Music and Economics

How the Financial State of Europe Dictates the Style of Modern Composition

VIRGIL THOMSON

ART-WORK, in large form, such as the painting of huge-scale canvases, the construction of heroic sculpture, or the composition of a massive symphony, is seldom undertaken unless the artist is reasonably sure of a decent domicile for his work. The choice of materials, moreover—of granite, bronze, or color—is determined less by the subject matter of the projected work than by the structure of the domicile itself and the financial exuberance of its patron. Even museum-pictures show a significant similarity in their observance of sizeconventions. In fact, it is the stability of such conventions that makes masterpieces possible; and the longevity of any musical style is determined in large part by the survival of the particular acoustic and instrumental conditions under which it was perfected.

If you have ever heard a symphony of Mozart or Haydn performed by thirty players in a ball-room you have been surprised, no doubt, by the power of the wood-winds, the trumpet-like brilliance of the strings, and the general richness of sonority in a music you had always considered elegant, but a little thin. You have gained some idea, however, of its original intention. And ever after, its performance by a large orchestra will sound dull, fuzzy, and confused. A modern orchestra in a balconied barn is as hopeless with Mozart as a choir of five hundred voices trying to sing Palestrina in Carnegie Hall.

Of course, the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart are still performed, because not even our present adverse conditions can wholly hide their quality, just as the organ fugues of Bach are sometimes rendered in our churches, notwithstanding that the electro-pneumatic keyboard has removed from the instrument on which they are played all possibility of precise execution. The great enjoyment of such works, however, is nowadays a matter of cultivation. We know them only through the veil of imagination as we know Greek plays and mediaeval mysteries. We shall never realize their pristine power until we hear them on an 18th century instrument or in acoustic conditions similar to those of the Viennese court.

THE classic symphonies were the product of it fifty years' experiment—experiment with instrumental combinations and sonorities, experiment with harmony and counterpoint in order to perfect a style suitable to the instrumental possibilities of the age, and most important ol all, experiment under stable auditory conditions. It is no wonder that their perfected manner is precise, easy, and definite and that their classic effulgence, despite some dimming by time—still shines like a good deed in a naughty world.

Symphonic writing after 1800 faced an entirely new set oi conditions, economicallv, acoustically, emotionally. The French Revolution and its attendant wars had left the noble patron too poor to pay for private music. Beethoven and his followers had to hire a hall and invite the populace. And now began that race between the tent and the circus which occupied the entire nineteenth century. The hall must be equipped with enough scats to make the concert pay. But the orchestra must also be large enough to make that hall resound.

In addition, a great variety of effect in both instrumentation and harmony, a tremendously high seasoning was necessary for any music that wished to hold the interest of an audience suffering from a combination of industrial fatigue and the Romantic neurosis. New instruments were invented. Trombones and harps, pianofortes, opheclcides, bombardons, bass drums, and tubas were brought in from the theater to rouse a philistine public. The desire to hear an ever louder noise became a sort of musical end in itself. Berlioz wrote a Requiem lor performance in Notre Dame by four hundred executants, including sixteen kettle drums, twelve horns, and four separate choirs of trumpets and trombones—thirty-eight in all, stationed at the four corners of the tribune.

Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, and Strauss, successively enlarged the symphonv orchestra while Weber, Meyerbeer, Wagner and Stravinsky added everything they could think of to the instrumentation of dramatic spectacles. Mahler's symphony for one thousand performers is probably the peak of the noise-making effort. Rimsky-Korsakoff and Debussv, sensing the futility of increased loudness as a hope of glory, went in for delicate and "cclouristic" sonorities. The latter developed a fetich of making as little sound as possible upon as many instruments as possible, and PPPP replaced FFFF as a means of enforcing attention. But the pay-roll was not abbreviated.

LONG before the present century opened, it was obvious that the law of diminishing returns, both aesthetic and financial, would eventually stop orchestral expansion. Wily composers, however, had meanwhile found patronage. The great industrial and commercial magnates and the governments that represented them were far more generous to music than the nobility had ever been. In order to pacify the public (and ennoble it where possible) bv means oi the divine drunkenness of art, they supported orchestras of a hundred players or more in practically every important city of Christendom.

