The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Musical Chronicle (October 1923)
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
WERE the queen of music a light divinity, like as not Professor Sam Eliot, Jr of Smith would have been hearing her, the last past months, play all sorts of nice little things to him upon her harp. Being not one of the looser, but of the graver Olympians, it is probable that she has merely been leaning over him from out a window in heaven and addressing hallelujahs and salves, gaudias and pax vobiscums from the pipes of a concert-organ; fluting rapturously upon him many a brilliant morning, and encircling his front many a sunset hour with tender-breathéd thanks. Some marvellous expression of her gratitude, assuredly, she has been making him. Few of late have been kindlier than he to her congregation upon the earth, or more deserving of her smiles. Not himself of the musical confession, he has nevertheless most admirably supported her cause. It seems he is a member of that race which is falling more rapidly than leaves do in November, or Nordics in the minds of neo-Hegelians: the race of American college professors who have not yet permitted the environing elements to annihilate intellectual curiosity and courage in them. In the course of the last year this young man persuaded the class about to be graduated from Smith to give Andreyev's The Black Maskers as its commencement play; persuaded the faculty to sanction the heterodox choice; and, most inspiredly of all, procured the right to invite a certain unknown young composer to supply the incidental music so richly invoked by the dramatist. In this fashion, he built well; placed Polyhymnia in his debt. For he made himself the immediate producing cause of one of the most important events in the life of music in America. He made himself the midwife to an event which commences a new time in it.
We have proof that, at length, for the first time since the colonization of the Atlantic seaboard, an whole creative musicianship has appeared among the Americans. The audiences which assisted at the three performances of The Black Maskers in Northampton in June heard an incidental music poorly performed, muffled by the two circumstances that it was sounded from behind the stage, and by a scratch body of instrumentalists; and nevertheless thrilling and winged. Only those of the auditors quite shut in sensibility could have failed to perceive, through the muffling matter, the living stuff of tones. Music was there; there was an intention which transpired, even off the instruments of amateurs. The nine numbers supplied by the composer brought perfectly to Andreyev's drama the extension through music required by him. They are a re-creation, in a sister medium, of the play itself; flowing from a vision of it so profound and exact that it seems the composer must have stood while composing close to the point at which the dramatist stood when he made the dialogue. From these pieces, we receive a joy and satisfaction not incomparable to that which we receive from the score of Pelleas, from the Psalms of Bloch, the Möricke-songs of Wolf, or from any other musical composition in which a composer has actually created toward a poet: stood upon his own shoe-leather, and enormously enriched with his proper life-blood a literary expression. They have indeed the wild sinister pulse of Andreyev's dolorous fantasy, the sardonic and anguished cries, the flow of inky depressive current. Their tones utter, too, the chaos, the sorrow, the baffled frenzy of the mind which can no longer harmonize its visions, its many cruel, irreconcilable truths and lies disrupted in doubt. The music has the indefinite, vague outline of bitter, endless revery, of Hamlet-like melancholia streaming densely silently through rocky wastes and mocking perspectives underneath a sky eternally charged with murk. Lorenzo calls his musicians to play; and what sounds from their pieces gibbers and cavorts and shrieks like humiliating, destructive thoughts that will not down. A wedding-procession is organized; and wedding music is played fraught with the atrocious cries and furious irony consequent to a suddenly shattered dream, a suddenly yawning abysmal vision. More than the words, the music of Lorenzo's song curses life and confesses Satan. Mousic comes full of chill metaphysical brooding; deathly beautiful with the wind from out the inhuman spaces of the universe; stark and black with the sense of crucifixion. And last, while the flames of death beat back the storm of black maskers, the orchestra chants and exults and is transfigured with the cleansing, releasing resolving deed.
