussorgsky, Balakierev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Cui ( but not at all embodied or attested to in the work of the most famous Russian composer ever, Tchaikovsky, for Lambert appears to have adhered to the then-received notion that Tchaikovsky wasn’t a proper Russian composer but a sort of super-talented ape of the Germans and the French ) . We have already seen this view of Lambert encapsulated in the passage from Music Ho! paraphrased by Weaver, a passage that rounds out a longer passage that it would be apposite to quote in full here, thus:

The classical symphony has as its spiritual background the aristocratic and international qualities of eighteenth-century society. The romantic movement gives an individualist twist and an added picturesqueness to the eighteenth-century symphony which alters its technical form without seriously striking at its spiritual foundations. Nationalism, however, destroys both the aristocratic quality of the eighteenth-century abstract symphony and the individualist quality of the nineteenth-century programme symphony.

The conflict is not only technical and emotional, it is almost a class conflict, and it is hardly too far fetched a play upon words to suggest that the phrase “first subject” is in itself undemocratic. In Mussorgsky this conflict is openly avowed. Symphonic development was repellent to him because it symbolized not only foreign domination but aristocratic domination. In [ Mussorgsky’s operas ] Boris [ Godunov ] and Khovantchina we find the strongest expression in any art form, up to the present day, of the conflict between aristocratic internationalism and proletarian nationalism.

The phrase “first subject” is susceptible to a play on words because “subject” denotes both a musical theme and the mere citizen of an aristocratically structured polity ruled by a king and because “first subject” denotes the first musical theme in a movement constructed in sonata form, the form central to the classical symphony as developed and perfected by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, but the fetched-ness of the wordplay may have been farther than Lambert supposed. For while it is undoubtedly true that the symphony had as its material background the aristocratic qualities of eighteenth-century society ( I shall “stick a pin” in the international qualities for now ) inasmuch as the first symphonies were written for orchestras maintained by noblemen like Haydn’s patron Prince Esterhazy and the Compte d’Ogny, who commissioned Haydn’s “Paris” symphonies, it is at least disputable whether the classical symphony was at any point or to any extent aristocratic in its “spiritual” character, and indeed Adorno held that it was innately democratic in character and tendency, at least to the extent that we associate democracy with the rise of the individual at the expense of the aristocratic order. Adorno’s extra-musical “subject” was the individual conceived not as an obsequious courtier or flunky in the aristocratic pecking order but as an autonomous experiencer-cum-agent intrinsically inimical to that order, the individual as conceived by philosophical champions of the French Revolution like Immanuel Kant. In Adorno’s view, the emergence of sonata form was one of the great milestones of the debut of that subject in history writ large because this form granted the composer an unprecedented degree of control of musical material over larger expanses of time, in blocks of music that comprised multiple movements. First ( so Adorno ) sonata form went through a “petit-bourgeois” phase under Haydn’s superintendence, a phase characterized by formal stasis the complete “fungibility” of the material—its amenability to being placed in multiple intraformal settings with minimum alteration of its basic contours; then, with the arrival of Beethoven, sonata form entered a kind of grand-bourgeois or heroic-bourgeois phase ( parenthetical disclaimer: here the terminology is mine, not Adorno’s, as I cannot recollect his explicitly contrasting Haydn’s strain of bourgeoisness with Beethoven’s ) , wherein the composer could introduce distinctive and “infungible” material into a work without sacrificing an iota of formal coherence. ( Naturally this narrative grotesquely exaggerates the contrast between Beethoven’s modus operandi and Haydn’s, and one could plausibly enough argue that Haydn was a grander bourgeois than Beethoven in that throughout his career he was working with sonata form itself as his core material and material that far from being “infungible” exhibited infinite plasticity in his hands. Still, I cannot in good faith upbraid Adorno too harshly for his meta-petty pigeonholing of Haydn as an arch-pigeonholer inasmuch as one can only fully appreciate the extent of Haydn’s inexorable innovativeness by acquainting oneself with multi-decade stretches of his oeuvre, which really only became practicable with the Antal Dorati’s conclusion of his complete cycle of the symphonies in the early 1970s, in other words several years after Adorno’s death. Of course Adorno presumably could have acquainted himself with such stretches by perusing the scores of all the Haydn symphonies, string quartets, piano trios, etc., as these scores were presumably not difficult to obtain in either Frankfurt, New York, or Los Angeles [ his three main cities of residence ] . But it would have been unreasonable to expect him or indeed anyone but a dedicated Haydn scholar like Herr Hoboken or H. C. Robbins Landon to undertake such an extensive ocular survey; there are “only so many hours in the day” even for a fully professionally trained composer like Adorno, a man fully conversant with the mysteries of musical notation. And by the same token, given a complete set of recordings of the Haydn symphonies, string quartets, piano trios, autc. even an amateurishly untrained listener like the present writer, a man only very spottily acquainted with the aforesaid mysteries, can acquire a more or less adequate sense of their formal and contentual diversity as a corpus [ which is by no means to be confused with an adequate sense of their respective formal and contentual richesses ] within the span of a year no matter how busy he is, by simply regularly and recurrently employing a random selection from the as aural wallpaper. And the same holds true, mutatis mutandis, for any other comparably gargantuan collection of musical compositions organized according to any other principle. This is “worth” both “pointing out” and “sticking a pin in” because pace both Adorno’s and Lambert’s disparagement of “atomized listening,” the capacity of most serious music to yield up even its most recondite treasures to such listening provided that the atomization is offset by sheer doggedness of repetition naturally contains implications for an appraisal of music’s essential versus accidental qualities, implications whose explication must perforce be postponed to the moment when I have fully explicated Lambert’s and Adorno’s respective appraisals of that distinction. ) Perhaps the principal attribute of the symphony and other sonata-form movements that encouraged Adorno to regard them as innovatively “bourgeois” was their harmonic dynamism by comparison with older multi-movement forms like the early eighteenth-century suite, a dynamism that lent them a distinctly dramatic character that bore fruitful comparison with contemporaneous “bourgeois” stage dramas like the plays of Beaumarchais that served as the bases of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of Seville. Unlike the suite, which remained anchored in the home key from first movement to last, a symphony, string quartet, aut cet. could move far afield from the home key both within movements and between them, but because the harmonic system of the late eighteenth century was still centered on the tonic-dominant polarity, in the hands of a skillful composer the divagations from and returns to the home key could be concatenated in a way that always made sense and yet never failed to surprise ( yes, yes, yes: not unlike Figaro’s discovery that he is Marcellina and Dr. Bartolo’s lovechild, or Figaro’s and Count Almaviva’s discovery that they have been planning to commit adultery with their own wives ) .  Lambert was presumably aware and even mindful of this dynamism, but at least in Music Ho! he takes no note of it or indeed of any aspect of the harmonic register of sonata form. For Lambert, sonata form is signalized above all and to its discredit by its repetitiveness as embodied in its recapitulation section:

The element of formal balance provided by the recapitulation that is an integral form is one of the greatest stumbling blocks to a sensitive composer—for although he is dealing with time in the abstract he has to express himself with time in the concrete. We know from his letters that Mozart conceived his symphonies in a moment of time, that is to say from his point of view the recapitulation did not necessarily come after the development, but that does not alter the fact that the audience will have to hear them in that order.

It is perhaps “worth remarking in passing” that Lambert like Adorno seems to have a blind spot about Haydn that distorts his conception of the history of sonata form, for a far larger proportion of Mozart’s sonata-form movements than Haydn’s contain recapitulations that are near-note-for-note repetitions of their expositions, and indeed Haydn rarely refrains from introducing conspicuously new material into a recapitulation or treating the material of the exposition in a conspicuously new way. It is perhaps also worth pointing out that the kind of clairvoyance that Lambert seems to regard as a “super power” possessed uniquely by Mozart is in fact widely distributed among the makers of all kinds of temporally structured works of art—such that, for example, a playwright is not unlikely to conceive his fifth act simultaneously with his first or a filmmaker his concluding scene simultaneously with his opening one. And finally it is perhaps worth pointing out that the Mozart’s-eye view of a sonata-form movement is exactly consubstantial with that of any listener who has already heard that movement through to its end at least once and at least roughly consubstantial with that of any listener who has head enough sonata-form movements to realize that they generally end with a repetition of their opening material; and that nevertheless people seem happy to listen to sonata-form movements over and over again despite knowing how everything is going to turn out at the end of them. I could say the same thing, mutatis mutandis, about Hamlet or the Iliad or Great Expectations, but I won’t, first because, as the pullulation of god-awful “spoiler alerts” over the past quarter-century attests, one of the mutata—namely, the fact that narrative and dramatic works do not end with a repetition of their opening scenes or chapters or verses—is massive enough to break the analogy, and second, because most people are not in fact willing to read a novel or play or epic poem through to the end if they already know how it is going to end to the extent of knowing whether its protagonist lives or dies, gets married or divorced, etc. Still, if one were while listening to a sonata-form movement for the first time to disregard the abovementioned harmonic dynamism altogether; if, indeed, one were then to disregard the entire harmonic register of the movement and take it in purely as a succession of melodies and scraps of melody, and to do so with the same sort of peremptory expectation of novelty brought to bear by the first-time viewer of a film or reader of a novel–why then, yes, one would be bound to be both bored and during one’s audition of the recapitulation portion of that movement. “Still,” the reader cannot but be on the point of demurring, “that is an awfully big ‘if one were,’ and that ‘one’ denotes only a hypothetical listener. Surely a listener capable of completely ‘tuning out’ the harmony of a ten-to-fifteen-minute long piece of music has never yet existed.” But I am afraid that I must forestall the broaching of that demurral by saying, “I admit that this listener seems quite a fantastical creature, but I am none too sure that he has never existed. Indeed, I am none too sure that he was not a documentably living person answering to the name of Constant Lambert.” Not, of course, that I believe Lambert was actually capable of such insensibility of harmony, but in a passage very close to the beginning of Music Ho!—a passage, in other words, that is placed so as to incline one by default to take all its statements of a general scope for foundational propositions of the author’s argument—he tenders an assertion about harmony ( and rhythm [ by which he seems to mean not rhythm in the strictest sense—i.e., the variation of note lengths in combination with variations in volume—but rhythm as an organized pattern of such variations [as in a dance meter or an ostinato ] , for in the complete absence of rhythm would not be recognizable as a melody or distinguishable from a tone row] ) vis-à-vis melody that in point of dismissiveness really is worthy of someone suffering from the meta-harmonic equivalent of total colorblindness.

During the Impressionist period… [ melody ] came to be regarded merely as one of the elements in music, whereas it is not only the most important element but an all-embracing one. Harmony without melody is only an aural tickling, and rhythm is not even rhythm—it is only metre, and can have at the most a vaguely mumbo-jumbo appeal, with no true musical significance [ … ] A composer may have a rudimentary harmonic sense or a rudimentary rhythmic sense, and yet remain a great composer on the strength of his line alone. 

