Music of the Century
tA History of Musical Thought. By Donald N. Ferguson. Second edition. (Routledge and Kegan Paul. 25s.)
Mn. MELLERS has collected fourteen essays published in various journals in the last few years and made a most interesting book. Five of the essays deal with French, three with Central European and the remainder with English "subjects. Satie, Roussel and Koechlin have been very little written about in this country, and these essays are an excellent introduction to three very different aspects of the French musical genius. That on Roussel is the most valuable for the ordinary concer4qer, who occasionally hears some of Roussers music and may well be stimulated but puzzled. Roussel himself, as Mr. Metiers points out, never expected his music to become generally popular, but it is by no means so unapproachable as that of many other composers, and even this short study should help to make it more widely understood and appreciated. The quotations from Koechlin's music whet an appetite which is at present impossible to satisfy, as the composer has published only a small proportion of his work and that is difficult to obtain. The two essays on the later works of Debussy and Faure respectively examine material which should by now be familiar—we have had a quarter of a century to work in—but is still comparatively (and disgracefully) unknown in this country.
Of the three Central Europeans Mahler and Kodaly have received considerable attention in this country recently ; but Egon Wellesz is known „almost exclusively for his musical scholarship, and Mr. ,Mellers' essay on his compositions iabvirtually an introduction to a new composer. In the third group the last essay, Towards a Musical Academy, is the most interesting, Utopian perhaps but full of sound ideas and suggestions and marked by a breadth of vision and sympathy which is also the keynote of Mr. Mellers' studies of individual composers. If not many executant musicians and fewer still among writers on musical subjects can hope to satisfy the requirements of Mr. Mellers' ideal academy, it is after all the chief property of an ideal to be unattainably high.
The second edition of Professor Donald Ferguson's History of !Musical Thought differs from the first (already reviewed in these pages) chiefly in its more extended treatment of the twentieth century. It is, of course, difficultioa avoid seeing the development of even so international an art as music from the standpoint of one's -own country. But I think no English reader need feel abnormally chauvinistic if he reads Professor Ferguson's account of modern English music with some dismay. Sir Arnold Bax, we are told, " assumed by common consent—at -least for a considerabe time—a rather distinctive leadership." Elgar's symphonies are described as "somewhat after the manner of Brahms." Hoist is given six lines :(three on The Planets), Vaughan Williams about a dozen, Walton ("a sturdily dissonant symphony ") nine or ten, half of which are con- cerned with Facade. Strangest of all, in a book published in 1948,
the name of Benjamin Britten does not 'appear at all. Instead, Eugene Goossens is given the same space as Vaughan Williams, while Edward MacDowell has almost a page and Professor Ferguson judges that Russia has been musically the most outstanding country in the years since 1920. If this fantastic perspective prevails in the section dealing with British music that we know well, we may question Professor Ferguson's competence to speak of the music of other countries which we, inevitably, know less.
MARTIN COOPER.
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