THE ATONAL TRAIL
opera composers, Peri, Cavaliere, and Monteverde) and from the con–
sequent adoption of equal-temperament tuning as the basis of Western
music. As such it entered and without doubt enriched the vocabulary of
most twentieth-century composers. However, as a system of composition
it was rejected by most contemporary composers. Only a small group
of initiates led by SchOnberg adopted the twelve-tone technique in its
entirety and by attempting to present it to the public as a "new" system,
rather than a final step in a harmonic evolution, they created a strange
kind of fetish, a hermetic cult, mechanistic in its technique and depress–
ingly dull to the uninitiated listener. Now, twenty years later, the debate
of atonality versus tonality is sporadically revived by the promoters of
the Schonbergian doctrine. This time the revival has taken place in
France and in America. In France it is a part of a general infiltration
of "Mittel-europa" ideas into the "cora" of French civilization, an infiltra–
tion which has been going on for some ten to fifteen years. In America,
its revival is due to the fact that many Central European issues have
been imported here as a corollary to the immigration of their pro–
tagonists. Here the debate found an attentive and fertile soil in the "lec–
ture tour pattern" of incoming intellectuals or in the broader American
pattern-the desire for "education" and "appreciation."
Most of the revival of this debate is just so much rehash of settled
issues-a kind of cafeteria dinner consisting of stale clam chowder and
faded mixed-fruit salad. It has neither much intrinsic meaning, nor does
it contribute in any way to the progress of musical thinking. Usually it
reflects a great deal of "standardized" confusion of terms, lack of true
knowledge of music history, a traditionally erroneous interpretation of
the evolution of musical language and a both biased and arbitrary re–
jection of all modern musical production which is not written according
to the dodecatonal method (see Mr. Kurt List's appallingly arrogant and
superficial article in the January issue of PR). But what is worse, this
revival of a settled debate shows a lack of new ideas and
therefore
a
return to the ideas of the twenties. All this is part of the retrospective,
impotent attitude which is now so apparent in most phases of cultural
and political life in Europe.
One of the most zealous propagandists of atonality and the twelve–
tone technique is the French critic and composer Rene Leibowitz. For·
some time he has been a regular contributor to Mr. Sartre's magazine
Les Temps Modernes.
There, Mr. Leibowitz has been leading a twofold
campaign: ( 1) a defense of the dodecatonal system and its Master, and
(2) an attack on Stravinsky and those composers (and there are many)
who do not accept the dodecatonal system as a basis for composition.
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