I doubt I have found another passage of declarative prose more shockingly subversive in the past decade. For after all ( and as Lambert himself semi-acknowledges later via a different route, i.e., by stating, “harmony as we understand it does not exist in primitive African music” ) , harmony is after all the feature that sets modern Western music and the serious Western composer apart from the ancient and extra-Occidental riffraff. It is after all from its inclusion of a harmonic accompaniment that one distinguishes the performance of a work of modern Western music ( even non-serious modern Western music, i.e. pop music ) from the sound of some non-pianizing Musikant striking up a tune on his lonesome. ( And of course Bach’s suites and partitas for solo cello and solo violin don’t count as vehicles of such a sound, for as everybody who has read the first line of a set of liner notes of a recording of any of them knows, despite their prevailing reliance on single-string notation they all somehow miraculously contrive to delineate continuo-ready harmony from first note—or, rather, virtual chord—to last. ) If harmony is after all only an aural tickling, oughtn’t all us Occidental listeners to throw out our entire record collections from Abba to Zemlinsky and force ourselves to become rabid aficionados of the unharmonized plunkings and clangings of Japanese koto ensembles and Balinese gamelans? And yet, and yet, no sooner had I recovered from my shock on reading the passage than I began to think that in it Lambert might have been onto something. And I am still thinking that he was onto something therein. By this I do not mean that I am as insensible of the blandishments of harmony as the counterfactual meta-harmonically colorblind fellow I mentioned earlier ( or, what comes to the same thing, that that fellow is not counterfactual but actual and that c’est moi ) but rather merely that I wonder to what extent I have ever really listened preeminently for harmony in a piece of music or that some harmonic feature of a composition has ever won me over to it or made me regard it as more formally coherent than I would have done in that feature’s absence. I recall, for example, Charles Rosen’s mentioning somewhere that a composer need not rely on inter-movemental melodic correspondences and resemblances to impart formal unity to his work, that harmonic devices alone were often sufficient to impart that unity, and that Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata with its recurring employment of the Neapolitan Sixth chord demonstrated this; and I recall realizing instantly what he meant by that recurrent use of that chord in that work, recalled the insistent repetition of that chord in both the concluding phrase of the principal theme of the first movement and in the coda of the finale, and immediately afterwards thinking that I did not like the Appassionata a jot more for the realization.  And complementarily, there are numerous compositions not noted for their harmonic richesses that I am inordinately fond of—and fond of not for the reason one is fond of some “guilty pleasure” of an inanely simple-yet-insanely catchy pop song but for the reason one is fond of a Bach fugue or indeed the most involute of Schoenberg’s sonata-form movements—namely, because they possess a combination of coherence and complexity that rewards repeated audition and reflection. I am thinking in particular here of certain works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose lack of harmonic sophistication has even been acknowledged by his biographer, Michael Kennedy. I was impelled to seek out RVW’s Sixth Symphony in 1987 on seeing it described by one of the far-abovementioned British music mavens ( perhaps Kennedy himself ) as “the strangest symphony ever written”; on first hearing it, I certainly found it the strangest symphony I had ever heard, and nearly forty years later I still find it among the strangest symphonies I have ever heard even though I have in the meantime become aurally acquainted with dozens of symphonies ( e.g., Webern’s and Schnittke’s ) written in purportedly far stranger and less penetrable styles than RVW’s purportedly only lightly “modalized” modification of humdrum late-Romantic tonality. And why do I continue to regard it as superlatively strange? Why, simply on account of its ingenious concatenation of its melodic material—at least as near as I can tell from my recollection of what I tend to dwell on when I not infrequently run my inner ear over my recollection of the work. I really do find it quite extraordinary the way the first movement, solely by its selection and arrangement of melodies, contrives to move from precipitate ominousness to bellicose tumult to sinister searchingness to swinging ( in the big-band sense ) hopefulness to pastoral nostalgia and back to precipitate ominousness within the taut span of about eight minutes. Of course this capsule description makes the movement sound like a sort of medley or potpourri, but it is really nothing of the sort because despite the heterogeneity of mood, the melodies consistently either flow into or recall each other in a manner that is entirely smooth and logical. And the entire movement likewise flowed into the next movement ( the positional “slow movement” of the work, albeit possibly not its slowest [ (sic ) on the “possibly,” for by way of emphasizing the aural apprehensibility of the beauties and complexities of this work I am deliberately if conveniently consulting nothing but my memory of it ] ) entirely smoothly and logically—viz., via without a pause between its final chord and the first note of that movement ( doubtless the uninterruptedness is marked attaca in the score ) , a tonic residue of that chord that is followed by a  five-note motif so ominous ( in keeping with the attaca continuation of the mood of the conclusion ) and yet so insanely catchy that back in ’87 I could not forbear from imposing on it the war chant of the cavity creeps, the arch-villains of a superhero-themed cartoon toothpaste commercial of several years earlier: We make holes in teeth! And when the last three notes of that motif—three quarter-notes or eighth-notes of equal pitch—detached themselves from its main body and began repeating themselves ever-more insistently with a single quarter-note or eighth-note rest between each repetition, I could not forbear from chanting all the while: “Holes in teeth. Holes in teeth. Holes in teeth” as if at the prompting of the insistent throb of an aural toothache. Of course, RVW could not have had the cavity creeps in mind back in ’47 when he wrote the Sixth, but I cannot but suspect and indeed almost assume that via the repetition of that three-note motif he was trying to evoke a kind of assault consubstantial with that of the creeps on the twin enameled fortresses of the human mouth—a martial assault, to be sure, but one relying entirely on brute force and mindless tenaciousness rather than on skillfully crafted strategy, and in the light of the Sixth’s immediately postwar provenance, I cannot but reflect that here RVW seems to be much of a mind with Adorno in the exactly contemporaneous Minima Moralia, wherein TWA remarks that the campaigns of the Second World War were more like industrial demolition projects than campaigns in the classic military-scientific sense. To be sure, in the ensuing scherzo, RVW seems to be something less of a mind with Adorno on martial matters inasmuch as the main body of that movement is cast as a briskly obstreperous military march.  But this march is by no means in the vein of the marches of Sousa or Elgar: indeed, in virtue of its rhythmic dynamism and heavy employment of triangles and cymbals it sounds decidedly Turkish, a quality that not only affiliates it with Haydn’s and Mozart’s famous Turkish-themed orchestral compositions but also, and more evocatively in virtue of the more modern musical language, with the Janissary-aura’d march movements of the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies of a composer with whom Vaughan Williams has seldom if ever been compared ( and whom he at least affected to despise ) , Gustav Mahler, an affiliation strengthened by the brief appearance of a xylophone ( an instrument that figures prominently in the first two movements of GM’s Sixth ) in the transition to the trio, wherein a solo saxophone lends a decidedly jazzy air to the proceedings, but an incongruously sinisterly jazzy air that links it to the big-band episodes of the first movement. An almost irritably brisk yet somehow eerie coda ( it always sounds to me as if it had been lifted note-for-note from the soundtrack of some late-1950s or early-1960s American suspense-drama series like The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents, specifically a moment thereof coinciding with the protagonist’s discovery of some disturbing-if-not-quite-terrifying secret ancillary to the main one of the episode ) leads by presumptive attaca to the finale, or as RVW styled it, the Epilogue, to which he affixed a motto taken from Shakespeare’s Tempest: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on / And our little lives are rounded by a sleep.” ( RVW had a knack for literary framing devices that also recalls Mahler and has perhaps only been surpassed by his in erudition and aptness. ) This finale is a slow movement ( the tempo is marked “Moderato,” but frequent rests and passages of long-held chords give it the effect of an Adagio ) and therefore perforce enjoins the listener to compare it to and with all the other famous slow symphony-finales—those of Haydn’s “Farewell,” Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, and Mahler’s Ninth. Of all of these it is most like the Mahler, but as if partially in illustration of the implausible thesis that RVW’s aversion to Mahler was a manifestation of “the anxiety of influence,” it out-Mahler-Ninths that finale by echoing only its very last episode, the all-pianissimo strings-only portion from the beginning of the recapitulation of the second subject onward. And the epigraph of course suggests that this Epilogue is supposed to be a kind of sequel not only to its own preceding three movements but also to the Mahler finale: as that movement signifies a farewell to life, this movement portrays the aftermath of that farewell, the “sleep” that “rounds” or follows life. ( Of course in the context of Shakespeare’s play the couplet suggests that this sleep not only follows but also precedes life—i.e., that we living humans are all dreams in the mind of some other being, perhaps God as imagined by Berkeley, but in forbearing to complement this sleepy epilogue with a prologue preceding the first movement, RVW declines to run with this suggestion [ and wisely so as far as I am concerned, for to my imagination’s ears the conjectural result sounds less Berkeleyan than Pirsigian. ] ) By default sleep is the quintessence of reposefulness, and so by default one expects any musical depiction of sleep to confine itself to musical techniques and gestures indicative or communicative of repose—piano-and-softer dynamics, rests, long note values, solidly major-key melodies free of chromatic inflections, and harmonies that do not linger over dissonances. As I have already mentioned, the Epilogue makes consistent use of the soft dynamics and intermittent use of rests and long note values, but the other two it almost entirely abjures. The main ( and “arguably” only ) melody is doggedly minor-keyed and more often Moderato than Adagio in tempo ( albeit not so often, per my above remark, as to make one cease to think of the movement as Adagio-esque ) and in its many variations is it is frequently subjected it rarely settles on a consonant chord. Clearly while RVW has no desire to present the sleep of the hereafter as the full-blown antithesis of a reposeful sleep, as a sleep riven by nightmares, he does wish to present it as a sleep only rarely utterly free of anxiety. Indeed, he chooses to conclude the movement and symphony in a decidedly unsettling manner—viz., by having the strings oscillate repeatedly and ever-more-softly between two chords differing from each other by the interval of a semitone, the most disruptive of chromatic inflections, until in the final measures the music has become so quiet that it is virtually impossible to tell by ear whether or not the work ends on the tonic triad. This is an altogether spooky or unheimlich conclusion, a conclusion that fully bears out the Twilight Zone-like apprehensions of the abovementioned coda of the scherzo. Alban Berg concluded his Lyric Suite in essentially the same manner twenty years earlier, only with a solo violin instead of an entire violin section and a major third instead of a minor second. And now that I have mentioned the Lyric Suite, it occurs to me that the only parallels to Vaughan Williams’s Sixth that I can locate in my entire history of listening—parallels, that is, in point of initial-cum-enduring strangeness-cum-engagingness—are certain genre-bending atonal works like the Lyric Suite rather than any works known officially as symphonies, sonatas, string quartets autc. ( apart, perhaps, from Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, which, in including a part for a soprano singer in its last two movements is “arguably” less of a proper string quartet than the Lyric Suite ) . And this reflection brings in its train another reflection, one that lends additional support to Lambert’s notion of “harmony without melody as a mere aural tickling,” namely, that I tend to find the works of Schoenberg and his disciples comprehensible ( comprehensible, that is, in a way that subsumes the just-mentioned strangeness-cum-engagingness, for total incomprehension is the handmaid [ or possibly mistress ] of boredom rather than of Unheimlichkeit ) not to the extent to which they remain tethered to conventional tonality but to the extent to which their motifs and motif-constellations have strong melodic profiles. Thus I find Berg’s Chamber Concerto the most difficult of all his works even though it antedates the Lyric Suite and therefore more shallowly assimilates Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method than the later work does, simply because I have trouble locating the recurrence of any motif in the Concerto apart from the four note one played by the violin as that instrument’s first solo passage. And among the movements of the Lyric Suite I find the first easiest to follow even though it is one of the work’s three twelve-tone movements ( the others being “freely atonal” in construction and hence presumably more abundant in vestiges of tonal harmony ) because all its motivic material is emphatically presented in horizontal outline within its first few measures. I likewise have had little trouble following the argument of the first movement of Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet because it presents at its outset two principal subjects that contrast as starkly from each other as those of the subjects of a classic ( i.e., non-monothematic ) classical-epoch sonata-form movement, and because there are few ensuing passages that do not contain manifest echoes and modifications of those themes; or the argument of its second movement, because it is in structure a cantabile theme and variations, whereas that work’s scherzo and finale remain fairly opaque to me after dozens or perhaps even hundreds of listening-sessions because they contain long passages in which it is difficult ( at least for me ) to discern an echo or anticipation of melodic material hailing from elsewhere in the movement. On the other hand, the absence from all these compositions of the familiar elements of harmony, of familiar vertical combinations of notes--of common chords, seventh chords, augmented chords, diminished chords, etc.—is no impediment whatsoever to my understanding of their respective arguments; just as the presence of these elements in the music of Vaughan Williams’s music affords only negligible aid to my understanding the arguments of their works. Now “far be it from me” to infer from the nugatoriness of harmony to my comprehension of post-1900 music that harmony insgesamt has always been as much of a mere “aural tickling” as Lambert supposed it be; and indeed, I am inclined to think that at least in the music of the two great pre-Beethovenian classical masters, Haydn and Mozart, harmony surpasses melody as a form-constituting attribute. “That said,” inasmuch as tonality is first and foremost ( or perhaps even solely ) a harmonic system, the fact that I derive little benefit from harmonic elements in  “processing” works of either “late tonality” or atonality suggests that the entire break with tonality by Schoenberg and his disciples was less momentous than it has been cracked up to be—cracked up to be, to be sure, with especially crepitative force by Lambert’s abovementioned colleagues-cum-compatriots, the members of the British musicological establishment, but also not-unforcefully by Adorno, who, in keeping with the spirit of Berg’s essay “Why Is Schoenberg’s Music So Difficult?” was keen to emphasize the continuities between Schoenberg’s tonal and post-tonal works, clove to the received view that the break with tonality in Pierrot Lunaire, the Second String Quartet, and the Three Piano Pieces was the most decisively transformative event in Schoenberg’s career ( and in the career of modern music en bloc ) .  One might expect that Lambert, thinking as little of harmony as he does, would regard the tonal-atonal divide an unworthy of a single ascending fissure, but that is not exactly the case. Indeed, when writing about the divide directly he gives one reason to suspect that he was the Ur-cum-arch English atonality-basher, so vehemently and categorically does he reject Schoenberg et al.’s post-tonal modus operandi. He decries it as unnatural with a natural-scientific—specifically zoological—precision most dogmatic tonalists are happy to dispense with in favor of a more narrow appeal to human nature in the Aristotelian tradition: “The unco, a species of Malayan ape noted for its singing in quarter-tones, is, as far as one can tell, the only living creature, capable of vocal production, that possesses no sense of tonality.” ( Here it is perhaps “worth mentioning,” if only parenthetically, that Schoenberg was only too willing to concede a natural-scientific basis to tonality, likening it as he did somewhere to the laws of gravity and aerodynamics, and from this comparison he derived the inference that inasmuch as we have managed to fly in defiance of those laws via the aeroplane, we should not feel inhibited from writing music that flouts the prescriptions of tonality. [ Here it is perhaps “worth mentioning,” if only sub-parenthetically, that it may have been this aeronautical conceit that further suggested to Schoenberg his late-life comparison of the “breather of air from another planet” in his Second String Quartet’s finale, his first fully atonal piece, to an astronaut. { Here it is definitely “worth mentioning,” if only sub-parenthetically, that this comparison exasperated Adorno. } ] ) And he reckoned that atonality’s unnaturalness doomed it to permanent obscurity: “While the listener finds that most aural stumbling blocks disappear with repeated experience, it is rarely that he overcomes the initial strangeness of atonalism, even when sufficiently familiar with the idiom to detect immediately the difference between its few masters and the many fumbling secondraters.” On the other hand, Lambert does not seem to be wedded to tonality as a complete system centering on all of the above-listed elements of harmony and on the conventions that flow into and out of them. He does not seem, in other words, to be thinking of tonality as narrowly as most of its defenders and detractors alike tend to think of it—viz., as synonymous with diatonicism, on tonality that pivots on the distinction between the major and minor modes and that relies on chord progressions proceeding via combinations of the above-listed chords and resolving in conventional cadences. One gathers this not only on negative grounds—on the grounds that he does not explicitly defend the properties of diatonicism, but also on positive ones, on the grounds that he does explicitly champion certain composers ( e.g., Satie, Debussy, and Bartók ) who at least intermittently wrote music that could not strictly have been described as diatonic. To specify the contrast between Lambert and the usual tonality-boosters in both sharper and more general terms: unlike them, he has no investment in tonality as a traditional system to be clung to superstitiously or quasi-religiously. Unlike them, he does not think that there was an historical moment in, say, 1890, when composers had finally ascertained the just proportion between consonances and dissonances, between home keys and the keys to which they modulated, between diatonic intervals and chromatic ones, and so on, and that if composers had stuck to that just proportion ever since, everything would be perfectly hunky-dory—that effectively, the twentieth century would have been chock-full of works that were every bit as brilliant, as indisputably worthy of designation as masterpieces, as the best late works of Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, et al. without being a jot more harmonically adventurous than them.  Indeed, Lambert seems to have no interest in any aspect of post ca.-1600 Occidental serious music as worthy of veneration qua tradition. One gathers this from, for example, his attitude to certain of both Schoenberg’s and Bach’s most legendarily complicated contrapuntal works:

The innumerable inversions, augmentations, diminutions and crabwise canons of Schönberg’s later works can, for the most part, be detected only by the visual analyst with time to spare. That a work is capable of elaborate analysis proves nothing, for a bad work may be just as interesting from the analyst’s point of view as a good one.

[ … ]

Schönberg’s contrapuntal writing varies in quality as much as Bach’s fugues: at times it is worthy to be set before the more introspective of the ’48, while at others it sinks below the level of the Mirror fugues in the Kunst der Fugue—which, being visually conceived are, apart from their more agreeable consonance open to precisely the same objections as Schönberg’s crabwise canons. We must distinguish between the occasional and expressive counterpoint in Pierrot Lunaire and the contrapuntal obsessions of the wind quintet. 

