Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern ComposersRosenfeld, Paul
History
Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers
Rosenfeld, Paul
Composers; Music -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Music -- 20th century -- History and criticism
chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle.
Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery.
And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately
assumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling,
showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being. Something that had
long lain inert had been reborn at the contact in Western men. A part of
personality that had lain dead had of a sudden been suffused with blood
and warmth; light played over a hemisphere of the mind long dark. The
very hand that drew, the very mouth that matched words, the very body
that beat and curved and swayed in movement, were Western and Eastern at
the same time. It was no longer the Greek conception of form that
prevailed on the banks of the Seine, or wherever art was produced. Art
was become again, what the Orientals had always known it to be,
significant form. It was as though Persia had been born again in Henri
Matisse, for instance. A sense of design and color the like of which
had hitherto been manifest only in the vases and bloomy carpets of
Teheran dictated his exquisite patterns. Hokusai and Outamaro got in
Vincent Van Gogh a brother. The sultry atmosphere and animal richness of
Hindoo art reappeared in Gauguin's wood-cuts. One has but to go to any
really modern art, whether produced in Paris or in Munich or in New
York, to see again the subtle browns and silvers and vermilions, the
delicate sensuous touch, the infinitely various patterns, the forms that
carry with them the earth from Arabia to Japan.
As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists, Ezra Pound in
particular, were Chinese long before they discovered Cathay in the works
of Ernest Fennellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us; has
been on us since the Russian five began their careers and expressed
their own half-European, half-Mongol, natures. The stream has commenced
setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar
tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the
Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales
and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill
fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was
near.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account