Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

may be counter to the demands of the moment (of this or that modernity), and that the new (the unique, the inimitable, the previously unsaid) might lie in some direction other than the one everybody sees as progress. Indeed, the future that Bach could discern in the art of his contemporaries and of his juniors must to his eyes have seemed a collapse. When, toward the end of his life, he concentrated exclusively on pure polyphony, he was turning his back on the tastes of his time and on his own composer sons; it was a gesture of defiance against history, a tacit rejection of the future. Bach: an extraordinary crossroads of the historical trends and issues of music. Some hundred years before him, another such crossroads occurs in the work of Monteverdi: this is the meeting ground of two opposing aesthetics (Monteverdi calls them prima and seconda prattica, the one based on erudite polyphony, the other, programmatically expressive, on monody), and it thus prefigures the move from the first to the second half.

Another extraordinary crossroads of historical trends: the work of Stravinsky. Musics thousand-year history, which over the course of the nineteenth century was slowly emerging from the mists of oblivion, suddenly toward the middle of our own century (two hundred years after Bach's death) stood revealed in its full breadth like a landscape drenched in light; a unique moment when the whole history of music is totally present, totally accessible and available (thanks to historical research, to radio, to recordings), totally open to the examination of its meaning; this moment of vast reappraisal seems to find its monument in the music of Stravinsky.

The Tribunal of the Feelings

Music is 'powerless to express anything at all: a feeling, an attitude, a psychological state,' says Stravinsky in Chronicle of My Life (1935). This assertion (surely exaggerated, for how can one deny music's ability to arouse feelings?) is elaborated and refined a few lines later: music's raison d'etre., says Stravinsky, does not reside in its capacity to express feelings. It is curious to note what irritation this attitude provoked.

The conviction, contrary to Stravinsky's, that music's raison d'etre is the expression of feelings probably existed always, but it became dominant, widely accepted and self-evident, in the eighteenth century; Jean-Jacques Rousseau states it with a blunt simplicity: like any other art, music imitates the real world, but in a specific way: it 'will not represent things directly, but it will arouse in the soul the same impulses that we feel at seeing them.' That requires a certain structure in the musical work; Rousseau: 'All of music can be composed of only these three things: melody or song, harmony or accompaniment, movement or tempo.' I emphasize: harmony or accompaniment; that means everything else is subordinate to melody: it is melody that is primordial, and harmony is merely accompaniment, 'having very little power over the human heart.'

The doctrine of socialist realism, which two centuries later was to muzzle Russian music for over half a century, asserted this same thing. 'Formalist' composers were berated for neglecting melody (the chief ideologue, Zhdanov, was indignant because their music could not be whistled on the way out of the concert); they were exhorted to express 'the whole range of human feelings' (modern music, from Debussy on, was denounced for its inability to do so); music's faculty for expressing the feelings reality arouses in man gave it 'realism' (just as Rousseau said). (Socialist realism in music: the principles of the second half transformed into dogmas to block modernism.)

The most severe and thorough criticism of Stravinsky is surely Theodor Adorno's in his famous book The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949). Adorno depicts the situation in music as if it were a political battlefield: Schoenberg the positive hero, the representative of progress (though a progress that might be termed tragic, at a time when progress is over), and Stravinsky the negative hero, the representative of restoration. The Stravinskian refusal to see subjective confession as music's raison d'etre becomes one target of the Adorno critique; this 'antipsychological furor' is, he says, a form of 'indifference toward the world'; Stravinsky's desire to objectivize music is a kind of tacit accord with the capitalist society that crushes human subjectivity; for it is the 'liquidation of the individual that Stravinsky's music celebrates,' nothing less.

Ernest Ansermet, an excellent musician and conductor, and one of the foremost performers of Stravinsky's work ('one of my most faithful and devoted friends,' says Stravinsky in Chronicle of My Life), later became his implacable critic; his objections are fundamental, they are concerned with 'music's rai-son d'etre.' Ansermet says it is 'the affective activity latent in men's hearts… that has always been the source of music'; the 'ethical essence' of music lies in the expression of that 'affective activity'; with Stravinsky, who 'refuses to invest his person in the act of musical expression,' music 'thereby ceases to be an aesthetic expression of the human ethic'; thus, for instance, 'his Mass is not the expression of the mass but its portrayal, which might just as well have been written by an irreligious musician' and which, consequently, provides only a 'ready-made religiosity'; by thus undercutting the true raison d'etre of music (by substituting portrayals for religious avowal), Stravinsky fails in nothing less than his ethical obligation.

Why this fury? Is it the legacy of the previous century, the romanticism in us striking out at its most significant, its most thorough negation? Has Stravinsky violated some existential need hidden within us all? The need to consider damp eyes better than dry eyes, the hand on the heart better than the hand in the pocket, belief better than skepticism, passion better than serenity, faith better than knowledge?

Ansermet proceeds from criticism of the music to criticism of its author: if Stravinsky 'neither made nor tried to make his music an act of self-expression, it's not out of free choice, but out of a kind of limitation in his nature, a lack of autonomy in his affective activity (not to speak of his poverty of heart, a heart that will stay poor until it has something to love).'

Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of 'affective activity'? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?

What Is Superficial and What Is Profound?

The soldiers of the heart assail Stravinsky, or else, in an effort to salvage his music, they try to disconnect it from its author's 'erroneous' ideas. That noble determination to 'salvage' the music of composers who might have too little heart occurs quite often with regard to the musicians of the first half, including Bach: 'The twentieth- century epigones, who were frightened by the evolution of the musical language'- meaning Stravinsky with his refusal to follow the twelve-tone school-'and who believed they could redeem their sterility through what they called the 'return to Bach' are deeply mistaken about Bach's music; they had the effrontery to represent it as 'objective,' absolute music with none but a purely musical meaning… Only mechanical performances, in a certain period of craven purism, could give the impression that Bach's instrumental music is not subjective and expressive.' I have emphasized the terms that show the passionate quality of this 1963 text by Antoine Golea.

By chance, I came upon a little commentary by another musicologist; it concerns Rabelais's great contemporary Clement Janequin and his so-called descriptive works, like 'Le Chant des oiseaux' ('Birdsong') or 'Le Caquet des femmes' ('Women's Chatter'); the determination to 'salvage' is the same (here again the italics are mine): 'Nonetheless, these pieces remain rather superficial. Now, Janequin is a far more complete artist than people are willing to admit, for aside from his undeniable pictorial gifts, his work displays a tender poetry, a penetrating ardor in the expression of feelings… This is a poet of subtlety, sensitive to nature's beauties; he is also a peerless bard of womankind, to whose praise he brings tones of tenderness, admiration, respect …'

Note the vocabulary: the poles of good and evil are designated by the adjective 'superficial' and its understood contrary, 'profound.' But are Janequin's 'descriptive' compositions actually superficial? In these few works, Janequin transcribes nonmusical sounds (birdsong, women's chatter, the racket of the streets, the sounds of a