Music and More: Essays, 1975-1991

National Review, Feb 1, 1993 by Roger Scruton

Music and More: Essays 1975-1991, by Samuel Lipman (Northwestern, 336 pp., $35)

THE CIVILIZATION of Europe (which became that of North America) has endowed us with gifts so great that only a carefully nurtured habit of ingratitude enables us to forget them: art, education, and science; freedom, rights and democracy; wealth, technology, and institutions. Miraculous though such gifts appear to an impartial judge of the human condition, there is one yet more miraculous, at once the highest achievement and the living symbol of our culture: music.

Western music is unlike any other sound that man has produced. It is neither the sacred voice of faith, nor the ritual dancing of a tribe, but a language in which every feeling may be voiced objectively. It is neither folklore nor courtly custom, but the property of all who listen. It includes love song, ballad, dance, liturgy, and drama-- but surpasses every such use to become an object of contemplation, the intricate symbol of life and the mirror of eternity. All human beings can become attuned to its harmonies, which arise from a meditation on the tone itself. It is heard and understood from Japan to Greenland and from Siberia to the Cape: a universal language which knows no boundary of faith or climate, and which establishes a communion among the living, dead, and unborn whose voices sound with equal measure in the chorus of tenality. No words can begin to capture what we hear in the masterworks of music, and if we call them divine it is because we half believe that this is true.

All that is obvious; but it is easily forgotten in an age when music, piped into city streets and restaurants, trickling from radios and Walkmans, fading in and out of advertisements, available electronically in any circumstance and at any time, has become "too much with us." The post-modern music lover is a jaded specimen, on such familiar terms with the transcendental that he can no longer perceive what it means. Critics have ceased to look for words that will describe the wealth of musical significance, and write instead in the language of the record librarian.

Just occasionally, however, a critic will emerge who is aware that our civilization and its music are not two things but one, and that the preservation of musical taste is a task worthy of the greatest sacrifice. Such a critic is Samuel Lipman, whose recent articles on music and culture are here collected in a single volume. Himself a pianist of distinction, Lipman knows from within the tradition that he celebrates in these essays the tradition of true performance, in which the spirit of music is handed on. In a trenchant examination of Roger Norrington, he shows that this tradition has nothing to do with the cult of "authenticity," which spawned those busy groups with such chilling names as the "Academy of Ancient Music," or "Musica Antiqua Cologne." The effect of authentic performance is not merely to produce that raucous and out-oftune sound which is the inevitable result of playing imperfect instruments with techniques that have now been superseded; it is also to sever the works of the past from the living tradition that gives sense to them, to seal them hermetically within their "period," and to create a museum of musical taxidermy, with Bach, Handel, Haydn, and now Beethoven and even Schubert, exhibited as eerie carcasses. The reception of Norrington, whose brisk and breathless Beethoven is an exercise in musical deconstruction, is as incomprehensible to Lipman as it is to me. "All the reviewers," he notes, "speak of the coruscating excitement they seem to get out of Norrington's work, but this verdict only proves how indistinguishable in modern criticism true excitement is from mere panic." The tick-tock rhythms of the metronome, with which Norrington busily sweeps the meaning from the classics, sound in the short-winded prose of his admirers, and even if a whole establishment has contrived to hear these rhythms as the "authentic" sound of pre-Romantic music, this should not blind us to the fact that they are the authentic sound of modernity: mechanical, lifeless, purged of feelings. Authentic performance is designed for the consumer society: quick, forgettable, and embarrassment-free.

Lipman's learned and heartfelt articles on performers are a welcome antidote to fashion. He shows that the true tradition of performance has created the classics anew for each generation of listeners. Properly performed-- which is to say, performed with the "discipline in freedom" that comes from discarding pedantry and empty scholarship--the classics never lose their freshness, but speak to us directly, through our instruments, in a language that is ours. There is nothing intrinsically wrong, as Lipman reminds us in a fine essay on Willem Mengelberg, with the practice of adjusting instrumentation to match the expectations of modern ears, still less with the freedom of rhythm and tempo that enabled masters like Mengelberg to sing through the orchestra, and to endow musical phrases with the shape of human feeling.