Only readers—invoking the plural, where this blog is concerned, rather more in hope than expectation—of a certain age will get the reference in this post's title. It's because I am old that I'm moved to situate Burgess's 1983 collection simultaneously after (Shaffer's play was 1979) and before (Forman's 1984 movie) Amadeus. If you're likewise old, you'll remember the alliterrhoeaic movie poster:
It's a fun film, and it still stands up; not least because it takes for granted that music is more than idle aural decoration. The whole premise of the movie is that music, and the human passions it provokes from joy and transport to envy and rage, are literally matters of life and death. That it was such a huge hit had much to do with the sheer vitality of this vision.
Burgess's This Man And Music is neither mad nor murderous. Instead it meanders, is something of a misfire, and doesn't come alive in Amadean or even ABBAdean mode. Music was clearly deeply important to Burgess, but that importance is declared rather than demonstrated here. Eleven separate pieces wander around Burgess's own compositions, various questions concerning music's effect and connections with the written word.
First we get a short memoir called 'Biographia Musicalis' covering ground that will be familiar to readers of The Pianoplayers and Little Wilson and Big God. The second chapter 'A Matter of Time and Space' is an abortive discussion that does little more than assert the importance of time and the unimportance of space to music. 3's 'Let's Write a Symphony' (I rather mourn the lack of an exclamation point at the end, there) is less inclusive than that chapter title implies. Not so much a primer, more an account of Burgess's own writing of his three symphonies, pitched at a level of sufficient self-indulgence to dissuade rather than encourage others to follow suit: 'that descent in tritonal fourths is, I foresee, in danger of being employed as a mannerism' [57] and so on.
Chapters 4 and 5 ('Music and Meaning' and 'Meaning Means Language') struck me as the most interesting, and I would have liked to see the discussion they include expanded. Instead the volume takes a sharp turn left into literature at the midway point: 6 'Under the Bam' looks at musical phrases quoted or gestured towards in famous works of literature, providing the staves and notes to enable us, should we want it, to sing The Waste Land's 'the river sweats oil and tar' or 'the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter'. Chapter 7 ('Nothing is so Beautiful as Sprung') is about Gerard Manley Hopkins's experiments in prosody and 8 ('Re Joyce') does the same thing for James Joyce, whose sentences, we're told, embody a kind of 'oral athleticism' [135]. Chapter 9 'Contrary Tugs' sees Burgess reinvent the Barthean wheel by in effect distinguishing between the texte lisible and the texte scriptible. And the last two chapters are Burgess in full-on Explainderby mode, stepping his reader carefully through all the admirable aspects of (in 10, 'Oedpius Wrecks') MF and (in 11, 'Bonaparte in E flat') Napoleon Symphony.
Burgess wasn't really capable of writing boringly, and this book does hold the reader's attention. But much of it feels first-draft-y and underpowered. The discussion of prosody in Hopkins connects poorly with the early brief discussion of musical tempi and rhythms, and reads like the work of someone who really needed to read Derek Attridge on poetic metre—which, since Attridge's seminal The Rhythms of English Poetry was out by 1982, he could have done. Most crushingly, Burgess's opening claim that 'To Hopkins we owe a new system of prosody that speaks not Greek but English' [117] betrays a basic misunderstanding both of the differences between Greek quantitative prosody and the traditions of English stressed verse, and also of the ways in which Hopkins deliberately rewired the logic of stressed and unstressed prosodic patternings. Greek verse counts not stresses but patterns of long and short vowels; English verse counts beats (Robert Graves described the former as the pull of the oar, the latter as the strike of a blacksmith's hammer on the anvil) and though Hopkins worked and thought deeply about the difference his own sprung poetry is stressed, not quantitative.
