It is the same with music. No one, at age twelve, except a few geniuses, listens to the slow movement of a late Beethoven Quartet or a Brahms Symphony and makes sense of it (makes sense of the slowing down of time and the complex interweaving of the different instrumental voices) without many years of experience coming to terms as good listeners with the musical art. Some people, either for lack of exposure or from limited powers of concentration, never come to terms either with The Brothers Karamazov or the Ninth Symphony. These things lie, regrettably, beyond them. (That is not a moral judgment on them.)

A good source for dispelling the idea that Beethoven, say, was instantaneously intelligible in his most ambitious works is The Lexicon of Musical Invective by Nicolas Slonimsky. The author devotes ten finely printed pages to Beethoven, drawing from newspaper reviews and journal articles of Beethoven’s own day and later. These show abundantly how strong the reaction against Beethoven’s musical art was. People could not understand it. The scores sounded to them like caterwauling and vulgar noises. I give a couple of examples: (1) “Beethoven took a liking to uneuphonious dissonances because his hearing was limited and confused. Accumulations of notes of the most monstrous kind sounded in his head as acceptable and well-balanced combinations.” (2) “Among the new signs which bring about changes in Beethoven’s style, this sign that is like the sign of Cain, is nothing less than a violation of fundamental laws of the most elementary rules of harmony: wrong chords, and agglomerations of notes intolerable to anyone who is not completely deprived of auditory sense.” Both of these, incidentally, date from 1857, three decades after the Master’s death. Slonimsky collects similar denunciations of Berlioz and Chopin, of Schumann and Brahms.

A principle of the traditionalist outlook is that the world is arranged in hierarchies. This is why, before the civic authorities admit a fellow to high school, he must first have acquitted himself nominally in grade school; and before the civic authorities admit a fellow to college, he must have acquitted himself, not merely nominally, but outstandingly, in high school. We give young children different, simpler reading matter than we give to adolescents and adults. However, in a traditional society, the commonalty does not permit the lowest common denominator of understanding to set the bar; such a society also lets people sort themselves out, so that those who can may rise to the level of engagement suitable to them. Adults as well as quite young children can both take pleasure in Aesop’s Fables, but only those adults who have acquired full literacy and are motivated by intellectual curiosity can make sense of Troilus and Cressida or Lord Jim.

How many people, after all, can understand Josquin’s Missa Super L’Homme Armee? Few. But after repeated auditions during Sunday service, even the uninstructed listener would begin to grasp more and more of its treasure of aural beauty.

What a traditional society would assume concerning those who can rise to Shostakovitch and Conrad is that they will bring back to the lower rungs of philosophy’s ladder that part of what they have discerned that will be nourishing in some way to the less educated and the less disciplined. This is the reason why language distinguishes between teachers and students. In respect of Beethoven’s Late Quartets or Shostakovitch’s Eighth Symphony, the artist is the first teacher, who challenges the student to rise on tiptoes. Great art teaches us to aspire.

P.S. Permit me to add this: A careful re-reading of my essay and a careful re-perusal of the responses to it (which are all gratifying to me, even when I disagree) will show that (1) I am not “against” music-for-the-masses, and I think it should be the best music possible. (2) I never characterize anyone who dislikes the anti-modern modernists (Schoenberg, Stravinsky) in any way invidiously. Those who dislike The Rite of Spring or Moses und Aron should remove themselves from the audience and not engage in masochistic struggles. There is nothing amiss in such a reaction. (3) I like Beethoven, too, in addition to Schoenberg; it has never occurred to me that liking one requires disliking the other. On the other hand there is a strong connotation in one or two of the responses to my article that the one who makes room for Schoenberg and Stravinsky is somehow contaminated and must be dismissing or diminishing Beethoven. Not so. Finally, (4) I am absolutely unafraid to be called an elitist, but at the same time seek no imposition on any fellow soul of an aesthetic experience uncongenial to his nature. I should like to know what threat there is to anyone in that.

For example, look at this quote: “Shostakovich wrote difficult and challenging scores, for which the audience will never be large, but so it is for all real art.”

That kind of thinking destroyed the Western art. True art must be popular – not by lowering itself, but by uplifting the listeners. It must be first of all accessible, and in addition ambitious and creative. Compare Shakespeare with XX-century dramatists, or great Romantic composers with modern non-entities, or great painters of the past with modern swindlers.

The great art of the past was and is popular and liked. When the artists started to believe that they were geniuses which are above the dirty masses, their art immediately died. Now, they are able only to swindle money from ambitious nouveau riche or from the state. Nobody care about their useless productions.

As for Zhdanov etc – they were primitive idiots with no taste. Under such command, nothing can prosper.

TFB

Someone who intended to mock modernism or demonstrate its impotence would do well to choose a work other than Falla’s Concerto for his example. I wrote “apparently” because, as far as I’m aware, the interpretation is a biographer’s informed speculation rather than the composer’s explicit statement or program.

In my view, which I am heartened to see that you share, Falla captured something specific to the Spanish Catholicism that once was – something of its austerity, sincerity and conviction. It tells me more about the interior lives of the Spanish of his youth than any amount of Romantic-nationalistic trash ever could.

Best wishes,
bbtp