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Editorial Review Book Description
"A supermarket tabloid of classical music criticism."--from the new foreword by Peter Schickele. A snakeful of critical venom aimed at the composers and the classics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Who wrote advanced cat music? What commonplace theme is very much like Yankee Doodle? Which composer is a scoundrel and a giftless bastard? What opera would His Satanic Majesty turn out? Whose name suggests fierce whiskers stained with vodka? And finally, what third movement begins with a dog howling at midnight, then imitates the regurgitations of the less-refined or lower-middle-class type of water-closet cistern, and ends with the cello reproducing the screech of an ungreased wheelbarrow? For the answers to these and other questions, readers need only consult the "Invecticon" at the back of this inspired book and then turn to the full passage, in all its vituperation. Among the eminent reviewers are George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Hans von Bulow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Hanslick, Olin Downes, Deems Taylor, Paul Rosenfeld, and Oscar Wilde. Itself a classic, this collection of nasty barbs about composers and their works, culled mostly from contemporaneous newspapers and magazines, makes for hilarious reading and belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves--or hates--classical music. With a new foreword by Peter Schickele ("P.D.Q. Bach"). ... Read more Customer Reviews (8) 
Good to flip through for a chuckle at how wrong some critics ultimately proved to be
Nicolas Slonimsky's LEXICON OF MUSICAL INVECTIVE collects those critical reviews of composers from Beethoven's time which proved "biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgements". It's handily arranged in alphabetic order by composer, so while listening to, say, Bela Bartok's first piano concerto, you can amuse yourself with a 1928 review from the Cincinnati Enquirer:
"Mr. Bartok elected to play his composition dignified by the title Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra. Note the ommission of key. Ultra-moderns cannot be bothered with such trifling designations ... It has been said that the Concerto is based on folk tunes. They have been successfully concealed. Only tonal chaos arises from the diabolical employment of unrelated keys simultaneously."
A 1913 review from the Boston Journal manages to make unprophetic judgements about two composers in one go:
"For the most part the latest symphony [the Sibelius Fourth] from the pen of Finland's foremost composer is a tangle of the most dismal dissonances. It eclipses the saddest and sourest moments of Debussy."
In addition to these citations, Slonimsky offers his own analysis of critical tendencies in the opening essay "Non-Acceptance of the Familiar". To the elderly among the old critics, Slonimsky notes, new music always seems louder than what they are used to. They also often resorted to linguistic similes, comparing new music to "Chinese", a then-handy symbol of incomprehensibility. He gives some general anecdotes about the world of music reviewing, such as a Russian journalist writing a review on Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite" before the concert even took place--he was fired when the review appeared but the piece had actually be taken off the programme at the last minute. There's even an index of Invective, so if you want to find all reviews making use of the terms "Hideous", "Grunting", or even "Feeding Time at Zoo", you'll know which pages to turn to.
Though the work is entertaining, it's no essential addition to a home library. You can read it in an hour at your public or university library. Also, the work was never updated after 1965--it ends with the generation of Bartok, Webern, and Varese--and so those hoping to read invective against Boulez, Stockhausen and others won't find it here.
Great Fun
The ill-informed and pompously long-winded "12x88" completely misses the point. It doesn't matter what Slonimsky says in the Forward - the content of the book is hugely entertaining and in many cases hilariously funny. And "12x88" doesn't seem to realise that a good deal of the most vituperative attacks on music came from other composers, frequently of equivalent eminence, so condemning or praising "critics" leads nowhere.
Also it is not clear the previous reviewer has any clear idea what he means by "atonal" music. Is aleatoric music, which may be "tonal" or not or beyond such classification, included ?
And what about much baroque music, that also creates little if any emotional involvement ?
A book for people who require periodic comic relief with their serious music
The author seems to have believed, along with many Modern music fans and others in music education, that many music critics are ill equipped to make sound judgments on new music because they generally don't appreciate musical innovation.
The book reads like a browser: Anyone who finds novelty in reading a century old criticism of music that everyone knows turned out to be well regarded will find such humor here. There seems little substance in such an endeavor. So a critic didn't like a piece of music because it hurt their ears at the time. So what? So we've all heard the story of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" having been despised for its atonality, and many other similar tales. None of this is vital any longer. In fact, today we have the opposite problem: a culture of vanguard minded music educators, classical musicians and their brethren who disdain all music that is considered, in their view, over-played, overly commercial, simplistic, dated, cliche.
With a little research, anyone may discover the opposite of Slonimsky's findings: Within most tradition of artistic criticism lives a common prejudiced view against art that isn't innovative. This is especially true among today's commercial music critics. If you read around you'll discover that most music critics, and art critics in general, are involved in a campaign to rid the world of creations that are not original enough for their taste.
The worst result of this is found in how individuality becomes confused with originality. These two attributes are quite different. Yet, most intellect surrounding music carries the former vanguard attitude, which supplants individuality with the notion that academic innovation is better, ultimately discouraging emotion and the importance of subjective response.
