Books › Musical Courier 1928-06-21: Vol 96 Iss 25, 1928 › scan 31
Scan 31
Musical Courier 1928-06-21: Vol 96 Iss 25, 1928
81 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026, twice; the two readings disagreed in places. Printed page 32. See the scan on archive.org.
1to pass an examination and take out a license before they are allowed to vocalize within the city limits.
3George Antheil has an article in the current Forum called Jazz Is Music. He credits jazz with character, rhythm, harmony, and orchestration, all its own. He also predicts a sure concert future for jazz as soon as a composer shall appear sufficiently talented to weave the jazz elements into original symphonic material properly extended and developed. Antheil's theory is all right, but one cannot help thinking that if the composer in question be talented enough, he probably would find his own means and methods of expression, without hampering it in any arbitrary idiom that might be the popular mode of the moment. It seems more reasonable to assume that if gifted symphonic composers adopt jazz at all into their scores in the future, the treatment will be episodic and employed only to create some single effect or to suggest some bit of atmosphere—much as jazz has been used tactfully by those serious composers, Carpenter, Spalding, Hadley, Schelling, Bloch, Gruenberg, and a few others.
5Alice O'Brien returned not long ago after spending five months in the Belgian Congo. She reports that the wives of the various native kings spend the days in dancing, singing, and making themselves beautiful. Miss O'Brien took a phonograph and jazz records into the Congo wilds, and she says of the result: "The blacks did not respond to jazz at all, contrary to my expectations. I imagine that there were too many instruments to permit them to find out what it was all about. They have a sort of elementary jazz of their own, different and wilder than ours. They use drums, and human voices, and they beat sticks and metals against hard surfaces, to mark the rhythm. Our unaccompanied singing pleased them much better than even the best of the instrumental or vocal jazz records. Their favorite song was Home, Sweet Home."
7We shall ask our Pago Pago representative, Governor Stephen V. Graham, to try jazz on the aborigines in American Samoa, and send us a scientific report of his findings.
9Heywood Broun, the Telegram columnist, declares: "I would, I must admit, prefer even the most ordinary voice in any ballad, to hearing Gigli or any other master run through the scale." Which explains why Heywood is a columnist and not a music critic.
11J. P. S. sends this: "At the recent harmonica contest in Central Park, the first prize was a violin. Is that a boost for the violin, or a knock for the harmonica?"
13NEW YORK, June 12, 1928.
14Dear Variations:
15I hear you are objecting to Prohibition. I don't see why. After all, Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.
16Yours fraternally,
17ANTON ROVINSKY.
19With equal rights fairly well established, how is it that women composers have not taken to writing modernistic music? Perhaps some creative lady or some thoughtful male of feminist understanding might be able to explain the psychology—or is it the physiology?—of the case. In view of the facts, Kipling could hardly expect any danger from the female composer of the species.
21The lesser the member of the cast, the more pompously he parades the lobby of the opera house.
23Many a man is wearing a hunted look because he doesn't know, at the present high prices for synthetic fluids, whether to stop buying the stuff or to give up his children's music lessons.
25It was Gilbert Gabriel whose old ears did not deceive him when he heard the resemblance between the current popular tune My Heart Stood Still, and the slow movement of Tchaikowsky's fifth symphony. The question is: How did Tchaikowsky, in 1887, get hold of an American popular piece published in 1928?
27Those sweetish strains are the political ukuleles being played seductively by the political minstrels of both parties, to woo votes for the Presidential election.
29A writer in The Sackbut (June) inquires in his caption: "Is It Life Or Death For The Arts"? Well, nothing as serious as that. Just a passing headache, let us say.
31We asked a well known pianist before he sailed for Europe recently: "Are you going to play abroad?" "No," he answered, "I'm just going over as a kibitzer."
33Vacation
34(no line here) one of two readings
361—Anticipation.
372—Realization.
383—Satiation.
394—Stagnation.
405—Cessation.
416—Occupation.
427—Elation.
44LEONARD LIEBLING.
46DEADNESS, TRANSITION OR WHAT?
47Are we in a period of decadence? Has Europe become musically unproductive? Or is the supremacy merely shifting from nation to nation, or continent to continent?
49There has been a lot of discussion of these questions, off and on, by critics both in Europe and America, and by the answers they make to these questions we have come to divide them into "old fogies" on the one hand, "chauvinists" on the other. The chauvinists' argument is easy. Why, of course, they say, the Germans are worked out. They've dominated music for nearly two centuries and have put the blight on all other nations during that time. Now they're finished and it's France's turn (or Russia's, or Italy's, or England's, or America's, or whatever nation the chauvinist calls his own).
51But is that true? In the first place, Germany has not dominated the field. Italian opera has been quite as popular, often more so, than German symphonic music. Carmen has been more popular than either German symphonies or Italian opera. Tchaikowsky for a long time ran head to head with Wagner, both in England and the United States. All these countries reached creative peaks in the nineteenth century—not indeed by virtue of a local or national culture, but by an interplay of ideas and idioms. Music was a European culture, fed by nationalistic characteristics, but ripened in an ideal of beauty that was international.
