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Bottoms up

Andrew Thomson is stimulated by two books devoted to a great Anglo-Catalan composer

Best known for his books on the late Sir Michael Tippett, Meirion Bowen now turns his attention to a subject who has certainly received much less adulation, yet may well be at least equally worthy – Roberto Gerhard. In the self-effacing role of editor and part-translator, Bowen has produced two contrasting but complementary publications: a short study by Gerhard’s pupil and disciple Joaquim Homs, and a useful collection of the composer’s own writings. The first of these, Robert Gerhard and his music, makes an excellent brief introduction, concise but not at all dry, charting Gerhard’s nomadic existence in Barcelona, Vienna, Berlin, and finally Cambridge, whose rigorous intellectual climate provided an obvious stimulus. Homs, trained as an engineer before turning to composition, brings an admirable precision of mind to both the biographical and musical detail; moreover, his own memories, unobtrusively presented, add a welcome personal touch. There are also three appendices, containing Gerhard’s notes and sketches, the reminiscences of three American composers, and above all, a long letter to Arnold Schoenberg.

This request made in October 1923 to study with the radical Austrian composer is a most valuable document, being Gerhard’s youthful testament, a veritable cri de coeur. He complains of his hermetic isolation in Spain, the extreme inadequacy of his musical education under that inspired amateur Felipe Pedrell, and the desperate attempt to catch up on everything at once: Bach, Beethoven, Tristan, Pierrot Lunaire, Sacre du printemps... The result is a remarkably mature and perceptive diagnosis of his situation at that particular point in history.

It is not so very much this continual striving and retracing of steps, this assembling and dismantling of the elements of technique which torments and discourages me, but much more an increasingly deeply-felt dislike of the individualist-anarchic spirit of this whole way of working, and the disunity of what should be so unified, the complete lack of tradition in such an autodidactic education. [...] For some time, I thought of going to Paris. The city attracts me very much, but the impressionist, decorative technique which I could learn with Koechlin is no longer what would fully satisfy me. I can no longer be tempted to try and discover my identity sous l’influence conjugée de Stravinsky et de Ravel.

Although Schoenberg was to fulfil all his hopes of achieving true classical disciplines and intellectual foundations, Gerhard’s Spanish sense of realism and Francophile clarity also made him aware of his revered master’s limitations and absurdities. To a private notebook he confided his view of Schoenberg’s neoclassical Cello Concerto as ‘a ham-fisted, thematically, tonally and formally erratic and confused farrago. This is not the work of an artist, it’s the work of a pedant, a crushing bore’. (Casals, the dedicatee, infinitely preferred DF Tovey’s gigantic concerto.)

Though fearless and independent in his critical judgements, Gerhard is not a particularly distinctive writer. Indeed, much of his highly technical Selected writings is dauntingly academic in manner and at times too condensed to be readily understood. (How very different to the wide cultural mishmash and Jungian flights of Tippett’s engaging book Moving into Aquarius.) Yet one admires his complete artistic integrity and severely disciplined intellect, with its judicious employment of philosophical ideas. Interestingly, for all his initiation into the cultural ferment of 1920s Berlin, this quintessential cosmopolite relies chiefly on French and Anglo-Saxon thinkers like Bergson, Valéry, William James and the Cambridge philosopher of science AN Whitehead. Above all, one of his great merits is his phenomenologial approach to complex sonic structures, how they are actually present to consciousness, registering in the different minds of composer, player or listener. In one of the best essays, ‘Sound observed’ (1965), he speculates illuminatingly:

It’s common knowledge, too, that a composer may be consistently successful in imagining sound, and yet far less dependable in analysing sound when he actually hears it. [...] A dull-witted orchestral player may well have a sharper ear than the finest composer. This may seem odd. [...] It looks as if an overdevelopment of mental audition in the composer could sometimes result in an imbalance between his outer and his inner ear.

Likewise, the articles in ‘Schoenberg, 12-note music and serialism’ are of exceptional interest. As he told Gerhard subsequently, such were Schoenberg’s doubts and hesitations in venturing into the new world of atonality – paralleled by Freud’s courageous explorations of the unconscious mind – that in composing the Three piano pieces op.11 he took fright at his own spontaneous thought and was tempted to tone down some of the more unusual sound-combinations. But as Gerhard observes, ‘it is only too plain that without some degree of “exorbitance” there would be no evolution at all’. In ‘Tonality in twelve-tone music’ (1952), he continues in a vein which reflects his keen interest in modern scientific ideas:

The whole ‘atonal’ episode might, therefore, be regarded as a tremendous adventure providing fresh randomness, on a perhaps unprecedented scale, so that a new system of order could grow out of it. It is only two clear, on the other hand, how oppressive the ‘weight of too much liberty’ can be. Where anything is possible at any moment, nothing can ever happen of necessity.

Thus the 12-note series is seen as providing an exhilarating quality of resistance to tone-material ‘softened by atonality’. Yet even in this ‘well-policed state’ a certain element of randomness and irrationality remains vitally necessary within the system. Indeed, far from being dogmatic, Gerhard adheres to the Wittgensteinian notion that ‘To argue about the intrinsic sense of the rules of chess, for example, would be evidently meaningless; the point of the rules lies in their being observed in the game and in their making sense in the observance’. It’s surely no coincidence that Schoenberg himself was an enthusiastic chess player.

Also included are some essays on Gerhard’s own compositions, much the most vivid of which discuss the various stage works, notably the ballet Don Quixote and the opera The Duenna. Ever pragmatic, he is fully alive to the essentially physical, extra-musical nature of ballet, in which human interest and the spectator’s involvement in the drama are paramount. Some like myself may regard these works as the most successful and enjoyable of his oeuvre, and regret his subsequent development into the increasing abstraction, intensive serialism and textural fragmentation of the four symphonies. But such an active exploratory mind could hardly refrain from engaging with the avant-garde trends of the 1950s and 60s, particularly electronic music and the total serialism of Boulez and Stockhausen. So in ‘Functions of the series in twelve-note composition’ (1960), in which he expounds his own extended methods of interacting pitch and time structures, Gerhard takes issue with Stockhausen’s chromatic time-scale, on the empirical grounds that ‘whereas the ear is fantastically nimble in the domain of pitch, it must be admitted that it is unbelievably primitive and undeveloped in apprehending time’.

Like Alexander Goehr’s Finding the key (see MT February 1998) this is a serious and responsible book, and any younger readers with their very different preoccupations may well ‘feel the air from another planet’. It certainly offers a moral challenge from a previous age to the players of the games which pass for so much contemporary music. There are some quaint things, at least by today’s arguably debased standards, such as his fond appeal to a kind of Leavisite clerisy of ‘the educated and the semi-educated middle-class man and woman (mostly in a lower income-bracket than the mass-entertained working class)’. But there’s encouragement for everyone in his robust dictum, worthy of Dr Johnson:

The good and bad are mixed, as always, in unequal proportions; but to be despondent because life will produce monstrosities as well as healthy strains would seem a far more serious symptom of mental sickness than the many abnormalities we deplore.

That, Sir, shows a bottom of good sense.

Andrew Thomson is the author of monographs on Widor and d’Indy.