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WILLIAM YOUNGREN
remark that "It is perhaps natural that gentlemen who are incapable of
criticism should fall back on parsing."
For Shaw and Haggin criticism, as opposed to idea-spinning and
parsing, deals in "associations" which are neither strictly private nor
strictly public, neither the fantasies of the system-builder nor Boretz's
statistically enumerable and emotionally neutral "musical facts," but
something else altogether: active responses that are highly personal yet
capable of being shared, argued about, collaboratively qualified and
sharpened. Criticism in this sense depends on thinking of music primarily
as a medium of communication and of individual musical works as
formally embodying and conveying insights which, like those of a
poem
or novel, can only be roughly paraphrased in the ordinary language
we use to describe thoughts and emotions. Yet this sort of language
is
usually the only sort the critic can use in describing and evaluating what
he hears and in getting his reader to hear it too. Thus Haggin finds
nothing wrong with saying (for example) that what the second movement
of Beethoven's Sonata Opus 111 communicates is "the sense of experience
mastered, lessons learned, resignation, inner illumination achieved"–
providing we realize that no such description can ever make the sonata
itself superfluous and that the inadequacies of language would force
us to use the same words in describing lots of other music-for example
the opening of Schubere.s B-flat posthumous Sonata. Of course the
technical language of musical analysis can help too, but only if sub–
ordinated to the critic's central concern with description and evaluation.
This concern is for Haggin embodied in the unremitting effort
to
apply
two crucial distinctions to any given musical event: first, the distinction
between "the real, active, purposeful operation of the composer's mind"
and "its mechanical operation in his general formulae"; second, the
parallel distinction in performance "between the playing of the instru–
ment and the playing of the music ... between a Hofmann who used
the music to show what he could do with the piano, and a Schnabel
who used the piano to illuminate the music."
This will do to suggest the central features of Haggin's work, yet
it ignores much that is peripheral but extraordinary: his excellent ballet
criticism, his enlightened concern with the way the concert and broad–
casting industries deal with musicians and the public, his great gifts of
sympathetic human observation.
Music Observed
gives a generous sampl–
ing of both central and peripheral, and its publication is therefore
something to cheer about. Readers who know Haggin's other books will
be interested in seeing how he handles the major performers who have
emerged since
Music in the Nation ;
readers who do not yet know
his
