The Swish of the Bow On the Strings

A Few Pertinent Remarks About the Lost Art of Enjoying Chamber Music

DEEMS TAYLOR

IF you are anybody at all in musical circles, in fact, if you arc just anybody at all, you have of course heard The English Singers. This group of six vocalists is finishing an American tour whose success for once deserves the adjective, "sensational." They have made twenty appearances around New York alone, and after every one the air has been thick with lay and professional murmurs of "remarkable", "divine", "swell", "delicacy", "nuance", "transparent beauty", "perfection of ensemble", and "revival of the lost art of madrigal singing".

Even so, I have managed to think up a brand new reason for being enthusiastic about The English Singers, and for speculating upon the significance of their work. To me, what gives their concerts their especial and peculiar charm is the extent to which they have managed to debunk music, to strip concert-giving of the ritual that makes the acquirement of modern musical culture such a dreary business. The English Singers do almost none of the things that are supposed to induce a proper spirit of reverence for the art of bel canto. They do not file solemnly out upon the platform with the general air of being members of the College of Cardinals about to elect a new Pope; they do not stand in a row, like a firing squad; they do not hold their music waist-high, in the genteel pretence that they do not need it; and they have no leader to give studies in plastic self-expression while the singing is going on.

Not at all. They emerge, six people who are on the point of having a good time and who are astonished and delighted to find so many of their friends assembled to share it with them. They sit cozily around a table, their music laid before them, while their chief, Mr. Cuthbert Kelly, says a few apologetically informative words about the music, or reads aloud the words of a song. Then he, too, seats himself, gives an almost imperceptible signal with a lifted forefinger, and they're off. Incidentally, once they arc off, they sing like a more or less celestial choir; but they could sing a good deal worse and still be a success. For they have restored at least one branch of chamber music to the realm of mundane enjoyment.

TO realize what a lost art that is, one has only to consider the conditions under which most classic chamber music was written and performed. It is, as its name implies, "room music", and was no more intended to be sung or played in public halls than the warming-pans of our ancestors were intended to be exhibited in art museums. The madrigals that I he English Singers interpret so beautifully were written at the behest of certain English gentlemen, for their private pleasure, to be sung by the host and his assembled guests after dinner—a sort of Elizabethan equivalent of bridge. When you hear the huge string section of the Philharmonic Orchestra thundering through a concerto grosso by Johann Sebastian Bach, try to remember that Bach wrote it for the friends and private orchestra of a Saxon Elector, the passages for the solo instruments being played by the professionals, with all the amateur fiddlers joining in the tuttis; the audience, if any, being composed principally of the Elector and his family.

The modern chamber-music concert, like the modern song or instrumental recital, is a wholly unnatural form of musical entertainment, with origins economic rather than aesthetic. In the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries nearly every duke or count of any importance, particularly in Germany and Austria, kept a private orchestra and a private composer or two, to say nothing of a staff of vocal and instrumental soloists. Unfortunately, the dukes and counts have almost disappeared, and their social successors incline to ballerinas and race-horses rather than musicians. Consequently the latter were finally forced to discover that it was easier to make a thousand people pay two dollars apiece to hear them perform than to make one person pay two thousand dollars. Hence the modern recital and chamber music concert, which, however estimable as democratic compromises, arc aesthetically monstrous and physically uncomfortable. In the case of opera and orchestral concerts, the large auditorium and the remote performers arc not inappropriate, for the large scale of these musical forms, and their almost complete impersonality, arc part of their impressiveness. But chamber music and solo music arc a different matter. To hear a string quartette as it should be heard, one should be near enough, as Cecil Forsyth puts it, "to hear the swish of the bow on the strings." And if you can be near enough to a singer or instrumentalist to establish some sort of personal contact while he is making music, your pleasure is exactly doubled. In the course of serving a four-year sentence as a New York music critic I must have heard nearly half a thousand recitals. Three of them I remember with particular pleasure, and none of them was public. The first was a studio party at which Jascha Heifetz played for twelve people at five o'clock in the morning. The second was another party, at which Arthur Rubcnstcin and Paul Kochanski played such violin and piano music as it pleased them to play, for as long as they chose to play it—which was hours. The third was an unforgettable evening when John McCormack sang through two volumes of Hugo Wolf, with Sergei Rachmaninoff to play his accompaniments—and Ernest Newman to turn the pages.

THE sheer discomfort of the modern recital is something to daunt any but the most intrepid music lovers. To sit in an unplcasantlv decorated, vilely ventilated auditorium, on a straight-backed chair that was designed with no reference to the human frame, holding one's overcoat in one's lap, hoping that one's hat is not hopelessly lost under the seat, wedged in between anonymous and faintly hostile neighbors, friendless, comfortless, tobacco-less— this is a fearful price to pay for a Haydn quartet.

Some day a genius among musical managers will present the ideal chamber music recital. He will hold it in a room not more than forty feet square. The chairs will be low, roomy, and overstuffed, and not less than two feet apart. The floor will be strewn with rugs, the walls will be hung with pictures, and the light will come from the sides and not from overhead. The players will be the London String Quartet, and their program will consist of Warwick-William's arrangement of The Flowers of the Forest, the Mozart C-major quartet (the one with the introduction that the critics object to so violently), and the quartet of Claude Debussy. Every hearer, upon arriving, will have his coat, hat, rubbers, brief-case and other baggage politely taken away from him and checked—free—and will be introduced to the other guests. Upon reaching his chair he will find beside it a small table, upon which will be the following articles: I ash tray; I package of cigarettes; two cigars; I decanter, fitted; I siphon, ditto; I bowl of ice; I tall glass.

The tickets would have to be, I imagine, about fifty dollars apiece; and I for one, am going to begin saving up for a pair tomorrow.