Liberace the musician had a terrible facility and a terrible sincerity; what he played he played with feeling, whether it was Roll Out the Barrel or I’ll Be Seeing You, and in sad pieces a tear would well up over the mascara and drop to the silver diamanté of a velvet coat while the rings on his hands flashed up and down the keyboard, and in a thousand mirrors he would see the tear, the mascara, the rings, he would see himself seeing the mascara, the rings, the tear. All this could be found too in Liberace (the writer): the slick, buttery arpeggios, the self-regarding virtuosity as the clever ring-laden hands sparkled over the keys, the professional sincerity which found expressiveness for the cynical & the sentimental, for the pornographic, even for alienation & affectlessness. And yet he was not really exactly like the pianist, because though he did genuinely have the emotional facility of the musician he had only the air of technical facility, there being to even a buttery arpeggio not only the matter of running hands up and down the keys but
L wants to know what βíηφιν means. I say he knows perfectly well what it means & he says he doesn’t.
At first (because I was explaining that βíηφιν was the instrumental form of βíη, meaning by force or violence) I thought that the writer was like a person who typing puts a hand down one key to the right or left of where it should be, so that an intelligible sentence nrvomrd duffrnly uninyrllihlnlr ot nrstly do, snf yhr gsdyrt you yypr yhr eotdr iy hryd (ψηλαφ
Od. 10.
Met. 1.
I Sam. I? [Have not read in years.]
I Sam. II-V? [Hell.]
It is strange to think that Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre was first published in 1911, a year before Roemer brought out Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik. Schoenberg, who had a wife and two children, was scraping a living as a teacher of music & portrait painter. I think Roemer held a position at the University of Leipzig. Roemer’s colleagues might have pointed out the fallacy; I might have spoken fluent German & lost half an hour on it; I might have lost 50 hours a week later—and Ludoviticus would not now be setting Mr. Ma at defiance by mastering 500 simple tasks on a daily basis. The atoms which now direct the application of a pink Schwan Stabilo highlighter to Odyssey 10 would be going about some other business, as would I, & the world, for all I know, would be short an Einstein. And yet tactful colleagues, bad German and terrible timing might have conspired to catapult me from an academic career without effect upon Schwan Stabilo & Odyssey 10: Schoenberg, distracted by financial difficulties, might have written a stupid book. He might have written a clever book; I might have gone to buy a dress on the day of the party.
On the day of the party I walked down to Covent Garden at lunchtime to buy a dress, and on my way to Boules I thought I would just stop off for a moment at Books etc. I happened to go into the music section, and I happened to pick up Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony.
My father used to say, when things went wrong, that man is the cat’s paw of fate. I think this is the kind of thing he had in mind.
No sooner had I taken the book from the shelf than I had to buy it; no sooner bought than began to read.
Schoenberg was putting forward arguments for the development of music using a much more liberal notion of consonance, and then possibly eventually of a music using a much wider range of notes (so that you could have, say, an extra four notes between C and C sharp). He said:
It is clear that, just as the overtones led to the 12-part division of the simplest consonance, the octave, so they will eventually bring about the further differentiation of this interval. To future generations music like ours will seem incomplete, since it has not yet fully exploited everything latent in sound, just as a sort of music that did not yet differentiate within the octave would seem incomplete to us. Or, to cite an analogy—which one has only to think through completely to see how very relevant it is: The sound of our music will at that time seem to have no depth, no perspective, just as Japanese painting, for example, affects us as primitive compared with our own, because without perspective it lacks depth. That [change] will come, if not in the manner that some believe, and if not as soon. It will not come through reasoning (aus Gründen) but from elemental sources (Ursachen); it will not come from without, but from within. It will not come through imitation of some prototype, and not as technical accomplishment; for it is far more a matter of mind and spirit (Geist) than of material, and the Geist must be ready.
I thought this was one of the most brilliant things I had ever heard in my life. The comment on Japanese art was obviously wrong—I no sooner read it than I saw in my mind an image of Lord Leighton’s Greek Girls Playing at Ball, with its irreproachable, its even masterly use of perspective in the handling of the girls, the antique landscape, the airborne drapery, no sooner did I see this than I started to laugh, so shallow and superficial and even artless did it seem in comparison with (say) a print by Utamaro. But the basic argument was absolutely brilliant.
Before reading this brilliant book I had thought that books should be more like the film The Godfather, in which at one stage Al Pacino goes to Sicily and the Italian is all in Italian. Now I thought that this was a rather simpleminded way of looking at the question.
If you say that in a book the Italians should speak Italian because in the actual world they speak Italian and the Chinese should speak Chinese because Chinese speak Chinese it is a rather naive way of thinking of a work of art, it’s as if you thought this was the way to make a painting: The sky is blue. I will paint the sky blue. The sun is yellow. I will paint the sun yellow. A tree is green. I will paint the tree green. And what colour is the trunk? Brown. So what colour do you use? Ridiculous. Even leaving abstract painting out of the question it is closer to the truth that a painter would think of the surface that he wanted in a painting and the kind of light and the lines and the relations of colours and be attracted to painting objects that could be represented in a painting with those properties. In the same way a composer does not for the most part think that he would like to imitate this or that sound—he thinks that he wants the texture of a piano with a violin, or a piano with a cello, or four stringed instruments or six, or a symphony orchestra; he thinks of relations of notes.