Beethoven's Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions...

Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic dilemmas and resolutions during the composer’s lifetime. By Robin Wallace. Pp. viii + 184. (Cambridge University Press.) 1986. £22.50.

Part of the object of this book is to refute the view that Beethoven was not well received by critics during his lifetime, and part of it is to survey the aesthetic philosophy of those critics, in comparison with those of today, and the degree and kind of understanding they had of Beethoven's music. In both these aims it is successful and serves a useful purpose. However, the writings of music critics past or present are usually far from being either elevating or enlightening, and their wrestling with both music and concepts beyond their understanding makes very dull reading. The author himself shares in the general confusion of thought, but he does bring out some pertinent points and, otherwise, takes a fairly impartial and non-partisan stand.

The "expressive", i.e. associative, view of music of the eighteenth century is contrasted with the "abstract" or "absolute" view of the nineteenth, with the emphasis on "formal analysis". Robin Wallace finds that the critics contemporary with Beethoven "all combine abstract, idealist views of Beethoven's works with sincere attempts to anchor these views in the everyday world of sense perception" and so bridge the gap between the two centuries. The former are supposed to derive from "'the German idealists', from Kant through Schopenhauer, who ultimately saw music as the key to the transcendental world of absolute ideas". While it is doubtful if this is what is meant nowadays by the word "abstract" as applied to music, it does not seem to be intended with any sort of conscious logic by the Romantic music critics either. E. T. A. Hoffmann is cited as referring to music as "a wonderful, infinite spirit kingdom", but emotions, such as awe, fear, pain and longing, are all that he seems to find there. The Romantic belief in "the soulfulness of music" amounts, in the critics quoted (Wendt, Hoffmann, Kanne, Berlioz), to seeing it as emotional and nothing else. This is contrasted with the "absolutist standpoint championed by modern writers"—which, presumably, sees music as not even emotional but altogether meaningless. In between, we have the wretched reductionist view, which sees monumental works of art as "portraying the psychological struggles" of their authors.
A very interesting passage is cited from the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling: "The form of art in which the unity of existence is made directly into potency, into symbol, is music". "Schelling's view", writes Robin Wallace, "was essentially Platonic: the forms of music are the forms of the world itself; they spring from the rhythm and harmony of the visible universe". This is the Pythagorean view, not "German idealist", and is a very long way from the vague fumblings of the music critics in question. We are referred to Mattheson, a hundred years earlier, and to his view "that there was a 'secret affinity' whereby well-ordered sounds would impart their harmony to the sympathetic human soul"—which again is Pythagorean; but this seems to have little relation to either Wendt or Hoffmann, who get nowhere near to this level of thinking. If it is perfectly true that music is an expression of "the transcendental world of absolute ideas", it is also true, as Debussy said, that "of all the arts music is closest to nature", i.e. the concrete, material world of sense-perception. None of our theorists seems able to understand that symbols and archetypes, "the transcendental world of absolute ideas", can be perceived only through their concrete manifestations and, conversely, that the world of nature can be understood only as an embodiment of "the transcendental world of absolute ideas".

Probably the most interesting and perceptive of the critics cited is A.B. Marx, the founder of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. For him, tone-painting was "one of the fundamental expressive devices of music", and there was "no distinction between art and reality". He saw Beethoven as the first composer to use Tonmalerei to give unity and coherence to an entire work—and he sees the unity in Beethoven's works, putting him in advance of most critics, even today; and sees that the four movements of the cycle belong together. In the Eroica Symphony he sees the idea of the Heldenweihe, the consecration of the hero, as the unifying motif—the Prometheus theme, central to Beethoven—and that the Funeral March "far transcended the death of any one man".

Hoffmann's "infinite spirit kingdom" and emotional view of music are not "an antithesis" to Marx's view, neither are they "abstractions"; they are just a different emphasis—a question of expression compared with the means to expression. The use of the formula "abstract" is one of the principal obstructions to clear thinking, particularly in music criticism, and none of these worshippers of abstraction seems to have taken the trouble to consider whether it means anything—and, if so, what. If "emotional" is meant, why use the word "abstract"? Emotions are extremely concrete, and so are their causes. Neither is Kanne's "depth of spirit" a contradiction. A "spiritual dimension in music" is, again, nothing to do with "abstract", which in the last analysis is meaningless as a word, and it is in the sense of meaninglessness that it is so popular in our time. To find meaning, all these dimensions have to be present together, the concrete (sensation), emotion, thinking (idea and intellectual grasp) and intuition (the spiritual dimension, or perception of inner truth), and this is exactly what art, especially music, realizes. It is not a matter of different theories of aesthetics but of different levels of confusion, culminating in total confusion (abstraction) or meaninglessness.

The tired cliché that what music expresses "cannot be conveyed in words" really refers to the inarticulateness of the critic or, still more, to the fact that he cannot understand the music, and this is a high-sounding excuse. If we were really to think about the consequences of this statement, we should have to abolish all forms of natural science, for a start, and philosophy, and we should end with nothing left in language but the grunts of hypothetical cave-men. Some of the remarks of the critics quoted here give a good assessment and insight into the music, such as Marx's "dreams and sensations that travel beyond the music, beyond the earth itself, on the Elegiac Song, op. 118. An interpretation like this is not intended to be definitive, but it has much more value than giving a list of the keys through which the music passes and assigning it to stereotyped forms such as A-B-A or X-Y-Z, which tells us nothing except that a blockhead is speaking. So we pass from an eagle's empyrean view, like that of Schelling and the Pythagoreans, to sea-gulls flapping about in an emotional fog and end up with birds that cannot even fly but waddle on the ground counting the number of key-changes, like picking up worms. This has to be "progressive", since it proceeds from past to present, but this is another cliché. When any individual cycle is reaching its end the symptoms of disintegration set in. Any change can be progressive or retrogressive—or both—and everything is change—but not necessarily "progress" in the linear sense. Comparing the change represented by Beethoven with contemporary changes is a simplistic false analogy, because the historical context, and the nature of the changes, are entirely different. Also, not all creators of changes are Beethoven’s, and to assume an equivalence is exceedingly naive. Thus one can "progress", in a sense, towards nothingness or regress, like Schelling, towards truth.

