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The Gramophone, September, 1923 A Musical Autobiography (continued) By Compton Mackenzie My dramatic interest was completely satisfied by Tannhiiuser, but I did not get any emotional uplift out of i t . Even to this day. with rare exceptions, I do not enjoy music emotionally; I think that I enjoy i t for the way i t occupies the waste ground of the mind. I should be inclined to say that for as many people as find church music emotionally satisfying there are at least as many others who can pay attention to prayer because their idle and vagrant thoughts are being occupied by the music. I shall return to this discussion later on when I come to speak of the use to which I have put music as an aid to l i terary composition. At the t ime of which I am writing, and for some years before and after, I was finding in Swinburne's poetry all I required emotionally. I had a pirated American edition, which contained in one volume nearly all the poet had written. Wherever I went that l ight blue volume went with me; and if anybody had suggested to me that I could gct from Chopin what I got from Swinburne I should have laughed. I wonder what is the emotional fodder of adolescence at the moment. There is certainly nothing in contemporary English verse that could feed emotionally any youth of sixteen or seventeen, and the young men of the vVar period were forced into a premature self-expression lik e hyacinths in glasses that flower feebly ever afterward, or they were like accumulators charged by the War, and, now that active service is over, are worn out. . Well, whatever may be the emotional catharsis of the modern young man, I wish him as much joy from the process as I had from Swinburne. I t was about this period that my first musical friends grew much excited over Tchaikovsky, and I well remember trying to discover the magic that was evidently distilled for th em from the Sixth Symphony (H.M.V. D.713-717). It seems incredible to me when I look back at myself in those days that there really was once a period in which with complete sincerity I could say that I p erceiv ed no melody anywhere in the Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky; I seem to be confessing that about thi s t ime I was unable to perceive that sugar was sweet. How well I remember, on a dripping grey morning in February, a genuine Tchaikovsky morning, going to see an Irish friend of mine who was studying to be a professional pianist, and sitting pati ently whire he played over and over again the opening whine of the Sixth Symphony. I can hear him now . " Do you mean to say you can't hear that i t's a melody?" he cried, using 'every moment a richer brogue. I shook my head. " It's an affectation," he cried, "to pretend you like the Waldst ein Sonata and say that you can't recognise the ,melody in that." And off h e went again, playing the phrase over and over with one hand in the treble. But i t was no affectation . I was being perfectly sincere in declaring that I could not perceive the melody_ That was in 1900; and I spent aU the Stimmel' of that year in the heart of France, where I read more than 200 Tauchnitz novels and l istened to the grasshoppers. But I never heard a note of music. When I went up to Oxford, I had the inestimable advantage of finding myself in a musical set; but out of perversity, or simply because I was still actually unable to enjoy music, I gained nothing from my association. I would not join the Oxford Musical Club, 'where I should have heard good chamber music once a week; I would not go to Balliol Sunday evening concerts; I would not take advantage of the visits of great artists to Oxford. All this t ime music was just a bore. I remember that one somewhat musical friend of mine was always asking another of my very musical friends to play him the Pomp and Circumstance March (H.M.V. D.179), and I remember the friend who was always being asked p1'otesting at being made the exponent of such a cheap piece of melody, and I remember wondering to myself how on earth he arrived at finding something in which I could perceive no melody at all so obvious as to be cheap; but my heart was hardened and I was content to go on disliking music and taking no trouble to like i t . I t is humiliating when I write these words to look back to that Oxford period and ponder on the wasted t ime and lost opportunities so far a ;; music was concerncd, because my perversity and s illy complacent ignorance can n ever really be made up for by any amount of concentration now. I t was the same with singing, which I could tolerate even less. patiently than instrumental music. I suppose that the moment was not ripe, and i t is idle to lament not having taken advantage of what did not exist. I t is only now, when I try to reconstruct my musical life, that I perceive in what. a desert I existed. The only reminiscence worth recording of this period was of meeting Donald Tovey at lunch during Eights week, and of leaving soon after lunch because he was playing Beethoven sonatas to an enraptured audience; of returning to tea to find him still there.
