reading
Patricia finds time to pick up some cool books on music and the arts
by patricia hammond | august 2000
This February, when my wanderings took me to Oxford and Cambridge, I walked into the places where Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press sell their books. I made a beeline to the books on music, and tried in vain to find an interesting sentence! I spent a good 15 minutes at it, then feared that some migraine might come along and take advantage of my vulnerable state, and fled. Boring, boring, dry, dry! It may be my fault in some way, but I don't care right now. I'm just frustrated that there seem to be two choices in books on music these days: Boring and dry, or stupid and condescending.
"Van Loon's writing has everything I love; humor, passion and thorough
knowlege."
After I left England, I went to Geneva to stay with a
friend there. Her bookshelves do her credit, and
nobody who stays with her could complain of having
nothing to read. There are as many old books as new,
and I saw a copy of Hendrik Willem Van Loon's "The
Arts of Mankind" nestled among them, and gave it a
try.
Finding that book, over 50 years old,was like a ghostly tap on the shoulder from those dead authors whose words are so much more alive than most of what is available today! I was riveted to those dusty pages.
Van Loon: I wish his books were everywhere, and they certainly ought to be still in print. In his day he was very popular; the copy on my friend's shelf was from July 1942 (Van Loon died two years later) and in its 5th printing since it had come out in 1938. It lists about 20 different countries and languages his books have been published and translated into, plus Urdu, Bantu and Esperanto for good measure.
Van Loon's writing has everything I love; humor, passion and thorough knowlege. His personality leaps off the page and with him, his subjects, be they Gluck, Louis XIV, Rembrandt, the ancient Egyptians or Martin Luther. He illustrates his books with as much intelligence and enthusiasm as he writes. Some of his sketches are instructive...as when he shows us what a wood engraving and an etching look like, surrounded by the tools that made them; or different types of portable organs. Over five pages he demonstrates five different ways of painting the same little harbour in Veere, with entertaining commentary. Other illustrations can be quite touching, such as one simply entitled "Mozart," which shows a modest little crooked cross in a mound with a few yellow and red flowers sticking up around it. Or a group of medieval musicians, backs bent and instruments under their arms, trudging from one village to another in the pouring rain.
In the foreword (I'm one of those bad people who usually don't read those) Mr. Van Loon humbly states that this book on the Arts doesn't contain any facts that aren't already known, neither is it written to air his aesthetic theories. He says that the reason he wrote it is
- "Merely to invite you to join us, and by 'us' I mean all those who feel that
we can occasionally do without dinner or breakfast, but that life without a
few extra dishes of music or painting is hardly worthwhile."
- "Now that sort of statement (like more or less all rhetorical utterances) is
apt to be most beautifully distorted and misunderstood. For it comes very
close to that terrible old slogan 'art for art's sake' which has ruined more
careers than I care to think of. The last thing I want to do is take you
away from a comfortable and decent mode of making a living, and then turn
you loose on a cold and indifferent world to spend the rest of your days as
disgruntled and indifferent pseudo-artists, spending miserable days and
nights in an uncomfortable old attic, subsisting on stale spaghetti, and
contemplating the glorious revolution that will at last bring you
recognition. The revolution may come, but it will hardly bring you the
recognition you so eagerly desire. On the contrary, it is more likely to
put a pickaxe in your hands and tell you to make yourself useful digging
sewers for the benefit of your less fortunate neighbours."
In the rest of the book he talks about painting, architechture and music through history and around the world, and every word vividly conveys his enthusiasm.
I've read a couple of his other books. One is a series of evenings where different characters from history come to dinner; needless to say, it's informative and entertaining. Another is on Bach, and comes with a record (I saw this at Sikora's Classical Records but ironically, in this copy the sleeve had no record in it!) and he's written about ships, the Pacific, America, nursery songs, Ancient Man, and religion, among other things. A friend of mine searched the Public Library online, and was laughing at the variety of subjects this man has tackled in his time.
So that's the fascinating Van Loon. Understadable but not condescending, entertaining but not flippant and silly (no "Art for Dummies" here!), thorough but not boring, informal but well-written. And he illustrates his own books! We'll never see another like him.
Something else I read recently is "Studies of the Great Composers" (and you thought "The Arts of Makind" was a dry title! Never judge a book by its title!) by Sir C. Hubert H. Parry, M.A. Mus. Doc.; Seventeenth Edition. Sir C.H.H. Parry is most well-known today for his composing, specifically "Jerusalem," for anyone who watches Last Night of the Proms.
Anyway, his book on composers is very good. His style is certainly not as breezy as Van Loon's, but engaging in an old-fashioned way. What I particularly love is the fact that old Sir Parry has an opinion, and no squeamishness about expressing it. He tells the life stories of the composers with as much human interest as attention to their musical output. The book has no date of publication anywhere, but in the chapter on Wagner, Parry describes how in the afternoon of Feb 13th, 1883, "without a struggle, he ceased to live." and in the following, final chapter, entitled "Conclusion," he informs us that "Brahms is not yet past the prime of his vigour,...and may yet produce works beyond the great height he has already attained." So that narrows it down to within 14 years. The time of writing is particularly interesting when, in the final chapter, Parry speculates on the future of music:
"But as time goes on the fields get exhausted, and in order to get to a high point without deliberately imitating the works of earlier composers it becomes necessary to get more and more complicated , till at last the endurance of man will go no further; and then most probably the greatest type of musicians will become rarer and rarer, and people who require new music to gratify their insatiable taste for change will have to put up with more and more of the cheap trifles which are only fit for a moment's tasting and then to be thrown aside for good; and those who have a taste for greater and nobler music will have to feed more scrupulously on the great masterpieces of the past."