53The question, therefore, is not what is happening to German or Italian or French music, but what is happening to European music. If European music is going down; if it has spent its force so that it can no longer produce the profound beauties of Bach and Beethoven, the limpid perfection of Mozart and Schubert, the vivid reflection of life that is Verdi and Bizet, then European music is a dying culture. That is not a new phenomenon in history. Greek sculpture and architecture decayed, so did the art of the Renaissance, so did the drama and poetry of the Elizabethan period. Three centuries are a long time for a great art to live, and European polyphonic art has lived three hundred years.
55The recognition of such a state is not pessimism, it is an aesthetic observation that is quite legitimate. It can never be an absolute certainty, for we can never be certain whether some of the music created today or tomorrow may not be immortal. Nor will it discourage the creative musician; the creative impulse will never die, and there have been painters of great allegories, builders of Gothic cathedrals, writers of great English verse long after the golden ages of these arts. But it should make more reasonable those who expect too much, who expect every work to be a masterpiece and every idea to be one hundred per cent. original.
57BEING INVESTIGATED
58A certain method of singing is being investigated. At least, we do not know whether this is a method of singing, or a method of teaching singing, or an alleged method of teaching singing. Probably the latter, as, otherwise, it would scarcely need to be investigated. This method is published somewhere in the West, and is sold by mail. Oh! It is sold; sold by mail. That is the reason it is being investigated. It makes extravagant claims. Most people make more or less extravagant claims, but they are not, therefore, investigated. For extravagant claims are nothing but harmless boasting—until they begin to sell something. Then, of course, they become the opposite of harmless. They get money for something that isn't, and that sort of thing generally leads to investigation—or worse. And so a certain singing method, published somewhere in the West, is being officially investigated.
60FIDELIO IN PARIS
61Nowhere is the greatness of Beethoven's genius more apparent than in his opera Fidelio. I say this in defiance of the popular verdict that Beethoven was not an operatic composer at all. Beethoven was not a composer of popular operas. He was altogether out of sympathy with the stories on which most popular operas are founded, and he wondered at Mozart who could supply music for such an immoral and vulgar story as Don Juan. When his library and miscellaneous papers were sold after his death, a great pile of opera librettos which Beethoven had rejected were discovered.
63Fidelio lives because Beethoven's music keeps it alive. The tameness and morality of the book prevented the work from becoming a popular favorite at the beginning of its career. The devotion of a faithful wife does not awaken much romantic or dramatic interest in audiences which are accustomed to the glamor, intrigue, and amorous passion of the average opera. Most wives are faithful, most women are pure. But, whatever the shortcomings of the book may be, if it has any, Fidelio is still holding its own at the beginning of its second century.
65Fidelio, being Beethoven's only opera, must necessarily be his first. What first opera by any other composer is worthy to be placed beside it? Rossini composed forty-three operas. His only surviving work, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, was at least the seventh on the list. Mozart produced twenty-one operas. He had had much experience before he wrote Don Juan. Gluck wrote fifty-eight operas. His famous works come a long way down on the list. Meyerbeer left eighteen operas behind him. His Huguenots had many predecessors. Of Verdi's twenty-seven operas only the productions of the composer's mature period continue to hold the stage. Traviata, Rigoletto, Aida, Otello, Falstaff, had many predecessors.
67Weber tried his hand at many scores before he produced Der Freischutz. Euryanthe, Oberon. Weber, in fact, said about Schubert's productions that first operas, like first puppies, ought to be drowned. Who knows the first few operas of Wagner? No opera of Schubert has lived. Schumann failed at opera writing. Mendelssohn could not find a book to suit him. Brahms made no attempt to compose an opera. Beethoven wrote one opera, Fidelio, which, in spite of a pale drama, was selected by the Vienna Opera Company to begin its season in Paris in the spring of 1928, one hundred and fourteen years after it was composed. It made a profound and lasting impression when performed with the precision and emotional intensity of the Vienna company, directed by Conductor Schalk. Its first Parisian performance was in 1860.
69Beethoven once said: "The whole business of the opera is the most distressing thing in the world." He composed an opera which endures, nevertheless. He could have written many more of them had he found a book to suit his tastes.
71Beethoven also composed nine symphonies. What symphony of Gounod can compare with the first symphony of Beethoven? Yet Gounod composed the most popular grand opera ever written. Where are the symphonies of Meyerbeer? of Verdi? of Gluck? of Rossini? Mozart's symphonies are smaller in every way than Beethoven's, and his opera of Don Juan, which belongs in the same class with Fidelio, was by no means Mozart's first.
73Beethoven's thirty-two sonatas place him at the top of the list. His great orchestral overtures are still vital works on modern programs.
75Beethoven has not only beaten all the instrumental composers on their own grounds, but he is the only operatic composer whose first opera is still a standard work in its second century.
77COLLECTING VIOLINS
78J. C. Freeman, expert in charge of the Wurlitzer collection of violins, says in a recently issued trade report that the available number of violins, violas and cellos by Stradivarius, Guarnerius, Amati, and others of the first rank, always very limited, will be thoroughly inadequate in a short time to satisfy the demands of the collectors. There recently has been a very marked increase in the interest of persons of means who look upon such instruments as works of art to be collected as paintings are collected. Mr. Freeman believes that the time has come for a public exhibition of rare old violins gathered from their owners all over the world.
80The idea is a good one, and the place for such an exhibit is at one of America's great art galleries. Many of the world's finest violins are already in America, and it should not be difficult for American wealth to arrange for the loan of many more.
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.