“What Happened to Ravel’s Bolero?”: Weinzweig’s Serialism

Abstract

WHAT HAPPENED TO RAVEL’S BOLERO?” : WEINZWEIG’S SERIALISM S.R . M A C G IL L IV R A Y A N D N O R EE N IVAN CIC Lakehead University I f all art constantly aspires to the condition of music, as Pater assures us is the case (140), it is somewhat surprising that there have not been more discussions of the structural relationships between musical compositions and works of literature. E.K. Brown’s examination of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Helen Gardner’s of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are two notable exceptions that help to prove the rule. In Canadian studies particularly there has been a dearth of such enquiries. The point is not made with reference to works that have a musician as hero or heroine, such as Robertson Davies’s A Mixture of Frailties, or to works that may include pieces of actual music, such as William Kirby’s The Golden Dog, or to works of literature, usually poetry, that have been given musical settings,1 but rather with reference to those works of literature the structure of which can be profitably examined in musical terms, not just to prove the correctness of Pater’s assertion, but in order to discover new means by which to appreciate the literature and the artistry of the writer willing to challenge conventional modes of expression. Two examinations of some of D.C. Scott’s poetry published in recent years (Roberts; Kilpatrick) indicate a number of the rewards to be derived from such an approach. But these studies also suggest that a good deal more can be done, not only with Scott, himself a noted amateur musician, but also with other writers who have had training in music (among Canadian writers E.J. Pratt, Earle Birney, and Robert Finch come immediately to mind), or whose writing gives clear evidence of a musical influence. Such a writer is Helen Weinzweig, author of two novels, Passing Ceremony (1973) and Basic Black with Pearls (1980), and a number of short stories, most of which have appeared in the recently published A View from the Roof (1989). She has been married since 1940 (Such 15) to John Weinzweig, the man called by the Toronto Star “the Dean of Canadian Composers” (Littler G3), for whom she has been a patient, sympathetic, supportive, but not exclusively uncritical listener (Such 18). The close relationship, both personal and artistic, has had an almost in­ evitable effect, to the good, as it turns out, for Weinzweig’s career as a professional writer. “I don’t understand myself how I started writing in a manner that turned out to be professional from the beginning,” she told inEnglish Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , x v ii, 2 , June 19 9 1 terviewer Nancy Bauer. “My husband is a composer, and in being part of his career, I did do lots of absorbing of the creative process by osmosis” (Bauer 12; Such 18). The point here, however, is not whatever effect her composer husband’s work has had on the astonishing maturity of Weinzweig’s prose (even from the first published story there is virtually nothing that can be pointed out to as ‘prentice work), but rather the shaping effect that John Weinzweig’s interest in experimental composition has had in sparking her own interest in the composition of some of her own work. Since 1938 John Weinzweig has been vitally interested in Arnold Schoen­ berg’s twelve-tone technique and the variations that can be worked on it. Twelve-tone’s abandonment of the classic diatonic scale seemed to offer free­ dom from a stale and outmoded conventionality and to provide the means to an expressiveness of mood needed by a modern composer writing for a mod­ ern age and its audience. “I listened to a recording of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite in the music library of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where I w eis taking my Meister’s degree,” John Weinzweig told an interviewer, “. . .and. . .1 heard music that w eis essentially very dramatic and highly expressive. I was so moved...