NICOLAS SLONIMSKY Writings on Music VOLUME ONE Nicolas Slonimsky, Boston, 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. Library of Congress 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 Igor Stravinsky 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, Paris, 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 Serge Koussevitzky, joining the many émigré Russians who sparked the lively musical life of Paris. In 1923, the Russian tenor and opera director Vladimir Rosing, 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 Hollywood Bowl. 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.