Sounds & Fury

A Lesson From Hamlet And Macbeth

Blogger Molly Sheridan of Mind The Gap in a post a few days ago posed the question: "[P]utting aside the inter-movement consumptives for a moment, ambient concert noise: welcome sign of life in the hall or performance death knell?", in answer to which we replied in the post's comments section with just a smidge of snark:

Depends on what's being performed. If it's Cage or Stockhausen or stuff written by their acolytes, it could be a welcome sign of life in the hall. If, however, it's genuine music being performed, say Bach or Mozart, or...well, you know the list, then it's most decidedly a performance death knell.

Then, to Ms. Sheridan's follow-up question: "What's the most ridiculous concert noise you've had to endure?", we, with something more than a smidge of snark and with the intent of hammering home our point, replied (here spruced up just a smidge):

Well, it wasn't in a hall but at an outdoor concert at Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell some time ago (1962) with the Philadelphia Orchestra with none other than Leopold Stokowski on the podium (famously its conductor for some 26 years, he hadn't conducted the orchestra since 1939 or so and was making a guest visit to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his assumption of the orchestra’s leadership in 1912). Right in the middle of La Mer, if I remember correctly, a low-flying military helicopter began making its slow way over the Dell. Stokowsky stopped the performance in mid-paragraph, waited until all was silent, then began again — from the top. He had to do that three times during that performance.

And he was right, of course. Helicopters and Debussy just don't work together. Helicopters and Stockhausen, on the other hand....

Looking back on what we'd written, we retired from the comments thread feeling quite pleased with ourself for doing our small bit in making the case for music as distinct from noise — ambient and random, or created by design.

But then our thoughts turned to Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective and the language so often used by those disparaging the New Music of the time which music came to be viewed as great music by later times, and where one of the most frequently voiced charges was that that New Music was "noise, not music," and then thought of the often remarked phenomenon that everything written on the Internet is forever, which set us to wondering if perhaps that should give us pause to be so unequivocal in our judgments concerning certain New Music and of the works of certain icons of the New Music world.

Well, perhaps it ought to give us pause. But, then, as Hamlet remarked of conscience, such thinking doth make cowards of us all, and while we may fairly be accused of several less than stellar human traits, cowardice is not among them. And so we've determined to continue our incautious way in our judgments until either unexpectedly enlightened, proven wrong, or vindicated. For like Macbeth, we can do no better than to do all that becomes a man, secure in the knowledge that he who does more — or less — is none.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

Turn your eyes to any one composition that bears the name of Liszt, if you are unlucky enough to have such a thing on your pianoforte, and answer frankly if it contains one bar of genuine music. Composition indeed! Decomposition is the proper word for such hateful fungi, which choke up and poison the fertile plains of harmony, threatening the world with drought.

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

The Pathétique Symphony [of Tchaikovsky] threads all the foul ditches and sewers of human despair; it is as unclean as music well can be. One might call the first movement Zola's Confession de Claude set to music! [...] The second movement, with its strabismal rhythm, is hardly less ignoble; the third, sheer billingsgate. In the finale, bleary-eyed paresis meets us face to face; and that solemn closing epitaph of the trombones might begin with: "Here continues to rot...."

—W. F. Apthorp, Boston Evening Transcript, 31 October 1898

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Critical Cop-out Or Reasoned Critical Perspective?

The following is taken from Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective from which volume we've posted several extracts in an ongoing series here on Sounds & Fury. This one struck us as something a classical music critic of today might write about any number of works of so-called New Music.

[This work] makes a cruel demand on the patience of the listener. Most of it is ugly, and consequently at variance with the well-founded principle that claims for high art a devotion to the beautiful. It is hardly wise to pass an adverse judgment on [this piece of latter-day music], for as time passes, it may turn out that this work is overflowing with charm that the future will make clear. One becomes accustomed to everything through prolonged acquaintance with it — even misery. All that the opponent of this latter-day music is safe in saying is that he does not like it.

—From the Boston Herald of 18 March 1900. The work in question was Strauss's, Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Critical cop-out or reasoned critical perspective?

You decide.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

New ears for new music! The new ears were necessary to appreciate the new music made by Serge Prokofiev.... As a composer, he is cerebral... The lyric themes are generally insipid.... The [Piano] Sonata, a second one, contains no sustained musical development. The finale of the work evoked visions of a charge of mammoths on some vast immemorial Asiatic plateau.... Prokofiev uses, like Arnold Schoenberg, the entire modern harmonies. The House Of Bondage of normal key relations is discarded. He is a psychologist of the uglier emotions. Hatred, contempt, rage — above all, rage — disgust, despair, mockery, and defiance legitimately serve as models for moods.