The over-all conclusion to which one must come after reading this book is that, while Beethoven was applauded and esteemed in his lifetime at least as much as he is today, he was, on the whole, understood as little then as he is now. We come upon an occasional perception that rings true—such as Hoffmann's view of the fifth Symphony: "all is part of an endless process of cataclysmic change". The reviews quoted of the ninth Symphony are uniformly boring and unconscious, while detractors of the late works generally complain of "lack of unity", unity being just their most significant and striking attribute; but this is still not perceived today. "Even in Vienna, the last quartets were not well understood"; but who understands them now?
M. McM.

Temporal Processes in Beethoven's Music

Temporal Processes in Beethoven's Music. By David B. Greene. Pp. ix + 192. (Gordon & Breach.) 1982. $28.

Here we have yet another Beethoven book, this one even ten times more tedious than John Crabbe's Beethoven's Empire of the Mind (which I reviewed in the last issue of this journal) and consisting of almost unmitigated nonsense. However, it has the advantage of providing us with a typical sample of a whole generation of claptrap and of a characteristically American-academic (I think especially American) tendency to "expect fulfilment" (a phrase used in this book) through stating in obscure and involved language what previously was perfectly obvious. Sometimes the obvious is scarcely disguised and becomes painfully obvious: for example, "each sound ... is meaningful largely because of its relation to preceding and coming sounds"; more often a whole page of convoluted language is required to state a platitude, or it takes a paragraph to say "determinism". In this syndrome, inventing new jargons passes for thinking, and the idea is to ignore existing knowledge and terminology in order to invent a new jargon at all costs and thus to appear original, "learned" and, especially, "scientific". One could call it "jargonology" or the obfuscation of commonplaces, the method being to present in a pseudo-scientific style tedious jargon-ridden rationalizations of some preconceived formula bearing, in reality, no relation to the subject supposedly being discussed. (The footnotes refer to a huge bibliography of presumably similar stuff.)

Before inventing a new paradigm of jargonology it would pay better to understand the meaning of existing words, such as "classical". The concept of cosmic order is not equivalent either to determinism or rationalism, neither is "that which endures non-temporally". Bach is classical but not rationalist. What is "unchanging order"? A static universe? There is confusion of "intuition" with "sensation", the use of tautological terms such as "eventful occurrence"; there are pages of rambling about "motion inward"—why not "introversion" and "extraversion"?—concepts that have already been defined and thoroughly understood by anyone who knows anything. Such "motion inward" in Beethoven is not typical of, nor has anything to do particularly with, the nineteenth century. God, or meditation, was not discovered then; on the contrary, the civilization was heading towards complete atheism. The "angry despair or grim resignation" of later Romantics has nothing to do with "revealing and hiding the self but everything to do with the state of the civilization around them.

It is a pity that Korzybski is not required reading for these people, that they might have some training in the basics of thinking and the use of language. He would cure them, if anything would, of endless hair-splitting to state a commonplace. But instead they read and quote people like Heidegger, who write whole volumes, inventing a vocabulary of new words, to say, for example, that the real self is not the same as the personality or conscious ego.

We have much talk about "Heroism", referring to the Promethean aspect of Beethoven that is obvious to everyone else but implies much more than "heroism"; and pages of meaningless verbiage about "living from the past" and "living toward the future" that get us nowhere. For the first movement of the A minor Quartet, op. 132, we are given the invaluable insight that "The movement's temporal process turns out not to exemplify one in which revolution is possible and heroism effective". In 35 pages about this movement we do not even get any correct idea of the form of the movement, let alone of its meaning, but only interminable drooling about such terms as "front-heaviness", "centre-controlled shape" or "end-directed shape". The profound conclusions reached in 179 pages of this are that Bach is classical (in the correct use of the word, which is not understood here) and that Beethoven is a prophet of change. "Past orientation is subordinate to future orientation". Putting it that way is surely worth a Ph.D. in Indiana.

For further consideration of this kind of thing I refer the reader to Orwell's essay on Jargon, and there is also a lecture on it by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. M.McM.

Beethoven's Empire of the Mind

Beethoven's Empire of the Mind. By John Crabbc. Pp. 135. (Lovell-Baines Print, 60 Penwood Heights, Burghclere, Newbury, Berkshire.) 1982 £5.95.

I read through half of this book without there occurring to me a single thing to say about it, either for or against. I began to think at this point, though, that it was becoming increasingly boring and that I might re-quote the quotation from Beethoven, in his joke to the publisher about the C sharp minor Quartet: "a patchwork of pilferings". Or let us say quotations. There is a noteworthy absence of any original idea, and we arrive after each topic at the most pedestrian possible of conclusions; for example: “'to make his guess and comprehend more or less'—this probably applied to a lot of Beethoven's reading of abstract or allegorical material".

The author has read widely on-the subject and familiarized himself with the history of the period and sets out to survey Beethoven's literary and ideological culture. I might mention on the positive side that Beethoven's interest in Kant is brought into focus here, as a welcome change from Hegel. Kant is a mind very much more akin to Beethoven and more to the point, and we find a relevant quotation from him that begins: 'Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more frequently and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.'

The italicized phrase was written down by Beethoven as a guiding principle. The book is strewn with a collection of quotations, from Beethoven himself and others, that constitutes the only interesting matter in an otherwise unrelievedly unimaginative and tedious recital. Among these quotations are some that have a bearing on questions touched upon in the preceding review, such as this from Goethe on Beethoven: . .-.it is immaterial whether he speaks from feeling or knowledge, for here the gods are at work strewing seeds for future discernment . . .

Beethoven's discourse to Stumpff, as related by Stumpff: When in the evening I contemplate the sky in wonder at the host of luminous bodies continually revolving in their orbits . . . then my spirit rises beyond these constellations so many millions of miles away to the primeval source from which all creation flows and from which new creations shall flow eternally ...
recalls the phrase from Kant and points to the origins of the ninth Symphony, though Crabbe does not sec that. On the contrary, he repeats once again that inane saw, convenient cover for paucity of understanding and intellectual sterility, "music cannot be about anything" and is "a purely abstract art", and proceeds then to enumerate the subjects "about" which Beethoven .wrote—Prometheus, Coriolanus, etc., etc. In short, a book purporting to be the study of a mind of the order of Beethoven, by one of the order exemplified above.
M.McM.

