NICOLAS SLONIMSKY

Writings on Music

VOLUME ONE

Nicolas Slonimsky, , 1927 NICOLAS SLONIMSKY Writings on Music VOLUME ONE Early Articles for the Boston Evening Transcript Edited by Electra Slonimsky Yourke

ROUTLEDGE New York and London Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 http://www.routledge-ny.com/ Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE http://www.routledge.co.uk/ Copyright © 2004 by Electra Slonimsky Yourke

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or uti lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any informa tion storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the author. Cataloging-in-Publication Data Slonimsky, Nicolas, 1894–1995 [Selections. 2003] Nicolas Slonimsky: writings on music. p. cm. Edited by Electra Slonimsky Yourke. Includes bibligraphical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0- 415-96865-8 (v. 1: alk. paper) 1. Music—History and criticism. I. Yourke, Electra. II. Title. ML60.S646 2003 780–dc21 2003011569

ISBN 0-203-97028-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-96865-8 (Print Edition)

published in The Boston Herald, May 5, 1926

CONTENTS

Preface x A Note from the Editor xiii

Tansman’s Traits: Prodigious Youth, Prolific Composer, New Guest at the 1 Symphony Concerts 12/28/27 Stravinskiana 2/25/28 4 The Avierinos’ Concert 3/22/28 7 By Way of Introduction [Honegger] 3/30/28 10 A Welcoming Hail [Casella] 4/28/28 13 Young Modernists Hoe Their Own Row [Copland & Sessions] 5/11/28 15 By His Faith, By His Work, To The End [Gilbert] 5/26/28 18 The Hand That Evokes Music From the Ether [Theremin] 10/2/28 22 From the Ether A “New” Music In New Manner [Theremin] 10/8/28 25 New Stirrings in Ether-Wave Music [Theremin] 10/19/28 29 In Arthur Honegger the Symphony Concerts Receive a Notable Guest 1/10/29 31 The Patient, The Doctors, The Verdicts [American music] 1/29/29 35 Composer, Conductor, Cosmopolite [Goossens] 2/23/29 39 By Innovation Shall Hearers Recognize Him [Cowell] 3/9/29 43 Bouncing Into Fortune’s Lap And Out Again [Dukelsky] 3/14/29 46 Our Jazzing, Their Jazzing, Reasons Why 4/20/29 49 Modernist Sprung From the Ancients [Casella] 5/28/29 56 The Pit They Have Hollowed for Toscanini 11/2/29 59 Unalloyed, Undecorated, Undiminished [Musorgsky] 11/30/29 64 This America Deep in His Fervent Soul [Bloch] 12/27/29 67 A Single Line Is Glazunov’s Musical Life 1/15/30 71 Side-Glances at Prokofiev Now Returned 1/30/30 74 In Epitome The Career Of Roussel 10/23/30 77 Who Is Mossolov? And What Is He? 12/1/30 81 The Psalms and Pieties of 12/13/30 83 The Strange Case of Arthur Vincent Lourié 1/3/31 86 Fortunate Years for Unfortunate Composer [Musorgsky] 4/11/31 89 With the New Concerto for Mirror [Stravinsky] 12/26/31 93 Florent Schmitt 11/26/32 98 Enter Lastly The Youngest Of the Angels [Markevitch] 4/20/33 101 Scientific Mind Turned on Music [Saminsky] 5/20/33 105 Welcome for The Incoming Modern Master [Schoenberg] 10/28/33 107 From the West Composer New To Bostonians [Harris] 1/24/34 112 Composer Who Has Clung To His Own Way [Ives] 2/3/34 116 Ranging Round the World of Music 11/3/34 120 Ranging Round the Music-World 11/17/34 124 Ranging Round the World of Music 1/5/35 128 Ranging Round the World of Music 2/9/35 132 Marginal Notes on The Russian Film 2/23/35 136 Memorandum About Unfamiliar Music 3/20/35 139 Ranging Round the World of Music 4/6/35 141 Music of Ives on New England Scene 5/4/35 145 Ranging Round the World of Music 6/8/35 147 Shostakovich, The Soviets’ Wonder Boy 11/2/35 150 Ranging Round the Music-World 12/35 153 Visitor from Mexico to Symphony Concerts [Chavez] 4/9/36 157 Vladimir Dukelsky, Alias Vernon Duke [date unknown] 160 New Placing of Rakhmaninov [date unknown] 164