A psychic maturity, freshness of spirit, living culture, and technical control have opened into the realm of music in America. The music to The Black Maskers is no happy hit such as many slight talents make once in their lives; accidents liable as not never to repeat themselves again. The author is an artist. His workmanship declares him marvellously in control of his resources, capable of producing hard form which reveals itself the larger the more it is heard. Broken as it sounds, elusive and mysterious as it is in outline, full of abrupt brutal resolutions and strange new sounds and sudden suspensions and blinding blurs, his work has a fine clarity and solidity of form. There is not a consonance in the work; the ideas are subtle and delicate; nevertheless, we do not go lost in this free, ultramodern style.
A living flow informs the structure. The clangorous and ironic passages subside naturally into the weeping, dolorous, soft ones. Nor has the music form in the American manner: at the expense of robustness and vibrancy. There is great strength in the movements; powerfully pulsing rhythms; long melodic lines that flow and continue and extend in beauty; no padding, no waste. The orchestral dress, too, is masterly. There were twenty-nine or thirty instruments playing; the score calls for no more; yet musicians in the audience found themselves deceived as to the number and character of the components of the band. One, an expert, went behind the stage looking for bass-clarinets and contrabassoons; and found merely clarinets and fagots: the brilliant handling of the lower registers of these common instruments had caused the mistake. Indeed, perhaps only one element which might have been present in this art was wanting. That, was the absolute individuality of style. Not that there was any plagiarism or even derivative material in the score. Except for some moments, mostly in the final fire-music, when vague resemblances to Moussorgsky and to Bloch appear, the music is never reminiscent. It merely wants that final sharpness of contour which the musics written by composers in the fulness of their maturity beget. But taking into consideration the youth of the composer, we see that it could not possibly have put in appearance at this early time. It is thoroughly normal, even by the laws of genius, that it should have absented itself.
Roger Huntington Sessions, the composer of this beautiful, moving work, is indeed still in his twenty-seventh year. He was born at the close of 1896 in Hadley, Massachusetts, the residence of his family during nearly two centuries. Whether or not there were musicians among his ancestors is not known. There were clergymen, however; his maternal grandfather was Episcopal Bishop of western New York. Sessions matriculated at Harvard at the age of fourteen; was editor for a while of the Harvard Musical Magazine. After graduation, he went to the Yale Music School to study under Horatio Parker. He remained three years in New Haven; then received the appointment of instructorship in the history and theory of music at Smith College. While at Smith, he found time to come to New York and study under Ernest Bloch. When the Cleveland Conservatory was organized around Bloch, two and a half years ago, Sessions accepted an engagement as instructor in theory and orchestration, and-has been associated with the institution since. A number of compositions preceded The Black Maskers; among them a symphony. But the Andreyev music constitutes an Opus 1.
The hour which strikes in it leaves us still a little stunned. Only a brief while since, we had been wondering whether the arrival of a musician with enough of chaos in him to make a world were truly possible in America; wishing indeed for the tone such an apparition would give to life, and nevertheless scarcely daring to expect to witness it in our own day. Signs of an efflorescence in the musical life were not wanting. Many young earnests of future performance had been made; and some were more than promises, merely: respectable and heartening performances. Nevertheless, the ripened, sovereign inner force was not yet present. Itself is such a miracle that one could not predict its arrival. And yet, that golden gift is among us to-day. About it, the musical life reconstitutes itself; gets a new gravity and solidness. It comes, as it must inevitably have come, as the voice of the living young people in a compromised and shoddy world. No Indian or negro, or bastard Scottish tunes. Absolutely, no red white and blue. Rather, the grey on grey of Russia. That, is more American. The music speaks an hundred ironic, pensive, conflicting moods. And we feel strangely at home; strangely rich and potent.—Whether Roger Sessions' gift is entirely for the theatre, we do not as yet know. The two best of the numbers, the turbulent chaos of Lorenzo's thought in Scene III, the prelude to Act II, symphonic as they are, were inspired directly by the vision of the play. But that fact is not necessarily significant. He may find himself even more richly in the absolute forms. In any case, it does not much matter. Sessions goes to a great career, whether he goes to the opera, or the ballet, or the symphony, or to all three. It is we who are to be congratulated. He himself is good luck.