In the eyes of many—perhaps even most—historians and analysts of serious Western music, the mirror fugues in the Kunst der Fugue are among the supreme achievements of that music and are to be regarded as such precisely because most of their contrapuntal transformations can “be detected only by the visual analyst with time to spare.” While I cannot in any frankness or candor say that I agree with them on this point, I cannot in all frankness and candor say that I agree with Lambert thereon either. My reservations here spring mainly from my inability to discern any categorical or definite distinction between the qualities in written music that are detectable by the ear and those that are detectable by the eye alone. ( I say “mainly” because there is at least “a case to be made,” however feeble, for notated music as an artefact worth taking in through the eyes alone. ) This distinction is obviously not as definite or categorically “binary” as the one between the frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum that are visible to the human eye and those that are visible only to certain insects or the one between the frequencies in the auditory spectrum that are audible by the human ear and those only audible to dogs. If composers like Bach and Schoenberg had written fugues with contrapuntal combinations as inaudible in the same way and for the same reason as a super-high pitch is inaudible, one would have good reason to upbraid them for exceeding their remit as composers ( or simply for being absolutely barmy ) . But it seems to me that the combinations in Bach’s mirror fugues are inaudible, at least to most listeners ( and certainly to the present writer-cum-listener ) , for an entirely different reason—namely, that they require more concentration than one can bring to bear on the act of listening; in other words, that they exceed the powers of the human mind rather than those of the human ear. And of course this defect of the human mind, the defect of insufficient concentration is itself not a defect that can be categorically “binarily” distinguished from its complementary virtue, that of adequate concentration. Poor concentration is not a defect on the order of the defect in certain powers that it would seem to be safe to attribute to all human minds—say, the inability to picture an object of greater than three dimensions; for the power of concentration obviously varies from individual to individual. To be sure-ish, there is presumably some threshold of intensity-cum-duration of concentration that no human mind has ever crossed, but one cannot merely by consulting one’s own private experience as a concentrator. I am quite certain that my mind is incapable of exerting the intensity-cum-duration of concentration required of, say, a chess grand master—the ability to think “If I make this move, my opponent is bound to make one of x moves, which move of his will require me to make one of x^x moves minus all moves excluded by that move he will have just made, which move will require him to make one of X^{x^x} moves minus all moves excluded by my previous two moves,” and so on until one has arrived at an initial move that cannot eventually result in one’s own checkmating—but I am pretty sure that such concentration is humanly possible because I know that chess grand masters are said to apply such a pattern of thinking with not-infrequent success and that their games with each other not-infrequently end in draws.  Now while I assuredly don’t know that the concentration requisite to spotting a mirror fugue by the ear alone is humanly possible, this may not be because it isn’t humanly possible but merely because the humans who have found it possible have not seen fit to tell or write of their aural mirror-fugue spotting ability–this most likely because unlike chess-playing, music-listening is not a competitive activity ( at least not officially ) , such that no aural mirror-fugue spotter can have much of an incentive for distinguishing his aurally derived analysis of a mirror fugue from the analysis thereof that he might have derived solely from an ocular perusal of work’s score. I belabor this point not so much because I have any “skin in the game” ( or, rather, non-game ) of demonstrating the aural recognizability of super-complex contrapuntal structures as because in the culminating moment of his argument Lambert himself turns out to set great store by a certain objectively notated musical property that I at least find as impossible to spot aurally as I do such structures.  But precisely because he does not address this property until that culminating moment, I am going to defer addressing his addressing of it until the culminating moment of this essay in favor of addressing a question ineluctably elicited by our super-recent discovery of his indifference to tonality as a harmonic system-cum-tradition–namely, to what extent is Lambert an aesthetic ahistoricist-cum-nominalist ( which is to say, inter alia, the philosophical antipode of Adorno, an [ and perhaps the ] arch aesthetic historicist-cum-realist ) at least as regards the art of music? We can safely conclude that that extent is not infinite because we know that he regarded the balanced repetitions of sonata form as indissociable from the hierarchical social organization of the aristocratic era and the motoric repetitions of Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik as both belatedly Victorian-industrial and timely-ly post-German Romantic. And yet his reduction of tonality to its most basic property, the centering of melodies and chords on a specific tone, suggests that he believes that all of music’s most essential properties are freely available to composers at any given historical moment and that it is merely a sort of largely historically contingent collective failure of imagination that has led them to employ certain elements of music resourcefully to the detriment of certain others at certain historical moments. And that certainly seems to be the case to judge by his attitude to the other properties of music and their historical emplacement. For example, he asserts that the music of Elizabethan England was far more rhythmically sophisticated than any of the music of the Classical and Romantic periods of any country and implies that the later composers were less rhythmically interesting than their sixteenth-century English predecessors simply because they were less interested in rhythm. I can certainly at least see what he is driving at in his assertion about the Elizabethan composers even if the composition that has compelled me to see it is not of Elizabethan provenance but rather a twentieth-century pastiche of a classic Elizabethan form–viz., “My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth,” one of “P.D.Q. Bach’s” madrigals from his cycle The Triumphs of Thusnelda ( a composition with which, incidentally, I am familiar only aurally, through the recording of it included as a sort of filler to the LP of the premiere recording of “P.D.Q.”’s “half-act” opera The Stoned Guest ) . At a certain point in the final occurrence of the refrain of this piece ( a piece which, being a madrigal is a capella from beginning to end ) , the singer of the bass part ( performed in the recording by none other than “P.D.Q.”’s “discoverer”-cum-creator, Prof. Peter Schickele ) breaks away from his colleagues and “riffs” on the refrain’s lyrics ( lyrics consisting entirely of iterations, curtailments, and extensions of the nonsense phrase “Fa-la-la” à la the refrain of the Christmas carol “Deck the Halls” [ a correspondence that enables “P.D.Q.” to conclude the piece with a word for word-cum-note for note quotation of that song ] ) , developing them into an exuberantly protracted bebop-style “scat” solo that I at least would be punishingly hard-pressed to divide into any non-arbitrarily apportioned succession of bar lines, let alone to reduce to a single time signature, be it one as fringy as 12/32 or 20/16 ( although I can only presume that it has been satisfactorily notated, as “P.D.Q.”’s works have all been published as scores intended for complete realization on their basis alone ) . Here, as with most if not all of “P.D.Q.”s evocations of popular modern styles and procedures in a purportedly ancient-cum-hifalutin context ( including the just-mentioned evocation of “Deck the Halls” ) , while the immediate humor derives mainly if not entirely from the incongruity of the evocation, the more lasting effect is the inculcation of a sense of the substantive continuity between the representative samples of the two types of music. The scat solo in “My Bonnie Lass” ultimately only works even as a musical joke because a sixteenth-century madrigal handles rhythm in a way that does not differ drastically from the way in which it is handled in a modern jazz improvisation. And my discovery of this paucity of difference via “My Bonnie Lass” impels me not to dismiss out of hand Lambert’s prima-vista overblown contention that jazz single-handedly re-imparted to music a type and degree of rhythmic vitality that had remained dormant since the decline of the madrigal, a contention illustrated by such assertions as “On paper the rhythmical groupings of a tune like ‘Step on the Blues’ ( from The Girl Friend ) bear a striking resemblance to the irregular groupings to be found in the music of Edmund Turges ( circa 1500 ) [ … ] .” ( I am unsure, incidentally, if Lambert’s bibliographic information is entirely accurate here, and the online reference source of first resort isn’t giving me much help in ascertaining if he is. It identifies The Girl Friend as “a musical comedy with music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart and book by Herbert Fields” but does not list “Step on the Blues” as one of that work’s songs, while the 78-disc label of the only recording of “Step on the Blues” I have managed to access via YouTube, an instrumental arrangement performed by the “Ipana Troubadours, S.C. Lanin—Director,” credits “Conrad, Donaldson, and Harbach” as the song’s composers and “Kitty’s Kisses” as the work from which it hails. ) And I am all the more sympathetically inclined to this view of jazz when I find that it is the basis of a further contention to which I have already avowed my intuitive allegiance in this essay, viz. that English sounds more natural when sung in the context of a jazz song than in a German-style song—i.e., a Singpsiel number or Lied—that happens to have English lyrics:

We still go on setting English poetry in the totally unsuitable rhythms drawn from the German Volkslied. Actually, had not the course of English music been interrupted first by Handel and then, more gravely, by Mendelssohn, we should probably have found the rhythmic tradition of English music very much more eccentric and more full of ‘conceits’ than the tradition of jazz. As it is, certain jazz songs show a more apt feeling for the cadence of English speech than any music since the seventeenth century.        

