Malcolm Gillies

Bartók:Concerto for orchestra-—Understanding Bartók’s world by Benjamin Suchoff

Benjamin Suchoff was for thirty years associated with the Be1a Bartok Archives (later, the New York Bartok Archive). From 1968 until 1982 he was its head and also successor-trustee of the Bartok estate. During those years he brought out a long series of primary-source publications, mainly Bartok’s ethnomusicological writings and his essays. Since 1982 he has remained highly active as a Bartdk scholar and has in the last two years produced two books: a mainly ethnomusicological sequel to Bdla Bartok Essays, published by University of Nebraska Press, and this volume on Concerto for Orchestra. Suchoffis still working on one even more important book: the third, final, never-published volume of Bartdk’s study of Slovak folk music.

The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott

Sarah Collins’ study of the life, influences and aesthetics of Cyril Scott (1879–1970) is a valuable illumination of a quieter corner of early twentieth-century cultural life. Heralded in his youth as the emerging ‘English Debussy’, Cyril Scott did not live up to that prediction. He was too much the fin-de-siècle dilettante. His interests and passions were too far-flung— including achievements in poetry, philosophy, the occult and medicine, as well as music—and his life insufficiently disciplined to be able to achieve substantial fame in any one of these areas. It is, then, to the credit of The Boydell Press that it has published Collins’ study of an interesting, sometimes controversial, but ultimately minor figure, who nonetheless grappled with so many of the aesthetic currents of his times; and, as Collins’ book ultimately shows, integrated them in ways not previously exposed. Central to that integration was his faith in ‘unintentionality’ (p. 224). That integration did not, however, lead to a revised recognition of his own talents or heightened impact upon the artistic world. Over a very long lifetime Scott moved from an early expressionist-influenced belief in the artist-autocrat to an occult-influenced belief in the artist-prophet. Yet how much the vicissitudes of his life’s track influenced his aesthetic view, or vice versa, is a recurring feature of debate in Collins’ analysis. Writing of Scott’s final quarter-century, Collins observes ‘an arid, resigned pessimism born of the futility of composing works that were never performed’ (p. 212), but the track towards that ingrained pessimism can be traced well back into the decades between the World Wars, if not sometimes to the years leading up to World War I. After conducting her long review of ‘Theory and Practice’ (Chapter 7), across four periods in Scott’s life, Collins can justifiably observe that ‘the increasingly dogmatic nature of Scott’s aesthetic theorising—coalescing as it did into a theory of musical affect—coincided with the decreasing public interest in his musical output’ (p. 218). So much so that in 1949, when a series of works were performed in celebration of Scott’s seventieth birthday, the critic Hugh Ottway would only see them as further evidence that ‘justified Scott’s continued obscurity’ (p. 170). In final summary, then, Scott was a thorough Romantic, who proved unwilling, if not also incapable, of adapting to an increasingly modernizing world. He died a relic of a long-gone age, and perhaps also a long-gone aesthetic. It is ironic, then, that one of his better known books was The Philosophy of Modernism, in its Connection with Music, published in 19171 when musical modernism’s defining tenets were still in formative flux. The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott is unsurprisingly written in two parts: the life, and the aesthetic thinking. It is prefaced by a brilliantly contextualizing Introduction and concludes with a meaty Epilogue, which itself reconsiders context. In fact, you could say that this

Grainger's London years: A performing history history

Abstract I would have enjoyed playing the piano if I could have done it with even a reasonable amount of skill and accuracy. If I could have played with the facility of any of my advanced pupils … I would have loved to play the Schumann Concerto, the G major Beethoven Concerto, the two Chopin Concertos, the Beethoven ‘Emperor’ Concerto [and] two of the Rachmaninoff Concertos … In my early years as a grown-up pianist I used to get worn out during my public appearances and feared I could not keep going to the end. Especially when playing concertos with orchestra I felt feeble and inadequate … I feel disgraced by my feebleness as a pianist (my poor fingerwork, my unreliable memory) and as a conductor (by that feeling of helplessness when I stand before a choir or orchestra).

BartÓk’S last works: A theory of tonality and modality

Abstract Bartok’s ‘Harvard Lectures’, first published in 1976, provide the basis for a theory of the composer’s tonal and modal usage, which is particularly applicable to his final works. Supported by evidence from Bartok’s last folk music writings the theory defines four means of tonal or modal identification, all relying on the principle of notational consistency. Related questions of modulation and tonal hierarchy are also explored, thus making the theory sufficiently comprehensive for an analytical implementation.