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A report on the state of music today will have to begin with some recall of its state in other modern times.

     Back in 1914, on the verge of World War I, musical modernism was already mature and successful. The works of Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg and Stravinsky had thrown sharp profiles against the sky; and these were clearly not nineteenth-century profiles. Nor was the sky a nineteenth-century sky. The Wagnerian storms were over and the rainbows of Valhalla washed white. It was clear and ready for anything, with just enough windiness around to carry forward the fires of revolution.

     For the advanced composers of the time did appear in those days, both to the radical-minded younger musicians and to the conservative older ones, as leading a revolution. And the revolution they were leading, as most revolutions do, had provoked a war. If today the war about modern music is no longer a cause, that is because, like all wars between generations, it has been won through the mere survival of the younger side. We all take the twentieth century for natural, simply because most of the people now active either as creators or as consumers were born and brought up in it.

     After World War I it had already come about that the musical climate was one of successful, or achieved, revolution. The bases of a new musical expression and of a slightly fresh way of dealing with musical sound, had all been laid down by our great leaders. The next generation were merely sons of the revolution. And though innovation was still being admired, as a matter of modernistic principle, the main musical activity between the two World Wars was what Gertrude Stein, in her 1926 Oxford lecture, called ‘equilibration and distribution’. Distribution we shall be speaking more about later, because after World War II it becomes really massive.

     Contemporary music between the two World Wars did not, however, in spite of its faithfulness to a revolutionary past, obey any unified command. Modernism in one form or another was the order of the day; but its practice was sectarian and the members of different schools did not fraternize easily. Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, for instance, though both resident in Los Angeles during the late 1930S, never met, even in battle, and never felt the need, for all the world-wide leadership they both exercised, of anything resembling a summit conference. The Russian impresario Diaghilev and the Austrian Reinhardt did, it now appears, have a cartel agreement by which Reinhardt’s productions were not shown in western Europe and the Russian Ballet refrained from invading the central regions.

     On the verge of World War II, in 1939, let us say, there were about five separate kinds of contemporary music available, all of them reputable, all skilfully practised, and most of them with a history of at least two decades of public acceptance. Composers representing the five kinds could be viewed as occupying a fan-shaped enclosure rather like the French Chamber of Deputies, where those who favour change sit on the left and the defenders of privilege on the right.

     On music’s right, twenty years ago, sat the survivors of Late Romanticism. These included Richard Strauss, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Ernst von Dohnányi, all still writing music, and Jan Sibelius, still an impressive figure, though he had ceased to compose about 1926.

     Next to them on the left, though still to right of centre, sat the eclectical modernists, composers like Hans Pfitzner in Germany and certain young Americans of the time whose work was animated by some delight in dissonance and some brash sound, but of which the nineteenth-century allegiance was betrayed by its basic structure, all built of sequences and working toward climaxes.

     The central section, and by far the largest, was occupied by composers whom one may call either neoclassical writers or Impressionists, since they worked both veins. This large and powerful group still exists; and it still operates, as it did then, under the intellectual hegemony of Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud and Paul Hindemith. They occupied, and still occupy, virtually all the seats of power; and they distribute the patronage. For several decades now they have headed just about every conservatory in the world, every college music department, every musical magazine of distinction. They have conducted the symphony orchestras, run the publishing houses, written the musical criticism, distributed the prizes, the travelling fellowships, the commissions and the cash awards. In Europe they administer the radio too. In America they advise the foundations.

     The reason why our century’s neoclassic composers are the same men as the musical landscapists is that they do not essay to emulate history, like Brahms (who was called a neoclassic in his time), but rather to evoke it, as if history itself were a series of picturesque landscapes, like Scotland or Ceylon. Their relation to music’s past, even among our most academic types, is a product of modern historical awareness and the modern style-sense. They adapt to present-day service details from older times very much as our parents turned square pianos into writing desks or — as I once saw back in the 1920s — used a mediaeval chalice for an ash tray.

     A smallish branch of the neoclassical and Impressionist group is sometimes called, or used to be, neo-Romantic, though the term is embarrassing because of its earlier association with such heirs of real Romanticism as Sibelius and Rachmaninoff. I mention this group because I am one of its founding fathers, along with Henri Sauguet. We seem to have started it in Paris about 1926. The idea for it, like many of our ideas, probably came out of Erik Satie. Our parallel workers in painting (and our close companions) were Pavel Tchelitcheff, Christian Bérard, Eugene and Leonid Berman. What we had in common was a respect for the integrity of our own and of one another’s personal sentiments.

     Now most of the century’s earlier artists — Debussy and Ravel, for instance — had viewed with disfavour the use of poetry, music or painting to express personal sentiments. Even today Picasso, Stravinsky, Hindemith and T. S. Eliot are not likely to allow themselves any such indulgence. Nevertheless, a century before, personal sentiments had furnished some of poetry’s and of music’s best material — as in Schubert and Schumann and Chopin, for instance, or in Blake and Byron. It was our scandal, in an objective time, to have reopened the old Romantic vein and to have restored, in so far as our work was successful at all, private feelings to their former place among the legitimate themes of art.