Index 167

PREFACE

Fleeing revolution-torn St. Petersburg in 1918, my father, Nicolas Slonimsky, first went to Kiev, then to Yalta in the Crimea in 1920, thence to Constantinople; finally, via Bulgaria, he arrived at his intended destination, , late in 1921. He was twenty-seven and, despite the revolutionary turmoil of his life to date, had made his way as a working musician. He had taught piano, accompanied singers, coached, worked as a rehearsal pianist; he wrote on musical subjects for newspapers and journals along his itinerary of flight, and he had pounded the piano in silent movie houses. In Paris, he became musical secretary to the conductor , joining the many émigré Russians who sparked the lively musical life of Paris. In 1923, the Russian tenor and opera director , having received funding from George Eastman to start an opera company in Rochester, New York, invited my father to join the staff as accompanist and coach. My father accepted eagerly and boarded a transatlantic liner with his few possessions and a British book of basic language instruction. He did not speak a word of English. Undeterred, he applied his analytical skills, his knowledge of other languages, including Greek and Latin, and his musical ear to the task of mastering American English. His approach was to avoid using a dictionary and to treat the language as an “extinct dialect.” His boisterous fellow artists at the Eastman School, including the novelist Paul Horgan and the director Rouben Mamoulian, were no help—they enthusiastically adopted his mislocutions as much more fun than the correct ones. At the movies he studied the subtitles, and he treated print advertisements, which he had never seen before, as tutorials in the lingua franca. Hence, by the time Koussevitzky, now conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, invited him to leave Rochester and become the BSO’s rehearsal coach; he could also act as official bilingual secretary. His credentials, his job, and his additional independent activities as accompanist, teacher, and lecturer quickly earned him a place in the Boston “intelligentsia.” His English was fluent by then, though still accented. The Boston Evening Transcript, a daily newspaper, conceived of itself as modest, conservative, partisan, and in good taste, specializing in literature and theater. It had come into being in 1830, founded by Lynde M. Walter, a well-born graduate of Harvard University. From 1842, the Transcript was edited by the founders sister, Miss Cornelia W. Walter, called “the brilliant lady editor” by some but not by Edgar Allan Poe, who, after she criticized him, described her as “the pretty little witch.” In the 1880s, its editor was Edward Clement, known as “the Beau Brummel of Boston journalism.” With a circulation of about 17,000, it continued to emphasize the arts, especially music and drama. There is no record of how my father came to write for the Transcript, starting in 1927. His position as Koussevitzky’s secretary and musical assistant had just come to a calamitous end upon the publication of an article in the Boston Herald headlined “My Secretary Knows More Than I Do—The Boss,” for which he, among many others, had been interviewed. But his photo was featured. He tried to explain to the maestro that the quote referred to the secretary to the President of the United Fruit Company, but to no avail. As he tells it in his autobiography, Perfect Pitch, he was summoned to the Koussevitzky home:

Koussevitzky motioned me to repair to the living room, with Mrs. Koussevitzky leading the way. He proceeded to speak in measured tones as if addressing a defendant in a court of law: “I have nothing against your making extra money by playing the piano in clubs and at social functions,” he began. “But we have a right to demand that you leave my name out of your publicity.” … Then Mrs. Koussevitzky broke her silence. “Like a dirty Odessa Jew,” she remarked icily, “you are trying to pull your sordid little tricks behind Mr. Koussevitzky’s back.” Considering that Koussevitzky was himself a Jew, born nearer to Odessa than I, her remark was fantastic in its rudeness.