—Richard Aldrich, The New York Times, 21 November 1918

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

The Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune has pretty sonority, but one does not find in it the least musical idea, properly speaking; it resembles a piece of music as the palette used by an artist in his work resembles a picture. Debussy did not create a style; he cultivated an absence of style, logic, and common sense.

—Camille Saint-Saëns in a letter to Maurice Emmanuel, 4 August 1920

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: Special Wagner Edition

The more we see and hear of Richard Wagner, the more are we convinced that music is not his special birthright, is not for him an articulate language. ... Either Richard Wagner is a desperate charlatan endowed with worldly skill and vigorous purpose enough to persuade a gaping crowd that the nauseous compound he manufactures has some previous inner virtue; or else he is a self-deceived enthusiast ... too utterly destitute of any perception of musical beauty to recognize the worthlessness of his credentials.

—Henry Smart in the London Sunday Times, quoted in Musical World, 12 May 1855

Look at Lohengrin. ... It is poison — rank poison. All we can make out is an incoherent mass of rubbish with no more real pretension to be called music than the jangling and clashing of gongs and other uneuphonious instruments with which the Chinamen, on the brow of a hill, fondly thought to scare away our English "blue-jackets."

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

Wagner] affirms that national melody is unhealthy and unreal, being simply the narrow-souled emanation from oppressed peoples.... The symmetry of form ... ignored, or else abandoned; the consistency of keys and their relations ... overthrown, contemned, demolished; the charm of rhythmic measure ... destroyed; the true basis of harmony, and the indispensable government of modulation, cast away, for a reckless, wild, extravagant and demagogic cacophony, the symbol of profligate libertinage! Are we then to have music in no definite key whatever? ... This man, this Wagner, this author of Tannhäuser, of Lohengrin, and so many other hideous things — and above all, the overture to Der Fliegende Holländer, the most hideous and detestable of the whole — this preacher of the "Future," was born to feed spiders with flies, not to make happy the heart of man with beautiful melody and harmony.

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

The second part of the program began with a prelude and introduction of an opera by Monsieur Wagner, entitled, Tristan and Isolde. On this text, the composer certainly has surpassed anything that one can imagine in confusion, disorder, and impotence. One might say it was a challenge to common sense and the most elementary requirements of the ear. Had I not heard this monstrous piling of discordant sounds three times, I would not believe it possible.

—P. Scudo, L'Année Musicale, Paris, 1861

Wagner is a man devoid of all talent. His melodies, where they are found at all, are in worse taste than Verdi and [Friedrich von] Flotow and more sour than the stalest Mendelssohn. All this is covered up with a thick layer of rot. His orchestra is decorative, but coarse. The violins squeal throughout on the highest notes and throw the listener into a state of extreme nervousness. I left without waiting for the concert to end, and I assure you that had I stayed longer, both I and my wife would have a fit of hysterics.

—Letter from César Cui to Rimsky-Korsakov, 9 March 1863

With the last chords of the Twilight of the Gods, I had a feeling of liberation from captivity. It may be that the Nibelungs' Ring [sic] is a very great work, but there never has been anything more tedious and more dragged-out than this rigmarole. The agglomeration of the most intricate and contrived harmonies, colorlessness of all that is sung on the stage, interminably long dialogues — all this fatigues the nerves to the utmost degree. So, what is the aim of Wagner's reform? In the past, music was supposed to delight people, and now we are tormented and exhausted by it.

—From a letter of Tchaikovsky's from Vienna, to his brother, Modest, 20 August 1876

I do not believe that a single composition of Wagner will survive him.

—From a letter by Moritz Hauptmann, 3 February 1849

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius. Why, in comparison with him, [Joseph Joachim] Raff is a giant, not to speak of [Anton Grigorevich] Rubenstein, who is after all a live and important human being, while Brahms is chaotic and absolutely empty dried-up stuff.

—Diary entry by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 9 October 1886.

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

I confess freely that I could never get any enjoyment out of [this composer's] last works. Yes, I must include among them even the much admired [last] symphony, the fourth movement of which seems to me so ugly, in such bad taste, and ... so cheap that I cannot even now understand how ... [the composer] could write it down. I find in it another corroboration of what I had noticed already in Vienna, that [this composer] was deficient in esthetic imagery and lacked the sense of beauty.

—Composer and conductor Louis (Ludwig) Spohr in Selbstbiographie (1861) on Beethoven and the fourth movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

(Adapted from Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)