Books, Arts & Manners: Music’s Sixes & Sevens

NOW that Lady Hillary has taken to discoursing on the meaning of meaning, are critics empowered to write on the meaning of music? Composers have said us nay for many years, and I delight in two expressions of their disdain. The great musical ironist Erik Satie could address a critic: “Monsieur et cher ami: Vous n’êtes qu’un cul, mais un cul sans musique.” And Max Reger put it even more bluntly: “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.” Louis Armstrong, for whom musical expression was like breathing, was more tolerant. “There are only two ways to sum up music,” he said. “Either it’s good or it’s bad. If it’s good you don’t mess around with it. You enjoy it.”

You can sympathize with these three when critics hold forth on Les Six, as if Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and the others were all formed by the same cookie cutter. About all they had in common, other than a dislike of Wagnerian Teutonism and the Impressionism of Debussy, was geographic. (What link is there between the Swiss Protestant Honegger and the Provençal Jew Milhaud?) Honegger’s roots were much like those of the middle and later Stravinsky, though his rhythms were stronger and more regular, his counterpoint richer. The work for which he is best known is Le Roi David, an oratorio for voices and orchestra, heavily reliant on brass and percussion.

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Ralph de Toledano

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NOW that Lady Hillary has taken to discoursing on the meaning of meaning, are critics empowered to write on the meaning of music? Composers have said us nay for many years, and I delight in two expressions of their disdain. The great musical ironist Erik Satie could address a critic: “Monsieur et cher ami: Vous n’êtes qu’un cul, mais un cul sans musique.” And Max Reger put it even more bluntly: “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.” Louis Armstrong, for whom musical expression was like breathing, was more tolerant. “There are only two ways to sum up music,” he said. “Either it’s good or it’s bad. If it’s good you don’t mess around with it. You enjoy it.”

You can sympathize with these three when critics hold forth on Les Six, as if Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and the others were all formed by the same cookie cutter. About all they had in common, other than a dislike of Wagnerian Teutonism and the Impressionism of Debussy, was geographic. (What link is there between the Swiss Protestant Honegger and the Provençal Jew Milhaud?) Honegger’s roots were much like those of the middle and later Stravinsky, though his rhythms were stronger and more regular, his counterpoint richer. The work for which he is best known is Le Roi David, an oratorio for voices and orchestra, heavily reliant on brass and percussion.