The Concertgoer's Companion

The Concertgoer's Companion. By Antony Hopkins. Volume 2: Hoist to Webem. Pp. viii + 360. (Dent.) 1986. £15.

Antony Hopkins thinks that Hoist was "led off course" by a passion for extra-musical subjects but, in spite of this, he gives a good account of The Planets and writes well only when describing this sort of music. He is completely at sea with "the classics", to which he applies his passion for "absolute music", and thus he exhibits a curious dichotomy or inner split. This shows again in the context of Ives, where he has the highest praise for all the extra-musicality, here amounting to gimmickry.

Again we find this contradiction in the chapter on Liszt. Ignoring the outmoded cliché that Liszt wrote "much that was flashy and meretricious", Hopkins does full justice to the Faust Symphony. While he describes fairly well the relevance of the music to the subject—for example, of the opening theme: "its avoidance of any defined tonality; it is in a musical limbo, a symbol of a lost soul"—this is contradicted by uneasy asides here and there: "it would fire our imagination just as much if it were called by a completely different name"; and, of the first transformation of the second theme: "Liszt's interest here is to find out how the theme responds to this different treatment. He wants to see what its possibilities are used as a melody" (in case we should mistakenly suppose any relevance to the work as a whole or its subject). Then we go back to noting correspondences in the music to the story of Faust: "This isn't just a theme transformed but Faust himself transformed by Gretchen's beauty"; and "nobody can deny the intensity of feeling behind this music". Feeling is valuation and can arise only as a response to something real and vital. The very fact of Antony Hopkins's writing these books is a contradiction of his premise that music is "nothing but" a technical exercise, consisting of musical technicalities for their own sake, since in that case only musical technicians could have any interest in it, and they would be engaged in a singularly futile occupation. When Hopkins forgets or is forced to abandon this obsession he can write a very good description of the music, as he does here of the Faust Symphony. The Totentanz and piano concertos are also decently handled, though he puts in a reminder that, while he can appreciate thematic transformations in Liszt, he refuses to see them in Beethoven—in, for example, the fifth Symphony.

Likewise, in the context of Mahler, not even Antony Hopkins can very well talk about "absolute music", with the result that, apart from the occasional reproof that Mahler tends to rely too much on words, we get on the whole a very satisfactory and readable introduction to this composer, with descriptions of the Kindertotenlieder and the third and fifth Symphonies that make us want to go out and buy the music on tape or disc. Looking then at dos Lied van der Erde, Antony Hopkins gives a sensitive and cultured appreciation of this work that shows an entirely different side to his personality from that called forth by "the three Bs" and is surely a remarkable contrast! It seems that the association of words with music is an indispensable condition for Antony Hopkins as well as for Mahler.

Mozart, too, gets a readable introduction. While there may be some use in the kind of descriptions that follow of some of the piano concertos, in focusing the attention on the details, there is no use in the inveterate attitude that seems to regard all pre-romantic and non-vocal music in the vein of a Mickey Mouse film: "a harmonic impasse out of which the pianist tries to wriggle his way"—in the D minor Concerto—"The orchestra duly shows its approval". Phrases like "a neatly contrived modification" of a theme suggest that we are considering something like a display of figure-skating. There is, of course, no attempt at interpretation of a work as a serious artistic expression and as a whole, and its episodes seem to be taken as more or less inconsequential: "Once this pretty diversion is over. . .". The theme with which the D minor Concerto ends is "an enchanting tune in Mozart's wittiest vein"—to suit Hopkins's theory that the work has to end on a "joyous" note, "even to an untrained ear", whether or not this contradicts everything else in the Concerto. It does not do so to my ear, nor is the theme in the least bit "witty", while ending on a major chord does not suffice to cancel out the rest of the work. A trained ear is no use on its own, and it has to be linked up with the rest of one's faculties—a link that seems to be missing here.

This element of mindlessness and complete mystification in front of music is nowhere more evident than in the section on Shostakovich, where Hopkins successfully rivals the most obtuse of cultural commissars. To explain the appearance of William Tell in the first movement of the last Symphony he proposes "his own" brilliantly ingenious (even for him!) explanation—that Shostakovich couldn't think of anything else to say! The trouble is that one cannot recognize one's own reflection! Hopkins thinks that the line he quotes from the preceding work, which "seems to hold a special significance: 'What comfort for talent among villains and fools'", holds it only within the Soviet Union!

He does, however, hit on the idea of a cavalry charge in the fifth Symphony—indeed, this Symphony has a distinct atmosphere of War and Peace; but his description of "the second movement" I can in no respect identify, and it seems to be purely imaginary, with some foppery about "Beethoven dressed up as a Russian peasant" or the other way round. Nor can Hopkins make head or tail of the finale—he has forgotten about the cavalry charge detected in the first movement, which seems to have dropped from the sky, "for no particular reason" and with no relation to anything. Certainly, Shostakovich was no worse off with Zakharov and Zhdanov, and his later works of world pessimism could just as well have been written by a resident in the West.

The tenth Symphony, probably the most evocative of all Shostakovich's works, completely baffles Antony Hopkins. He is obsessed with hearing folk-music and peasants everywhere, and even the mysterious horn-calls in the third movement strike him as a waltz(!). The thirteenth Symphony (Babiy Yar) he considers "propagandist", and "we just can't take seriously statements like: 'He who gives them false change is a scoundrel'". It probably sounds too near home, and when it comes to obscuring, denigrating and trivializing for a generation the works of the greatest composers there may not be much difference between a fool and a scoundrel.

M.McM.

Music and Its Social Meanings

August 1985 Vol. 46 No. 3
Music and its Social Meanings ("Musicology Series", Vol. 2). By Christopher Ballantine. Pp. xix +202. (Gordon & Breach.) 1984. $29.75.

Recently we had occasion to review a book claiming that the social order is decisively influenced by and depends upon music; now we have the opposite and are told that the latter is a product of the former, and that Beethoven has to be understood in terms of Marxism. Bach is "static", wholly because of feudalism, and Beethoven, no longer "the Voice of God" (Mellers), represents "the bourgeois democratic order" and also, to a certain extent, the Voice of Stalin. Yet Dr. Mellers lends support by writing a laudatory introduction, showing again a characteristic lack of discrimination and of a critical faculty.

