PARTISAN REVIEW
In general Mr. Leibowitz's articles are on a fairly high "cultural" level,
though the spurious use of some Existentialist terms inapplicable to
music (situation, essence) occasionally obscures his otherwise clear but
somewhat naive line of reasoning. Recently Mr. Leibowitz has made a
tour in the United States and has, I understand, given the usual visiting
foreigner's series of lectures. He has been in Hollywood to pay homage
to Schonberg and has also called on Stravinsky. The result of his visit
to Hollywood was the article: "Two Composers: A Letter from Holly–
wood," printed as the Music Chronicle in the March issue of PR.
This peculiar little item warrants a certain amount of attention.
Not that the ideas expressed in it are particularly new. Far from it. In
a sense it is a rehash of the same old argument-Schonberg versus
Stravinsky-which we have read about in most of the articles of the
apologists of atonality in the twenties. And yet Mr. Leibowitz takes a
detached attitude, and under the cloak of impartiality he attempts to
prove the greatness of Schonberg by smearing Stravinsky without either
an understanding of the ideas underlying Stravinsky's music or a
thorough analysis and comparison of both composers' recent works. On
the whole it is a superficial piece, politely vicious and presumptuous and
at the same time full of weak and untenable arguments. Mr. Leibowitz
begins his piece by stating that it "is probably quite safe to say that
the musical activity of the last forty years has evolved essentially under
Schonberg's influence." In fact, he (Mr. Leibowitz) doubts whether
"there is a single composer" whose work has not been affected by
Schonberg even though he might "never actually have heard a note"
of Schonberg's music. He ends this candid paragraph by stating that
Schonberg's "fantastic innovations have entirely transformed the art of
sound through what might be called the emancipation of dissonance."
No one will deny Schonberg's influence which, of course, is enormous
and has manifested itself in contemporary music very vividly in the
Western world. However it is presumptuous to assert that
all
composers
knowingly or unknowingly have experienced this influence. It seems,
historically speaking, much more likely and closest to the truth, that the
transformation of the language of contemporary music towards a free
(or better, "new") use of dissonance has been the result of a spon–
taneous development which occurred in several countries and in the
works of several composers
at the same time
quite independently. To
say, for example, that Stravinsky's
Sacre du Printemps
is erroneously
accepted as a "caesura in modem harmony"
because
Schonberg drew
more radical conclusions in this direction some five to eight years
before
this work was written is the same as saying that the Chinese discovered
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