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no longer have any idea of it. The reason is that they are always wanting to make music sweeter.61 |
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'Incoherent, shrill, chaotic . . . laborious trifling . . . full of unaccountable and often repulsive harmonies . . . disagreeable eccentricity . . . morbid desire for novelty, extravagance, disdain of rule . . . odious miaowing . . . does not belong to the art which I am in the habit of considering as music . . . violation of fundamental laws . . . ugly, in bad taste . . . stupid and hopelessly vulgar . . .'. All this was said of Beethoven by nineteenth-century critics, some of them writing long after his death.62 Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Debussy, Mahlerthese and many other great and original composers have suffered such assaults from the unadjusted. We are in no position to assert that Timotheus was a Beethoven. But we should beware of adopting a disparaging attitude towards him and the other leading composers of his time on the strength of Plato's and Aristoxenus' complaints. It is clear that these composers extended music's technical and expressive resources and freed it from many of the constraints of conventional forms. It is not altogether inappropriate to compare the transition from eighteenth-century Classicism to nine-teenth-century Romanticism. |
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Aristoxenus records with a mixture of distaste and satisfaction the case of a Theban musician called Telesias, who was brought up on the best 'classical' composers, including Pindar, Dionysius of Thebes, Lamprus, and Pratinas, and thoroughly well grounded in aulos-playing and other aspects of musical education. In middle age he became captivated by the elaborate theatrical music and, losing interest in the classics, learned the most complex and untraditional compositions of Philoxenus and Timotheus. He tried to compose in both the Pindaric and the Philoxenian style; but his sound early training precluded his being successful in the latter.63 |
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As Plato and Aristoxenus themselves indicate, this music was popular with the public and soon accepted as canonical.64 A medical philosopher of the mid-fourth century takes it as a fact that the greatest diversity in musical notes is the most agreeable, and that the |
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61 Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1145a, cf. b-d; Aristox. Harm. 1.23. |
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62 Excerpted from N. Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective, 42-52. |
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63 Aristox. fr. 76 ap. ps.-Plut. De mus. 1142bc. |
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64 According to Slonimsky, op. cit. 19, 'A fairly accurate time-table could be drawn for the assimilation of unfamiliar music by the public and the critics. It takes approximately twenty years to make an artistic curiosity out of a modernistic monstrosity; and another twenty to elevate it to a masterpiece.' |
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