s bound to obtrude itself; dissociation from one's
ego--if such a thing were possible--would be intellectual death; only
by the clear, persistent image of ourselves do we exist--banal
psychology as old as the hills. And the ear, like the eye, soon
"accommodates" itself to new perspectives and unrelated harmonies.

I had felt, without clearly knowing the reason, that when Albertine
Zehme so eloquently declaimed the lines of Madonna, the sixth stanza
of part one, beginning "Steig, o Mutter aller Schmerzen, auf den Altar
meiner Toene!" that the background of poignant noise supplied by the
composer was more than apposite, and in the mood-key of the poem. The
flute, bass clarinet, and violoncello were so cleverly handled that
the colour of the doleful verse was enhanced, the mood expanded;
perhaps the Hebraic strain in the composer's blood has endowed him
with the gift of expressing sorrow and desolation and the abomination
of living. How far are we here from the current notion that music is a
consoler, is joy-breeding, or should, according to the Aristotelian
formula, purge the soul through pity and terror. I felt the terror,
but pity was absent. Blood-red clouds swept over vague horizons. It
was a new land through which I wandered. And so it went on to the end,
and I noted as we progressed that Schoenberg, despite his ugly sounds,
was master of more than one mood; witness the shocking cynicism of the
gallows song Die duerre Dirne mit langen Halse. Such music is
shameful--"and that's the precise effect I was after"--could the
composer triumphantly answer, and he would be right. What kind of
music is this, without melody, in the ordinary sense; without themes,
yet every acorn of a phrase contrapuntally developed by an adept;
without a harmony that does not smite the ears, lacerate, figuratively
speaking, the ear-drums; keys forced into hateful marriage that are
miles asunder, or else too closely related for aural matrimony; no
form, that is, in the scholastic formal sense, and rhythms that are so
persistently varied as to become monotonous--what kind of music, I
repeat, is this that can paint a "crystal sigh," the blackness of
prehistoric night, the abysm of a morbid soul, the man in the moon,
the faint sweet odours of an impossible fairy-land, and the strut of
the dandy from Bergamo? (See the Guiraud poem.) There is no melodic or
harmonic line, only a series of points, dots, dashes, or phrases that
sob and scream, despair,