But when I put these contentions to the test by attempting to apply them to the phenomena to which they refer, I find that they do not hold up as sufficiently serviceable generalizations—that the phenomena either do not seem to bear them out at all or to bear them out too fitfully or in only one of numerous significant registers. For example, English is after all at root a Germanic language, Lieder are after all German poems set to music, and technically speaking, German and English versification are indistinguishable: in both languages poems prevailingly consist of rhyming lines of stressed and unstressed syllables ( a concurrence that presumably greatly contributed to the establishment of Shakespeare as a classic in the German-speaking world via Schlegel’s and Tieck’s translations [ for all of Shakespeare’s verse is accentual-syllabic and an underappreciated portion of it rhymes even in the plays ] ) . It is accordingly difficult to see how the compositional practices employed in setting German poems to music should not work equally well for the setting thereto of English poems. I own that I still find most serious English vocal music unnatural and stilted-sounding, but perhaps that’s “just me”—or more specifically ( as already conjectured in “Weasel Goes the Pop” ) just a knock-on effect of my having heard English sung in pop songs long before hearing it sung in operas and serious-musical song cycles. But perhaps I am overlooking something in the positive side of the comparison—i.e., failing to discern a feature of the prosody of jazz that adds something quintessentially English to vocal music? To the extent that “Step on the Blues” is as representative as Lambert represents it to be, I infer that I am overlooking no such thing, for on listening to the abovementioned arrangement of that tune I encounter but one tiny moment in which the rhythmical grouping is at all irregular—a moment at which a phrase that I take to correspond to the words of the song’s title ( i.e., inasmuch as when I hear it I reflexively want to sing it as ‘Step ON the blues’ ) is repeated two or three times in succession on its own in a broken-record like way before being allowed to segue into its succeeding phrase the third or fourth time round.  This moment is certainly rhythmically reminiscent of the “Fa-la-la”-ing bits of “My Bonnie Lass” ( which will have to do as a succedaneum for the groupings of Turges, for I hear no such groupings in the single recording of a Turges composition that I have managed to dredge up at the Chewb and yet I dare not regard it as representative ) , but in what sense is it “characteristic of the cadences of English speech”? Are Anglophones more inclined to non-semantic repetition in their everyday chit-chat than Germanophones? ( Well, perhaps—after all, Max Headroom was as Anglo-American as Winston Churchill. ) And it is not as though this sort of thing is utterly unprecedented in the mainstream of the Austro-German classical tradition: right off the top of my head I can already think of an example of almost exactly the same rhythmic pattern in the minuet of Haydn’s Symphony No. 65 in A major.  In short, Lambert seems grossly to overstate the extent of both the German word-setting tradition’s deviation from its English counterparts and jazz’s rectification of this deviation. He overstates thus by conflating two separate phenomena—the musical setting of verse and the subordination of verse to musical treatment.  The correct way to describe the relation between the two phenomena would have been roughly as follows: Lied-style composition is largely and equally well-suited to setting both English and German verse to music, but Lied-style-song composers both German and English, the Elizabethan madrigalists and jazz composers were not content with setting to music poems as they appeared on the page: they liked to repeat certain lines and portions of lines. And so they availed themselves of a technique no less typical of eighteenth and nineteenth-century German instrumental music than of pre-eighteenth-century English vocal music—the repetition of rhythmic-cum-melodic phrases and units of rhythm-cum-melody even smaller than phrases. ( Of course in the case of jazz, one is most often not dealing with a pre-extant poem but with a set of words, such that the repetition of the words readily arises from of the repetition of the rhythmic-cum-melodic units. ) But this recasting of his argument would not have satisfied Lambert, inasmuch as he would have refused to “concede my major” that eighteenth and nineteenth-century German instrumental music was rhythmically vital enough to supply jazz composers sufficient impetus to resourceful repetition: “Without wishing in any way to denigrate the magnificent achievement of the German romantic school from Weber to Mahler,” he writes in the paragraph immediately preceding the above-quoted one that mentions the Volkslied, “we can without exaggeration say that it is remarkably deficient in purely rhythmic interest. Wagner himself was conscious of this failing and admitted it with a deprecatory ‘Well you can’t have everything’ air.” It would be nice to know where Wagner made the admission in question, as this would allow me to clinch or reject my conjecture that it was made regarding his own output exclusively rather than “the entire German romantic school from Weber to Mahler [ and if the so, perforce partly clairvoyantly, inasmuch as Mahler was still a 23-year-old composer-in-training in 1883, the year of Wagner’s death ] ” for I am happy enough to concede that the rhythmic sludginess and sluggishness of Wagner’s music has been known to set at least the present writer a-dozing. In any case, the inescapable rhetorical effect of ascribing the admission to Wagner is to impel the reader to regard him as the central and most representative member of “the German romantic school,” which is hardly fair, what with his being an especially soppy straw man in point of “purely rhythmic interest,” and on considering him as such a figure, as in considering “Step Up the Blues” qua reincarnation of the spirit of 1500, one is immediately assailed by robust counterexamples—from the peculiar cross-rhythms in the chorus of jeerers in the first scene of Der Freischutz ( with the women singing a succession of unsyncopated notes of uniformly short length while the men chime in with notes of varying length at irregular intervals ) to the bouncy syncopation-fest in the coda of the Brahms’s Second Symphony [ which, admittedly, Lambert would have excluded from “the German romantic school” on account of Brahms’s status as the official successor of Beethoven qua pre-romantic symphonist ] to the “Panic” percussion episode towards the end of the first movement of Mahler’s Third. Still, even supposing one must concede that German music of the nineteenth century is less rhythmically vital than that of other nations and periods, one is surely entitled to query whether this comparative rhythmic effeteness was not a necessary price to pay for the acquisition of other, equally valuable qualities that have not been as prevalent elsewhere and at other times, or to recast the question in general terms, if musical-compositional practice does not inevitably entail tradeoffs, if it is not impossible for any style or method of composition to be all things to all ears at once. But Lambert presumably believes that the answer to this question is no; or perhaps it has never occurred to him to ask it. Hence, either way, neither his association of sonata form with the aristocratic pre-French-Revolutionary organization of society, nor his association of Mussorgsky’s rejection of symphonic development with democratization, nor his pillorying of Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik as belatedly Victorian-industrial can be regarded as genuinely historicist because it perforce follows that if there are no reasons of any kind why all musical qualities might not all coexist with equal salience in a given work or in the compositional practice of a given composer or geographical location there cannot be any specifically historical reason why all such qualities might not coexist therein. Lambert self-evidently must not believe, for example, that Gebrauchsmusik’s belatedness arose from a sort of Althusserian law of “uneven development” among the arts, from a notion that there is or was something specific about music in contrast to the other arts that prevented it from embodying the spirit of the Victorian age in its technique until the Victorian age was history in the fullest sense, for if he could believe any such thing he presumably would not maintain that any efficient cause so contingent and extra-musical as the popularity of German composers like Handel and Mendelssohn prevented the English from exploiting the precedent of rhythmic vitality established by their own pre-eighteenth century composers. And while he does causally link the partial supersedence of sonata form by more flexible forms such as those of Mussorgsky’s operas to the rise of nationalism, he by no means claims that the supersedence of these forms in turn by the innumerable musical forms and movements of the early twentieth century has arisen from any abeyance of nationalism as a political force. To the contrary, writing as he does in the very year of the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany and several years into Mussolini’s government of Italy, he cannot avoid acknowledging ( albeit only briefly and occasionally ) that nationalism is more powerful than ever before as such a force. Although such a wantonly unsystematic approach is undeniably quite bracing and engaging if only on account of its sheer brazen insouciance and complete absence of academic stuffiness, it is obviously quite “problematic” for at least two salient reasons. First, however mysterious or even ultimately unfathomable the connection between music and history in the big traditional sense may be, music clearly does not interact with history in such an intermittent and a la carte manner as Lambert seems to suppose. If rhythmically vital home-grown English music failed to thrive owing to Handel and Mendelssohn’s popularity, their popularity was largely owing neither to extra-musical circumstances nor to merely idiosyncratic qualities of their respective musical corpora. It was largely owing, rather, to these corpora’s participation in a certain stylistic tradition of Italian and German origin that had ( as Lambert himself fleetingly acknowledges ) whose methods and techniques had become the musical lingua franca of Europe and that therefore would have dominated musical taste in Britain through other composers in that tradition ( and indeed did dominate it through at least two others—Haydn and J.C. Bach ) even if a single note of Handel or Mendelssohn had never been played there. It is accordingly as silly to blame the absence of rhythmically vital music from eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century England on the popularity of Handel and Mendelssohn as it would be to blame the absence of Gesualdo-esque levels of chromaticism from eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century Italian music on the popularity of Rossini.  Second, there is something extremely unconvincing and unsatisfying about a notion of music ( or of any other art ) whose constituent elements and registers are not even expected to aspire to cohere with one another. Even if we grant melody pride of formal place as Lambert does ( and as I have already effectively granted he is right in dong ) and grant second-place importance to rhythm ( as Lambert appears to do in repining so stridently at lack of rhythmic vitality ) , surely it does not follow from these concessions that the formal relation of the harmony to melody and rhythm is of negligible importance, as Lambert implies when he writes, for example, “Much of the emotional stimulus of jazz is due to the piquant contrast between the terse and slangy rhythm and the somewhat glucose harmony.” Of course it will be instantly demurred that here Lambert is making a point diametrically opposed to the position that I am imputing to him, that here he is actually saying that the interrelation of rhythm and harmony in jazz is of paramount importance, but what he is actually saying is merely that the fortuitous coincidence of certain qualities in jazz harmony and jazz rhythm produces a perversely desirable effect. He is saying that the harmony “works” in a certain perverse sense, and quite in defiance of the presumptive intentions of the musicians involved, despite not working at all in the way that harmony works in complete conformity with the presumptive intentions of the composer in a well-composed piece of serious music. ( A normative counterexample to this perverse functioning of superfluous elements is afforded by the cello parts of Haydn’s piano trios. As is well known, they merely double the bassline of the piano and consequently contribute nothing substantial to the musical argument, such that they could be stripped away entirely and the ex-trios would function perfectly well as sonatas for violin and piano. And yet inasmuch as they do not contradict the musical argument, it is quite clear that they consistently serve a purely coloristic purpose, that of adding greater weight to the bassline, making it sound “bassier.” The “glucosity” of jazz harmony as described by Lambert bears more fruitful comparison to those moments in Haydn’s early string quartets in which the cello is suddenly directed to play in a higher register than the viola and thereby to deprive the music of a bassline, moments that suggest inadvertency on the composer’s part, as if [ in the approximate words of a twentieth-century British music critic whom I now unable to identify, just as I am now unable to pinpoint the book in which I read them ] Haydn has briefly forgotten that he is not still writing for a continuo ensemble in which the bassline has already been supplied by the contrabass. ) And to the extent that this is an accurate generalization about jazz, even the best jazz merits the kind and degree of disdain heaped on it by Adorno, and Lambert’s apologia for jazz is no apologia at all but a condemnation malgré lui-même. I wish I could more than figuratively frame such howlers of Lambert’s as this sentence on jazz and the passages on German rhythmic poverty versus English rhythmic vitality because they deserve to be textbook examples of the conceptual limitations of the ad hoc anti-philosophical Anglo-Saxon approach to the history of art and art-like phenomena and hence of the desirability of an approach such as Adorno’s that does not disguise its aspiration to relate even the most fine-grained elements of these phenomena to the most monumental aspects of other historically mediated phenomena in the most philosophically robust terms. To be sure, the adoption of such an approach by no means guarantees that one will accurately account for everything and be fair to everyone, and in his employment of his “negative Hegelian” version of this approach Adorno evidently got certain things wrong and shortchanged certain people. As we have already seen, in underrating the extent to which the most characteristic technical qualities of Beethoven’s music had already been achieved by Haydn he made the break between the “petit-bourgeois” and “heroic” epochs of the bourgeois era seem cleaner than it actually was. And Charles Rosen was certainly onto something when he disparaged Adorno’s condescending attitude even to the Russian composers he admired most as “cultural racism.” And my own experience as a listener has persuaded me that he was too uncharitable to mainstream composers of the second rank ( as opposed to full-fledged oddballs like Satie ) , particularly non-German ones. I find that while he was seldom if ever wide of the mark in his appraisal of them, I cannot bring myself to regard them as completely superfluous to my life as a listener, which in turn impels me to suppose that their music possesses historically exigent qualities that he overlooked. To be sure, at bottom Dvorak is a sort of poor man’s Tchaikovsky crossed with a poor man’s Brahms, and I cannot regard the prospect of a complete aural survey of his voluminous chamber and orchestral output without a pang of proleptic weariness à la the young man in the film who already knows that he “didn’t have a good time” at the bar he has yet to visit, but of the double-handful of Dvorak works with which I am familiar there are a near-handful that I regard with genuine fondness and even admiration—for example, the Slavonic Dances, which I find slightly superior to Brahms’s Hungarian Dances qua “folkish” miniatures. And to be sure, Elgar comes across as nothing more or better than a sort of stiff-upper-lipped Mahler in plus-fours, but is such a figure entirely superfluous to music’s share of the conveyance of the Weltgeist? Do not certain of Elgar’s best works, such as the Second Symphony and the Sea Pictures, supplement Mahler’s symphonies and song cycles as substantively in their own way as do the Little Mermaid and Lyric Symphony of Alexander Zemlinsky, near-double of Mahler to whom Adorno may have been far kinder largely on account of his close personal and pedagogical ties to Arnold Schoenberg? But despite all these shortcomings and blind spots, Adorno’s philosophy-cum-history-cum-sociology of music offers a more or less compelling account ( I refuse for likeability’s sake to stoop to employing the other n-word [ i.e., n**r****e ] let alone the even more execrable other s-word [ i.e., s***y ] ) of why and how music changed when, where, and how it did between, say, the late seventeenth and the latish twentieth century ( it having been perforce prevented from weighing in on musical change in the full-blown late twentieth century owing to Adorno’s death in 1969 ) . It is an account that more or less satisfactorily explains ( or can easily be made to explain ) , for example, why native-composed madrigals and whimsical English-language entertainments like Purcell’s King Arthur died out in Britain and German and Italian composers of operas, symphonies, and the like became popular in their place—viz., because the native notated music of pre-1700 was too “aristocratic” in a bluffly barbarous late-medieval sort of way, and the version of the aristocratic that acquired ascendancy in the early eighteenth century was already half bourgeois. And it is an account that more or less satisfactorily explains why Wagner is a less than totally satisfactory composer—viz., not, as Lambert supposes, because his music is too rhythmically monotonous but because it is too harmonically and melodically unsystematic.  It moreover more or less satisfactorily explains why Wagner came to write such harmonically and melodically unsystematic music in the first place—viz., because he was a typical middle-class showman of his age, the age of the definitively post-heroic bourgeoisie. ( To be sure, Adorno was not alone in tendering this thesis about Wagner, or theses about Wagner along such lines, for Jacques Barzun said more or less the same thing at more or less exactly the same moment in his triographic screed Darwin Marx Wagner [ a book written and published, like Adorno’s In Search of Wagner, in the very early 1940s ] . But as it indicates in its title, Barzun’s book is interested in Wagner’s music primarily as an embodiment of certain concepts likewise embodied in the work of Darwin and Marx [ notably evolution as a supposedly inexorable and purely mechanical process ] and therefore engages only fleetingly and superficially with its technical aspects. This is “worth pointing out” because it shows that a contextualizing practice as general in scope as cultural history [ for Barzun styled himself a cultural historian ] is as inadequate to a treatment of a specific art as an inadequately contextual treatment thereof such as Lambert’s. ) Finally but not finically, it quite persuasively presents Schoenberg’s leap to atonality as an inevitable response to the shambolic state in which tonality had been left by Wagner and both jazz and neoclassicism’s cleaving to tonality as an equally inevitable capitulation to this shambolic state, all the while tightly linking these developments to changes in individual and collective psychology throughout the Occident. Not too shabby, eh? Not that I maintain that Adorno’s philosophy-cum-history-cum-sociology of music is the only possible coherent and compelling account of music of the quarter-millennium that it covers but that no other account thereof that even aspires to such “interdisciplinary” scope and depth has yet appeared. The account comprised by Charles Rosen’s two great period-centered studies, The Classical Style and The Romantic Generation, probably comes closest, but while these books laudably devote far more detail to the analysis of scores than Adorno ever did, they are much more modest in scope than even Adorno’s slimmest monographs, contenting themselves à la Barzun with loosely linking the changes in musical practice to certain chronologically parallel developments in politics and philosophy. “Schon gut, schon gut. I catch. But to return to Lambert vis-à-vis Adorno: if Adorno on the whole despite his shortcomings almost everything right with his systematizing approach, while Lambert gets many if not most things wrong with his scattershot approach, why do you value Music Ho! at all, let alone find that it bears serious comparison with Adorno’s corpus of writings on music?” I value Music Ho! and indeed value it quite highly first because of Lambert’s above-discussed knacks ( if not geniuses ) for vividly describing key phenomena in the history of the experience of listening and for justifying the best composers of the abovementioned second rank ( composers among whom I number Vaughan Williams, whose justification by Lambert I have effectively extended and amplified in my above account of VW’s Sixth Symphony ) ,  and second because despite availing himself of an entirely different method from Adorno’s ( or, indeed, a non-method ) , Lambert starts with a core desideratum for music that is essentially the same as Adorno’s ( not to mention mine ) and arrives at the same conclusion regarding the shortcomings of contemporary music in relation to this desideratum: he thinks that music should not repeat itself whether the referent of “itself” is music written in earlier historical periods or music written earlier in a specific composition, and he believes that much of music of the early twentieth century has been repeating itself in both these bad senses ( which is why his book is subtitled “a study of music in decline” despite his guarded enthusiasm for jazz and certain composers of the second rank ) . Like Adorno, he is not a Julian Lloyd-Webber figure who thinks it would be all fine and dandy for composers to keep writing in the musical language of D’Indy until the end of time. Like Adorno, he regards music that repeats itself as inauthentic and lacking in truth content, even if he contingently articulates this view in terms that Adorno would have abhorred as inauthentic and false because obsolete or insufficiently historically mediated–in terms, that is, of quality and utility ( as in the above-quoted example likening a piano concerto to a pair of shoes ) . One sees this laudable horror of repetition in his general disdain for sonata form. To be sure, he was wrong to disdain sonata form as practiced by Haydn and Mozart ( as he dimly seems to be aware when he passingly terms the repetitions in Haydn “charming” because “in Haydn and Mozart our emotional reaction is derived from the movement as a whole” ) because in that version of sonata form the repetition subsists in meaningful tension with harmonic difference, but he was not wrong to disdain it as practiced in “the typical nineteenth-century symphony as represented by Tchaikovsky No. 5, Dvořák’s From the New World, and César Franck in D minor” because in these works the repetitions are very much note-for-note echoes bereft of any meaning-bearing harmonic difference. ( Although in singling out these works as the typical symphonies of their period he undersells nineteenth-century composers’ awareness of the antiquatedness of sonata form and their efforts to modify it to suit the exigencies of their material. In neither Tchaikovsky’s Fourth nor his Sixth Symphony, is any section of first-movement sonata form dealt with in a straightforwardly conventional way. ) His irritation with nineteenth-century sonata form is essentially consubstantial with the attitude expressed by Elliott Carter towards the school of musical composition known as minimalism seventy years later:

[ Minimalism is ] death. If you write one bar and then repeat it over again, the music ceases to have anything to do with the composer, from my point of view, anyway. It means a person’s stopped living. It doesn’t have anything to do with music. [ … ] I think that one of the big problems we live with is that that kind of repetition is everywhere, in advertising, in public address systems, and in politicians always saying the same thing. We live in a minimalist world, I feel.

