For those who haven't read it, Music Ho!, subtitled tellingly A Study of Music in Decline, is an assessment of the composition scene as Lambert saw it in the early 1930s. Of course it reads as a dated book now in some respects, yet when Lambert, who died in the early Fifties, wrote an introduction to the 1948 reprint he noted that "the situation still seems to me precisely the same", and I can't help thinking that might still have been his assessment. I read it with yelps of surprise and delight at the pertinacity of the writing.
When Lambert refers to "pre-War" he means the 1914-18 war, and it comes as a shock to realise that in the 30s Debussy was still considered new, and the experiments of the nationalist and Russian schools were of recent memory. Whilst admiring Iberia, Lambert is sniffy about Debussy. "Debussy's real revolution in harmony consists far more in the way he uses chords he uses .... The difficulty many people experienced on first hearing (his) work was ... created far more by the lack of rhetorical and emotional reasoning ... (his music) is entirely lacking in the thrust and counterthrust methods of the German Romantics."
Lambert detected a problem with the nationalists. "To put it vulgarly, the whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder." Admirers of Bartok might disagree with this, but nevertheless it's a sentence with which Lambert skewers many lesser figures.
Music Ho! is full of such treasurable one-liners. What of the revolutionaries, of Schoenberg and Stravinsky? "Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives", the first sentence of the book reads. Ouch. "... it is the ear that is the final judge", Lambert writes of Schoenberg. "It is no use claiming formal unity for a work on the theoretical grounds of its contrapuntal construction when this construction cannot possibly be observed by the listener who has not been primed, or supplied by the composer with a crib". Well quite. "However much one may admire Schoenberg's powerful imagination and unique genius, it is difficult not to feel that world of sound and thought that he opens up - though apparently iconoclastic - is au fond as restricted as the academicism it has supplanted."
How to explain composers' increasing pre-occupation with the darker side of human nature? "Others may see in the disintegrating brutality of Elektra, Le Sacre du Printemps, and other works, a reflection of the brutality of the succeeding war years, similar to the moral laxity, failure to keep up appearances before the servants, and general disintegration of behaviour that invariably precedes revolutions."
But Lambert is not really having this. "Horror and neurasthenia are absent from pre-Impressionist music for the simple reason that composers lacked the technical means to give as much expression to this side of their nature as was accomplished by the poets and novelists. Horror and neurasthenia in literature can be expressed without resorting to extremes of technique. (Poe) can convince us, for example, that Roderick Usher's personal variations on Weber's last waltz were strange and morbid by merely telling us so. But a composer treating the same subject could only convince us by making the waltz actually sound strange and morbid..."
Not that society at large should be excluded from musical considerations. "It is essential that we should see music against its social background ... For every technical argument for or against a method of composing, there is at least one social argument, and the social argument is often the more far reaching and convincing". As for the intellectual climate of a period, "It was the most natural thing in the world for Liszt to take his young countesses on Lake Como and read them Tasso and Victor Hugo. If anyone still thinks this spirit exists let him visualize himself taking his young woman on the Serpentine and reading her T.S.Eliot."
I'm not sure I'm with Lambert here. If the Romantics didn't still speak to us, we wouldn't be listening to them any more. The kind of quasi-hysterical feelings that prompted the Symphonie Fantastique may be ludicrously out of date, but music is sufficiently abstract an art for the musical consequences of those feelings to be compelling the best part of two centuries later. And of course if it is still OK to listen to music centuries old, one has to wonder why it isn't alright to write new pieces in that style. It's always seemed to me that the argument against doing so was that it might be tedious for the composer rather than for the audience.
Lambert has some musical tastes which would now be regarded as odd. He doesn't just like Satie and Glinka, but thinks them important. The largely forgotten Anglo-Dutch composer Bernard van Dieren is highly rated. He has no time for Brahms, and is positively dismissive about the New World symphony. And of course his book was ridiculed amongst modernists for the title of its final chapter - Sibelius and the music of the future. At the time Lambert wrote Music Ho! Sibelius had just begun the long silence which saw him produce nothing for 25 years. How could Sibelius teach the future anything?
Lambert is very careful in his terms here. "No composer can surprise us now with sensational technical discoveries ... The glamour of the anarchist and the mystery of the sphinx have begun to pall, and we are faced with the unenviable task of making constructive effort and plain statement appear interesting ... There is nothing in music which has really lost its meaning, no device of rhythm, no harmonic combination which the composer of vision cannot reanimate". Amen to that. "I am not suggesting for a moment that the important composers of the future will imitate Sibelius's form, any more than they will imitate Van Dieren's harmony, but I am convinced that they will draw more inspiration from the solitary figures of present-day music than from the various petty movements which spring up every five years - and disappear as rapidly."
This is a very funny book which everyone interested in classical music should read once a decade. Lambert is a clever man who is not afraid to look at the big picture and who delights in the barbed one-liner. Here he is on Ravel: "There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this limit is obviously reached ... towards the end of La Valse and towards the beginning of Bolero)".
I wonder what he would have made of things now. "Elgar", he writes, "was the last serious composer to be in touch with the great public ... Sophisticated composers are either becoming more sophisticated, like Alban Berg, or they are deliberately turning their sophistication to popular account, like Kurt Weill ... In this process of splitting up, any music which does not belong specifically to either type will be ruthlessly disregarded. The middlebrow composer will disappear ..."
These were prophetic words; but Lambert does not consider what their long term consequences might be for the art we love. Not being granted the long term in which to consider his prophecy, he can hardly be blamed for that. Where most people don't listen to classical music, and where the maintenance of a professional symphony orchestra requires bums on seats and extensive state subsidy in a time of austerity, the continued courting of the sophisticated composer - the Kurt Weills have disappeared - looks increasingly like an indulgence which has cost classical music dear.
By coincidence, the cover of this morning's G2 splashes an article by Tom Service which is, in terms, a plea for people to get into contemporary music. When an art for has to plead for followers you know something has gone wrong.
