<<  -- 5 --  Peter Dickinson    SEEING MUSIC WHOLE

Between Old Worlds and New (see below) is the latest anthology of Mellers' writings and it has been carefully selected by John Paynter, a colleague of Mellers' at the University of York for many years. The articles come from periodicals such as the Times Literary Supplement and the Musical Times and were written mostly in the last twenty years. Even routine book reviews strike sparks of enlightenment from Mellers and it is fascinating to compare his valuations of American composers at different stages in his long career -- first of all in Scrutiny, then in Music in a New Found Land and finally much more recently. In this area, he welcomes studies of Ruth Crawford, Paul Bowles, Virgil Thomson, Colin McPhee and Partch's collection of essays, Bitter Music. Partch's failure is rightly diagnosed as: 'What he asked for could never happen, in the conditions of life as it is; and he wasn't prepared to accommodate what is to what might be'.

Reviewing books by Allen Forte and Steven E Gilbert on Gershwin, Mellers still sees the need for a substantial book on the music -- there is one forthcoming from Howard Pollack, whose major study of Copland came out in 2000. Mellers makes alluring phrases to put down Samuel Barber -- 'dazzlingly handsome, even beautiful, with silver spoons hanging down from his mouth and prizes magnetically gravitating towards him' -- but it was unfair to call his last opera, Anthony and Cleopatra, 'a total disaster' since it was revised and revived. Mellers notes Sessions' failure to reach a public because chromatic serialism is no longer a 'gateway to truth' but he consistently gives Copland a high place alongside Ives.

Of the nineteenth century subjects, Mellers is on top form discussing Wagner, with the myths as grist to his mill, as well as Brahms and Berlioz. Satie is just a foonote to a Berlioz book-review and gets called 'a very minor master', which is surprising since it was Mellers himself who campaigned so successfully for Satie's recognition (before Rollo Myers' 1948 study) and Cage, Feldman and the minimalists have added to his significance, quite apart from the growth in demand for his music indicated by the current record catalogue. Reviewing his book on Haydn's quartets, Mellers calls Hans Keller a genius and, noting Philip Glass' interest in myths, wonders -- unsurprisingly -- why 'the formulae in which he musics them have to be so banal'. Keller would certainly have agreed with that.

The jazz-influenced works Mellers discusses include Lambert's Piano Sonata and Concerto for Piano and Nine Instruments, which he rates higher than Milhaud's La Creation du Monde, and Krenek's 1927 smash hit, Jonny spielt auf, which he dismisses in the 1974 Opera North revival at Leeds. Peter van der Merve's book, Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (1989), is understandably rated as a 'remarkable, perhaps great, book' but it has not had the influence Mellers expected. Sometimes his engagement with the subject of a book is so overwhelming that he gets disarmingly carried away and has to remind himself to refer to the author, like a critic reviewing the score rather than the performance. But Between Old Worlds and New, like his other books, is replete with vintage Mellers. His Concertino for Solo Violin and Orchestra called The Wellspring of Loves (1981) ends with 'Aphrodite the Postponer of Old Age'. We can be grateful that the goddess has been able to exert her influence on Mellers for so long and that his irrepressible enthusiasm never was extinguished by those carping critics who once had the nerve to write to Scrutiny.