     This curious move on our part, which many observers mistook for reactionary, actually brought us over to the very left-most position possible within the middle party of contemporary music. That was a position contiguous through its choice of subject-matter to that of the chromatic and atonal world, which occupied the terrain just to the left of our central grouping.

     The chief subject-matter of these last composers had long been abnormal psychology and their method of treatment something one might call emotional micro-analysis. Schoenberg’s cantata Pierrot Lunaire and Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck are characteristic and fine examples of chromatico-atonal music from our century’s first quarter. The one contact between their studied luridness and our spontaneous lyricism was the fact that both described interior rather than exterior realities. Our methods of composition and our climate of feeling were as different as Paris can be from Vienna. Nevertheless, we did together open up the hard flank of Impressionist and neoclassical objectivity and thus rendered possible, I think, the transfusions and the graftings that have made blood-brothers today out of all composers.

     My fifth and farthest-left grouping of pre-War days we might call the rhythmic research fellows. Henry Cowell and Edgard Varèse were its leaders. The movement was small but outspoken. Nowadays this group is quite large 2nd includes within its wide arms not only the percussion writers and the specialists of pure noise-composition but the tape-tamperers too, those who construct music directly on magnetic ribbon without the intervention of hand-played instruments. Also, their use of arithmetical structures, which are about the only structures available to nontonal music, has been picked up by the chromatic composers, especially by those accustomed to employing tone-rows in fixed numerical series.

     Today the fences between our five stylistic groupings are all broken down, and desegregation is general. The Late Romantics have all died. The eclectical Romantics, with no conservative support left them, have moved into the neoclassical and neo-Roman tic neighbourhoods. And these neighbourhoods are in constant flirtation with both the chromatic composers of the former middle-left and with the arithmetical constructors from music’s engineering or factory suburbs. The result is a melting pot, where everybody practises at least a little bit all the techniques and where everybody’s music begins to sound more and more alike.

     Such a consolidation seems on the whole desirable both for music and for its business. For its business it provides a standard product to meet the demands of massive international distribution. With thousands of symphony orchestras in the world, millions of radio listeners, millions of gramophone recordings sold, and every government exporting music to every other as a form of political propaganda, some standardization both of the product and of the consumer has been inevitable. From an artistic point of view the standardization has some virtue too. It may well be that our century’s styles and devices are coming to be amalgamated into a classical style, or universal idiom, that will serve the masters of our century’s last decades for the creation of master works.

     Such a consummation, I hope, is not far off; but I do not think it is complete just yet. Most of the music written since World War II has been, on the whole, over-chromatic tonally and over-elaborate rhythmically. As a result, it has tended toward obscurity, toward poverty of expression rather than toward wealth and variety. In a time of fears and conformities, of cold wars and urgent concealments, the composers of Europe and America who consider themselves leaders seem to have ambushed themselves against all possible interrogation, and behind a thick wall of complexity to be hopefully hiding their hearts from the common view.

     We all speak a common idiom nowadays, but one not perfected yet for full communication. It may be that the stabilization of our vocabulary will come through opera. Certainly the Western composers are making a massive assault on this ever-so-resistant fortress. The fortress is resistant because nineteenth-century opera, which is still our basic repertory, had got its stories and its music so admirably fitted together that they cannot now be torn apart. A nineteenth-century type of play just will not work with twentieth-century music, and a really twentieth-century play, il there is such a thing, seems to need less musical complexity than any opera house is accustomed to furnish to its patrons; or at least it requires a different kind of sensitivity from that for which the standard repertory-house routines have been designed.

     In general, most modern operas have too many notes in them; their music tends to crush both words and meaning. Nevertheless, the opera is the place where modern music will have to be made to work. Complexities and other games played for their own sake can be entertaining in the concert hall, even quite impressive. But in the theatre everything must serve. Today our century’s own proud and raucous musical idiom may be preparing itself to serve, and thus to conquer, the opera. But I do not know a composer living, not an old one or a young one, who has yet made more than just a tiny dent on the masonry of that moated monument.

     Our composers are a united front for action, and the distribution of their works is global business. But I wish they were better prepared for global distribution. Maybe in ten years they will be speaking more clearly, saying more things. Just now I cannot help feeling that they are being at once garrulous and secretive. Also that there is far too much music in the world.

     I do not feel this because I get tired of musical sound itself. Musical sounds are always a pleasure. It is unmusical sounds masquerading as musical ones that wear you down, and the commercializing of musical distribution has given us a great many of these as a cross to bear. It has also given such currency to our classics that even these the mind grows weary of. Because though musical sound is ever a delight, musical meaning, like any other meaning, grows stale from being repeated. Perhaps that is why so many of our contemporary composers feel safer hiding it.

     After all, most of the arts today, save possibly history and reporting, reflect a manneristic epoch. Music is merely the latest to assume the mask. When one remembers the high and hilarious hermetisms that both poetry and painting have enjoyed in our century, one need not be surprised that music, in its own slow time and for its own quite private reasons, should at last have got into the game.