Here it is “worth pointing out” that Carter was born in 1908, hence in the same decade as both Lambert and Adorno, such that he, like them, was “present at the creation” of the musical noise-pollution industry, and that although he spoke these words in 2003 ( specifically to Geoffrey Norris in a newspaper interview ) , it is reasonable to suppose that he conceived of “the minimalist world” as having come into being not with the premiere of “the first minimalist composition to make a significant impact on the public consciousness,” Terry Riley’s In C, in 1964, but in his own youth, with the advent of the aforesaid industry and the attendant loudspeaker-mediated incessant musical din so stridently decried by Lambert ( for a “public address system” is of course but a localized network of loudspeakers ) . And had Lambert lived to hear In C and its hundreds of “classical”-chart topping successors by Riley, Philip Glass, and John Adams, he would doubtless have regarded minimalism as an unsurprising outcome of the reinforcement of the late Romantic and neoclassical predilection for anachronistic repetition by two further generations of universally enforced radio and gramophone-listening.   ( As for Adorno, although he lived a further half-decade after the premiere of In C, he presumably regarded whatever minimalist compositions he could not avoid encountering as beneath his notice, for short of a complete revolution in his understanding of music, he could not but have despised minimalism, and we know he underwent no such revolution because he is on record as denouncing rock music [ whose massive popularity in his target pedagogical demographic prevented him from ignoring it ] , a form or style united with minimalism in [ so the rabid Adorno fan Glenn Gould in 1981 ] its “deadly dull…exploit [ ation of ] one beat that goes on and on and on indefinitely.” )  For Lambert alighted on the remarkable discovery—a discovery disclosed quite early on in Music Ho!—that to write music “that has something to do with music” it does not suffice “to write one bar and not repeat it again,” for in merely doing that one willy-nilly repeats what others have already composed, exactly in the manner of a twentieth-century would-be Columbus or Magellan who set out to explore the world just as his fifteenth and sixteenth-century predecessors had done—i.e., pointing a ship in some randomly chosen direction:

There is an obvious end to the amount of purely physical experiment in music, just as there is an obvious end to geographical exploration. Wyndham Lewis has pointed out [ where? ] that when speed and familiarity have reduced travelling in space to the level of the humdrum those in search of the exotic will have to travel in time, and this is what has already happened in music. The Impressionist composers vastly speeded up the facilities for space travel in music, exploring the remotest jungles and treating uncharted seas though they were the Serpentine [ in London’s Hyde Park ] . Stravinsky, at one time the globe trotter par excellence can no longer thrill us with his traveller’s tales of the primitive steppe and has, quite logically, taken to time travelling instead. He reminds one of the character in a play by Evreinoff [ Who he? ] who lives half in the eighteenth century, half in the present.

I was both thrilled and crestfallen when I read this passage for the first time—thrilled because it was and is so impressively spot-on, and crestfallen because the conceit propounded therein was one that I had long before come up with on my own—and thereby proved its unsurprising applicability, mutatis mutandis, to other arts than music.  Adorno did not alight on the cartographical conceit, but although in 1933 he was still championing Schoenberg and his pupils as genuinely progressive figures, by 1953 he had like Lambert tentatively arrived at the conclusion that nothing wholly and essentially new remained to be done in music: “The suspicion is justified that [ the pianist and fellow-advocate of the Second Viennese School ] Edward Steuermann once expressed, namely that music, at least great music, whose concept extends from Bach via Beethoven to Schoenberg, is a transient category, bound up with the bourgeois era and fated to be forgotten.” To be sure, Adorno continued to take an interest in contemporary music and developed a particularly keen enthusiasm for the works of Pierre Boulez, but on the whole he regarded the most supposedly advanced composers of his last two decades, the so-called total serialists, as mere epigones of the most near-totally serial-minded mind of the Second Viennese School, Anton Webern. And his consignment of all of “music, at least great music” to the bourgeois era naturally recalls Lambert’s consignment of sonata form to the aristocratic one with the difference that it is at least “arguably” correct, as the Second World War “arguably” dealt the coup de grace to the bourgeois era that had received a near-fatal body-blow in the First, even though as perceptive a cultural critic as Jean Amery would go on describing the present as “late bourgeois” into the early 1970s. In any case, by the early 1950s, the neoclassicists had vanished from the time-traveling musical circuit ( Stravinsky himself having meanwhile become a late-life convert to Schoenberg’s method ) , leaving in their place the latest generation of jazz musicians: “It [ i.e., the fated oblivion of great music ] ” continues Adorno immediately after the just-quoted one,

is not unlike the way a jazz athlete, highly qualified in his particular specialty, who already finds it impossible what was actually at stake, rejects serious music as corny, as an old-fashioned mixture of naiveté and affectation, and at the same time—having long since ceased to be content with pride at his own ignorance—goes so far as to declare himself an adherent of that music in the name of the Weltgeist.

This characterization of the jazz musician qua exponent of regressive music who fancies himself in the post-vanguard of the great tradition anticipates Chuck Berry’s 1956 autogenealogy of himself and his own songs in “Roll Over Beethoven,” and when rock ‘n’ roll morphed into its much more pretentious instar, rock tout court, pop musicians’ will to disparage the “corniness” of traditional serious music while demonstrating their mastery of it became much more flagrant. No popster’s claim to deserve to be recognized as a “serious artist” is complete absent the release of a record featuring an ineptly arranged wash of orchestral strings, but in the “video” for the recording, the audio for these strings is invariably synched with manifestly fresh-off-the-reel footage of toothless octogenarian violinists in tie-and-tails. And although pop’s technical stock in trade has not changed an iota since “Roll Over Beethoven,” few if any of the thousands of spin-off styles and genres of pop that have appeared in the past six decades--from funk to rap to speed metal to techno to grime--have failed to pass themselves off as “groundbreaking” or “revolutionary” developments “in music” ( not just pop music, all music ) , a tendency whose wearisome apparent interminability eventually prompted me to apply my then-newly discovered ( or as I then thought, invented ) cartographical conceit by privately likening the more recent of these self-off-passings to “the umpteenth discovery of Poughkeepsie.” But enough about me, and indeed about Lambert and Adorno qua fellow-disparagers of the music of their time, for even more interesting than their concurrence that the current state of music ( give or take twenty years ) was parlously moribund is their divergence regarding the best means of addressing and rectifying this state. Adorno was neither slow to propose such a means nor brief in expatiating on it, but the terms of his expatiation were unhappily ( some would naturally say “conveniently” ) so tentative and vague that one—not only I, but many another reader including Richard Leppert, the editor of a collection of Essays on Music by TWA—is stumped to imagine what form the means in question might actually take. But perhaps this de facto formlessness is “no accident,” for Adorno dubbed this prospective post-bourgeois musique informelle, “informelle” being not the French equivalent of the English informal ( although as we shall very shortly see, Adorno doubtless wished it to carry overtones of that word ) but a neologism, the negation of formelle, a word that Cassell’s French Dictionary ( first published in 1972 last revised in 1981, and hence a more reliable source on a septuagenarian word than the latest Larousse ) renders as “formal, express, precise, plain, explicit.” So this is clearly ( and plainly and precisely, if not necessarily formally, expressly, or explicitly ) a case in which “a bug is a feature”: an authentic musique informelle would be informal, not definitely stated ( or prepared slowly ) , vague, imprecise, and implicit, and such indeed is the impression of it given in closest approach to a definition of it:

What is meant is a type of music which has discarded all forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in an inflexible way. At the same time, although such music should be completely free of anything irreducibly alien to itself or superimposed on it, it should nevertheless constitute itself in an objectively compelling way, in the musical substance itself, and not in terms of musical laws. ( tr. Susan Gillespie )     

“Ironically,” whenever I try to picture this type of music in action or “praxis,” I inevitably find it hard not to think of it as some kind of revival of Musikantenmusik or Gebrauchsmusik, as some lone fiddler “striking up a tune” or gaggle of musically untrained people launching into song at the prompting of some contingent and fleeting stimulus. And I suppose it is possible that Adorno himself imagined musique informelle as just that, inasmuch as he tendered a codicil to the definition that is tailor-made for inoculating any such revival against kitschy anachronism: “Musique informelle is not cultural neutralism, but a critique of the past.” A latter-day Musikant who was also a practitioner of musique informelle would evade kitschy anachronism because whatever he happened to play, it would definitely not be an old tune presented to his listener’s ears as if it had been made up on the spot or written literally only yesterday. It might, rather, take the form—excuse me, unform—excuse me, inform—of, say, the opening four-note motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but of that motif as played an allusion elicited by the exigencies of a quotidian moment—say, the ringing of a telephone in the familiar ( or once familiar ) rhythm of a whole notes alternating with dotted whole rests ( or in the UK, double quarter notes alternating with dotted half notes ) . On hearing the ring-tone, the phone’s owner ( a non-musician ) might say to a friend in the same room before answering the call, “It’s like fate knocking at the door,” thereby prompting the friend qua latter-day Musikant to say, “But if it were really fate knocking at the door, wouldn’t it sound like this?” then pick up his violin and play the opening notes of the Fifth ( perchance much to the consternation of the call-taker who by then has answered the call and is trying to listen to the party at the other end [ who, perchance, in a delicious instance of “the irony fate,” is delivering to him some fatefully or fatally bad news ] ) .  As to why I can’t seem to think of musique informelle’s taking any other form than latter-day Musikantschaft, this may simply be owing to some contingent personal defect of my imagination, a defect that is preventing me from conceiving of a version of music-production that is eminently feasible, or it may very well be that my imagination is onto something, that it has correctly intuited the practical or logistical impossibility, even in the most utopian future post-bourgeois society—a society in which “the realm of freedom” had been completely “wrested from the realm of necessity” ( to cite the definition of the telos of Marxism formulated  by the as-of-this-writing [ Halloween 2024 ] -properly-late [ i.e., per my “Glossary of Solecisms and Barbarisms,” as opposed to long dead and therefore not properly late ] self-styled Marxist Frederic Jameson ) —of regularly and reliably producing music in the absence of the imposition of formal constraints that would perforce compromise the produced music qua “critique of the past.” Certainly the only extant approach to a counterexample that springs to mind, that of the practice of John Cage, does not seem quite to fit the bill because although its hospitability to randomness and contingency is certainly inimical to formality, its exiguousness of input from the composer calls into question its very actuality as a form—excuse me, inform—of composing, and its relation to the past is not so much one of critique as of indiscriminate assault ( Elliott Carter likened it to the desire to burn down an opera house, perhaps partly in allusion to the resemblance of Cage qua showman to Wagner the one-time meta-theatrical arsonist ) , and in any case Adorno himself was aware of Cage and although he praised his work’s “polemical meaning,” and asserted that his “contribution [ could ] not be exaggerated,” he stopped well short of anointing him as the world’s first practitioner of musique informelle. Perhaps certain works of electronic music would have satisfied him. I am thinking here of Pousseur’s Jeu de miroirs de Votre Faust, which in a long episode dominated by taped soprano voice and piano traverses the entire history of Western music in a manner reminiscent of Joyce’s traversal of literary history in the hospital episode of Joyce’s Ulysses ( and hence inexorably functions as a form of music criticism as the other episode functions as a form of literary criticism ) . Jeu de miroirs dates from 1967, so Adorno might just have had a chance to hear it, and he does in fact mention Pousseur approvingly in the essay in which he formulates the principle of musique informelle, albeit without citing a specific work ( and as that essay dates from before 1967 he could not have been thinking specifically of Jeu de miroirs ) .

In any case, what is essentially in point here is not what would have pleased Adorno but what approach to music-production might have most effectually resolved the problem of musical-topographical exhaustion ( or may have already resolved it or may yet resolve it ) . So let us take a look at Lambert’s suggestions regarding such an approach—or, rather, “prescriptions” regarding it, for that unlike Adorno he has quite definite notions of the sort of approach to take can be readily seen ( as I mentioned before ) in his titling of the pertinent chapter “Sibelius and the Music of the Future.” Of course from this title it can also readily be seen ( as I also mentioned before ) that the prescription boils down to an adjuration to future composers to imitate Sibelius, and I must needs admit that when I found him yoking Sibelius’s name with futurity so explicitly in that title I both saw at least a mild shade of red and felt an eyebrow ( specifically and perhaps felicitously my left one, as my right one is almost paralytically incapable of solitary motion ) jerk skeptically upward. For after all, I had never seen Sibelius presented as a “progressive” composer by even his most dedicated admirers and ardent propagandists ( who were at least legionesque among Lambert’s contemporaries-cum-colleagues in the Anglosphere, to Adorno’s intense irritation [ but in bringing Adorno back in I am getting a little ahead of myself ] ) . Indeed, I had read somewhere or other that within his lifetime Sibelius was widely regarded ( to his own Adorno-esque intense irritation ) as the immediate successor to Tchaikovsky as a symphonist, and so given that Lambert regarded Tchaikovsky as an exponent of “the typical nineteenth-century symphony” it was surprising ( and remains bemusing [ for Lambert never registers any awareness of the genealogy linking the two composers, let alone makes any effort to refute it ] ) that he also apparently regarded Sibelius as an exponent of a kind of symphony that ought to serve as a model for the typical twentieth-century one.  But as it turns out, chez Lambert there is no contradiction between the notion of Sibelius as a non-progressive and Sibelius as pioneer or pathbreaker because Lambert does not regard him as the founder of an entirely new method of composition à la Schoenberg.  Mind you, I myself have never found the comparison to Tchaikovsky particularly apt; indeed, to my ears there is only one episode in all of Sibelius’s symphonic output—which I have at least technically aurally surveyed ( i.e., been in aural proximity to a loudspeaker through which it has streamed ) in its entirety dozens of times over—that might actually be mistaken for something by Tchaikovsky—viz., the impossibly treacly principal melody of the finale of the Second Symphony, which really does sound ( at least to my ears ) like the lyrical second subject from the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth on saccharine-coated estrogen pills. Still, it is true that ( at least to my ears ) Sibelius could never be mistaken for the kind of twentieth-century composer whom Adorno termed ( naturally disparagingly ) “moderately modern,” a composer like Prokofiev or Shostakovich or Hindemith or the later Bartók who, while never making the leap into full-blown atonality, wrote in a style-cum-idiom that would have been found unthinkably chromatic and dissonant in the late nineteenth century. And yet again, he is not a twentieth-century composer who, like Elgar or Zemlinsky ( Adorno is doubtless turning in his grave at my mentioning these two in the same typographical breath ) , sounds pretty much like a classic late Romantic or post-Romantic who overstayed his historical welcome by a few decades. In short, Jeanny S. is quite “a tough nut to crack,” in the words of Glenn Gould apropos of himself in one of his self-interviews. And speaking of Gould, it is “worth pointing out” that he was an ardent Sibeliusian ( I defy you to take a crack at the tough nut of pronouncing that word, DGR ) , indeed, so ardent a one that he used the last few minutes of S.’s Fifth as the soundtrack of the conclusion of his radio documentary The Idea of North by way of underscoring the implicitly normative narrator’s presentation of northern Canada as a William Jamesian alternative to war-cum-Rodenberrian final frontier. It is “worth pointing this out” because Gould was also an ardent Adornian ( even if his Adorno-fandom seems to have been built on a much slenderer foundation than his Sibelius-fandom—viz., the collection of essays known in English as Prisms ) . And so he was perforce a champion of Adorno’s “perennial criteria of musical quality from Bach to Schoenberg”—the qualities of “evocativeness, of articulateness, of oneness in multifariousness, of diversity in unity.” Indeed, he could be said to have been “more royalist than the king” in his prizing of these qualities, inasmuch as while Adorno did seek and find “articulateness,” “oneness in multifariousness” and “diversity and unity” principally in the-quality-composers-from-Bach-to-Schoenberg’s contrapuntal passages and consistently treated contrapuntal’s antonym homophonic almost as a dirty word, he never went so far, as Gould once ( i.e., in his interview with Tim Page regarding his 1981 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations ) did, as to declare that “all of the music that really interested” him ( “not just some of it, all of it” ) was “contrapuntal in nature.” And yet, wie gesagt, Gould was an ardent admirer of Sibelius, the scourge of Adorno’s master-criteria ( at least according to Adorno ) .  So what gave or gives? Why, evidently, either that Sibelius’s music actually abounds in “articulateness,” “oneness in multifariousness” and “diversity in unity,” and that Adorno failed to see ( or hear ) this, or that S.’s music is as exiguous in these qualities as Adorno supposed and Gould enjoyed S.’s music as a so-called guilty pleasure rather than taking a “real interest in it.” Or, just possibly, that S.’s music abounds in a kind or kinds of “articulateness,” “oneness in multifariousness,” or “diversity in unity” that operate or operates independently of counterpoint and that Adorno overlooked this abundance while Gould “felt it in his bones” ( as Gould said he expected the listener to feel his own highly articulated treatment of tempo in relation to meter in the 1981 Goldbergs ) , and that this abundance on its own was good enough for Gould whatever he might have claimed about the monopolization of his interest by counterpoint. Or, just barely possibly, that S.’s music, while being markedly deficient in “articulateness,” “oneness in multifariousness” and “diversity in unity” makes up for this deficiency by being more “evocative” than Adorno gave it credit for being and that this evocativeness on its own was good enough for Gould whatever he might have claimed about the monopolization of his interest by counterpoint. For my part, before reading Lambert’s chapter on him ( to which I swear we will return shortly, DGR ) , by which point I had completed most of the abovementioned several-dozen aural surveys of the symphonies, I found myself unbudgeably on Adorno’s side and hence utterly unable to bring myself over to Gould’s, and indeed, I not only found Sibelius’s music lacking in the meritorious qualities specified in general terms by Adorno but also positively abounding in the bad ones specified by him in more particular terms in the following passage:

 

In isolation everything sounds workaday and familiar. The motifs are fragments of the lingua franca of tonality. But they are combined into a meaningless nexus: it is as if nouns like filling station, lunch, death, Greta, and ploughshare are being indiscriminately coupled with verbs and particles. An incomprehensible whole assembled out of the most trivial details produces a mirage of the unfathomable.  

 

A good example of such a “meaningless nexus” is ( and in writing in the present tense as I cannot honestly avoid doing I am obviously letting at least three-quarters of the cat out of the bag regarding my view of the degree of persuasiveness of Lambert’s argument ) the abovementioned conclusion of the Fifth Symphony. It begins with an episode melodically dominated by a rhythmically unvarying motif oscillating repeatedly between upward movement by the interval of a fifth and downward movement by the interval of a third. There is scarcely a more familiar vocable of “the lingua franca of tonality” than such oscillation along these intervals: it is exactly the kind of thing a toddler produces the first time he is placed in front of a piano keyboard in a calm enough mood to pick out individual notes with one finger instead of pounding out Ivesian tone clusters with his fists. And of course “there is nothing wrong” with starting out with such primevally familiar material just as there is nothing wrong with starting work on a  sentence with the determination that it is going to include a primevally familiar word like “lunch” or “death.” But Sibelius simply repeats the oscillation over and over again ( yes, Glenn, just like one of your accursed minimalists or rock musicians [ speaking of whom it is comically telling that the online reference work of first resort both cites ten occurrences of the motif in pop songs and acknowledges that it cannot distinguish between the ones that are quotations and the ones that are merely coincidental ] ) for a minute or two and then abruptly drops the motif, whereupon the symphony concludes with an ordinary V-I cadence in quarter notes—but one whose V part is apportioned among a half-dozen or so of those notes punctuated by rests of equal or greater length, so that the first-time listener is left in suspense as to when and whether the tonic chord will ever drop. The effect is rather like—nay, exactly like—listening in on a dog being repeatedly being told “wait for it” by his owner before finally being given the password that permits him to open his jaws to receive the long-withheld mini-biscuit. It is also more broadly reminiscent of the codas of Haydn’s “Joke” quartet and Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, but unlike these it fails to “land,” as one says of punchlines nowadays, because the aforementioned several minutes of bi-intervallic oscillation were manifestly un-jocular in tone and momentum ( the online reference work of first resort claims that it is an imitation of the horn call of Thor, surely the least humorous, the most po-faced, of pagan gods—but one doesn’t need to be aware of the allusion [ as I was not until more than figuratively yesterday as of this writing { Guy Fawkes Boxing Day 2024 } ] to be incapable of construing it as comical ) . In short, it is in a more than figurative sense a non-sequitur. Presumably Adorno was hinting at this quality of the abrupt illogical juxtaposition of different registers in including both a quasi-archaism like ploughshares and an ultra-modernism like filling-station in his catalogue of nouns. I grant that not every movement of every one of Sibelius’s symphonies is as flagrantly irrational as the finale of the Fifth. But almost wherever I do not hear irrationality, I hear vacuity: “There’s no there there.” Take the opening movement of the Fourth: it is celebrated by Sibeliusians as the great musical embodiment of the spirit of tragedy. To my ears it embodies nothing but a sort of querulous inertia. “Don’t get me wrong here”; don’t mistake my dissatisfaction for mere impatience, the manifestation of an incorrigible “short attention span,” for I dare say no listener appreciates a truly mahoosive symphonic adagio—say, the third movement of Bruckner’s or the first of Shostakovich’s Eighth, each of which dwarfs the first of Sibelius’s Fourth in duration—more than I do. But in these music-modules there is always something happening at however glacial a pace; at every moment of them an argument is audibly in the midst of being propounded, at every moment of them something is on its way to reaching or becoming something else, whereas a Sibelius movement always seems to be merely marking time and treading water in pseudo-preparation for its arbitrary lurch into the next episode of special effect-mongering. And of course from my couching of this description in the present tense, the reader will have gathered that for all its amplitude, Lambert’s chapter on Sibelius did not succeed at persuading me that this seeming was after all mere semblance, that there was after all a there somewhere in the roughly 200 minutes comprising the famous Finn’s symphonic output; and indeed on the whole the chapter struck me as a perfect analogue or counterpart of my established conception of the typical Sibelius work, for for the most part the chapter is just “one damn thing after another,” which is to say that for the most part Lambert contents himself with simply providing a sort of play-by-play description of all the episodes of all of the symphonies, together those of the two well-known tone poems, Finlandia and Tapiola, in chronological sequence. I say “for the most part” because I can recall exactly two passages in which he does something different—and I freely concede to his credit ( at least according to the standards of my  personal credit-rating agency ) that the something-different done at the first of these points has effected a modification of my appraisal of Sibelius in the composer’s favor, albeit one too slight and localized to have been worth incorporating into the just-tendered summary of that appraisal; and that the something-different done at the second of them has offered at least the remote prospect of a more substantial, less localized favorable modification thereof. The first passage occurs in the discussion of the first movement of the Second Symphony:

 

The exposition of this particular movement, a string of apparently loosely knit episodes, is completely incomprehensible at first hearing, and it is only towards the end of the development and in the curiously telescoped recapitulation that the full significance of the opening theme becomes apparent. Instead of being presented with a fait accompli of a theme that is then analyzed and developed in fragments, we are presented with several enigmatic fragments that only become a fait accompli on the final page. It is like watching a sculptured head being built up from the armature with little pellets of clay, or to put it more vulgarly, it is like a detective story in which the reader does not know until the final chapter whether the blotting paper or the ashtray throws more light on the discovery of the corpse in the library.    

 

This passage—or at least everything in it up to the word “clay”—made me eager to revisit ( or re-re-re-visit ) the Second because it suggested ( and still suggests ) that in its first movement Sibelius was engaged in quite an innovative and compelling formal treatment of thematic material for which I could think a precedent only in the finale of the card-carrying maverick Charles Ives’s Orchestral Set No. 2, composed many years after Sibelius’s number-sake ( such that, of course, if the parallel proved as close as this passage suggested, the laurels for innovation would have to be removed from Chuck’s semi-bald head and placed on Jean’s fully bald one ) . In Ives’s work the fragments that only gradually become a “fait accompli” are those of the hymn-tune “The Sweet By and By,” and they are presented over the course a multi-minute crescendo in which one hears them in rondo-like fashion interspersed with material foreign to the tune before the melody is finally blared out in full by the orchestral tutti, such that the effect is, yes, like a sculpture being assembled from little bits of clay, but also like an intrinsically effortful and repeatedly frustrated struggle to attain a clear-cut and irrevocable result like reaching the top of the Jeffersonian hill, such that and the instant intelligibility of the melody--even to someone hearing it for the first time—owing to its square-built phrasing and harmony leaves the listener no room to doubt that he is beholding a fully sculptured head. In short, Ives employs this new treatment of thematic material in a way that is highly dramatic, and this is “worth pointing out” because it may ultimately serve to absolve Sibelius of at least some of the blame for my disappointment in it during my post-Lambert revisitation. For on reading the Lambert I could not help expecting the Sibelius to be as dramatic in pacing as the Ives; I could not but expect the revelation of Sibelius’s fait accompli to be quite a viscerally imposing moment by comparison with the moments of its preparation. I did not realize that the comparison of the listening-experience to the viewing of a sculpture being shaped was to be taken in a phenomenologically exact sense and that listening to the movement would feel less like watching a play than ( to employ Gene Hackman’s famous simile for the spectation of a Rohmer film [ not that Rohmer is in any sense a cinematic analogue to Sibelius ] ) “watching paint dry,” for the fait turns out to be quite a niggling little tune and it is revealed with absolutely no fanfare ( pun intended inasmuch as the revelation is not preceded by the horn-call of Thor or any other sort of tucket or sennet ) and in dynamics that I assume are mezzo-forte at the loudest. Not that Lambert’s conceit of the sculpture is entirely ill-founded, inasmuch as the movement’s principal theme is indeed assembled out of smaller parts, but it is deeply misleading, inasmuch as the parts are far fewer in number than those of the clay pellets that would be required to produce a likeness of a human head and do not interpenetrate in the organic yet striking way that those pellets would be compelled to do. They are rather more like three or four cars of a very primitive toy train that are easily distinguished from each other by shape and color but not by function, and listening to the movement is rather like watching a child toy with each of these cars in succession before joining them together in a completely arbitrary order that is no more or less correct than any of the sub-handful or double-handful of other possible permutations. Lambert obviously gets closer to this characterization of the movement with his second, more “vulgar,” detective-story conceit, but even here he misleads because the fundamental distinction between the metaphor vehicles is not between U and non-U, for of course the difference between a discovered objet d’art and a discovery one makes at the end of a detective story is that even after one has seen the object d’art assembled one takes pleasure and interest in contemplating it, whereas once one has made the discovery in the story one has no interest in re-seeing the objects that occasioned the discovery, or indeed of ever reading the story again. And I certainly have no interest in re-listening to Sibelius’s Second Symphony now that I know how the principal theme of its first movement is put together ( for the reader already knows in what scant regard I hold the work’s finale ) , for all my interest has evaporated with the ( very faint ) surprise of hearing that theme assembled for the first time, just as my the interest in the punch-line coda of the finale of the Fifth has evaporated now that I know how many times the V of tis final cadence is repeated.

So on the whole, the first exceptional passage in Lambert’s exposition of Sibelius isn’t quite so redemptive of the composer’s modus operandi as I let on. Still, it provides evidence of Sibelius’s general use of a certain approach that, if employed more deftly, à la Ives, may yield compelling results and that I may just conceivably discover has yielded more compelling results elsewhere in S.’s oeuvre if I will only listen through it more attentively yet another time ( as I am afraid I am not likely to do ) . As for the second passage, it bids fair to be far more redemptive, and here it is:

Like the colour in a Cézanne landscape, Sibelius’s orchestration is an integral part of the form. One might almost describe it as having a kind of aural perspective, supplying a contrapuntal element that is sometimes lacking in the music itself. Just as in the polyphonic period a vertical section taken through the counterpoint [ presumably that of some Renaissance-Italian analogue of Sibelius, but who was that? ] often reveals harmonic combinations more remarkable than any of the Monteverdi school of writers [ as opposed to what other school of composition of the seicento? ] , so in Sibelius’ symphonies a vertical section taken through the orchestration often reveals a spacing of instruments more remarkable than anything to be found in the impressionist school. But as in the case of the polyphonic writers, this point of colour is the result of a logical development of independent lines. It cannot be detached from its context and for this reason Sibelius’ scoring does not lend itself to plagiarism as do Delius’s harmony or Stravinsky’s rhythm.          