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The Gramophone, September, 1923 and of hearing with relief the proposal to go down and see the first division row at six o'clock, and then of finding that Donald Tovey was to come too. I can see him now crossing the High and conducting an imaginary orchestra as he walked along, and I can see disapproving undergraduates with their relatives and friends turning round to stare at him in the SI.lUl ight of a May afternoon. I can remember wondering why we should be plagued with a musical genius during Eights week and if i t would not be possible to stop his making such an exhibition of himself by conducting an imaginary orchestra and tooting to himself like a cracked French horn, and I recall my embadassment and dismay when the ghost!)r scherzo he. was conducting involved an unusual energy of movement and he nearly conducted a young woman's hat off her head as we passed along towards the barges. It is really lamentable that the whole of my musical life at the University should consist in retrospect of being bored by Pomp and Ci1'cumstance played on the piano, and of being bored by Donald Tovey's behaviour in public. I can remember picking up from a musical friend's mantelpiece a programme of the Oxford Musical Club and thanking God, with a shudder, that I was not like these musical people on reading that some trio or quartet of Beethoven would be the t i t-bit that week. Then I remember going up to Cambridge during the Long Vacation to play in a dialogue of Thomas Heywood, called W orke for Cutlers, which had been discovered in the l ibrary of Trinity Hall. The parts were Rapier, Sword and Dagger. I played Rapier, and carried a genuine rapier of Elizabethan t imes, a tremendous weapon to manage gracefully, for i t must have been more than 6ft. long. We performed the piece as a Pastoral in the Hall garden, and to help out the stilted old dialogue Mr. Doimetsch was there with his orchestra. I believe that I was genuinely enchanted by the music, which was all of the period, and I was certainly enchanted by the antique instruments like the viola d'amore and viola da gamba, and the lute. When I got back to Oxford the following term I announced to my friends that at last I had discovered what I really l iked in music; and I begin to wonder nowadays if some of my would-be extremely musical friends who affirm that they can only stand Bach are not really in the same development of musical taste that I was in when I was twenty, because so often when they are tackled one finds that they are not really musical, and that the pleasure they claim to be getting from Bach is only the pleasure of l i terary association, the same kind of pleasure that I got, and still get, from a pre-Raphaelite painting. Of course I am not referring to people who, having experienced all music, return at last to Bach; but I am always suspicious of perfect taste that has not been reached by leagues of bad taste. I do not believe that, unless one has at some t ime or another revelled in Macaulay's Lays or Longfellow'S Psalm of Life, one can possibly enjoy the best poetry, except as snobs may enj,oy the company of earls, or parvenus the best vintages of champagne. The way beauty reveals i tself to mankind is the way the sun comes in wintert ime, shedding for a brief moment a few pale rays, touching with indescribable magic the cold scene, and a moment afterward retiring behind a grey waste of clouds. Most of us have perceived in early youth the beauty of a line of poetry that is definitely one of the great beautiful lines in the l i terature of the world; but why that particular line should have been appreciated when others equally beautiful werEpassed over unheard by the imagination i t would puzzle more than a Freudian to discover. And so with music; most of us can look back to something in great music that moved us before we were really moved by all great music as a matter of course; my own example would be that lncarnatus from the Mozart Mass. The fatal thing that happens to so many people in the adventure of taste is the way they find that they suddenly like something which they remember was considered good some years before they liked i t . What can I take as an instance? Let us say Rubinstein's Melody in F. Perhaps at an early age they have heard Rubinstein's Melody in F on the violin or violoncello or piano and were bored to death by i t , whereas their parents or guardians hummed i t on the way home from the concert. Ten years later, in their turn, they find themselves enraptured by the iYeZody in F, and in a burst of self-congratulation they fancy that they have achieved something and reached a landmark in their intellectual progress, and from that moment they are sorry for anybody that cannot be enraptured by Rubinstein's lYelody in F. It is the same in l i terature and painting. For one's own pleasure I am sure that i t is a mistake to have exquisite taste in all the arts. For the rest of my life I intend to be quite impenitent about music and painting, and never to allow myself to get beyond works of art that still delight me, though I know them to be far removed from the first rank. I have reached a standard in judging poetry which is like the top of a mountain above the lcvel of perpetual snow in i ts discouraging and monotonous perfection. I pick up volumes by contemporary poets whom I have heard praised by people who ought to know better. I gather a handful of poems and carry them up to my mountain-top to comparc them with the snow at the summit. But the artificial snow I have gathered melts in my hand long before I reach the summit. Yet what a great deal of harmless pleasure might be. mine if I had worse taste and was not firmly convinced that great English verse died with Shelley. Even now, such power have day-

