Preface:
This book makes no attempt to be an ordnance survey of modern music or a study of modern composers as individual artists. Many composers of merit are not mentioned in it at all, and in the case of others attention has unfortunately been focused upon their lesser works. The task of docketing the outstanding figures of modern music has been ably done by other writers, and as for the purely technical questions raised by unusual combinations of sound I am of the opinion that craft-analysis like craftsmanship itself is of interest mainly as a preliminary. Avoiding both the pigeon-hole and the blackboard I have tried to trace a connecting line between the apparently diverse and contradictory manifestations of contemporary music.
The theme of the book is modern music in relation to the other arts and in relation to the social and mechanical background of modern life. It is a study of movements rather than musicians and individual works are cited not so much on their own account as for being examples of a particular tendency. When absolutely necessary technical arguments are introduced, but there are few technical terms and no music-type illustrations.[12]
The book as a whole is meant to be a non-technical presentation of the position the composer (and, for that matter, the listener) finds himself in today, though in order to establish this position clearly it is occasionally necessary to hark back a bit, as in the section devoted to nationalism.
I hope that this brief study, though inevitably one-sided and incomplete, may lead the way to a broader and more 'humane' critical attitude towards an art which though the most instinctive and physical of all the arts tends more and more to be treated as the intellectual preserve of the specialist.
My thanks are due to Lord Berners, Mr. Cecil Gray and Messrs. J. and W. Chester for the loan of music.
--C. L., December 1933
Contents:
Preface
PART I: PRE-WAR PIONEERS
(a) The Revolutionary Situation
(b) Impressionism and Disruption
(c) Debussy as Key-figure
(d) Music and the Naughty 'Nineties
PART II: POST-WAR PASTICHEURS
(a) The Age of Pastiche
(b) Diaghileff and Stravinsky as Time Travellers
(c) Surrealism and Neo-Classicism
(d) 'Toute r?action est vraie'
(e) Synthetic Melody
(f) Abstraction in Music
(g) Eric Satie and his Musique d'ameublement
PART III: NATIONALISM AND THE EXOTIC
(a) Nationalism and Democracy
(b) The Russian Nationalists
(c) The Conflict between Nationalism and Form
(d) Nationalism and the Modern Scene
(e) The Cult of the Exotic
(f) Exoticism and 'Low Life'
(g) The Spirit of Jazz
(h) Symphonic Jazz
PART IV: THE MECHANICAL STIMULUS
(a) The Apalling Popularity of Music
(b) Mechanical Romanticism
(c) Craft for Craft's Sake
(d) Mechanical Music and the Cinema
(e) The Disappearing Middlebrow
PART V: ESCAPE OR SUBMISSION
(a) A Psychological Cul-de-sac
(b) Sch?nberg and Official revolution
(c) Sibelius and the Integration of Form
(d) The Symphonic Problem
(e) Sibelius and the Music of the Future
?
Index
All: The music, ho!
Enter Mardian the Eunuch
Cleopatra: Let it alone; let's to billiards.
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