The opening comparison—reaffirmed by explicit mention of the impressionists as foils in the third sentence—is certainly both very arresting and very promising, as one already knows exactly how Cézanne’s use of color differs from that of his impressionist predecessors, and the mention of perspective in particular calls to mind Cèzanne’s paintings of mountains wherein thanks to the coloration it is always clear which portions of the composition represent recesses in the montane rock and which portions represent protuberances thereof. If Sibelius is indeed a full-fledged musical post-impressionist at the level of orchestration, as this comparison all but explicit says he is, he is already at least slightly more worthy of consideration than Adorno supposes. The rest of the passage, if borne out by the music, would make Sibelius into a figure whom Adorno would positively be obliged to admire qua partial one-upper of his revered Second Viennese School. For this “vertical section taken through the orchestration” suggests nothing less innovative than a kind of “harmonization,” a transposition into the harmonic register, of Anton Webern’s Klangfarbenmelodie, a melody in which the change in instrumental timbre from note to note is as integral as the change in pitch. A block of chords in which the fact that, say, a bassoon rather than a tuba is playing the bass note and a piccolo rather than an ocarina the highest pitch, and so on, is of important structural significance certainly sounds interesting. The only trouble is that at least so far, I can employ “sounds” here only in its non-aural, extended quasi-metaphorical sense, as the construction of the described type is one that I cannot yet actually hear with my ears in Sibelius’s music or even can yet imagine so hearing in any music: like Schoenberg’s crabwise canons ( for yes: we have at last arrived at the abovementioned culminating moment ) it would seem to be an effect that is only perceptible via an ocular inspection of the score. And so one “circles back” to the comparison to Cézanne only to find that it ineluctably forces one back into the horizontal axis. For if the analogue to post-impressionist painterly perspective really arises “from the development of independent lines,” it cannot but be apprehensible solely through the ear’s tracking of those lines over time just as visual perspective is apprehended via the eye’s tracking of the transitions between colors in space. If perspective in Sibelius’s music really functioned in this way, one would in listening to a Sibelius symphony find oneself taking in several traditional Klangfarbenmelodien at once—to find one line cycling through various sonorities while other lines above and below it in average pitch cycled through a different succession of sonorities; to find, say ( and for madness-avoidance’s sake, confining ourselves to two lines ) , a clarinet passage yielding to a flute passage and in turn to an oboe passage while, say, a violin passage yielded to a viola passage and in turn to a cello passage, and so on such that  one heard a transition between a succession of composite sonorities: clarinet-violin followed by flute-viola, oboe-cello, and so on. But to the best of my imperfect but by no means necessarily inadequate recollection ( for instrumental color is perhaps the element of music most readily imprinted on the memory and retained thereby, and it is entirely fair to characterize in general terms an effect that casts such a capacious net over a composer’s oeuvre as coloration does ) , Sibelius’s orchestration does not work at all like this; rather, in his symphonies, one tends to hear passages dominated or even monopolized across horizontal lines by instruments of one family succeeding to passages dominated or even monopolized across such lines by instruments of another family—to find passages in the massed high strings followed by passages in the reeded-woodwinds followed by passages in the horns, and so on. And if my ear has surmised correctly, then it seems to me that Lambert’s case for Sibelius hasn’t got a load-bearing leg to stand on, for he himself admits that it his music is “sometimes lacking in  counterpoint,” i.e., utterly bereft of any interaction between distinguishable melodic lines as opposed to thinly possessed of relatively simple interaction between such lines, a quality that one would describe as “rudimentarily contrapuntal”; and if Sibelius’s music is in fact dominated by the kind of blocky orchestration that my mind’s ear recollects, one would have to substitute “most often” for “sometimes” inasmuch as such orchestration is impervious to contrapuntal treatment. “But you yourself have admitted to being smitten with the music of Vaughan Williams, which is likewise largely bereft of contrapuntal interest.” Yes, but as my narrative account of his Sixth Vaughan has shown, Williams’s music compensates for the lack of counterpoint ( as for its primitive harmony ) by abounding in full-fledged, long-limbed melodies, and not even Lambert makes any bones about the infrequency of proper melodies in Sibelius’s. “OK, but if Sibelius’s music is such a contrapuntal desert as you have surmised it is, how did it ever garner the admiration of Glenn Gould, who is on record as saying that ‘all the music that really interests me is of a contrapuntal nature’?” Ah, for an answer to that question we must at last turn to that Adorno-cited quality of evocativeness. For of all the qualities TWA cites, evocativeness is the one most “arguably” extant solely in the ear of the beholder. That which evokes a dung heap in my mind may for aught I know evoke a bed of roses in yours, and while Sibelius’s music evoked nothing but “inarticulacy” and “an inhibited promiscuity in the darkness” in Adorno’s mind ( as in mine, for that matter ) , in Gould’s it presumably evoked the frozen flatlands of Finland, “the land of a thousand lakes,” qua sister realm of the Canadian North, or else why would he have used the Fifth in the soundtrack of his documentary? Mind you, I am not saying that evocativeness is entirely subjective or that Sibelius’s music in particular is objectively entirely unevocative of the lake-pitted Finnish flatlands; I am saying ( or perhaps merely conjecturing ) , rather, that the twentieth century saw the naissance and crescence of a mass subjective craving for musical evocations of Scandinavian landscapes, particularly among Anglo-Americans, and that Sibelius’s music happened to be the only type of contemporary music that even came close to being adequate to satisfying that craving. Of course there were other Scandinavian composers around at the time—notably Gould’s cousin the Norwegian Edvard Grieg and the Dane Carl Nielsen. But Grieg was essentially a Scandinavian Dvorak ( i.e., a Scandinavian poor man’s Brahms ) , such that he confined his evocations of Scandinavia to the human aspect of that region through the quotation and pseudo-quotation of Scandinavian folksong in music that was otherwise indistinguishable from that of a conservative German romantic. And as for Nielsen—why, he effectively hamstrung himself even in being a Dane rather than a Finn or a Norwegian, for in non-human geographical terms, Denmark is a cozy outcropping of the least climatically forbidding part of Germany, the balmy grasslands of the north. And in any case, Nielsen’s music is too ostentatiously feisty and dynamic to evoke the signature Scandinavian trait of nearly inanimate inertness—not for nothing did he subtitle his Fourth Symphony “The Inextinguishable” and his Second Symphony “The Four Temperaments”—only one of which, the phlegmatic, is truly applicable to the Scandinavians as pined for by people down under ( i.e., all the Anglophones, for even Anglophones of the northern hemisphere see themselves as spiritual Australians by comparison with the Scandinavians–better tanned, more physically active, more outspoken, etc. ) . So that left and leaves Sibelius by default. ( And yes, I know that the Finns are by a certain definition not Scandinavian at all—i.e., because they speak a language that is completely unrelated to Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. But to the fetishizers of the particular flavor of Scandinaviana now in point, the Finns’ linguistic isolation makes them even more Scandinavian than the inhabitants of the other countries—i.e., more like unwilling transplants from some planet as arid scarce and flora and fauna as the moon. )   I repeat: I do not find Sibelius’s music evocative of any place or thing in particular. But I am not a piner for Scandinaviana. If I were such a piner, I might contrive to make myself find it evocative of Scandinavia just as a piner for Italiana might contrive to transport himself all the way to downtown Pisa or Florence on the wings of a whiff of oregano. It is exactly like the recentish craze for “Scandy noir” detective shows. As far as I am concerned the setting of a detective show in the uplands of Norway or one of the three or four oversized fishing villages that pass for cities in Sweden only makes it about ten times as boring as it would have been otherwise ( which would have already been intolerably boring as far as I am concerned ) , but there are obviously millions of people who eat up such shows like taffy-coated lutefisk—and more power to them/who am I to complain? Well, I am obviously one to complain a great deal about it, but I am powerless to do anything about it, for my discovery of Lambert’s enthronement of Sibelius as the king of the realm of the “music of the future” in the teeth of his manifest fatal defects has persuaded me that on such slight affective effects as those produced by Sibelius’s music the better part of the world’s admiration of aesthetic artifacts of all sorts hinges. That awful new argoteme vibes is really a much juster mot juste for the phenomenon than atmosphere or mood—for unlike these it conveys a sense of its slightness, its exiguousness, its fugitiveness, its waywardness, and at the same time its hypnotic rhetorical irresistibility. Once a certain composer, painter, poet, novelist, filmmaker or genre or style of music, painting, poetry aut al & c. has given you certain vibes, that is enough to win you over to him or it for life. ( And complementarily, to fill out the schema in argotically correct terms, once such an entity has given you the ick, you will shun it like the pest for life ) . And it now seems to me quite likely that vibes-infection adequately accounts for most if not all of Lambert’s shortcomings as an apologist for the music he loves-cum-polemicist against the music he hates. He has not squared the circle of meta-aesthetic rectitude of jazz for me because he has not recuperated the manifest inadequacies of jazz’s harmonic pseudo-system, but he doubtless never saw any need of recuperating that pseudo-system because the vibes he got from jazz’s rhythmic tricks—together with its Anglophone vocals—sufficiently redeemed it for him. “How ironic that having set out to reconcile Lambert with Adorno, you have come to endorse an attitude to music espoused by a bugbear of both of them—viz., Richard Wagner, namely, in his categorical rejection of Mozart on the grounds that he could ‘hear the sound of crockery’ in it!” I do not endorse the attitude; I merely regrettably acknowledge the objective force of the phenomenon that gave ( and continues ) to give rise to it. Was mich betrifft, and essentially per Adorno, one’s affective disposition to a given piece or body of music ought to be traceable to objective qualities in the music, and that disposition should be enriched and made more favorable as one discovers further objective qualities in it or impoverished and made less favorable as one fails to find them therein. But if one cannot find those qualities and at the same time finds one’s affective attachment to the music undiminished, or one does find them yet finds one’s affective revulsion from the music undiminished, one ought at least to admit this—to admit that one likes it for unaccountable reasons, and Lambert repeatedly apparently fails to tender such an admission ( the hedge of “apparently” being necessary because I obviously can never discern if his enthusiasm or disdain is feigned rather than real ) . Such at least I hope I have done in my account of my attitude to the music of Vaughan Williams: I acknowledge that I love it despite its exiguousness of harmonic and contrapuntal interest, and while I am willing to concede that this lingering love is a point in favor of Lambert’s assertion of the primacy of melody, I am not willing to concede that melody on its own is enough to carry a musical composition of substantial dimensions—or, in more particularized terms, that a harmonically and contrapuntally more involved Vaughan Williams would not have been at least a modestly superior composer to the actual Vaughan Williams.  “Fine, but what does it ultimately matter that Lambert has turned out to be such a…how do you say…flake?” Flake, although nearly as objectionable as vibes ( although for partly antithetical reasons, i.e., because it is an argoteme that seems to have lost its currency since its mid-1980s heyday [ the non-antithetical part being that it seems ill-suited to designating anyone not hailing from the west coast of North America { such ill-suitedness being precisely what made Ronald Reagan’s application of it to Moamar Khadafy so piquant } ] ) , is probably just as juste a mot juste here as vibes was above. For Lambert would indeed seem to have flaked out on me; i.e., failed to deliver on a promise out of sheer thoughtlessness and flightiness. OK, so as I was saying, what does it matter that Lambert has turned out to be such a flake? For fudge’s sake, the bloke’s been dead for nearly three-quarters of a century and until three-quarters of a year ago you hadn’t read a word he’d written and yet you’re acting as wobegonely wounded as he if were your brother and had just eloped with your fiancée. Why should you give a tinker’s toss that Lambert has turned out to be at bottom—or at least in certain respects—yet another blustering unsystematic early twentieth-century English music critic, and why do you instead give many a toss of Thor’s mighty hammer about it?” Why, because, as I have already more or less stated, for all my admiration of Adorno, I was hoping to find in Lambert proof that great music had not effectively died out with the Second Viennese School in the middle of the twentieth century. I was hoping to find something new “to listen for in music” and to find that that something new was to be found in composers and schools of composition that I had hitherto poo-pooed or neglected. And to be sure, Lambert has afforded me something at least slightly more valuable than a booby prize for my hopes—viz., a modicum of relief from the guilt ( or, at any rate, the uneasiness ) I had always felt at listening for melody more than for any other musical attribute. But on the whole he has merely reaffirmed or even fortified my original prejudices—on the whole, he has made me admire Schoenberg and co. more and Stravinsky and co. less and persuaded me that jazz and Sibelius are an even a bigger waste of listening-time than I had previously supposed. “But have you ever really believed that music effectively died out with the Second Viennese School; or, to put it another way, do you really never listen to music written since the death of Schoenberg?” Not never but decidedly seldom—and I can easily count the composers of that seldom-listened-to music on one hand. And of this sub-handful I can in good faith call only two new favorites of mine ( which is essentially to say, composers who have reliably offered me something new to listen for ) —namely, Elliott Carter and Alfred Schnittke. As I have already remarked in one of my essays comparing Glenn Gould and Charles Rosen, Carter really did move beyond the Second Viennese School in a substantial way via his technique of “metric modulation,” which transposed counterpoint into the dimension of time by allowing separate musical lines to be treated as discrete events generally occurring at different speeds and only occasionally converging in tempo and thereby giving a transitory impression of a single event ( just as in traditional counterpoint the lines move about in space in relation to each other and give the impression of occupying a single space only at certain pivotal harmonic moments ) . Still, although it undoubtedly makes for absorbing and super-dramatic listening, Carter’s new counterpoint is after all still a form of counterpoint and therefore in “a certain real sense” more of a refinement than an innovation, such that “in a certain real sense” our old bugbear John Cage was very much onto something when he snidely described Carter’s music as “adding another wing onto the academy.” As for Schnittke, he was certainly not merely giving expression to personal megalomania when he said that his technique of “polystylism [ had ] guided the musical avant-garde out of its crisis,” because this technique, although superficially resembling that of Stravinskyian neoclassicism, allowed him to deal with the problem of form in a genuinely innovative way; namely, by treating the styles of entire musical epochs and registers of taste in much the same way as earlier composers had treated blocks of contrasting material within a style—such that, for example, his string trio begins in a florid post-post romantic style reminiscent of Berg, then passes into a sort of dessicated Schubertian early romanticism, and concludes in a sort of infantilized version of the baroque contrapuntal style; all of this adding up to an argument as coherent as any of those propounded by any of the great symphonists from Haydn to Mahler. Still, there is no denying that such a technique remains ineluctably retrospective and that the moral inculcated by it is always the same—namely, to quote from memory ( and therefore regrettably not quite accurately in letter but, one hopes, accurately enough in spirit ) Schnittke’s pal and frequent premierer the violinist Gidon Kremer, “The gestures associated with these forms and styles used to have meaning, and now they don’t, and that’s why we’re in a mess.” “But” ( by the way, this is your friendly reader-stroke-interlocutor talking, not Mr. Kremer ) “if this moral is true, isn’t it worth inculcating, and perhaps even worth inculcating many times over?” Yes, up to a point—I mean up to a certain historical point, beyond which the inculcation seems to become ( or perhaps even already to have begun to become ) more and more nearly gratuitous. After all, Schnittke was born in 1934, the year immediately after the publication of Music Ho!, a year in which, pace Lambert and per Adorno, the old forms and styles had “arguably” just been given a new lease of life in the Second Viennese School’s first decade of twelve-tone compositions; and when Schoenberg died he was already seventeen years old, old enough to have grown up taking that new lease of life for granted, such that his late-century lamentations on the death of the old forms and styles can be taken as sincere outpourings of grief of someone who was “present at the destruction.” But now, in 2024, Schnittke himself been dead for more than a quarter-century and the moment of the death of those old forms and styles has all but passed out of living memory. We are now as temporally remote from Schoenberg’s last works as those last works were from the middle-period works of Brahms and Tchaikovsky. One can only live among ruins so long before they become one’s everyday household furniture, just as can only full-throatedly bewail the passing of one’s youth until early middle age. A “crisis in meaning” in music clearly supervened about a century ago and has not since been resolved, but with each passing year it becomes more and more debatable whether this crisis is in any sense or to any degree our crisis and more and more defensible to regard this crisis as “history” in the quasi-pejorative argotic sense.  “So are you saying that now all’s right with the world, such that we no longer need that angst-ridden music of the early mid-to-late late twentieth century as a sort of shoulder to cry on—no, not a shoulder to cry on, because that sounds more like something out of the sentimental nineteenth century—say, a sort of fellow psychiatric patient to scream our lungs out in company with?” By no means: to the contrary, I think that all is a good deal wronger with the world than it was in the early mid-to-late twentieth century. But I also find that not even the most angst-ridden music of the twentieth century adequately conveys a sense of the wrongness, and I also cannot conceive of a form of music—or, rather ( because we must bear in mind Adorno’s musique informelle as a lingering potentiality, however feeble ) a version of music-production, that would adequately convey that sense. In other words, I suspect that music qua conveyer of the current state of the Weltgeist may have had its day, that contra Schoenberg, not only is “there no longer a good deal more music to be composed in C major” but there is no longer the tiniest smattering more music in any key or non-key to be composed.  “So what are composers to do now?” I don’t for the life of me know, and to be perfectly candid and frank, for all my above verbal handwringing, it has since occurred to me I don’t really care whether any new Weltgeist-bearing music is being composed now or will ever be composed again. Seriously, mate or matess, what concern of it is it to me, a mere—mere in the sense of “exclusive,” not in the sense of “humble” or “less important than the ‘artist’—listener-cum-student whether it is composed or not? Certainly it would be nice to hear a work of music that was new in the fullest chronological sense—i.e., not merely new to my ears but new to the world altogether—that also seemed to be new in the fullest weltgeisttragend sense, but I am not going “to sleep an hour less or eat an ounce less meat” no matter how long I go without hearing such a composition. And in more general terms, the terms of the various current crises of all the arts from music to painting to “literary fiction,” I think that one should seriously entertain the notion that the crises are mere ( mere not only in the sense of “exclusive” but also in the sense of “humble” and “less important than just about everything else imaginable” ) epiphenomena of the death-throes of a racket—not a tennis racket, mind you, but a mafia-style racket. Consider the current perpetuum mobile of novelists and would-be novelists’ kvetchfests about how the internet and so-called smart phone have “killed” so-called literary fiction because nowadays a character in a novel could instantly get out of any quandary by just ringing up someone or just googling something. I suppose it’s more or less true ( I concede through gritted teeth qua militant and justified anti-Whig [ i.e., inasmuch as while I find Google ever-more-woefully inadequate for my own research purposes and hardly ever find myself in a quandary from which a so-called landline phone would not have extricated me just as serviceably as a so-called smart one (i.e., a quandary during which I am not at home or within a very short walking distance of the sort of establishment that used to afford access to a pay telephone ) , I realize that the great mass of today’s mollycoddled hypochurls find both Google and so-called smart phones super-adequate and super-indispensable, respectively ] ) that so-called “literary” fiction has been killed by that very duo of culprits, and I suppose that because that is more or less true, more or less everyone who has trained himself to write a novel is now out of a job, but so what? Does anybody really need ( “need” in the broadest sybaritic sense, of course, not in the narrowest life-and-death one ) to read books about nonexistent present-day people trying to extricate themselves from nonexistent present-day problems? Would any reader care a jot if such books ceased to be written altogether? Or at any rate, would any decent reader, any reader who wasn’t an unregenerate turd, care a jot about that ( for I own that now as ever before a good chunk of even the highest-browed reading public consists of people for whom a mirror-perfect description of the quotidiana of a life exactly like their own in all its external particulars is sufficiently gratifying [ cf. the writer in Tarkovsky’s Stalker’s weary admission that he only writes about his readers ] ) ? ( While I am here, I might as well provide a specific example of such a kvetchfest—one from a writer lamenting that one could never get away with writing the sort of book that W.G. Sebald used to write, the sort thick with geographical references that but very imperfectly “map onto” the real world; first because every such reference would be instantly fact-checked and corrected by every reader via a consultation of Google maps and related engines, and second, because Google maps and related engines allowed every would-be reader to explore “virtually” most of the sorts of places WGS had explored in person. But to the first of these laments one might readily demur that Google maps etc. have simply “raised the bar” for would-be Sebaldians, that they must now take care to fact-check their points de repère meticulously before committing them to paper [ and as for the counter-demurral that such a writer benefits “artistically” from being allowed to bend or break the truth, I can only say that the for all the respectability, nay venerability, of falsification, nobody has ever adduced a compelling argument in defense of it—i.e., convincingly argued that inaccuracy qua inaccuracy possesses intrinsic virtues or that caeteris paribus an accurate account of the world is not always superior to an inaccurate one. ] And to the second of the laments one might readily demur that the opportunity for “every man” to become “his own W.G. Sebald” in yet another sense from the one I effectuated in my pastiche is a cause for rejoicing rather than for repining. Seriously: if a “virtual” stroll through a train station in a big continental-European city or along the High Street of a small English seacoast town affords a present-day person the same kind of food for thought that WGS found in actual flâneurie in such places, who but a jobbing author qua jobbing author—i.e., a wisher for the broadest possible range of readerly market niches--can sincerely regret this rather than welcome it? “B-b-b-ut,” you pout-stammer, “if anyone can engage in such flâneurie now, what is the point of writing a book prompted by the thoughts prompted by such flâneurie?” Why, exactly as much of a point, and exactly the same sort of point, as there has always been of writing a book prompted by the thoughts prompted by geographically situated entities one has solely encountered through books and other –i.e., a point that can range from “none whatsoever” to “the most important point in the universe of significance” depending on the nature and quality of the thoughts prompted by the virtual flâneurie. Of course, as for the portion of the cachet of WGS-esque books derived from their arising from the presence of “boots on the ground” in exactly two senses—i.e., that of the boots worn by the flâneur as he strolls along the actual High Street and that of the “Boots” in the sign in the window of that High-Street’s chemist’s shop as he strolls past it—well, that is admittedly all foutu, history, “gone with the wind,” etc. But to lament the obsolescence of that portion is simply and utterly perverse inasmuch as the raison d’être and final cause of such boots-on-the-ground flâneurie was or were always the nexus of thoughts arising from it rather than the cash-making opportunities arising therefrom. Such a lament is as perverse as would be a lament at the collapse of the crutch-making industry in consequence of a plummet in the rates of leg injuries [ and no, not on the eminently defensible { if still highly debatable } grounds that “something has been is lost” now that nobody can any longer know what it feels like to walk with the aid of a crutch, but on the grounds that one has thereby been deprived of the opportunity to make a killing in the crutch-making industry ] .  So “ironically,” however strongly I may have soured on Lambert, I am going to have to give him the last word—albeit not his last word, the word in which he buoyantly envisages a future teeming with latter-latter day Sibeliuses, but, rather, the earlier-placed word of his above-quoted strictures on Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik qua gratuitous inventory of shoddily made shoes (a metaphor that now strikes me as all-too “on the nose,” for Lambert himself was after all by vocation first and foremost a composer and hence doubtless all-too-readily inclined to think of music as a shoe-like commodity [ and hence further more desperately inclined to search for a ‘music of the future’ into which to insinuate his own prospective compositional trajectory, whereas Adorno, having thrown over his ambition to be a composer donkey’s years before the Second Viennese School gave up the ghost, was naturally warmer to the notion of a version of contemporary musical praxis that transcended the traditional bounds of composition as a métier ] , although he certainly deserves praise for behaving like an ethical artisan by refusing to recommend shoddy goods merely in order to drum up custom for his trade en bloc [ when I search for a counterexample I immediately alight on one that perhaps felicitously centers on producers of goods that are as intangible as music: viz., that of university professors who publicly decry the governmental underfunding of the very elementary and secondary-school teachers whom they unreservedly sneer at amongst themselves ] ) . We now have all the shoes we need or will ever need, thank you very much, Mr. Composer. We have, withal, plenty of specimens of every type of shoe-pair we will ever need—plenty of brogues, plenty of slippers, plenty of pumps, plenty of clodhoppers, etc. ( but gosh forbid a single pair of sandals or flip-flops ) ; which is to say, in literal terms, plenty of specimens of every musical form and genre—plenty of symphonies, plenty of concertos, plenty of song-cycles, plenty of string quartets, etc. ( but gosh forbid a single rock or hip-hop album ) . “Very well, but in that case, we can only allow Lambert to have the penultimate word. For if you really believe that we have all the music we need, you are perforce consigning all that music to a museum—” –How I do wish that people would stop rushing for the metaphor of the museum the moment anyone hints at leaving something as it is for a millisecond or two instead of adding onto it like gangbusters and with hammer and tongs; or at least that they would stop employing the metaphor in an attitude oozing with “certainty that you will approve” their disdain for museums, as if a museum were the most nauseating sort of place in the world not barring an unventilated field latrine.  Remember: I am approaching this entire problem or question from the point of view ( and ear ) not of a composer but of a listener, such that as far as I ( and you, DGR, whom I am by default interpellating as a non-composer ) am concerned, turning the omnium of music in question would simply mean putting it all in one place, a place in which into which it has “arguably” already been put by generations of reference works, and a place into which some super-rare bird of a genuinely innovative composition could conceivably be introduced every now and then ( i.e., inasmuch as actual museums occasionally make adjustments to their fixed exhibitions ) . But in any case, the purpose or function that I am envisaging for this omnium is less nearly akin to that of a museum than to that of a school of martial arts, which is to say that I am envisaging it as a body of knowledge which, although it is of ancient origin and has not been recently augmented, continues to provide living people with certain ( as in both particular and sure ) means of dealing with the situations that life throws at them ( or throws them into, to get all Heideggerian about it ) . What I meantersay is that just because the world has changed in certain non-superficial ways since ( say ) Haydn’s and Beethoven’s and Brahms’s and Schoenberg’s respective times we all can still benefit from an understanding of how each of these men dealt with the world as it existed in each of those periods.  “So each of us can learn what it was like to compose a fugue or a sonata form movement in 1780 versus 1820 versus 1880 versus 1920?” No! Remember, I am talking here about the experience of the listener, and of the listener qua not mere culinary connoisseur of sound-painting but qua active cogitator about the idea of the world conveyed by a given work of music. For example: Haydn’s music conveys certain ideas about God, death, love, the human community, and so on that are manifestly different from both Bach’s and Beethoven’s and even more patently different from Brahms’s and Schoenberg’s, and by reflecting on these ideas one can try them on for size, so to speak, and see how congruent they are with one’s own ideas of the world—not only as it is now but also as it once was and as it someday might be again. Consider the notion-cum-phenomenon of the tragic as it expressed and articulated in two works separated from each other by almost exactly two centuries, Haydn’s 49^th Symphony and Shostakovich’s 13^th String Quartet. Both these works are thoroughly tragic in tone and spirit from beginning to end. But it would obviously be very wrong and indeed almost silly to say that the Haydn symphony anticipates the tone and spirit of the Shostakovich quartet or that the tone and spirit of the quartet echoes the tone and spirit of the symphony. Something obviously happened to the tragic between 1770 and 1970, and it is none too difficult to specify what happened to it—viz., that it ceased being noble and poised and became hysterical and neurotic. But of course these words “hysterical” and “neurotic” are themselves of nineteenth-century or early-twentieth century origin and would have been unintelligible to a person of 1770, so then one has to ask oneself “To what extent is this supervention of neurosis and hysteria the effect of the composer’s experience, and of organic and permanent changes in the general character of experience that took place between 1770 and 1970, and to what extent is it the effect of some sort of ‘copy-cat’ phenomenon like fashion that can be shaken off more easily?” Of course people will answer such a question by outragedly yet exasperatedly pointing to the “the horrors and atrocities of the twentieth century” or more specifically “the horrors and atrocities of Russia under Stalin” as if that explained absolutely everything when it in fact explains nothing because most people ( including Shostakovich ) did not experience or witness most of those horrors and atrocities directly, and by the same token Haydn did eventually experience or witness at least some of the immediate consequences of events as violent as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and yet failed to compose a work of the 1790s or 18-oughties that was nearly as tragic as his 49^th Symphony.  And as for us inhabitants of the 2020s, we are “arguably” or “in a certain very real sense” more insulated from true horrors and atrocities than both Haydn and Shostakovich; and by the same token we have “arguably” or “in a certain very real sense” witnessed and experienced horrors and atrocities whose horror and atrocity neither of those men could have imagined. Hence the fact that Haydn still “speaks to us” to a certain degree encouragingly suggests that we may yet be able to reclaim a sense of the tragic that is not neurotic, while the fact that even Shostakovich’s sense of the tragic can sometimes strike us as corny suggests that we may already be too far gone to reclaim any sense of the tragic, or at any rate a sense thereof that has not been vitiated by some force even less wholesome than neuroticism. Only closer aural and intellectual attention to the works and to their degree of correspondence with our experience of the world in the broadest and most comprehensive sense will perhaps—and yes, only perhaps—enable us to determine which of these suggestions is well founded and approach that world accordingly. And so I am essentially arguing that we should approach the entire established corpus of serious music in the same attitude and spirit, and with the same aims and purpose, as those in and which I long ago argued we should approach the combined literary corpus of James Boswell and Samuel Johnson. Here of course the reader will demur that applying such an approach to music will be infinitely more difficult and perhaps even impossible owing to music’s being a non-verbal medium, but here, as with his mistaking my advice to listeners for advice to composers, he will be making a category error about the object and the nature of my counsel—for I am not saying that one should write about music in this manner ( although even here I am strongly inclined to “deny the reader’s major,” inasmuch as I suspect that a great deal of extant worthwhile writing about music, including Lambert’s and Adorno’s has resulted from the application of the indicated approach ) but rather that one should think and feel about it ( and feel about in it ) therein; and doing this will entail nothing at all complicated or elusive. Everyone who has spent any amount of time listening to music hailing from mutually far-flung historical periods ( ‘Any amount—say, 30 seconds?’ Obviously not, but I should think a few hundred hours would suffice ) knows that they express and articulate correspondingly mutually far flung attitudes to the world, and the longer, more closely, and more extensively one listens the better one will understand the differences between such attitudes even if one never so much as dreams of writing a single sentence about them.      

                                                                                                          

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THE END