Music does not, and should not, require high browed appreciation. It is, above all an art that seeks emotional responses from its audiences.
In Sam Morgenstern's classic 1956 anthology of composers' essays entitled "Composers on Music" (available here at Amazon) Dmitri Shostakovich panned a performance of a new composer's music citing how its innovation and academic versatility did not help it accomplish music worthwhile to the listener. He claimed that the composer was part of a trend in Modern music toward the vanguard, where the mantra of innovation subverts actual music talent.
The author was clearly serious in his discussion of music criticism. To deride my comment (A reader, above) for taking him seriously seems in error.
Maybe it's my Russian glands, but I never have a problem staying serious for long periods of time. There are people who regard this as mental illness. They are dullards, conformists pushing their own behavior on others. Schickele always struck me as someone of that ilk. It's not offensive to me if people make cheap fun of music and musicians, but it also seems pointlessly unnecessary, considering how much better humor there is to find elsewhere in the world. I think mainly this cheap music humor stuff is for college students who can't hack doing anything seriously for long periods of time.
The book is also popular among composers who've apparently been unfairly criticized and need to boost their self esteem by reading erroneous reviews of famously loved music. They needn't go so far, since every issue of Rolling Stone magazine has pans of popular music records, and all, of course in the name of innovation over.... what? My guess: envy is the motivation. "It's so fun to see the pretty ones fall."
Vanguards, along with the street smart ("the low spark of high-heeled boys") have a commonality: they all hate the beautiful and the popular. I've been outcasted by such conformist idiots as the most popular kids in school, but I don't let it turn me into a vanguard. Maybe this is because I was cute AND unpopular, disliked by both of these extreme sets.
-A reader- above says Baroque music is emotionless. Maybe to you, buddy. Let's take Bach, who's music is from an age that is similarly regarded as emotionless (as compared to Romantic, for example). Here's what I do to put emotion in Bach:
Much of J.S. Bach's music that's performed up to tempo tends to sound like an emotionless mechanization of 16th notes. You can listen to slower pieces by Bach, but why stop there? Some of the pieces that were meant to be played at a fast tempo contain favorite passages, so I pluck that passage out of the composition, say 4 bars of a three-part Invention, slow it way down, and then comes the tingling and the raised hairs. It can be sensual: over & over the same short, lovable passage is like being caressed.
Fear of the unknown...
...is a "fresher" expression for Nicholas Slonimsky's introduction, "Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar," to this howler of a compendium of musical criticism.
In a nutshell, this book is a collection of excerpts from reviews, commentary and correspondence regarding the music of forty-three composers over a 150-year span, beginning with Beethoven and ending (approximately) with Bartók, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. While most of the composers are well-known, some (Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, Wallingford Riegger, Carl Ruggles, Edgar Varèse) are hardly household names. For the most part, the commentary closely follows, in time, the premieres of the works described. (In some cases, this may be years after their original premieres. It often took, in times past, years for the works to get from "the country of origin" to the venues that were the domains of the reviewers and critics. History - and this book - have shown that this extra time was not necessarily an asset in evaluating the works more accurately.)
A quick page count by composer shows that Wagner (at 27 pages), Schoenberg (at 20 pages), Stravinsky (at 19 pages), Strauss (at 16 pages), and Debussy (at 15 pages) come under the greatest critical scrutiny, or, in retrospect, the greatest "fear of the unknown." Surprisingly, other "true revolutionaries" come off somewhat better: Berlioz (at 5 pages), Mahler (at 4 pages), to name two. Even "universally-loved" composers who wrote music which these days is commonly considered accessible don't escape the critics' wrath: Bizet, Brahms, Puccini, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky are some who didn't exactly become accepted overnight.
It's not as if these music critics "who blew it" didn't know their field appropriately. More than a few (César Cui, George Templeton Strong, Virgil Thomson, to name three) were themselves composers, writing about the new music of their contemporaries. Others (Olin Downes, long-time music critic of the New York Times, Henry E. Krehbiel, similarly of the New York Tribune, and Philip Hale, similarly of the Boston Herald) were highly-respected music critics of their time, not normally given to "blowing it" as far as making a bad call against a new piece of music was concerned.
But that is what this book is about: "Blowing it, major-league big-time," usually with style and panache to spare, as well as all the buzzwords and "tricks of the trade" that suggest expertise. Then, along comes the unsuspecting reader of "the next morning's dailies." He (or she) reads the critique, and the die is cast: Wagner (or Strauss or Stravinsky or Debussy; enter a name of your choice) has just composed music that is: cacophonous; caterwauling; noise, non-music; not fit for human consumption (pick one). The reader has fallen victim to this "expert opinion." It is hard to shake this initial "expert" impression. It may take years. It may never happen. And it might have been the fault of the critic in the first instance.
