BOOKS
471
you hear, and to wind up like the ladies at the concert in
Howard's End,
mistaking fantasies and schemas for genuine perceptions. Since ideas
are more likely to get in the way with late Beethoven-ideas about the
philosophical content of German music, for example, or about certain
styles and traditions of performance--than with Ponchielli and Beider–
becke, learning to listen to them can help in learning to listen
to
him.
And since music critics are the main source of such distracting ideas,
it can also help a person who is intellectually but not musically sophisti–
cated to see their assumptions clearly spelled out and their arguments
evaluated. Therefore Haggin has devoted a good deal of his own writing
to that of other critics, a practice that has struck some readers as not
only ill-mannered but irrelevant since a music critic should confine
himself to music. To this he has replied that criticism is "a part of the
[musical] scene and a part that in considerable degree determines the
rest," and that a music critic has the obligations as well as the privileges
of an expert: "Is the rule for music critics to be different from the rule
for historians,
anth~opologists
and philosophers, who are considered to be
the right ones to evaluate each other's writings?" And he has then gone
on to deal devastatingly and very entertainingly with the system-grinding
musicologists, modern music propagandists and plain journalistic hacks
who are his colleagues.
Haggin's point, however, is not that we should have no ideas while
listening to music, but merely that we should get rid of externally
supplied ideas in order to experience directly those communicated by the
music. Therefore he has not followed Forster's Tibby in imploring us
"to look out for the transitional passage on the drum," but has been
just as hard on the occasional critic who relies on technical jargon and
a mindless appeal to "structure" as he has on the idea-mongers. In last
summer's
Hudson Re·view,
unfortunately too late for
Music Observed,
he had an amusing exchange with a very advanced technical critic,
the
Nation's
Benjamin Boretz, who had spoken of Mozart's K. 491
as a "profound and extensive . . . exploration of the entire range of
associations that can be generated from a single idea (two notes, actually,
first heard as the third and fourth notes of the opening melodic line
... }." Asked to explain this, Boretz did so in a way that led Haggin
to reply: "what he calls associations are any and all instances the eye
can detect of an A-flat followed by a G-or any other note followed by
a note at an interval of a second-with no regard for . . . particularities
of relation in time, consequent shape, or context." In musical analysis
as in so many things, the new dullness turns out to be very much like the
old, for there were Boretzes in the nineties too and they led Shaw to
