Writing about music

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2002 by Pritchard, William H

IN ONE OF HIS REPORTS ON THE CURRENT STATE OF MUSIC, written for The World in May of 1893, Bernard Shaw heaped scorn on what he called the "Mesopotamian manner" that distinguished (i.e., ruined) most writing about classical music. As an example of "the sort of thing" he had in mind he quoted the following:

The principal subject, hitherto only heard in the treble, is transferred to the bass (Ex. 28), the violins playing a new counterpoint to it instead of the original mere accompaniment figure, and so on till we come to a close on the dominant of D minor, a nearly related key (commencement of Ex. 20), and then comes the passage by which we return to the first subject in its original form and key.

"How succulent this is," Shaw exclaimed, "how full of Mesopotamian words like the dominant of D minor." He then proceeded to offer his own "celebrated analysis" of Hamlet's famous soliloquy:

Shakespeare . .. announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon ...

And on in this manner. A literary critic, if he wrote this way, Shaw says, would be dragged off to the asylum; but the more a music critic does it, "the deeper the veneration he inspires." He himself would be tempted, Shaw concludes, to "eke out his columns in the Mesopotamian manner" if it weren't for "commercial necessity and a vulgar ambition to have my articles read."

This is of course delightful and its appeal undeniable: we're all against pedants and are willing to believe that-in 1893 or 2003-the world is full of them: they are enslaved to theoretical and technical vocabularies that squeeze the art and life out of whatever they disfigure; they put their grubby (probably "academic") hands all over immortal masterpieces by Shakespeare and Beethoven. Shaw knew well and may even have had in mind the moment early in Dickens' Hard Times when the bad schoolmaster Gradgrind humiliates Sissy Jupe for her failure to define a horse in a sufficiently Mesopotamian manner ("Quadruped, Graminivorous, Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors," as Bitzer, the boy with cold eyes, eventually defines it). Like Dickens, Shaw's delight in exposing system and pedantry is patent; yet it's not clear, apart from writing something that can be read, just what constitutes for him-apart from his own contributions-useful criticism of the musical art.

This question exercised E. M. Forster enough for him to make novelistic capital out of it. In the fifth chapter of Howards End, the Schlegel sisters, their aunt, and their brother Tibby, along with a young German woman and her boyfriend, hear Beethoven's Fifth Symphony played at the Queen's Hall in London. Forster says it will be admitted that this symphony is "the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man," and that it satisfies all "sorts and conditions" of listeners. The recently crossed-in-love Helen Schlegel sees "heroes and shipwrecks in the music's flood"; her aunt taps her feet when the tunes come; her brother, "profoundly versed in counterpoint" has the score open on his knee; meanwhile Fraulein Mosebach thinks about Beethoven as "echt Deutsch" and her boyfriend thinks about Fraulein Mosebach. But the character we are closest to, Margaret Schlegel, "can see only the music." As the third movement (which Helen tells her aunt consists first of goblins then a trio of elephants dancing) draws to its close and reaches the coda-like buildup to the triumphant final movement, Tibby "implored the company generally to look out for the transitional passage on the drum," which advice Helen corrects to "no; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back." Forster proceeds to pull out all the stops, partly through Helen (the goblins represent "panic and emptiness") and through his own narrative commentary on why you can "trust" Beethoven when he says these things. It's clear that Helen and Tibby are excessive in their respective romantic and pedantic ways; but Margaret, who sees only the music, is granted no further narrative comment in the passage. Yet "only" is a powerfully loaded word for Forster ("Only connect!"), and it could be that her way of listening, although undescribed, is the best way to listen-to "see."

As far as seeing only the music and communicating his impressions to us, the outstanding writer of our time is assuredly Charles Rosen. He is this in part because although his credentials as a professional musicologist are impeccable-he seems to be familiar with the entirety of Western music-he is well aware of the dangers of Mesopotamian criticism. In the introduction to a recent collection of his essays (Critical Entertainments, 2000), he says that of all the arts music along with dance is the most difficult to write about. The critic of literature uses illustrative quotations from the poem or novel under inspection, and the art critic may reproduce the painting in a photograph; by contrast printed musical quotations are inconvenient and "scare away almost all the readers except for a few professional musicians." Rosen sees a day coming "when music criticism will be easily and routinely accompanied by an audible illustration of the subject to hand," but that day hasn't yet arrived. This inconvenience hasn't deterred him from providing ample music quotations in his influential books on classical and romantic music, but he still feels that such quotation is "deeply unsatisfactory."