574
PARTISAN REVIEW
(The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible
illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of "lux–
ury," the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when
the work asks for as little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is
delightfully, divinely great, when we feel the surface like the thick
ice of the skater's pond, bear without cracking the strongest pres–
sure we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognise, but
never surely to call it a luxury.)
JUST WHAT THE NATURE of Proletarian music should be-not only the
worker songs but also the concert music for the masses-was a con–
tentious matter in the early thirties. One of the leading spokesmen for
the proposed genre was ironically one of our most far-out composers,
the experimentalist Henry Cowell, who had acquired an international
reputation in the twenties (one might almost say "notoriety") for his
employment of the fist and forearm on the keyboard (which produced
what was called "tone cluster") and, at other times, fingers on the
strings. (Later his student John Cage must have gotten the idea of the
prepared piano from this.)
It
was not too surprising that a modernist
like Cowell should become involved in the Proletarian cause since his
music relied heavily in its choice of content on the vernacular, namely,
his Irish heritage of reels and jigs on the one hand, the styles of Eastern
music that he explored in his ethnic studies on the other. The dissonance
of his tone clusters could upset serious listeners who were traditional–
ists, but others could find it fun-a kind of circus stunt. His music was
not considered forbidding in the way that the music of the "austere"
Copland was. Dissonance was by no means the only thing that alienated
people from modern music.
In the early debates, often highly agitated ones, that took place at the
leftist arts groups-the John Reed Club and the Rebel Arts Group for
the arts in general, and, for music, the Pierre Degeyter Club (named
after the composer of
Internationale}-Cowell,
obviously drawing on
his own experience of putting dissonant tone clusters under folk tunes,
advocated dissonant accompaniments for the worker songs. The words,
he argued, dealt optimistically with the future when increased freedom
and happiness would be the worker's reward, and they should be
couched in sounds of the future. (The leftist jury of composers that
awarded a prize to Copland's picketline song for May Day
1934
obvi–
ously was also thinking in more avant-garde musical terms than the sit–
uation warranted.)
