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when the identity of music and song, of song and language, ceptive, acute, and inspired, he is certainly a contemporary is forgotten, it begins to decay, as has happened with European - at least for his generation. European music. Music born of language can be com- Orff is sixty -one. Of a noble Bavarian family, son of municative independently of text; but music born outside the colonel commanding the Royal Grenadiers of the of language cannot be made communicative, even by Wittelsbach Court, he grew up in Munich in the shadow adding a text to it." of Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner. He seems to have This still did not answer the question, "why the pre- sensed, even before he could have worked it out for himself dilection for old languages ?," and I put it to him again. intellectually, that these men were exploiting the last pos- "It is not just a question of old languages," he said. "It sibilities of their kind of music; it would be sterile there- is a question of old times. We Europeans represent an after. In 1912, when he was seventeen, he completed a aging culture, and it is a characteristic of old age to want choral work, Also Sprach Zarathustra, of which the score, to look back, to reminisce, to think of old times as better with its emphasis on percussion instruments, its break with times, even to return physically and spiritually to the the traditional treatment of the symphonic orchestra, its birthplace of one's ancestors and to the scenes of one's disregard of chromatic harmony, and its concentration youth. A culture in the prime of its life has little time upon elemental rhythm and elemental melody, much or concern for retrospection. It is preoccupied with its own resembles an Orff score of today. He has remained ever production, and is pleased with it. It lives in the present since outside the so- called mainstreams of contemporary and in the future. But towards the end, like an old man, music, and considerably apart from the center of the in- it looks back. ternational musical community. "Obviously, the old scenes and the old circumstances can Neither twelve -tonist nor neoclassicist, he has been never be seen or relived exactly as they were, nor can they identified with no school and has been sponsored by none. be restored. The old man, reviewing the past, does not On the contrary, his view that a thousand -year cycle of see the past. He evokes for himself a conception of the European music has completed its course, and his sharp past, a vision as seen from a distance measured in time break with tradition in favor of a return to the basic and colored by intervening events and circumstances. elements of song and dance and theater, have made him "That is why my work of retrospection is not anti- more enemies than friends among the proponents of con- quarian. I do not reproduce Greek or Latin or medieval temporary music. They still do. You will find Carmina music, any more than I reproduce Greek or Latin or Burana, Die Bernaurerin, Die Kluge, Der Mond, and Antigone being played in some theaters throughout Ger- many today, but you will rarely find anything by Orff in the festivals of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Is his music an end, or is it a bridge to something new? He doesn't claim to know. I remarked that the new Ameri- can music seems to represent a similar return to the ele- ments of melody and rhythm, rooted in language, and is a more spontaneous demonstration than Orff's own works of the validity of his insights. "Yes," he said, "it has, thanks to the Negro, the essential naïveté, the fresh, vital, infallible instincts of the primitive, that European music has lacked these many years. The last primitve injection in European music came from what Stravinsky and Bartók could contribute from the Slav and the Magyar. There are probably no further European resources." Scene from Antigone as presented in the Essen Opera House. Orff is fascinated by jazz, and has been so ever since medieval theater. I offer only a concept, an attitude. Even American troops held an impromptu jam session in his the Bavarian dialect I use in Die Bernaurein and Astutuli, home during the occupation of Munich in 1945. But he is for instance, is largely my own. Nothing is restored or not intimately acquainted with it. Although he respects -4.1 reproduced. Everything is stylized." its vitality, its originality and invention, it is not his music, r How well Orff has succeeded in this program is indicated and never will be. He is a European who looks back to the by the number of people, including some professionals, roots of European culture rather than forward to its Ameri- who have assumed that the tunes of Carmina Burana, for can extensions. But he is sensitive enough to its essential example, are traditional. They are not. Every last note is elements to have been disturbed by the synthetic character original Orff. What he has achieved is a conception or of Porgy and Bess. He found the work, in the recent projection of the medieval spirit which rings true to the Munich performances by the traveling American company, majority of his listeners. too European. He prefers the real thing. In thus reflecting so accurately a contemporary view of ( Die Kluge, incidentally, was first performed in the the past he is, indeed, a contemporary composer. And in United States by the Negro company of the Koramus Lyric his commitment to retrospection, however intelligent, per- Theater in Cleveland in Continued on page 162 A OCTOBER r956 69 .