Music
Blushing bores
Robin Holloway
Monotony', said Satie (and he should know), is mysterious and pro- found.' Examples spring to mind: the echo- ing spaces of plainsong and polyphony; the most emptied-out stretches of Wagner, Bruckner, Sibelius; Britten's Curlew River; the mesmeric pattern-making of the best minimalism. Though of course none of these are in fact monotonous. Some bal- ance deliberate flatness with areas of extreme dynamism, while others cunningly set up a motion, or a stillness, whose effect is self-sufficient. For all, more would truly be less.
Whereas tedium is a different thing. It so chanced that I have recently attended on three successive days musical events of high boredom-count. The first two concerts, otherwise enjoyable, each contained a duff work by a great composer. Both were con- certi. The fullness of Haydn's organ con- certo in C is easily excused; it is almost juvenilia, by a slow developer, written well before his first maturity in a genre that never became of compelling interest to him, and for an instrument in which he audibly took no delight. The dauntless soloist ploughed the stony acres till not an inch remained untamed, while the orches- tra sawed away in sequences of such regu- larity as to make us uneasy in our well-designed seats.
But at least the Haydn was modest. Tedi- um is less forgivable when the composer is straining his utmost to storm the heights and sound the depths with prosaic material that refuses to budge. Such discrepancies between intention and actuality do not arise before the romantics. Vivaldi, Tele- mann and other well-known bores are always sterling craftsmen; so, of course, are the great composers when they nod. Tchaikovslcy's second piano concerto sim- ply falls to pieces when you try to sit in it. His first, five years prior, had in spite of its initial failure rapidly become the prototype for every later attempt at the glamorous long-haired, animal-tamer piano concerto. It is certainly not one of his best works, but it is generous with characteristic invention and can still surprise and delight in a fresh performance.
The failure of its successor is rather more than that of an off-day. It is a know- ing attempt to repeat a winning formula. The slow movement alone escapes, partial- ly: solo violin and cello join the pianist to make an old-fashioned Palm Court trio playing melodies of appropriately faded daintiness. The outer movements become forgettable even while one tries to listen. I retain only the image of the flailing soloist at the endless labour of cowing the orches- tra into submission with empty bravura, ending both times in a hollow truce.
Both these bores blushed into retrospec- tive charm by comparison with the next afternoon's treat, a staged performance of a long-neglected serenata by Alessandro Scarlatti. His Dafni took place not in the dales of Arcady but in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The proceed- ings were musically accomplished, yet after only a few moments it was clear that tedi- urn on the grand scale was likely. And so it proved. Not even the handy colour-coding to assist the audience with the seven char- acters' ramifying amours could compensate for such musical nullity.
It seems an inescapable part of the dull- ness of dull music that it is as unconducive to fertile fantasising as to concentrated lis- tening. Inescapable is often the literal truth: one can't decently leave, and it would be impertinent to relay one's restless impatience to one's neighbours, who could well be loving every long-drawn minute. One can only look. The decoration in Trin- ity Library — classic authors in wooden busts; Byron complete, but unromantically clothed, in stone; George III, porphyriac in stained glass, receiving the shy approaches of Newton, while Bacon looks on and Fame blasts her trump — can help the wandering mind for a bit. An oblique sweep across the vast space of a crowded Albert Hall is always absorbing. And so the time passes, till a fleck of musical value besets the ear, or a long pause permits egress.
In the long run, however, more radical measures are needed. Music whose tedium Is unmitigated by a saving spark of artistic vitality should be frankly ditched. Or else there is Stravinskification. All three of these garrulous mediocrities would have
been perfect for the master's sickle and scissors (a Concerto in C, and sequels to Le baiser de la fee and Pukinella) — cutting down, cutting up, to be reassembled in witty montage instinct, behind the manifest naughtiness, with nascent new grammar. The master is gone, but the waste paper remains and kills, till brought to life again by perpetually renewed disrespect.
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