There is one significant omission, perhaps curious only to those who are unfamiliar with some of the other "alter egos" which Slonimsky had: Charles Ives. Now, Ives was America's first "modern" (or, in terms that I think fit him best, our "first-and-only romantic pre-post-modern"), and his music just barely found acceptance within his lifetime, even if this acceptance came many years after he stopped composing and was quite infirm due to a variety of ailments. Slonimsky had been a friend and champion of Ives well before Ives's music caught on with the concert-going public, and I like to think that omission of Ives as a subject of such invective was a conscious decision on the part of Slonimsky, perhaps as a gift from a friend. But it is also true that much of Ives's music went unperformed during his lifetime, thereby escaping the invective it might otherwise have garnered.
I almost thought that there might be a second significant omission, that of Hector Berlioz as music critic (something which he did for the better part of forty years). But the index at the back of the book did turn up one comment of Berlioz's (in a letter [dated 1861]), brief but to the point: "Wagner is evidently mad." By 1861, Berlioz and Wagner had already known each other quite well for some six years or more. Berlioz - despite trying hard - couldn't fathom the chromaticism in Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," this despite the fact that Wagner wasn't at all bashful about borrowing some of Berlioz's better ideas in his "Romeo et Juliette" for "Tristan und Isolde."
Also curiously absent is any mention of twentieth-century British composers (Vaughan Williams, Holst, Britten, Brian, Bax and so forth). Neither Slonimsky nor Peter Schickele (of P. D. Q. Bach fame, and the writer of a fresh Foreword to this edition) posits why this might be so. There is no shortage of criticism by British critics; they have plenty to say about the musics of composers of other countries. And sheer accessibility cannot be the explanation; the Fourth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams hardly fits the mold of "instant acceptance and accessibility." Curious.
It wouldn't surprise me if every working composer already has a copy of Slonimsky's little masterpiece tucked away for "rainy day" encouragement. And if they don't, they ought to. Music lovers would do well to read how initial critical thinking can affect acceptance of new music, and how critical opinion can change "once the dust settles."
But those who stand to benefit the most from reading this book, as a cautionary tale, perhaps, are the working music reviewers and critics. They (or at least their predecessors) are the ones whose flawed judgements at the time have not withstood history's judgement, resulting in these screamingly funny "critiques."
Good for much more than just a laugh or two! Pick your favorite composer. He's probably been picked apart by someone anthologized in Slonimsky's screamer.
Bob Zeidler
Essential, but in a way never intended by the author.
This book is an inspired piece of iconic significance, but
not in the way the author intended. What he DID intend
was to poke fun at music critics for their supposed
"non-acceptance of the unfamiliar." Well the critic's advocate is a role
too easy to adopt: how could anyone other than a clairvoyant
have known that such and such a composer would go on
to be lauded as a genius? Nay, the all-too-obvious benefit
of Slonimsky's hindsight, almost in itself discredits his viewpoint,
genius though he most certainly is. For what becomes clear
soon after starting the book is that the shock value and
the novelty wears off. What does NOT wear off though
is something Slonimsky never intended to protray (because
he was no clairvoyant himself and could not project the decline
of the linguistic standards in journalism subsequent to
his generation): that is the wonderful and eloquent beauty of
of the prose these music critics had. Their ability to describe
music, and its effect on the listener, by using seemingly endless
amounts of imaginative and hilarious simile, and other figurative
language is breathtaking; it's a bountiful joy to read, indicative of
a time when critics had the guts to say what they felt without
the stodgy attitude found in the cliche-ridden dross often found
in today's journalism. After a while -- once the reader is able to
cast his mind back to a time when music was
supposed to embody truth, beauty, reason,
and be presented by ordered use of harmony,
melody and rhythm -- it is not difficult at all to
agree wholeheartedly with most of what these
writers complain about. For much of Wagner's music
DOES INDEED sound like an "inflated display of extravagance."
Webern's serialism DOES often "call to mind the activity
of insects." Schoenberg DOES "torpedo the eardrums
with deadly dissonance." And on and on. Only a Philistine
university professor (who equates fame with musical quality)
would refuse to admit it. "...vacillating and fluid harmonies........this music is indeterminate,
vague, fleeting, indecisive, deliberately indefinite.............without
muscle or backbone......grey music forming a sort of sonorous mist....." That (written in 1910) is the most clear-minded, honest description of Debussy's
music you will ever read. But you won't read this kind
of opinion now, because in the classical music world,
once a composer is famous, he is then off limits to
honest assessment. Only the performance receives analysis. To be able to see what people thought AT THE TIME,
is a priceless opportunity Slonimsky has bequeathed
to us, regardless of that he did not intend it.
These review excerpts are nothing less than
a testament to the integrity and sincerity
that was once (a long time ago!) represented by men
of the critical pen. The Lexicon should be a required item on the shelf of
everyone who calls himself a writer in the field of the
performing arts. Then maybe scribes would be
more respected.
... Read more |
Great book - but THIS EDITION is unacceptable