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The Gramophone, September, 1923

and of hearing with relief the proposal to go down and see the first division row at six o'clock, and then of finding that Donald Tovey was to come too. I can see him now crossing the High and conducting an imaginary orchestra as he walked along, and I can see disapproving undergraduates with their relatives and friends turning round to stare at him in the SI.lUl ight of a May afternoon. I can remember wondering why we should be plagued with a musical genius during Eights week and if i t would not be possible to stop his making such an exhibition of himself by conducting an imaginary orchestra and tooting to himself like a cracked French horn, and I recall my embadassment and dismay when the ghost!)r scherzo he. was conducting involved an unusual energy of movement and he nearly conducted a young woman's hat off her head as we passed along towards the barges. It is really lamentable that the whole of my musical life at the University should consist in retrospect of being bored by Pomp and Ci1'cumstance played on the piano, and of being bored by Donald Tovey's behaviour in public. I can remember picking up from a musical friend's mantelpiece a programme of the Oxford Musical Club and thanking God, with a shudder, that I was not like these musical people on reading that some trio or quartet of Beethoven would be the t i t-bit that week.

Then I remember going up to Cambridge during the Long Vacation to play in a dialogue of Thomas Heywood, called W orke for Cutlers, which had been discovered in the l ibrary of Trinity Hall. The parts were Rapier, Sword and Dagger. I played Rapier, and carried a genuine rapier of Elizabethan t imes, a tremendous weapon to manage gracefully, for i t must have been more than 6ft. long. We performed the piece as a Pastoral in the Hall garden, and to help out the stilted old dialogue Mr. Doimetsch was there with his orchestra. I believe that I was genuinely enchanted by the music, which was all of the period, and I was certainly enchanted by the antique instruments like the viola d'amore and viola da gamba, and the lute. When I got back to Oxford the following term I announced to my friends that at last I had discovered what I really l iked in music; and I begin to wonder nowadays if some of my would-be extremely musical friends who affirm that they can only stand Bach are not really in the same development of musical taste that I was in when I was twenty, because so often when they are tackled one finds that they are not really musical, and that the pleasure they claim to be getting from Bach is only the pleasure of l i terary association, the same kind of pleasure that I got, and still get, from a pre-Raphaelite painting. Of course I am not referring to people who, having experienced all music, return at last to Bach; but I am always suspicious of perfect taste that has not been reached by leagues of bad taste. I do not believe that, unless one has at some t ime or another revelled in Macaulay's Lays or Longfellow'S Psalm of Life, one can possibly enjoy the best poetry, except as snobs may enj,oy the company of earls, or parvenus the best vintages of champagne. The way beauty reveals i tself to mankind is the way the sun comes in wintert ime, shedding for a brief moment a few pale rays, touching with indescribable magic the cold scene, and a moment afterward retiring behind a grey waste of clouds. Most of us have perceived in early youth the beauty of a line of poetry that is definitely one of the great beautiful lines in the l i terature of the world; but why that particular line should have been appreciated when others equally beautiful werEpassed over unheard by the imagination i t would puzzle more than a Freudian to discover. And so with music; most of us can look back to something in great music that moved us before we were really moved by all great music as a matter of course; my own example would be that lncarnatus from the Mozart Mass.

The fatal thing that happens to so many people in the adventure of taste is the way they find that they suddenly like something which they remember was considered good some years before they liked i t . What can I take as an instance? Let us say Rubinstein's Melody in F. Perhaps at an early age they have heard Rubinstein's Melody in F on the violin or violoncello or piano and were bored to death by i t , whereas their parents or guardians hummed i t on the way home from the concert. Ten years later, in their turn, they find themselves enraptured by the iYeZody in F, and in a burst of self-congratulation they fancy that they have achieved something and reached a landmark in their intellectual progress, and from that moment they are sorry for anybody that cannot be enraptured by Rubinstein's lYelody in F. It is the same in l i terature and painting. For one's own pleasure I am sure that i t is a mistake to have exquisite taste in all the arts. For the rest of my life I intend to be quite impenitent about music and painting, and never to allow myself to get beyond works of art that still delight me, though I know them to be far removed from the first rank. I have reached a standard in judging poetry which is like the top of a mountain above the lcvel of perpetual snow in i ts discouraging and monotonous perfection. I pick up volumes by contemporary poets whom I have heard praised by people who ought to know better. I gather a handful of poems and carry them up to my mountain-top to comparc them with the snow at the summit. But the artificial snow I have gathered melts in my hand long before I reach the summit. Yet what a great deal of harmless pleasure might be. mine if I had worse taste and was not firmly convinced that great English verse died with Shelley. Even now, such power have day-

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