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Terry Teachout Music Romantics’ Return Terry Teachout o what extent, if any, should “neoromantic.” For them, any mu- belief in the historical inevitability T the quality of a work of art be sic written after World War I, be it of abstraction was conditioned by his judged by its originality? by Puccini and Rachmaninoff or by Marxist politics. Yet Porter might The answer to this question is far such present-day “new tonalists” as just as well have been speaking of from obvious. Yet in the course of Lowell Liebermann and Paul Mora- the composer-conductor Pierre the century-long reign of mod- vec, is unacceptable if it makes use of Boulez, who famously declared in ernism in the arts, it came to be tak- expressive devices derived from the 1952 that “any musician who has not en for granted that to be innovative composers of the 19th century.1 experienced . the necessity for the was desirable in and of itself. De- It is tempting, and not altogeth- dodecaphonic [twelve-tone] lan- spite the fact that every great artist er wrong, to suggest that the last guage is useless. For his whole in every medium has derived innu- word about such criticism was pro- work is irrelevant to the needs of his merable aspects of his style and nounced by Fairfield Porter, the epoch.” technique from the example of his American painter who was also one In the event, history proved predecessors, the word “derivative” of the outstanding art critics of the Greenberg and Boulez equally 20th century: became one of the most commonly wrong. Not only is figurative paint- employed terms of abuse in the crit- To say that you cannot paint the ing still alive and well, but the ical lexicon. figure today is like an architec- twelve-tone method of Arnold Even after the collapse of the tural critic saying that you must Schoenberg, which Boulez advocat- avant-garde monopoly, many crit- not use ornament, or as if a liter- ed with a zealousness bordering on ics have continued to employ the ary critic proscribed reminis- now-discredited rhetoric of late the dictatorial, is no longer practiced cence. In each case the critical by any important composer any- modernism—in particular, music remark is less descriptive of what where in the world, and no more critics who object to the growing is going on than it is a call for a popularity of the kind of tonal mu- following—a slogan demanding than a handful of twelve-tone works sic they contemptuously dismiss as allegiance. In this case criticism has entered the standard concert is so much influenced by politics repertoire. Terry Teachout, Commentary’s that it imitates the technique of 1 regular music critic and the drama crit- a totalitarian party on the way to For more about Liebermann and Moravec, ic of the Wall Street Journal, also writes power. see my essay, “The New Tonalists” (Com- about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. mentary, December 1997). Moravec’s Te m - Porter, himself a figurative pest Fantasy, which won the Pulitzer Prize A member of the National Council on the last year, is now available in a “creator Arts, he is at work on a biography of painter, had in mind here the criti- recording” by the clarinetist David Krakauer Louis Armstrong. cism of Clement Greenberg, whose and the Trio Solisti (Arabesque Z7691). [62] Music None of this means, however, that transform their stolen goods into dissolution of tonality altogether.” a mature artist simply imitates the something wholly personal and in- He further believes that the avant- art of the past. The following dividual. When a great composer garde establishment, as a result of thought experiment may help to knowingly evokes the past, he does its dominance over the music de- explain why. Suppose a reputable so in ways other than imitative. The partments of influential colleges musicologist were to announce one “neoclassical” compositions of Paul and universities, was able to exert day that he has discovered the Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky, for undue influence on the postwar manuscript of a hitherto unknown example, do not sound like Bach, classical-music scene in America, Fifth Symphony by Brahms, and Handel, Haydn, or Mozart. Even with devastating results: though they make use of composi- that this symphony is comparable in [Its] attitudes filtered down to quality to its four predecessors. tional devices borrowed from the journalist-critics, who expressed Then, after the work has been per- works of those earlier composers, them in the press, fostering a di- formed and recorded by a promi- they employ these devices in their vision in the public between nent conductor and taken up by nu- own highly idiosyncratic ways, with those who prided themselves on merous orchestras, an