850
PARTISAN REVIEW
swimming in air, beating the keyboard of a piano with his right fist
and at the same time plucking the strings with his left hand. The
reference, of course, is to certain experiments with "note-clusters"
conducted by Mr. Cowell twenty-five and more years ago, some of
which were published at that time, I believe, by the Soviet State
Music Press. Below the cartoon is a rhyme which says, "Cowell bangs
it (the piano). 'Hop-la! Look out, or I'll kill you.' The listener sits
silent, afraid for his life. Look at the brute! He is a hysteric, and about
to collapse.... All this is good business in America, where music is
used to make money."
A general picture of American music is given by another cartoon
in the same issue. It represents a jazz band accompanying a bleating
goat. The caption in verse reads:
What is the use of melody and sentiment in the atomic age?
Sing)
0
goat) a T e Deum to Art.
At another point "musicologists" Copland and Saminsky are
grouped with psychiatrists Freud .and Borneigg, philosopher Bergson,
"gangsters" Raymond Mortimer and Bertrand Russell, as false author–
ities to whom Soviet musicologists and critics should never refer. The
American critics Virgil Thomson and Olin Downes are frequently
taken to task.
The main criminals of Western music, however, are not, accord–
ing to Soviet thought, the American composers. Americans are merely
the heirs of European decadence. The decadence starts with Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde
and with Debussy's
Pelleas et M elisande.
"It
is
under these two Impressionist trees and their shady branches that
there grew up so many 'fteurs du mal' of modernism," says Mr. Koval.
From there come the "great leaders" of Western decadence-the Stra–
vinskys and Ravels, the Schoenbergs and Bergs, the Weberns and the
Kreneks, the Hindemiths and Kurt Weills. The younger generation–
Messiaen and Jolivet in France, Benjamin Britten in England and
Menotti here in America- are descendants of an "inglorious," "igno–
ble," "decaying" civilization.
As
such, of course, they occupy only
minor positions in the bourgeois anti-Parnassus.
To us the important question to be answered is of course,
why
did the Politburo include music in its campaign against Western
culture and why did it surround this campaign with so much fervor
and drama?