Precisely. Of course, one can decide for oneself what he means. To me the "more and more complicated" is Schoenberg and Webern, and the "greatest type of musicians" who get rarer and rarer is exemplified by Shostakovich, and the cheap trifles are things like Philip Glass and Vanessa Mae.
It's great fun to read old books, smell them, carry them with you when you go to work; but finding quotes like that make it all even funner. It's almost like cracking open a rock and finding a fossilized fern!
I was at McLeod's Books, downtown, and found six issues of Penguin Music Magazine from the late 1940s. I love these. They have wonderful articles, and a regular feature called, "To Start An Argument" where two writers with opposing views each write on the same subject...The one I have here is called "The place of the performer in music." The first writer starts out rather waggishly by saying that the place of the performer is on the platform(Oh very good.),but then he gets down to business and declares that performers are merely transmitters of information, have no right to introduce any interpretative ideas of their own, and as for the term "Creating a part," it is a flapdoodle phrase. Flapdoodle. See? Reading these guys, you can pick up a new vocabulary! Continuing, he says of performers "...we even say we like his or her Chopin, as if Chopin was a puppet worked by a skilled ventriloquist of charming platform manners. That is, musically, a rubbishy point of view." Etc. He asks sarcastically if Bach ever fussed about his 'inner meaning' at Cöthen, or his 'soul' at the Thomaskirche. He concludes that "Any form of personal intervention in the performance of music is an insult to the composer and a barrier between composer and listener." So that was Hubert Foss' opinion. F. Bonavia counters, "It must be comforting to be able to believe that all that matters in music is the composer and the middle-man, the go-between, the interpreter, is of no importance whatever. It must be comforting to close one's eyes to the facts of history and one's ears to experience." He points out that composers have been known to alter their own works, that things aren't written in stone. He talks of many works that were obscure and unappreciated for years because they lacked a talented champion, like Beatrice Harrison and the Elgar Cello Concerto, Beecham and Mozart, Ysaÿe's Bach (oh dear, I'm being rubbishy!); and declares that "interpretative genius is almost as rare as genius for composition. Many can take us as far as the gates, but only a very few -not necessarily the most famous- will take us inside." I'd agree, wouldn't you? "Imagine Beethoven's 7th taken at half the speed it should go, played with indifferent regard for expression marks, wavering between mf & mp?" He comments on the power of live performances, how we have seen audiences losing control and almost maddened by the overwhelming, intoxicating beauty (Mr. Bonavia lived in a year that still had Furtwangler, Casals, Fisher, Richter, Horowitz, Heifetz, etc. etc. etc. etc. still performing...), "yet no one has lost his head over a recorded performance." And so, he concludes, to underestimate the place of the performer in music is "to believe in a theory that history shows to be untenable and experience every day proves to be fallacious."
A few pages on, and we get to the book reviews. "Six Great Russian Composers" by one Donald Brook, gets a brief but efficient treatment. Reviewer J.E. Morpurgo tells us that "Had the ink from his pen been invisible, the value of his writing would not have been less. It's time that every publisher realised that writing on the art of music is a highly specialized branch of literature and journalism (or both) and such trumpery stuff as this book on Russian Composers is valueless." "Music and Society" by a man named Mellers, and "The Orchestra in England" by a certain Mr. Nettel are reviewed together. "Mellers has a genuine and deep knowlege of music and musicians, but as historians they rock at different ends of the technical see-saw. Nettel is of the chatty, inconsequential school of popularisers. Mellers drags his scholarship to the darkest corner of a college staircase, and covering it with the shoddy cloak of obscurity, guards it with his superiority against the possibility of comprehension by his readers. In this contrast it is surprising to find them lurking together to commit the same misdemeanors against history." Now that's fun to read! Fun is often what I want when I sit down with a book. I don't know about other people...
Another book on composers takes a chapter to talk about Bach, commenting that no town in America is capable of producing a Bach, only Little Napoleons of Business...I don't remember the book's title, just that it was very old, and sits in one of my many boxes somewhere.
All of these books are readily available, almost as readily as if they were still in print. All one needs to do is get on the internet, go to abe.com or bibliofind.com and shop in little used bookstores all over North America.
So it's possible to find a book review in a 1930's magazine, then use technology from the 21st century to go out and buy it. Through modern technology, you CAN live in the past!
And if the past is where I have to go to get some good reading, that's where I'll be. Bye!
 | Patricia is a classically trained mezzo who now lives and works in the UK. For more information about her, visit patriciahammond.com. |