He never saw Koussevitzky again. That was in January 1927. Thereafter he pursued musical activities of his own and, within a few short years, conducted historic concerts introducing American music to European audiences. His championing of modern American composers, Ives in particular, brought attention to them and to him. In 1933, he conducted a series of landmark concerts of modern music at the . Although the audiences did not welcome them, he succeeded in establishing himself professionally as an important spokesman, analyst, and interpreter. The only available source in collecting the articles in this volume is his own files, now in his collection at the Library of Congress. There may have been more articles that he did not retain or that were lost over the years. Unfortunately, the Transcript microfilms are not indexed, so a search would require scrolling through hundreds of reels containing every page of the daily paper for many years. Even the undated articles included here cannot, as a practical matter, be located and properly sequenced. Most of these forty-eight Transcript articles, appearing at uneven intervals over nine years, were evidently timed for the visit of a composer to Boston or the performance of a work by the Boston Symphony. Hence they are especially interesting as contemporary analyses of composers of emerging significance. Many of the subjects proved not to be of pantheon status, making these analyses all the more rare and valuable. As firsthand records of the world of new music in Boston in the twenties and early thirties, their depth of content is surprising for what were, after all, columns for a daily newspaper. There is no record of why my father’s Transcript articles stopped in 1936. On April 23, 1941, an editorial headlined “Hail and Farewell” appeared on the front page of the Transcript. “For 111 years the Transcript has been closely interwoven with the history and traditions of Boston and America,” it read, but its circulation “has always been curtailed by the necessity of selling at a price [5 cents] higher than its immediate competitors,” rendering it less successful in attracting advertising. Accordingly, it would cease publication in seven days. In the same issue, news headlines announced that German columns had smashed through the pass at Thermopylae and surrounded the Greek army; the king and government had fled to Crete. The arts pages reported that Lillian Hellman had won the Drama Critics’ Circle award for Watch on the Rhine. The following days’ editions were filled with mournful cries and calls for establishment of a fund to keep the Transcript in business. On April 28, the Transcript gratefully reported the enviable experience of seeing “the flowers for our own funeral,” an avalanche of suggestions for keeping the paper alive. Although contributions were received and the employees agreed to donate a portion of their wages, there was no hope of success in a reasonable time. Readers were urged to offer jobs to 225 “loyal workers.” The paper lives in the lines of T.S.Eliot:

When the evening quickens faintly in the street Wakening the appetites of life in some And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript…

Electra Slonimsky Yourke October 2002 A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Every article in these volumes is presented in full without any editing whatever. I have also preserved the orthography and other stylistic elements as they appeared in the original publications or manuscripts. Changes were made only in the rare instances of errors or misprints obvious to me. Accordingly, readers will encounter a wide variety of spellings, especially of Russian names, and the disparate punctuation policies of dozens of different publications. I believe that fidelity to the originals helps highlight the historic nature of these documents, and preservation of the record, warts and all, was of great importance to my father, a lover of language in all its flowerings. —E.S.Y.

TANSMAN’S TRAITS PRODIGIOUS YOUTH, PROLIFIC COMPOSER NEW GUEST AT THE SYMPHONY CONCERTS December 28, 1927

The Times and the Musician—From Poland to Paris— Abundance and Individuality—Years of Preparation and Years of Maturity—Ease and the Man