I don't want to get bogged down. Several of these chapters are livelier than this, much is thought-provoking, and Burgess is tactfully modest about his intent. He calls This Man and Music 'an unambitious book', one that 'nibbles' at questions of musical intelligibility. Nonetheless the impression I took away from reading the whole thing was how thin Burgess's account of music here is. There's plenty of specificity, from technical terminology to AB's own rather scrappy handwritten musical notation:
But there's very little breadth to the account. Burgess's focus is almost entirely on: individual notes and chords, a small group of conventional tempi, on melody and symphonic themes. There's a little bit on duration and pitch, but historical detail aside this is all formal in a very narrow sense: music as pattern and structure. AB does not for instance discuss timbre, variety of sounds, the sonic richness that the electrification of music (from guitars to synthesisers and samplers) made possible. He doesn't discuss rhythm as anything other than Classical counterpoint, which means the drum-led explosion of rhythmic possibilities that jazz, pop and rock generated is a dark continent to him. This, of course, is part and parcel of his stubborn refusal to see any merit in the revolution effected by popular music from 1950 through to the period of writing. For a man so fascinated by music simply not to see that he has lived through a major, global reinvention of what music means is, shall we say, puzzling. Two things in particular: one, the new disciplines of popular drumming brought a kinetic force and variety, and a somatic intensity, to music, intensities of which counterpoint was simply incapable. And, two, at the proggier and synthier end of things, new sonic flavours and textures, and wholly new instrumentation, were able to dilate into aural landscapes or soundscapes in which music becomes worldbuilding of extraordinary variety and complexity: Kraftwerk, Yes, Jarre (to pick three at random) all doing it differently. For myself I'd say there's a third major innovation that pop and rock brought to music, to do with a deliberate primitivism (something like the stylised barbarism of Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon) and its attendant energies and disruptions; but I can see that this is precisely what Burgess objects to about pop styles: my feature, his bug.
Burgess makes a few semi-respectful nods in the direction of jazz, and has a kind word to say about Irving Berlin. That's as much of a compromise with the post-classical world as he's willing to make. This hardly surprises us, of course. To discuss the melodic talents of certain classical composers, concede that Berlin had his moments, whilst pointedly refusing to admit that the great melodic genius of his generation was Paul McCartney is almost endearing. The worry, I suppose, is that Burgess thereby reveals not a principled individuality of taste that refuses to join the vulgar herd, but on the contrary a timid coast-hugging conventionality of taste. We can hardly disagree that Mozart and Beethoven were great composers; but we might want to venture a little further afield, geographically and musically, from the great symphonies and sonatas.
The third thing that seemed to me missing here (beyond a broader sense of the sonic possibilities of music, and an openness to the revolution of pop) is any discussion of class. This in a sense is the oddest omission, precisely because the 'Biographia Musicalis' chapter is so eloquent on what it means to grow up working class and musical. Yet nowhere in the book is there any sense of the point that Pierre Bourdieu made in such detail in La Distinction (1979), that cultural capital and status determines the formulation of aesthetic taste. Classical music is aligned with upper class social being, pop with lower. The closest Burgess comes to acknowledging this is his intriguing but undeveloped point that music 'means' society:
When we speak of the 'meaning' of a Haydn symphony, we say no more than that it is an auditory symbol of stability. The music means the society of which it is an artistic product. [75-6]This, though, looks suspiciously like a straightforwardly reactionary point: Haydn simply translates the splendid social harmony and order of the Sun King's realm into notes on a stave, as (though Burgess doesn't specifically say this) modern rock and roll in its raucous anarchy indexes the decadence and savagery of contemporary life. Elsewhere he praises music as the 'abstract symbol of social stability' [74]. To which we're entitled to respond: bollocks to that.
There are a couple of other stabs at defining how or what music 'means'. 'Behind all music of an instrumental nature,' Burgess asserts, 'lies the dance, and behind the symphony lies the dance suite' [74]. This looks like AB is going to steer his discussion towards the somatic; but he doesn't. His baseline definition ('music is tension and resolution over and over again' 76) is so broad it would apply to almost any form of art, and anyway he disowns it almost as soon as he introduces it. 'The reader should now be heartily tired,' he airily says, 'of this glib talk of tension and resolution. It leads us only to the prenatal experience of the maternal heartbeat' [83]. Anything but that! Elsewhere he throws up his hands. That Beethoven's Fifth is significant he can hardly deny, but he asks and answers: 'what is this significance? We do not know' [78]. Hmm.
