Britten on Music

I’m coming around to the conclusion that Benjamin Britten’s 1964 address on receiving the Aspen Award should be required reading of all young musicians, particularly composition students. Perhaps a test should be given the first day of their entrance into a conservatory. One passage in particular is worth a careful reading, and perhaps a yearly re-reading:

There are many dangers which hedge round the unfortunate composer: pressure groups which demand true proletarian music, snobs who demand the latest avant-garde tricks; critics who are already trying to document today for tomorrow, to be the first to find the correct pigeon-hole definition. These people are dangerous—not because they are necessarily of any importance in themselves, but because they may make the composer, above all the younger composer, self-conscious, and instead of writing his own music, music which springs naturally from his gift and personality, he may be frightened into writing pretentious nonsense or deliberate obscurity. He may find himself writing more and more for machines, in conditions dictated by machines, and not by humanity: or of course he may end by creating grandiose clap-trap when his real talent is for dance tunes or children’s piano pieces.

Britten’s words emerged from one of the darkest eras in Western music, that horrid mosh of fear, paranoia, and misplaced intellectualism that spread like a miasma over post-WWII Europe and America. His speech reassures me that voices of reason will eventually prevail over voices of nonsense. That it is the voice of a composer whose posthumous star has risen to a soaring peak amongst 20th-century composers—allowing that the century just past was a time of hillocks rather than true mountains—adds yet more comfort. Britten stood fast even amidst the sneers of snotty academics who thought his music wasn’t brittle enough or intellectual enough or dissonant enough or offputting enough, even amidst the wailing of sob sisters who wanted him to write comfy and familiar stuff just like good old Charlie Villiers Stanford. From time to time Britten must have lamented that he was born into such a bleak musical era. Posterity, on the other hand, may be thankful. Benjamin Britten was, after all, one of the few bright lights twinkling in the gloom.

In 1964 Britten had recently resurrected a dormant genre by composing the first compelling requiem mass in about a century. The War Requiem stands right up there with celebrated predecessors by Mozart, Cherubini, Brahms, and Verdi. Almost twenty years earlier he had revitalized not only English opera, but really the whole operatic genre, with Peter Grimes. But he wasn’t all big sweeping stuff. He wrote great kid’s music, dandy miniature theater pieces, and superb lieder. He wasn’t an academic ax-grinder; instead, he wrote as his heart and mind dictated. He was no native woodnotes-wild type; he knew his hawks from handsaws. In 1946 he took on those misguided nags who dissed him for being such a careful technician: “There is, unfortunately, a tendency in many quarters today to believe that brilliance of technique is a danger rather than a help. This is sheer nonsense. There has never been a composer worth his salt who has not had supreme technique.” (My italics.)

I think of Samuel Barber, writing fugue after fugue on the train between West Chester and Philadelphia, his technique being honed and sharpened by his masterful composition teacher, Rosario Scalero. That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen any more, with predictable results. We’re producing a generation of fundamentally unskilled composers. Oh, they know all about world music and rock and electronica and how to use Ableton Live. But they can’t write.

Some commentators have stated in stentorian terms that Britten was antagonistic to recorded music, based on one paragraph in the 1964 Aspen speech. A more careful reading reveals a considerably more nuanced opinion—as is only to be expected from such a nuanced and sophisticated mind. Here’s the passage in question:

One must face the fact today that the vast majority of musical performances take place as far away from the original as it is possible to imagine: I do not mean simply Falstaff being given in Tokyo, or the Mozart Requiem in Madras. I mean of course that such works can be audible in any corner of the globe, at any moment of the day or night, through a loudspeaker, without question of suitability or comprehensibility. Anyone, anywhere, at any time, can listen to the B minor Mass upon one condition only—that they possess a machine. No qualification is required of any sort—faith, virtue, education, experience, age. Music is now free for all. If I say the loudspeaker is the principal enemy of music, I don’t mean that I am not grateful to it as a means of education or study, or as an evoker of memories. But it is not part of true musical experience. Regarded as such it is simply a substitute, and dangerous because deluding. Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener’s part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy triange of composer, performer, and listener.

Benjamin Britten left us a comprehensive recorded legacy. We have him performing more or less his complete output, either as conductor or pianist, in immaculately engineered modern recordings, mostly from Decca with additional batches from both EMI and the BBC. Anyone who was resolutely antagonistic to recordings wouldn’t be likely to have blessed us with such an assortment of gramophone treasures. No. Britten was aghast about the careless or casual use of recordings, not recordings themselves. He knew perfectly well that even the best of them are substitutes, as he says. No argument there: I may be the happy owner of a superb record collection, but I don’t confuse my recordings with the real thing. I make music every day, all day, 24/7. My recordings are another facet of my musical life, but they are only one facet and not the whole jewel.

Speaking of which: recently the hard drive that houses my digital collection (ripped CDs and downloads) began to throw up symptoms of imminent drive failure—missing files, sluggish response, weirdness. It happens. I checked my mirror backup—a second drive that is an exact copy of the main drive—and opted to replace my ailing drive with a brand-new one, then copy over the contents of my mirror backup. That should have done it, but alas: the mirror backup was too much of a mirror; it was missing a lot of stuff that hadn’t made it off the damaged drive. Even the usually reliable Disk Warrior couldn’t fix things. I was able to get about 80% of my collection off the backup drive and on to the new one. But there is 20% that vanished, even though my iTunes library thinks it’s still there. This is no small collection: it weighed in at 2.3 terabytes. Right now reports about 2 terabytes, thus I lost 300 gigabytes of recorded music. Since I store my digital rips in Apple Lossless Format, which squeezes a 700MB compact disc down to about 350MB with no loss of audio data, that means I’ve lost the equivalent of about 850 CDs. A handy utility program has identified the missing material (by comparing my iTunes library file—undamaged in the melée—to the actual contents of the disc), and I’ll be replacing it bit by bit, as it were. I keep my CD originals safe and well organized, so it’s just a matter of re-ripping those CDs, time consuming but otherwise uneventful.

Not surprisingly, certain directories suffered heavier losses than others, and no directory was hit harder than my Benjamin Britten collection. About 2/3 of that went pffft along with the hard drive. But it’s all on CD, so it’s coming back. (Hell, I’d buy it all afresh if necessary.) But instead of just mindlessly ripping the discs, I’m taking my time and revisiting the music. Oh, what a joy: Britten Britten and more Britten. Fascinating music, varied and rich, sometimes prickly, sometimes warm, sometimes grand, sometimes overwhelming. Peter Grimes sings the Illuminations during Noye’s Fludde, as the two dead soldiers agree to Let us sleep now. Serendipity, maybe, but a grand opportunity for exploration.

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