Composers have their fates, as do books. Music, the most abstract of all the arts, a substance taken from nowhere, or—as the recent experiments of a Russian professor purport to show—from anywhere, by means of a radio antenna and a human hand, that elusive substance seems to live a tense life of its own on the music sheet and in the concert-hall. What a riot of conflicting tendencies! What ingenuities of the creative hand! What intricacies of development, rivaling the trickiest problems in mathematics! As in science, new things are discovered, discussed, rejected, or finally accepted and put into practice. From simplicity, if not simpleness, it has evolved logically to sky-scraping edifices of sound. With the “ceiling” thus attained (to use an aviator term) the composers turned back. Simplicity, by all means, and tumbling went the stacks of musical scores. C major, if you please, and more of it. Skriabin made use of it, naively, as things now seem, in the fifty-three final measures of his “Poem of Ecstasy.” Prokofiev, too, is fond of this simplest key; and, even, the recent Martinu cannot resist the temptation and drenches his “Tumult” in its waters. The huge assemblages of sonorous instruments (and percussion!) have given way to smaller bodies (Frank Martin’s “Chamber Fox-Trot” dispensing with percussion altogether) until there are such things as Schönberg’s “Quintet,” that lymphatic piece of music which would supply an excellent musical accompaniment for H.G.Wells’s sombre vision of the earth’s declining days, with the sun half burnt and a few crustacea scattered on a forlorn beach…. Will the composers meet the inglorious end of Cratylus for whom there was but one unquestionable truth, the motion of his forefinger to and fro before his nose? Bold deeds and recantations succeed one another: only few discerning musicians can hurry slowly. Among them, one Alexander Tansman deserves attention. He is unafraid. He is old-fashioned. He writes music in consecrated forms. He puts to use his native Polish folk tunes. What is more, he expresses himself, and not merely a current idea…. Tansman was born in Lodz, a prosperous town of the erstwhile Russian Poland. He disclosed a sensitive ear for music at an age when babes make their first attempt to imitate the spoken word. Able teachers (Russia never lacked them) gave him first Nicolas slonimsky 2 instruction in the piano and initiated him into the elementary notions of musical science. At nine he was already engaged in serious composition. He rapidly traversed the paths of his early gods. Grieg gave him purity of design and bequeathed to him heed for folk- tunes as the most genuine material for musical work. Chopin taught him how to use the form of sublimated dance and demonstrated that embellishments, turns and figurations are not merely a musical accessory. Strauss and Skriabin brought him up to date (that is up to that date, before the cataclysm). A full-fledged musician, he produced a “Symphonic Serenade” for strings, the first of his compositions to be played in public. He was fifteen then and was working joyously, passing, one after another, through all the necessary stages of musical development. Tansman’s first notable success was the winning of all the three prizes at the Polish National Contest in 1919. The news reached him through the daily papers; in the spirit of joyous celebration he tossed his hat on his walkingstick and dashed madly through the streets of Warsaw. Before long he was on his way to Paris, at the time the capital of the musical world, by virtue of some uncodified treaty of Versailles. Ravel and Stravinsky were working there; he submitted himself to their influences, but later emerged from their crucibles invigorated and not effaced. Not unlike Chopin a century before him, he brought to Paris a wealth of his native melodies and soon became a musical plenipotentiary of Poland in the Western World. It was almost without effort that Tansman acquired full mastery over musical forms and orchestration. Then he found his voice and proceeded to speak with an accent quite his own. Accumulating organ-points, descending sevenths, ostensible fifths, and all-but- syncopated rhythms (often on a single note) are unmistakable shibboleths of Tansman. His three-sectioned forms, his songful flutes and sharply detached trumpets (he delights in referring to them in diminutive terms) make up the well-defined cast of his musical countenance. He once wrote to entertain some friends; it was a series of pieces “a la manière de—.” But “la manière” turned out to be Tansman himself, invariably. The joke was on the composer. Tansman does not shun polytonality, plain and outspoken; he is particularly fond of the combination of two opposing keys, say C major and F-sharp major. His “Etude Scherzo” is written frankly in this two-keyed tonality. By the way, why is it that the opposite keys (in the circle of scales) blend so well? Liszt all but united them; Stravinsky mated them in the magnificent pageantry of “Petrushka.” No composer has since been able to resist the enchantment of this firstling of polytonality. Tansman writes with amazing ease and speed. It is no extraordinary feat for him to toss together five Preludes in two hours and a half for an “occasion.” His manuscripts are the delight of the printers; hardly any considerable change marks the transition from the first draft to the second and final copy. If the results do not come up to his expectation he does not hesitate to throw the whole thing overboard or put the jetsam to other use. Thus an ill-born first movement of his Symphony in A minor becomes an Overture Symphonique and is played with this title at a Concert Straram in Paris, while the revision speeds on its way to catch up with the three ulterior movements that repose in the composers portfolio. Tansman has to his credit a symphony, an opera, a ballet, two piano-concertos, three quartets, three violin-sonatas, numerous orchestral and piano-pieces, and also songs. He plays the piano, lectures, writes. His fluent knowledge of five languages and a smattering Tansman's Traits 3 of a few others give him a requisite background for a man of culture. He had his thirtieth birthday last June…. Somehow or other it is characteristic of our time to produce men that work and live with ease and elegance. Knowledge is no longer a product of hard labor. The romantic heaviness and tragedy of a composer’s life has gone into fiction along with the bright-hued coats and unkempt locks.