It is true, of course, that art comes into being in the context of society, and one must consider both in the context of the spiritual development of man over—in our case—the whole Christian era. But to this development each domain has an entirely different relationship, just as Blake represents something different and opposite to, say, Locke or Adam Smith. On the other hand, capitalism and Darwinism are phenomena of the same order and way of thinking and one can add Marxism for good measure; but Chopin, though contemporary, certainly does not belong to this trend. Romanticism is related to individualism; schizophrenia and much modern art to the social alienation of the individual; "socialist realism" to his extermination by force. The relationship of art to the culture and society as a whole and its life-cycle was expounded on the right (non-Aristotelian) lines by Spengler as part of his aesthetics of history. One can also observe the great cycles of the outer planets and relate all social phenomena to these, in terms of a higher level of understanding of cosmic relationships.

In the book under review we are presented with the lowest possible level of understanding, or non-understanding—that of dialectical materialism and—what is worse—with its characteristic methods of reasoning. These start out from a valid critique of the status quo and thus generate a sympathetic energy in the reader or listener, which is then surreptitiously channeled into the most perverse directions, contradicting the very critique from which we have set out. This confuses the innocent—witness Dr. Mellers. All the right words are used for the wrong purposes. Thus, reference is made to the "ossified mentality" of musicology, to the absence of ideas of value and meaning in musicology, the need to consider everything in relation to the "whole". All very applaudable. Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism by Jurgen Habermas is cited; but Marxism is anything but consciousness-raising. The author writes of "deceits and rationalizations" used in the service of ideologies—a category that exactly describes his own technique and is a typical piece of "doublethink". "The picture is bleak", he says, and dialectical materialism is even bleaker. . False prophets are worse than entrenched ignorance.

The starting-point of this method is Hegel. The Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz describes in The Captive Mind Hegelianism in practice in enslaved Poland, from thorough first-hand experience as opposed to the arm-chair Marxism of Western bourgeois idealists. Referring to dialectical materialism Russian-style and the influence of Hegelian philosophy, he writes:
Precisely because such an analysis of history comes closer to the truth, it is more dangerous. It gives the illusion of full knowledge; it supplies answers to all questions, answers which merely run around in a circle repeating a few formulas.
Jung had written almost the same thing, describing this method as all the more dangerous as Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created.

In Jung's view the peculiar high-flown language Hegel uses . . . is reminiscent of the megalomaniac language of schizophrenics, who use terrific spellbinding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective form, to give banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces as searching wisdom. This so-called dialectic proceeds by the principle of subtle false analogies, and for that reason it is slippery, devious and difficult to come to grips with. One can use convincing-looking arguments to arrive at pure nihilism.

It is common nowadays to find Beethoven, of all people, associated with Hegel, and it seems fashionable to relate the sonata to Hegelian dialectic. The sonata represents dramatic conflict, yes; dialectic, we are told, is a forward movement through conflict. But the outcome of conflict is not necessarily forward, and if it is we may ask "Where to?". Ballantine would reply: "to the synthesis of opposites". But the mere change of contrasting material (second subject) into the tonic key does not constitute a synthesis, and musical form is not in the first place a matter of key. Even were we to concede a correspondence between Hegelian dialectic and the sonata principle it does not bring us anywhere. Dualism is characteristic of the epoch, and of conflict. Beethoven is a prophet of change. He uses the means at his disposal and stylistically belongs to his epoch; but this is the most superficial aspect only and does not address the inner message or meaning of the music. By slight deflections of facts into the channel of his dogma Ballantine uses sleight of hand; he cites "thematic transformation rather than variation" in his support. But thematic transformation derives from fugue and, except for Beethoven, is most atypical of the sonata period and a denial of sonata duality. Fugue, Ballantine admits, is integration rather than contradiction, and Beethoven himself contradicts Ballantine's line of argument by developing these forms of integration to an ever greater extent and by moving away from sonata duality, which is a stage towards dissociation. "Beethoven's fugues differ from Bach's in that they are dialectical syntheses... This makes it clear that Beethoven's aspirations echo those of Hegel and Marx" (p. 47). Everything is clear to a one-track mind, stuck in the nineteenth century, with not the slightest suspicion of the real revolution now approaching, a revolution in thinking.

The word "classical" is used without any regard to its meaning; conflict is not classical, but stability and integration are. The sixteenth century is the "classical" period of Western culture; the baroque, though influenced by the "Renaissance", retains the same spirit and equilibrium and may be included as "classical". Interpreting the sonata as the reconciliation of opposites is specious; and, in any case, what has, say, the fifth Symphony, or the ninth, or the Razwnovsky Quartets, or almost anything, got to do with such pedantry? In the ninth Symphony's finale "the baritone summons forth a new order": good. But this is in a cosmic context and not a political one. Schiller's ode heralds a new age, the Aquarian, one, it is to be hoped, of universal brotherhood but not of Marxism and dialectical materialism. The sonata period coincides with an increase of rationalism and a loss of spirituality, and sonata form as such corresponds to this trend. Beethoven, however, is the Voice of God and, like Blake, represents the opposite. Ballantine uses the word "spiritual" often, without seeming to know what it means.

We have a particular discussion of the fifth Symphony, from its "doom-laden" first movement to its "triumphant" finale ("triumphant" is one of the favourite clichés of meaningless musicology). But we learn nothing of the reasons for being either "doom-laden" or "triumphant", and it has taken us not an inch further.

Not content with making Beethoven a Marxist, Ballantine drags us through all this again in the essay on Sibelius, who now becomes the target of the same tired, preconceived formulae. In the second Symphony we have a conflict of contradictions, obviously, but we do not need Hegel to perceive them; but contradictions of what if we are not advanced by a centimetre in understanding its meaning. We can see, however, some further contradictions in the author himself, who defines everything in terms of abstractions while praising Marx for making Hegel concrete. His comments on the climax of the second Symphony are very revealing: "the over-long 2nd subject, with its folk-like individuality and Tchaikowsky-like pathos"; "its repetitions gratuitous; its peroration bombastic"; "written to formula"—these betray a total inability to comprehend the point and meaning of the work. To suit the author's dogma, immanent unity, the outstanding characteristic of Sibelian formal and melodic development, is termed "immanent contradiction". The second movement of the third Symphony, one of Sibelius's most powerfully symbolic slow movements, is "one of his slightest movements".

In discussing the fourth Symphony we seem to forget about Hegel and Marx and have "human morality" (Sibelius) confronted with chaos. The analysis here is straightforward as far as it goes and contains little or nothing with which to disagree. But in the fifth Symphony we are back to "dialectic", and after the first movement "the inadequacy of the rest of the work" means, presumably, that the latter is not dialectic enough and, hence, incomprehensible to Marxists (even more than the first movement). Far from comprehending the thematic transformations on which the first movement is built, "the 2nd subject is the 1st subject in the process of contradicting itself. If this is not sophistry then nothing is, and it is a good example of the self-deluding and sterile mentality behind the whole of this book, which belongs on the other side of the iron curtain.

M.McM.

Beethoven ("The Master Musicians" Series)

Feb. 1986 Vol. 47 No.1
Beethoven ("The Master Musicians" Series). By Denis Matthews. Pp. viii + 279. (Dent.) 1985. £12.95.
No doubt Denis Matthews has done what was expected of him for this series, but I wonder what purpose it serves to produce a précis of Thayer (with one or two sentences from other sources) in 76 short pages followed by 147 of the standard kind of incredibly dull descriptions of the works, inspired, no doubt, by the methods of quantitative and statistical science:
Its first subject, a brusque binary theme with a pattern of semiquaver swirls in the strings and strong cross accents in the wind, begins by sitting heavily on a dominant pedal, the bass-note E . . . . . The development, like the first movement's, moves in triumph to C major, hence F major, . . .

This is our illuminating insight into the finale of the seventh Symphony. One might as well be told that the first violins play 136,725 notes, the first horn 586 and so on.

The aim might be to disinfect the "Master Musicians" series of any traces of consciousness; but it is sad that sensitive musicians should allow themselves to be misled by the prevailing clichés of a mechanical age. Thus, although Denis Matthews regrets the decline of "romantic metaphor" (referring to his predecessor in this series), he endorses our present era of "academic precision", which regards Beethoven as a "master of absolute music". Perhaps one day somebody will tell us, in scientific terms and with precision, what "absolute music" actually is, if it is not "meaningless music", and how music can strike us humans as significant and/or moving, even profoundly so—which surely is incontestable—and at the same time be "absolute", whatever that is. Until that happens all this other "precision" leads nowhere and is contradicted at source by its imprecise premise.

Perhaps "academic precision" simply means conformity, and one does get the impression that the most sought-after quality in a writer on music is never to think for oneself or even to look out of the window, never to have a single idea of one's own (which would be "romantic") or the smallest original perception. "Objectivity", the current religious ideal, is achieved by turning oneself into a tape-recorder. It seems hard to believe that anyone could find so little to say about the extraordinary phenomenon Beethoven, that the music can mean no more to him, or have any greater interest, than brusque binary themes and triumphing C and F majors, that the maximum meaning to be found in the ninth Symphony is "the triumph of the major over the minor key"—as long as we can find "triumph" somewhere all's well with the world, even if it is not quite precise or objective. Beethoven went to a lot of trouble to arrive at such a banal result—or it would seem that it was not he who was deaf but most of his listeners today.

We read of a note in the sketches for the Seventh about "a second symphony in D minor"—could there be any connection between the Seventh and this future D minor Symphony? Or, to take a small but pregnant example: "The brief oboe cadenza that follows the return of the first subject (in the first movement of the fifth Symphony) is incidentally the outcome of a melodic thread woven into the reprise some bars previously" (italics ours). (This oboe cadenza may be the soft spot of the whole movement!)

The only incidentally interesting pages in this book are the half-dozen or so of reproductions of portraits and miniatures of some of the leading characters in the drama, and of these the first prize goes to that of Ignaz Schuppanzigh.

Music, Mysticism and Magic

Music, Mysticism and Magic: A Sourcebook. Selected and annotated by Joscelyn Godwin. Pp. x + 349. (Routledge & Kegan Paul.) 1986. £25.

This book is an anthology of excerpts from philosophers and seers through the ages, and down to the present, revealing the traditional philosophy of music, in a cosmic and spiritual context and on a quite different plane and level from the sterile one of most academic musicology. The author is, nevertheless, an academic musicologist, but one (Gottsei Dank!) of a new breed, with vastly wider vision and understanding. Setting out from Pythagoras as the original Western yogi of music, via Plato, the neo-Platonic philosophers and the Corpus Hermeticum, we see the relation between "the musical consonances and the patterns of astrology", arising in the first place from numbers and pure geometrical figures and applying to all the phases of life, from that between conception and birth onwards. "Each incarnate being sounds, as it were, a different chord of the planetary or psychological harmonies", which is charted in the horoscope, and we are talking about "the powers of the planetary archetypes within the human soul itself and "whether music is truly ... a gateway to knowledge of higher realities"—and astrology, too. This is not, however, a dilemma but a matter of depth or level of perception. "There is a deep underlying wholeness about this view of the world", and this book is dedicated to documenting it—a view that has always been that of true philosophers and also of true composers, who are philosophers in this sense, though it is outside the mental range of most of their commentators. To these it will still appear archaic and "pre-scientific", but in reality it reveals a lost wisdom that we are only now beginning to rediscover.

We find the same exalted "cosmology of many levels of being, linked by correspon- dences", among the philosophers of Judaism and Islam, in the second section of the book. The harmony of the spheres, "that is palely shadowed in our musica instrumentalis",... is not caused by the undulation of air (Suhrawardi). "No, what we have here is the archetypal Image of the sound, and this autonomous Form is itself sound"—forms perceived in the intermediate world, of Hurqualya, the world of the active imagination, or the etheric world of the "formal body", which corresponds to and precedes the sensory world. This is "the universe of archetypal Forms—the spiritual entities of those Spheres with their beautiful forms and exquisite sonorities" (Suhrawardi). "Although the water and earth [of our bodies] have caused a doubt to fall upon us, something of those [melodies] comes back to our memory" (Jalalu 'ddin Rumi).

Following on through mediaeval sources, "the musical harmony of Plato's World Soul serves here to articulate creation on the cosmic, elemental, and embryological levels ... a harmony also known to us as Love": Venus, as the archetype of harmony in astrology. It is also equated with the Holy Spirit and seen as the harmony of soul with body (Jacques de Liege). Marsilio Ficino, in the Renaissance, sees song as a celestial influence and conveyor of meaning. It can be used in conjunction with astrological factors as a medicinal influence.

In Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590) we meet "easily the most influential personality in the history of music theory from Aristoxenus to Rameau" (quoted from 0. Strunk). "The foremost theorists of the age (Renaissance)", writes Professor Godwin, "... seem to have entertained no more doubts concerning the cosmic background against which their practical expositions unfold than they did about the dogmas of Christianity". Zarlino compares the four voices in polyphony to the four elements; or, the consonance of the functions or four bodies of man is musica humana.

Professor Godwin sees Kepler as a watershed between the intuitive and the mathematical/ Scientific views of the cosmos, combining both: "by 1619 he was able to give a rational notation of the planets' songs, confirming that their real music is polyphonic, and not some static scale of distances or periods . . . ". After him the currents of thought divided into two streams, the one "leading ultimately to an age of deadly technocracy" and another — "at times an underground one, it is true" — showing that "the spiritual impulse which informed Kepler was never to be completely extinguished."

"At the mid-point of the i7th century the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher wrote the last great work of speculative music in the traditional sense." The harmonies of the spheres are echoed in the earthly realm through archetypal correspondences, and in the same way the earthly things harmonize and relate to one another, on a basis corresponding to musical scales and harmonic laws (very like the chemical periodic table), and to the planetary symbols.

Among nineteenth-century sources is Schopenhauer, who sees music as reflecting the vibratory patterns preceding material phenomena, which he calls "Will", thus seeing the world as embodied music. This was echoed later by Hazrat Inayat Khan — "The creative source in its first step towards manifestation was audible, and in its next step visible" — and by Charles Fourier, not only a pioneer socialist, but the author of "a vast system of correspondences" and a "Scheme of Universal Harmony". This is an expression of the non-Aristotelian, "Hermetic" and a-causal view of the world that persisted, as an underground current in the West, to surface again in this century and be vindicated by advanced science and in a spontaneous re-awakening that is rapidly spreading:
The bad habit that through ignorance and laziness tends to make us flatly deny whatever is outside the sphere of our knowledge, and treat as visionaries or impostors those who have seen in the nature of things that which we do not see.
This is from the treatise La Musique expliquee comme science et comme art by Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, poet, composer and philosopher and "the truest Pythagorean of his epoch". He sees music as a primary and formative force in the world, playing its part in the grand cosmic drama of fall and redemption to which Man is summoned both as spectator and as chief protagonist. "Music", writes Fabre d'Olivet, "does not consist in external forms", and he refers to "Europe, long enveloped in a spiritual fog".'

This last theme is taken up in the twentieth century more than by anyone, perhaps, among Western teachers, by Rudolf Steiner, who also has much to say on music: "If we are at all capable of experiencing a foretaste of the spiritual world, this would be found in music and the effects it has on the human soul . . . echoes of a glorious and wonderful existence". Direct experience of tone in the higher worlds—"the world of tones in the Devachan world", "an ocean of tones"—is described by Steiner: "Through esoteric knowledge the world, and above all the arts, become comprehensible to us". Perhaps the most poetical of these statements, and among the most recent, is that of the French poet Pierre Jean Jouve: "Music makes us plunge into the eternal with the most personal part of our being . . .".

The industry and research that must have gone into collecting all this material is intimidating, and Joscelyn Godwin has given us a source-book of great value to anyone beginning to wake up a little from our "enlightened" age. It shows, moreover, that a vein of great wisdom is to be discovered in Western culture—not only in the East. There is one surprising omission—of a figure that one would have thought most central to the theme—and this is Skryabin . . . one of the greatest composers, in the view of Vladimir Ashkenazy, and certainly one of the most interesting from the point of view of everything in this book. "There have been few specifically mystical composers such as Scriabin" (Faubion Bowers in The New Scriabin) who produced what are still "some of history's most extraordinary sounds". Besides this he was a most profound thinker and philosopher; V. P. Demova, in her study Skryabin's Harmony, refers to his "extraordinary development of intellect" and says: "it is not for us to correct him but to study him". This commendable modesty also heralds a refreshing change in the musicological climate, and it seems that Skryabin is only just beginning to be appreciated. "The purpose of music is revelation", he said. He was conscious of "other voices heard in other worlds" and aimed in his music to achieve "dematerialization . . . incorporeality . . . disembodiment". In Prometheus he set out to incorporate in music the whole theosophical cosmogony.
M. McM.

Beethoven's Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions...

Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic dilemmas and resolutions during the composer’s lifetime. By Robin Wallace. Pp. viii + 184. (Cambridge University Press.) 1986. £22.50.

Part of the object of this book is to refute the view that Beethoven was not well received by critics during his lifetime, and part of it is to survey the aesthetic philosophy of those critics, in comparison with those of today, and the degree and kind of understanding they had of Beethoven's music. In both these aims it is successful and serves a useful purpose. However, the writings of music critics past or present are usually far from being either elevating or enlightening, and their wrestling with both music and concepts beyond their understanding makes very dull reading. The author himself shares in the general confusion of thought, but he does bring out some pertinent points and, otherwise, takes a fairly impartial and non-partisan stand.

