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The Well-Tempered Listener (1940)

by Deems Taylor

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This is a collection of essays on classical music by Deems Taylor published in 1940 and based on his radio talks given as part of broadcasts of concerts of the New York Philharmonic. Taylor was a minor American composer and might be best remembered for his role in the Disney film Fantasia, for which he helped choose the selections and provided the commentary. One of his musical works, Through the Looking-Glass, is one of the selections on a CD I own--quite charming; one of his works of musical criticism was assigned in my required college musical appreciation course, and I was slightly acquainted with his daughter, Joan Kennedy Taylor. So when I found this book of his in a used book store--I grabbed it. I found it a surprisingly engrossing read and would recommend it to anyone interested in classical music.

It’s based on radio talks broadcast from 1937 to 1939, as well as reviews and articles he wrote in that period for magazines and newspapers. In the book he separates the essays into three sections, The Makers (composers); The Givers (performers) and The Hearers (music consumers). A lot of what he discusses is timeless and applies as well to any creative art or criticism. And a lot of what he discusses is still relevant because so much of the standard repertory remains unchanged from 1939. We’re all still listening to Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Strauss, Sibelius, Ravel, Stravinsky. Taylor has some criticism of modern music that still resonates with me:

What I find most wrong with... [modern music] is that so much of it resolves itself, in the last analysis, down to a series of experiments in making novel and hitherto unheard-of combination of notes--in other words, experiments in harmony. So many contemporary composers seem bent on proving that there is no chord so discordant and ugly at first hearing that it cannot eventually be heard without discomfort... [But even once] I’ve developed an immunity to the poisonous harmonic ingredients of their music, and can listen to it really critically, I find that their themes, and the handling of them, are neither attractive nor significant. They are busy harmonizing tunes that don’t exist.

He doesn’t accuse composers by name, but I imagine he’s referring to twelve-tone and other avant-garde composers of the time that I--and the general public--still don’t like to listen to today. Despite that opinion, he has a lot of optimism that time will winnow the wheat from the chaff--that if older pieces look better to us, it’s because the bad and the mediocre has dropped away. And looking at the current New York Philharmonic season online, I think he might be right. This season, besides the old standard pieces of Taylor’s time, there will be pieces created from 1940 to 2000 by: Khachaturian, Britten, Prokofiev, Bartok, Martinu, Shostakovich, Bernstein, Ligeti, Corigliano, Piazzolla, Sondheim, Vivier and Penderecki. I’d heard of all these composers except for Vivier, and looking up the pieces online for snatches of the compositions on YouTube they sound lovely. There’s also a surprising number of pieces written in the 21st Century or that will be having their New York or World Premiere--and where I could find examples of those composers and pieces it sounded like noise to me--discordant and cacophonous and just plain ugly. So I’d say we can see that winnowing process at work in looking over the decades. The more things change...

Some things are very much of his time but not in a bad way. It’s amusing to hear Taylor complain about music snobs and alarmists who condemned and wished to censor jazz and swing and radio in the way generations later people would speak of rock and rap and television. And his times were somber ones, where composers such as Shostakovitch were being condemned by the Soviets for “bourgeoisie” practices in music and Jewish musicians were being forced out of Germany. And that also makes its mark in his essays--as does some interesting social analysis as to why you rarely saw women in orchestras in his day--but why he felt that would be changing.

And he talks about the technicalities of music in ways that makes it easy for a layman to understand. I can’t read music and don’t play a musical instrument but he never lost me. I thought some of his insights and observations fascinating--as in his discussion of the evolution of music in the essay “Twilight of the Gods” where he discusses how young music is as an art. Or his discussion of composing in “What Makes It Tick?” His is a warm and humane voice and I’m so glad to have read his book. He says at one point that a good music critic “serves as a contemporary historian, a chronicler of the musical life of his times,” and points to the music criticism of George Bernard Shaw as “fascinating reading, not only as criticism, but also as history.” The same could be said of Deems Taylor. ( )
  LisaMaria_C | Sep 20, 2013 |
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Like its predecessor, Of Men and Music, this book is based on a series of radio talks.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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