obscure mu- highly individual results. As a result, their sophistication and dispar- sician discloses that he wrote it (and the neoclassicism of Hindemith, aged new music that lacked forged a manuscript copy suffi- Stravinsky, and their most gifted fol- “originality” and those who de- ciently plausible-looking to hood- lowers is viewed—correctly—as an fiantly rejected “modern music” wink the musicologist) in order to original style in its own right. altogether. This disparage- win recognition for his other com- Neoromanticism, by contrast, ment and suppression of tonal positions, all of which are similar in has almost always been regarded music amounted to a de facto style to the music of Brahms. with suspicion by critics, even blacklisting of composers who Would we still want to listen to though it has been embraced by at failed to conform to the ap- “Brahms’s Fifth,” knowing that it is least as many composers as has neo- proved version of music history. not really by Brahms? And would classicism. (The second edition of Among those American com- the actual quality of the work itself the New Grove Dictionary of Music posers who suffered most from the be diminished in any way by that and Musicians devotes twice as postwar intolerance of the avant- knowledge? much space to neoclassicism as to garde establishment, Simmons says, Obviously, the answer to the first neoromanticism.) Is this because were Samuel Barber, Paul Creston, question is yes and to the second neoromantic music is inferior in Nicolas Flagello, Vittorio Gianni- question no. In practice, however, quality? Or is it merely the last gasp ni, Howard Hanson, and the Swiss such things simply do not happen. of the same prejudice in favor of in- émigré composer Ernest Bloch, To the best of my knowledge, no novation for its own sake that once who spent most of his adult life in one has ever successfully faked an led avant-garde composers and the U.S. According to Simmons, important large-scale work of art by their critical sympathizers to dis- these men ranked among “the most a great artist working in a medium miss all tonal music as “useless”? conservative of the [American] tra- other than painting. This is not to ditionalists,” and their insistence on say that such a thing would be im- These questions are at the heart embracing “many of the stylistic possible, but that it seems never to of Walter Simmons’s Voices in the features of late-19th-century music” have occurred to anyone.2 Wilderness: Six American Neo-Ro- made them anathema to critics who In fact, to anyone capable of mantic Composers, the first in a refused to believe that such an ap- composing a symphony as good as planned six-volume series of critical proach could yield artistically valid those of Brahms, it would almost studies of modern American com- results at mid-century. Yet Simmons certainly not occur to attempt one posers who, in the author’s words, believes their best work to have that sounded as though it were by have “created significant, artistical- Brahms. The minds of great artists ly meaningful bodies of work with- 2 The Dutch painter Han van Meegeren was do not work that way, just as the out abandoning traditional princi- able successfully to forge Vermeers in the style of a master is peculiarly resis- ples, forms, and procedures.”3 1930’s and 40’s and sell them for high prices (one was purchased by Hermann Goering) tant to being counterfeited (as op- In Voices in the Wilderness, Sim- because Vermeer was at that time a compar- posed to being parodied) by a crafts- mons contends that the conven- atively obscure artist, whose true style was man of lesser stature. Imitability is tional wisdom regarding modern known only to a small group of scholars and not a trait readily associated with music is in need of revision. He re- connoisseurs. Today, van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers, which can be viewed on line at greatness. pudiates the mistaken notion that http://www.tnunn.f2s.com/vm-main.htm, In any case, to paraphrase T.S. “the evolution of the tonal system would immediately strike any art-world pro- Eliot, great artists do not imitate, proceeded according to a linear pro- fessional as anachronistic. they steal, and in so doing they gression that led inevitably to the 3 Scarecrow Press, 419 pp., $69.95. [63] Commentary July–August 2005 been comparable in quality to that made music, putting aside the ques- Rochester Orchestra in dozens of of such European contemporaries as tion of its originality, was not con- recordings of his own music and Arthur Honegger, Sergei Prokofiev, sistently interesting enough to com- that of many other American com- Dmitri Shostakovich, Ralph Vaugh- mand attention. Given the fact that posers.
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