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 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.