I have myself specially studied Polytonality; for just as scholastic training in harmony, counterpoint and fugue is necessary to every musician, I believe that according to the new methods of technique, a full technical training should follow. It seems to me quite reasonable that there should be added to the different treatises in the study of music, some chapters about Polytonality and Atonality; about the different ways of superimposing several tonalities; about writing new chords, their inversions, progressions, etc.

It would be useful to show examples not only of polytonal harmony or atonal, but also of polytonal and atonal counterpoint.

In a parallel line with this evolution we witness another one, quite as important, at Vienna.

It consists in atonal music, and Arnold Schönberg is its most redoubtable champion.

As far as form is concerned, the principal characteristics of this school are a return to an extreme brevity.

After Beethoven (and even with him), the symphony had begun to assume gigantic proportions. There were always long and useless developments, which made the work conventional and annoying. It took the extreme tact and delicacy of Mendelssohn to realize the marvelous proportions of Mozart's and Haydn's symphonies. But with Schumann, Brahms, and finally with Mahler, the symphony became endless and was developed without any reason whatsoever.

In his first works, Schönberg had not yet freed himself from these principles; that is to say in the period of his two string quartets and of the "Gurrelieder."

Then suddenly, he gave us short and extremely sober works, made en raccourci. He passes over Beethoven, and revives Mozart's form, still simplified. These works, though short, are very substantial in musical material. They are piano pieces, only two or three lines each, quite different from each other— and then the Pierrot Lunaire, which I am happy to have revealed to the Parisian public last year. Here, everything is reduced to its minimum: twenty-one short poems. The voice half sings and

half declaims; the orchestra is reduced to five instruments. With such small means, Schönberg has obtained an almost incredible variety. Each piece has its proper sonority, and the variety of expression is also prodigious. It shifts from the languid romanticism of moonlight to the weird grimaces of a ghost, from a kind of morbid sentimentality to the depths of tragedy or to a hideous clamor: and all this with five instruments! We are far from the heavy Wagnerian orchestra!

As for the harmonic line, one of the consequences of Wagner's chromaticism has been the thirst for perfect freedom of tonality. Schönberg has realized this wonder, which had become unavoidable. His melodic line only uses the chromatic scale, and his harmony is generally written with unanalyzable chords. If sometimes we find a chord related to diatonic harmony, we may be sure that it is never resolved in the scholastic sense.

Around Schönberg are grouped several young musicians who study with him. Their starting point is atonal music. These composers are:

Egon Wellesz, author of several works for chamber music and orchestra, who seeks to rejoin Schubert's tradition.

Alban Berg, author of a string quartet and charming pieces for clarinet.

Anton Webern, whose music is reduced to its absolute essentials by its brevity. It has the emotional importance of the throb of a heart, of a pulsation, of a sigh. His small pieces for quartet and those for violin and piano are small dramas concentrated into a few bars of a form so short that nothing remains except an invertebrate but expressive and vigorous design.

It would be useful for the acquirement of the atonal technique, as well as for the polytonal one, to study all their resources in a methodical way. How many subjects in school works are to be dealt with, from the successions of dominant seventh chords (the starting point of chromaticism), up to the handling of all the twelve keys together!

Polytonality (the logical consequence of diatonism), and Atonality (the logical consequence of chromaticism) are not new systems opposed to the fundamental principles of music, as it has too often been said. On the contrary, they are merely

their logical and inevitable result. They only make richer the different planes—that is, material sounds, harmony and melody —which are the means of expressing our thought, and require a very thorough technique.

What gives life to a work, what makes it true, will never be its characteristics, polytonal or atonal, but, rather, its essential melody. Thence springs its real power, because it comes straight from the heart of the musician. There is no training so complete or so thorough that it can suffice without that melodic source. It is the primary element, the authentic organic one, that comes from the pure sentiment itself and that is conducive to rhythmical and harmonic design. Without melody, all composing will fall, or end in vain rhetoric, quite conventional and empty. It is the entire secret of music, which I found out one day when I was studying at the Conservatoire with my master André Gedalge. I was showing him some vast symphonic plan or other, and he said to me:

"Just write for me eight measures that can be played without any accompaniment.”

Melody is thus our aim and greatest ambition.

It alone will allow us to work by our imagination and yet keep close to the tradition which we feel to be ours.

DARIUS MILHAUD.

THE BOOK OF THE MONTH

STARK YOUNG1

BY LAWRENCE GILMAN

IN the course of one of those amusing public arguments about the Function of the Critic which occasionally break out in English newspapers, a shrewd and anonymous disputant remarked quite simply the other day, as if he were stating the merest platitude, that so far as critics are any good at all, they are artists themselves. It is delightful to imagine the probable effect of that staggering declaration upon the kind of mind that believes it to be the critic's supreme use and virtue to act as a kind of æsthetic vermin-killer, or to hold examinations of poets, painters, composers, dramatists, and actors that come up before him, and give them just the right number of carefully graded marks, with a prize to the one who has done most "to advance the cause of wholesome American literature or plays, or operas" [what, you wonder, would a "wholesome" opera be like?], or to "promote good citizenship." He must, they tell us, be "just," and "fair," and "judicial," and "balanced." He must be "constructive," say these enviably assured creatures. Where is the critic who has not been tearfully besought by some poet or composer or playwright to tell him how to rewrite his poem or recompose his symphony or rebuild his play? And how often has the disheartened critic taken the trouble to reply that one need not know how to prepare a ragout in order to be able to say that the dish is a failure. How many times must it be said that the critic has no more concern with the artist than the diner-out has with the cook. Another shrewd Englishman observed that the critic―an artist and nothing else, if any one is to take him seriously-differs from other artists only in that he often takes as his subject some preëxisting work or works of art, 1 The Flower in Drama: by Stark Young. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

instead of taking a landscape or a battle or a distinguished profiteer. The fine critic attempts and achieves the original expression of some personal delight, wonder, or imaginative stir occasioned in him by the work of art before him, so that the most famous and valuable of criticisms, like Pater's descant upon the Mona Lisa, are really independent works of art as valuable as their subjects, and would retain their value long after those subjects had disappeared.

One need only bear in mind this simple truth about the critic and his true place on the cosmic map to understand why it is that he and the artist (the "creative" artist, as he fatuously distinguishes himself) are opponents whose differences can never be composed. They are opponents because they are rivals. They stand in no complemental relationship to each other. To view the critic as either the "interpreter," the sublimated pressagent, of the artist, or as his judge or assessor, is to misunderstand his true status. Fine criticism has the same use for the artist that the queen-bee has for the male who will fertilize her. The artist, like the male bee, is a necessary instrument; but he remains an instrument, and nothing more. Once upon a time a distinguished British composer, Sir Edward Elgar, wrote a piece of music for small orchestra called Dream Children, suggested by the essay of Lamb. The music died years ago; a feeble thing, it passed out of the concert repertory almost as soon as it was introduced there. But it remained long enough to call forth from a sensitive and gifted critic, the late Vernon Blackburn, a few paragraphs of prose which have survived by many years the music that suggested them-prose of such beauty and subtlety and tenderness that, reading it, you will perhaps wonder which, in this instance, was the artist and which the accessory. Sir Edward Elgar is, to be sure, somewhat less than a great composer. But that is not the case with Richard Wagner. In the finale of Götterdämmerung, Wagner achieved tremendous music -music of insurpassable splendor and nobility. Yet John Runciman, in a few sentences that he wrote of this scene in Götterdämmerung, created something surprisingly memorable, surprisingly detached and independent,-a good deal less than tremendous, to be sure, yet steeped in the essential beauty and feeling of the music: