Chapter VI

This piling up of Shaw on Huneker, these dips into Newman and Niecks, are beginning to be formidable, but one never knows what turn of the road may lead the traveller to his promised land and it is better to draw the map clearly even if there be a confusion of choices. And so, just here, I beg leave to make a tiny digression, to point out that the new music is not so terrible as all this explanation may have made it seem to be. Granville Bantock talks learnedly of “horizontal counterpoint” but his music is perfectly comprehensible. Schoenberg writes of “passing notes,” says there is no such thing as consonance and dissonance, and “I have not been able to discover any principles of harmony. Sincerity, self-expression, is all that the artist needs, and he should say only what he must say” but Mr. Huneker points out that he has founded an order out of his chaos, “that his madness is very methodical. For one thing he abuses the interval of the fourth and he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth. Vagabond harmonies, in which the remotest keys lovingly hold hands do not prevent the sensation of a central tonality somewhere--in the cellar, on the roof, in the gutter, up in the sky.” Percy Grainger says he dreams of “beatless” music without rhythm--at least academically speaking--but he certainly does not write it. F. Balilla Pratella writes pages condemning dance rhythms and still more pages elaborating a new theory for marking time (which, I admit, is absolutely incomprehensible to me) and publishes them as a preface to his _Musica Futurista_ (Bologna, 1912), a composition for orchestra, which is written, in spite of the theories, and the fantastic time signatures, in the most engaging dance rhythms. Nor does his disregard for fugue go so far as to make him unfriendly to scale; the whole-tone scale prevails in this work. His dislike for polyphony seems more sincere; there is a great deal of homophonous effect. Leo Ornstein has admitted to me that his “system” would be fully understood in a decade or two. As for Strawinsky ... how the public joyfully and rapturously takes to its heart his dissonances, and even asks for more!