PATTERNS IN SOUND

Abstract

USIC in the twentieth century is said to have taken a turn for the better. It has recovered from romanticism and has regained, or is in process of regaining, its pristine purity. Abstract music, which dived beneath the earth about the time of Mozart's death, has come to the surface again in an age in which Arnold Schinberg made his celebrated 'volte face' and Stravinsky produced his Symphony for wind instruments. Henceforth, music-or the only music that will count-is to have nothing to do with emotional expression or story-telling. Sound patterns are to be the order of the day. This, we are told, is, after all, the only true function of music. Why should Beethoven have bothered the rest of mankind with the story of his life in sound? What business had Berlioz or Strauss to make their art the mere bondmaiden of pictures and history? Music is not merely capable of standing by itself. It is entitled to do so; it shall do so! The popular superstition that music can have a religious significance is, when all is said, an illusioi; certain rhythms and progressions have been used for ecclesiastical purposes so long that, by a pardonable but quite mistaken association of ideas, we have come to believe that they are naturally adapted to them. The major chord seems cheerful only because your ear is getting the harmonics which it was expecting to get. Does the minor chord sound sad to you? Cheer up! It is only because, without knowing it, you had a craving for major harmonics and are disappointed subconsciously when you do not get what you wanted. It really was a gigantic mistake ever to allow music to try to portray emotions or depict programmes, because that sort of thing is foreign to its essence. All the great nineteenth-century masters were obviously on the wrong tack. Bach went astray too, very often: fancy such a sensible fellow thinking it was part of music's province to tell the story of the Passion or to voice the sentiments of mankind at Christmas! Handel was a most misguided man: he was actually fool enough to think that the music of his oratorios reflected the spirit of the words to which it was set. Haydn presumably laboured under the same delusion about