Thus, in the last half of the century, working again under approximately stable conditions, musicians evolved an orchestral science adequate to their means and representative of their epoch. Just as the protection of cighteenth-ccnturv court-life had sheltered a perfected classic stvlc, so did the nineteenth-century patronage of city and state foster that culmination of a mature and complex romanticism of which Wagner and Debussy remain the principal monuments.

The removal of this patronage is now imminent. Budgets have been so slashed in Europe that there is not a first-rate symphonv orchestra left on the continent. Obviouslv some proportion between the scating-capacitv of the house and that oi the stage must be reached which will approximately pav expenses while keeping up the quality. Composers have already experimented with smaller orchestras and new combinations, even in the present oversized quarters.

Milhaud's Bceuf sur le Toil, Stravinsky's Les Aoces, Mavra, and Octuor, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Satie's Socrate, de Falla's Retablo have been notable ventures in musical intimacy. Recently George Antheil, a young Pole of American birth living in Paris, has composed an opera for an open-air stadium on the Cyclops incident from Joyce's Ulysses, using only a cinema, a radio loud-speaker, and twelve mechanical pianos—which procedure if not intimate, is at least economical.

ART molds itself according to the life of the times. If bankrupt governments and surtaxed benefactors withdraw their subsidies, music will move into smaller and less expensive quarters. The future music of Europe is undoubtedly some form of chamber music.

Now music for a small group of players and an intimate audience is necessarily of a very different substance from that for massed instruments. Independent part-writing is now essential. Hence that "objectivity" (for contrapuntal writing is always objective) which we hear lately praised. Modern music in Europe is polyphonic, polyrhythmic, formal, cerebral, detached. The mob-hypnosis by means of harmoniously blended sonorities which audiences find so thrilling in Tristan und Isolde and in the symphonies of Brahms and Tchaikovsky is simply out of the question for an organization of twenty players. New conditions are enforcing a new style.

In America the situation is different. Our orchestras have never been more affluent than they are now. 'File conductor is the lion of the hour. Deficits are decreasing. Whether the intelligentsia and their patrons will remain faithful to mass-music, despite the change in European taste, is highly doubtful. On the other hand, such institutions as the stadium concerts in New York, the performances in the Hollywood Bowl, summer opera in Chicago and St. Louis, even the symphonic numbers heard at the more pretentious movie-houses, suggest that nineteenth-century music, having become definitely passe, is being folded to the bosom of the people in such a genuine embrace as to render unnecessary its encouragement or even support by highbrows.

AMERICAN musicians are mostly straddling the fence just now between the old world and the new. It is an uncomfortable position and one from which it is extremely difficult to work effectively in either field. 'Flic more intelligent of them will eventually make a choice according to their temperaments, and we shall then have two schools of composition—the Right Wing, traditional, eloquent, symphonic, prosperously supported by popular favor, and expounded in the academies; the Left, radical, intellectual, exclusive, supported by discriminating patrons and cultural snobisme.

The traditionalists will naturally look backward toward a dead or dying Europe. But inasmuch as the watchword in all modern music is "international sympathies by purely national methods', it is not improbable that .American composers of the advanced school may learn from the live Europe to turn their faces westward. For if their work is to be of any cultural profit, they must occupy themselves with the experiments, the trials and errors, the pondering of local problems in style and sonority, that are a necessary prelude to the perfection of any original manner.

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Certainly there is no lack of musical raw material for such experiment. Patrons are plentiful, at least on a piece-work basis. And the opposition of a popular party is exactlv the impetus needed.

The lack of stable acoustic conventions for small orchestra music is the only immediate difficulty. When a composer sits .down to write such a work, he must begin by doing much acoustic guessing, just as a rug-maker who wanted to weave carpets for a house not yet designed would have to take a long chance on sizes. Composers are wise to keep one foot in the symphonic field until the fashion for chamber-music becomes more secure than it is at present, because the conditions of writing for the large orchestras are moderately dependable. Indeed, the working out in America of any intellectual or modernist program waits just now upon the establishment of new halls and new habits of private entertainment. And its final achievement will be contingent less upon the talent of our musicians, for of that there is really no question, than upon real-estate values and the stock market.