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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the greatest composers of the past 250 years-Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms." This is puzzling after being told
again and again that music's decline is symptomized by the failure of
a sufficiently wide musical audience to embrace it.
I wonder if it would not be fruitful to consider the possibility
that it is not music that is in decline, but in some sense the
audience-or rather, that the vastly changed conditions since
musical performance became an industry and an arm of mass
culture are singularly unfavorable to serious creativity. Public
concerts go back only to about 1800, and they had barely become the
focal point of musical activity when they were enormously expanded
by the electronic media. With little time for adjustment the
composer found himself pursuing his experiments within a vast
arena. While he now can seek refuge in modern music groups as
poets seek refuge in the little magazines, he does so only at the risk of
getting inferior performances. I remember how envious my friend
Delmore Schwartz was when, as young composers, some of us had
the unusual good fortune of having our first attempts at orchestral
writing broadcast coast-to-coast. We had more reason to envy him
for his coterie affiliations, since a mass setting is a poor place for
flexing one's muscles and taking risks. A chance in the big arena can
be a one-time affair upon which success or failure of an entire career
hinges.
According to one endorsement of the book quoted on the jacket,
Lipman sets music "firmly in a social and intellectual context," but
he deals mighty little with issues such as this one . He sees the prob–
lem as internal to the art, and it would seem we have simply to
banish most music written since about 1910, getting composers to
make a fresh start. He finds this a time for "watching and waiting,"
which is like Harold Schonberg telling us we may expect the "Big
Man" to come along and rescue music from its desuetude. Both
critics seem to be advocating a kind of hiatus, during which com–
posers take a sabbatical, or during which performance of their music
is suspended, until they write the proper kind . But what context will
there be for anyone to function within? Even the savior who might
fulfill Mr. Lipman's requirements needs a field of operation out of
which to emerge.
ARTHUR BERGER
