Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

hunt or a battle, and so on) by musical means (choral singing); that 'description' is worked out polyphonically. The union of 'naturalistic'

imitation (which provides Janequin with some wonderful new sonorities) and erudite polyphony, a union, that is, of two nearly incompatible extremes, is fascinating: this is an art that is elegant, playful, joyous, and full of humor.

And yet: it is precisely the words 'elegant,' 'playful,' 'joyous,' 'humor,' that sentimental rhetoric sets in opposition to the profound. But what is profound and what is superficial? For Janequin's critic, superficial are the 'pictorial gifts' and 'description'; profound are the 'penetrating ardor in the expression of feelings' and the 'tones of tenderness, admiration, respect' for womankind. Thus 'profound' is what touches on the feelings. But one could define 'the profound' in another way: profound is what touches on the essential. The problem Janequin touches on in his compositions is the fundamental ontological problem of music: the problem of the relation between noise and musical sound.

Music and Noise

When man created a musical sound (by singing or by playing an instrument), he divided the acoustical world into two sharply distinct parts: that of artificial sounds and that of natural sounds. In his music, Janequin sought to put them together. In the middle of the sixteenth century, he thus prefigured what in the twentieth century would be done by, for instance, Janacek (his studies of spoken language), Bartok, or, in an extremely systematic way, Messiaen (in the works inspired by birdsong).

Janequin's art reminds us that there exists an acoustic universe outside the human soul, one that consists not merely of nature sounds but also of human voices speaking, singing, and giving sonic flesh to everyday life as well as to festive occasions. He reminds us that the composer can give a great musical form to that 'objective' universe.

One of Janacek's most original compositions: The Seventy Thousand (1909): a piece for mens chorus about the fate of the Silesian miners. The second half of the work (which should be in every anthology of modern music) is an explosion of shouts from the crowd, shouts that tangle together in a fascinating tumult: a composition that (despite its amazing dramatic emotional charge) comes curiously close to the madrigals that, in Janequin's time, turned the street cries of Paris and London into music.

I think of Stravinsky's Les Noces (written between 1914 and 1923): a portrayal (the term Ansermet uses as a pejorative is actually quite appropriate) of a village wedding; we hear songs, noises, speeches, shouts, calls, monologues, joking (a tumult of voices prefigured by Janacek), accompanied by an orchestration (four pianos and percussion) of fascinating harshness (which prefigures Bartok).

And I think of Bartok's piano suite Out of Doors (1926), the fourth part: nature sounds (the voices of frogs at a pond, it seems to me) suggest to Bartok rare and strange melodic motifs; then into these animal tones merges a folk song that, human invention though it is, lies on the same plane as the frog sounds; it is not a lied, that song of the Romantics meant to display the 'affective activity' of the composer's soul; it is a melody come from the outside as a noise among other noises.

And I think, too, of the Adagio of Bartok's Third Piano Concerto (a work of his last, his sad, American period). The hypersubjective theme, ineffably melancholy, alternates with a second, this one hyperobjective (which incidentally recalls the fourth part of the Out of Doors suite): as if a souls sorrow could find consolation only in the nonsentience of nature.

I say, indeed: 'consolation in the nonsentience of nature.' For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; 'it is the sea gone off with the sun' (Rimbaud). I remember the gloomy years I spent in Bohemia early in the Russian occupation. I fell in love then with Varese and Xenakis: those pictures of sound-worlds that were objective but nonexistent spoke to me of a life freed of human subjectivity, aggressive and burdensome; they spoke of the sweetly nonhuman beauty of the world before or after mankind moved through it.

Melody

I listen to a polyphonic chant for two voices from the twelfth-century School of Notre-Dame in Paris: underneath, in augmented note values, as a cantus firmus, an ancient Gregorian chant (a chant that goes back to an immemorial and probably non-European past); above it, in shorter note values, unfolds the polyphonic accompaniments melody. This embrace of two melodies belonging to two different eras (centuries

apart) has something marvelous about it: like reality and parable at once, here is the birth of European music as art: a melody is created to go in counterpoint with another, very old, melody whose origins are almost unknown; so this new one is there as something secondary, subordinate, it is there to serve; though 'secondary,' it is this voice that brings to bear all the invention, all the labor, of the medieval musician, whereas the melody it accompanies has been taken unchanged from an antique repertoire.

This old polyphonic composition delights me: the new melody on top is long, unending, and unmemoriz-able; it is not the product of some sudden inspiration, it did not spring forth as the direct expression of some state of mind; it has the quality of an elaboration, a 'craftsman''s work of ornamentation, a work done not to let the artist open his soul (show his 'affective activity,' to use Ansermets term) but to let him, in all humility, embellish a liturgy.

And it's my impression that until Bach the art of melody would keep that quality the earliest polyphonic composers gave it. I listen to the Adagio of Bach's E Major Violin Concerto: like a kind of cantus firmus, the orchestra (the bass instruments) plays a very simple theme, readily memorizable and many times repeated, while the violin melody (the focus of the composer's melodic challenge) soars above, incomparably longer, more various, richer than the orchestras cantus firmus (to which it is nonetheless subordinate), beautiful, spellbinding yet elusive, unmemorizable, and for us children of the second half, sublimely archaic.

The situation changes with the dawn of the Classical. Composition loses its polyphonic nature; in

the sonority of the accompaniment harmonies, the autonomy of the various singular voices disappears, and disappears still more as the great innovation of the second half-the symphonic orchestra with its thickness of sound-gains prominence; the melody that was 'secondary,' 'subordinate,' becomes the main point in composition and dominates musical structure, which incidentally undergoes a complete transformation.

Then the character of melody changes too: no more is it the long line that runs through an entire piece; it can be reduced to a phrase of a few measures, a phrase that is very expressive and concentrated, and thus easily memorizable, that can catch (or provoke) a direct emotion (more than ever before, music is set a great semantic task: to capture and musically 'describe' all the emotions and their nuances). This is why the present-day audience applies the term 'great melodist' to the composers of the second half-to a Mozart, a Chopin-but rarely to Bach or Vivaldi and still less to Josquin des Pres or Palestrina: the current idea of melody (of what constitutes beautiful melody) was shaped by the Classical aesthetic.

Yet it is not true that Bach is less melodic than Mozart; it is only that his melody is different. The Art of Fugue: the famous theme

is that kernel out of which (as Schoenberg said) the whole is created; but that is not the melodic treasure of The Art of Fugue; the treasure is in all the melodies

that arise from this theme and form the counterpoint to it. I like very much Hermann Scherchen's orchestration and recorded interpretation; for example, Contrapunctus IV, the fourth single fugue: he conducts it at half the customary speed (Bach did not prescribe the tempi); immediately, at that