Two particular questions occupy him. One is something to which he returns in Mozart and the Wolf Gang: can music be a moral good, or is it a merely a kind of amoral, aesthetic finesse? The openness of music disquiets him:
The commandant of an extermination camp could spend the day supervising the consignment of Jews to the ovens, and then go home and weep tears of pure joy at the divine revelations of sonata or symphony—his flaxen chubby daughter at the keyboard, or a fine record-player which was the due of his rank. On a summer evening in London in 1942, on that identical evening in Berlin, there were performances, both deeply moving and loudly applauded, of the Choral Symphony. [82]The conclusion Burgess draws from this juxtaposition is that 'if fascists and democrats found, as they did, the same matter for exaltation, then music cannot be about morality' [83]. But surely it can be about emotion, and emotion has much more to do with politics, especially fascistic politics, than morality. Burgess wouldn't agree. 'I am prepared,' he gracious concedes, 'to find listeners making an emotional or even a pictoral response to the music, but I do not think this is more than subjective fancy' [80]. Subjective fancy as opposed to, what? Objective fact? Burgess adds: 'I believe that the majority of composers are too preoccupied with the building of structures to concern themselves with "emotion".' The scare-quotes around 'emotion', there, are a splendidly chilly touch.
I'm entitled to disagree, of course, as are you, if you're so minded. It seems to me that emotion is much more directly entailed by music. I could be wrong.
Burgess's second question, which he considers at greater length, is whether music can 'mean' without the help of extra-musical props and hints. He thinks, on balance, not: it is the titles Beethoven gave to his 6th symphony that makes it 'pastoral', not the music. This is a respectable musicological position, although at root it depends upon critics lighting with cries of joy, as if for the first time, on the oldest of old-chestnut insights that 'meaning' is arbitrarily assigned and not integrally generated. That a minor key is coded 'sad' and a major key 'happy' is indeed arbitrary. Had we been raised to think of minor keys as happy and major sad, the system would work precisely as well. Likewise, the association of the green traffic light with 'go' and the red with 'stop' is arbitrary. The point here is that every communally agreed signification is arbitrary in this sense, so isolating music doesn't get us very far. More, Burgess in effect wants to have his cake and eat it too. He mocks Swinburne for his tin ear with the following anecdote:
Perhaps the limit of unmusicality was reached by the most musical of poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne was once treated to a performance of 'Three Blind Mice' on the piano and told that it was a song of sixteenth-century Rome. He professed to hear in it 'the cruel beauty of the Borgias'. [97]This, Burgess thinks, demonstrates that Swinburne was 'ignorant about the frontier between music and poetry', but it's hard to see how it does so. The most we can say about Swinburne is that he was ignorant of this particular tune: rather surprising but not impossible. More than that, and by Burgess's own logic, there's nothing intrinsically absurd in hearing in this particular melody cruelty and beauty. It's not a very sophisticated tune, true; but then neither is the tune at the heart of Beethoven's Ninth, and Burgess has nothing but praise for that. Simplicity can be cruel, just as it can be joyful.
I don't doubt that Burgess's encounters with music were on a personal level full of joy, but we get little sense of that from this collection. But perhaps its torpor reflects ambivalence not about music as such so much as about the viability of music criticism. John Deathridge, surveying a representative sample of music criticism later in the decade, detected beneath the 'bluster' a 'tacit admission that, in the end, there is no such thing as music criticism in the strictest sense. This expresses, as Adorno noted, a kind of "ultimate doubt" which turned a life devoted to music criticism into that of an intellectual gambler.' Burgess may or may not really have believed that music is all about 'the building of structures' and only adventitiously about emotion. For myself, I'll stick to the idea that there's bound to be a mismatch between a fundamentally rational, intellectual exercise like 'criticism' and a fundamentally affective, emotional one like music. A touch more Madness! and Murder! added to the Man! and his exclamatory Music! might have leavened this lump. Da capo.
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