The "expressive", i.e. associative, view of music of the eighteenth century is contrasted with the "abstract" or "absolute" view of the nineteenth, with the emphasis on "formal analysis". Robin Wallace finds that the critics contemporary with Beethoven "all combine abstract, idealist views of Beethoven's works with sincere attempts to anchor these views in the everyday world of sense perception" and so bridge the gap between the two centuries. The former are supposed to derive from "'the German idealists', from Kant through Schopenhauer, who ultimately saw music as the key to the transcendental world of absolute ideas". While it is doubtful if this is what is meant nowadays by the word "abstract" as applied to music, it does not seem to be intended with any sort of conscious logic by the Romantic music critics either. E. T. A. Hoffmann is cited as referring to music as "a wonderful, infinite spirit kingdom", but emotions, such as awe, fear, pain and longing, are all that he seems to find there. The Romantic belief in "the soulfulness of music" amounts, in the critics quoted (Wendt, Hoffmann, Kanne, Berlioz), to seeing it as emotional and nothing else. This is contrasted with the "absolutist standpoint championed by modern writers"—which, presumably, sees music as not even emotional but altogether meaningless. In between, we have the wretched reductionist view, which sees monumental works of art as "portraying the psychological struggles" of their authors.
A very interesting passage is cited from the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling: "The form of art in which the unity of existence is made directly into potency, into symbol, is music". "Schelling's view", writes Robin Wallace, "was essentially Platonic: the forms of music are the forms of the world itself; they spring from the rhythm and harmony of the visible universe". This is the Pythagorean view, not "German idealist", and is a very long way from the vague fumblings of the music critics in question. We are referred to Mattheson, a hundred years earlier, and to his view "that there was a 'secret affinity' whereby well-ordered sounds would impart their harmony to the sympathetic human soul"—which again is Pythagorean; but this seems to have little relation to either Wendt or Hoffmann, who get nowhere near to this level of thinking. If it is perfectly true that music is an expression of "the transcendental world of absolute ideas", it is also true, as Debussy said, that "of all the arts music is closest to nature", i.e. the concrete, material world of sense-perception. None of our theorists seems able to understand that symbols and archetypes, "the transcendental world of absolute ideas", can be perceived only through their concrete manifestations and, conversely, that the world of nature can be understood only as an embodiment of "the transcendental world of absolute ideas".

Probably the most interesting and perceptive of the critics cited is A.B. Marx, the founder of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. For him, tone-painting was "one of the fundamental expressive devices of music", and there was "no distinction between art and reality". He saw Beethoven as the first composer to use Tonmalerei to give unity and coherence to an entire work—and he sees the unity in Beethoven's works, putting him in advance of most critics, even today; and sees that the four movements of the cycle belong together. In the Eroica Symphony he sees the idea of the Heldenweihe, the consecration of the hero, as the unifying motif—the Prometheus theme, central to Beethoven—and that the Funeral March "far transcended the death of any one man".

Hoffmann's "infinite spirit kingdom" and emotional view of music are not "an antithesis" to Marx's view, neither are they "abstractions"; they are just a different emphasis—a question of expression compared with the means to expression. The use of the formula "abstract" is one of the principal obstructions to clear thinking, particularly in music criticism, and none of these worshippers of abstraction seems to have taken the trouble to consider whether it means anything—and, if so, what. If "emotional" is meant, why use the word "abstract"? Emotions are extremely concrete, and so are their causes. Neither is Kanne's "depth of spirit" a contradiction. A "spiritual dimension in music" is, again, nothing to do with "abstract", which in the last analysis is meaningless as a word, and it is in the sense of meaninglessness that it is so popular in our time. To find meaning, all these dimensions have to be present together, the concrete (sensation), emotion, thinking (idea and intellectual grasp) and intuition (the spiritual dimension, or perception of inner truth), and this is exactly what art, especially music, realizes. It is not a matter of different theories of aesthetics but of different levels of confusion, culminating in total confusion (abstraction) or meaninglessness.

The tired cliché that what music expresses "cannot be conveyed in words" really refers to the inarticulateness of the critic or, still more, to the fact that he cannot understand the music, and this is a high-sounding excuse. If we were really to think about the consequences of this statement, we should have to abolish all forms of natural science, for a start, and philosophy, and we should end with nothing left in language but the grunts of hypothetical cave-men. Some of the remarks of the critics quoted here give a good assessment and insight into the music, such as Marx's "dreams and sensations that travel beyond the music, beyond the earth itself, on the Elegiac Song, op. 118. An interpretation like this is not intended to be definitive, but it has much more value than giving a list of the keys through which the music passes and assigning it to stereotyped forms such as A-B-A or X-Y-Z, which tells us nothing except that a blockhead is speaking. So we pass from an eagle's empyrean view, like that of Schelling and the Pythagoreans, to sea-gulls flapping about in an emotional fog and end up with birds that cannot even fly but waddle on the ground counting the number of key-changes, like picking up worms. This has to be "progressive", since it proceeds from past to present, but this is another cliché. When any individual cycle is reaching its end the symptoms of disintegration set in. Any change can be progressive or retrogressive—or both—and everything is change—but not necessarily "progress" in the linear sense. Comparing the change represented by Beethoven with contemporary changes is a simplistic false analogy, because the historical context, and the nature of the changes, are entirely different. Also, not all creators of changes are Beethoven’s, and to assume an equivalence is exceedingly naive. Thus one can "progress", in a sense, towards nothingness or regress, like Schelling, towards truth.

The over-all conclusion to which one must come after reading this book is that, while Beethoven was applauded and esteemed in his lifetime at least as much as he is today, he was, on the whole, understood as little then as he is now. We come upon an occasional perception that rings true—such as Hoffmann's view of the fifth Symphony: "all is part of an endless process of cataclysmic change". The reviews quoted of the ninth Symphony are uniformly boring and unconscious, while detractors of the late works generally complain of "lack of unity", unity being just their most significant and striking attribute; but this is still not perceived today. "Even in Vienna, the last quartets were not well understood"; but who understands them now?
M. McM.

Beethoven's Compositional Choices

Beethoven's Compositional Choices ("Studies in the Criticism and Theory of Music" Series). By Janet M. Levy. Pp. x + 101. (University of Pennsylvania Press.) 1982. £18.75.

We have here an example, of an entirely different kind of analysis, one that is not concerned with interpretation or evaluation, nor even with understanding, but purely with matters of technique. Though the title is obscure, and somewhat meaningless, this study is actually a close comparison of the revised version of the first movement of the Quartet in F, op. l8 no. i with that of the version Beethoven presented to Kari Amenda two years earlier. There is an extremely detailed examination of each revision, with full quotations from the two versions, and the reasons for revision are discussed, such as improvements in articulation, texture and contrast. This discussion is largely sensible, and useful for students of composition, though far too much taken up with the dissection of minutiae for any other kind of reader. It would make a very good study for students to do themselves, perhaps for a thesis.

One could say more about the short preface by Leonard B. Meyer, general editor of the series, who does not believe in debate about first principles or "fundamentals" but in building "a corpus of coherent theoretical concepts" while disregarding these. One gathers that he is responsible for the clumsy title of the monograph. As an illustration of the relevance of first principles to coherent theoretical concepts we can remark that, though this study is valid enough in its limited context, it still adheres to the incomprehensible point of view, seemingly universal among musical "peepers and botanisers", that, if a theme or a motif (Leitmotiv) — here a "turn motive" — is repeated on a different degree of the scale and, therefore, in a different "key", it is simply for the sake of changing key. Does this apply to a Wagnerian Leitmotiv^ In a fugue, it is to bring in another voice, higher or lower in range. One would think, just from common sense, that it is rather because this alone makes "motivic saturation" possible, since repeating it in the same key would be intolerably monotonous. Naturally, motivic saturation can still be monotonous if overdone, and Beethoven removed 20 per cent of the occurrences in the second version, as his judgment matured. Form (to a composer) is "melody writ large", not a perpetual obsession with the mechanics of equal temperament; but the latter makes large-scale forms possible without monotony. It is for lack of understanding of fundamentals that the means are for ever being confused with the end.
M.McM.

Astrologie et Musique

May 1983 Vol. 44 No. 2
Astrologie et Musique ("Iconographie Musicale", Vol. V). Par Albert P. de Mirimonde. Pp. 243. (Editions Minkoff, Geneva.) 1977.
It is a very suitable moment for a book with this title to come up for review, for it coincides with the approach of a new kind of awareness of music, and of its relation to life and reality, and with a very significant and widespread renaissance of astrology. Up to the seventeenth, and—especially—the eighteenth centuries, says de Mirimonde, and descending from the discovery by the Pythagoreans of mathematical laws which seemed to apply to the whole universe,
the cosmos was considered as obeying the laws of music. The divine harmony of the spheres controlled the course of the stars and . . . terrestrial music was reputed to be its faint echo. In other words, music is the medium through which a higher reality is made perceptible. "For millennia", he writes, the cosmos was assimilated to an immense organism, of which all the parts were united by the incessant exchange of forces, knowable or mysterious. The first were related to a pro-scientific study, the second to occultism.

This view of the cosmos is now returning in the post-scientific, or rather the post-materialistic era, but on a new level; for this reason a new convergence of music and astrology is very much in the order of things. On this new level we are not concerned with "forces" (unless perhaps still in an occult context) so much as with what Jung called "synchronicity"—that is, an a-causal principle of correspondences, depending on the total configuration of the universe at each successive moment in time. It is a question of Gestalt—and this view is the basis of "non-Aristotelian" logic and is also now valid for the real thinkers in modern science, as opposed to the rank and file of soi-disants "scientists", who are still, with the political and economic systems, compulsively stuck in the nineteenth century. Astrology uses the astronomical configurations as the hands of a clock, to read the interlocking of cosmic cycles at each moment and interpret them in terms of archetypal symbols, the meaning of which has been arrived at empirically over millennia and which are being rapidly modified and expanded in their modern applications. In fact, an extraordinary effervescence is taking place in astrological thinking and research, which is extending into many fields of study, and it is now time to think about its application to music.

The ways in which it can be so applied remain to be developed and they are likely to prove extremely rewarding in the sense of helping to reveal undreamt-of meanings. De Mirimonde mentions the sixteenth-century savant, Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, who assigned the musical modes to planets and stars according to their character. It is possible that the keys of the diatonic system can be so associated—I myself have experimented with seeking a correspondence between the twelve notes of the chromatic scale and the twelve signs of the Zodiac and their planetary rulers, with partial, but not 100 per cent success so far. On the other hand, I believe that the application of certain planetary symbols (archetypes of the collective unconscious) and all that they imply to the interpretation, or the elucidation, of the trilogy of late quartets of Beethoven has proved very successful and very revealing. Such applications as these of astrology to music are aside from the obvious one of studying the horoscopes of composers, but this too can be extremely revealing, especially in the case of such phenomena as Bach or Beethoven, direct exponents of this higher reality of which music can be the medium.

The book under review, however, is not concerned with future associations between astrology and music but only with those of the past, as represented allegorically in the graphic arts of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is a minimal amount of text, with a short introduction, from which I have quoted, and there are 150 plates, consisting of reproductions of works of art, including two of musical instruments incorporating astrological motifs in their design. These plates are divided into three main sections: those concerned with Mercury, or Hermes, and all his atttributes; those illustrating Venus; and those connected with the Zodiacal sign Gemini. Each plate is provided with a short explanatory text, and there is an introductory review to each of the three sections, giving a resume of the historical origins of the various attributes illustrated of the three symbols, or astrological motifs, and their connection with music. Mercury-Hermes: the inventor of the seven-stringed lyre, the musician, and also the representative of the logos, the mediator between heaven and earth; reason, language, all communication; Prometheus. Venus-Aphrodite: music and art, beauty, everything of value, luxury, the feminine principle, Eros, social relations; "If music be the food of love . . ."; "The enemy of Hermes, who symbolizes progress towards an intellectual ideal". Gemini: connected with music in so far as it is one of the signs ruled by Mercury but mainly here, it seems, on the strength of a characterization by Manilius, astrologer and poet of the time of Augustus. In modern astrology neither Gemini nor Mercury are particularly associated with music, but Venus and its signs, Taurus and Libra, are so—and above all Neptune, the higher octave of Venus, unknown until 1846 as an astronomical entity. The association of Gemini with love and music must arise from the confusion between the Zodiacal sign and the constellation of stars of the same name. Owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the constellation Taurus is not where it used to be, in relation to the seasons, and a planet in the constellation Taurus would in later times be in the sign Gemini. Unfortunately, M. de Mirimonde, like others who are entirely ignorant of the subject, seems to think that this fact, known perfectly well to every beginner in astrology, invalidates it. But astrology is dealing in the cycle of the seasons and, therefore, in signs, which are symbolic, and not constellations. 0° Aries is the spring equinox, which remains constant and no longer has anything to do with the constellation Aries. The precession of the equinoxes is itself a much larger cycle with its own significance astrologically. Due to the rotation—or, rather, gyration—of the Earth's axis, its Zodiacal periods constitute the twelve months of the Great Year, or Platonic Year, of about 25,868 solar years.

This book is somewhat misleadingly entitled, as it is really an anthology connected with the graphic arts and does not tell us much about either astrology or music except that they have been traditionally associated throughout history. Its value lies much more in its explanation and selection of allegorical works of art on three particular themes, some of them very interesting, some curious, and in the quality of production of the volume.

M. McM.