The Last Samurai (9 page)

It is strange to think that Schoenberg’s
Harmonielehre
was first published in 1911, a year before Roemer brought out
Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik
. Schoenberg, who had a wife and two children, was scraping a living as a teacher of music & portrait painter. I think Roemer held a position at the University of Leipzig. Roemer’s colleagues might have pointed out the fallacy; I might have spoken fluent German & lost half an hour on it; I might have lost 50 hours a week later—and Ludoviticus would not now be setting Mr. Ma at defiance by mastering 500 simple tasks on a daily basis. The atoms which now direct the application of a pink Schwan Stabilo highlighter to
Odyssey
10 would be going about some other business, as would I, & the world, for all I know, would be short an Einstein. And yet tactful colleagues, bad German and terrible timing might have conspired to catapult me from an academic career without effect upon Schwan Stabilo &
Odyssey
10: Schoenberg, distracted by financial difficulties, might have written a stupid book. He might have written a clever book; I might have gone to buy a dress on the day of the party.

On the day of the party I walked down to Covent Garden at lunchtime to buy a dress, and on my way to Boules I thought I would just stop off for a moment at Books etc. I happened to go into the music section, and I happened to pick up Schoenberg’s
Theory of Harmony
.

My father used to say, when things went wrong, that man is the cat’s paw of fate. I think this is the kind of thing he had in mind.

No sooner had I taken the book from the shelf than I had to buy it; no sooner bought than began to read.

Schoenberg was putting forward arguments for the development of music using a much more liberal notion of consonance, and then possibly eventually of a music using a much wider range of notes (so that you could have, say, an extra four notes between C and C sharp). He said:

It is clear that, just as the overtones led to the 12-part division of the simplest consonance, the octave, so they will eventually bring about the further differentiation of this interval. To future generations music like ours will seem incomplete, since it has not yet fully exploited everything latent in sound, just as a sort of music that did not yet differentiate within the octave would seem incomplete to us. Or, to cite an analogy—which one has only to think through completely to see how very relevant it is: The sound of our music will at that time seem to have no depth, no perspective, just as Japanese painting, for example, affects us as primitive compared with our own, because without perspective it lacks depth. That [change] will come, if not in the manner that some believe, and if not as soon. It will not come through reasoning (aus Gründen) but from elemental sources (Ursachen); it will not come from without, but from within. It will not come through imitation of some prototype, and not as technical accomplishment; for it is far more a matter of mind and spirit (Geist) than of material, and the Geist must be ready.

I thought this was one of the most brilliant things I had ever heard in my life. The comment on Japanese art was obviously wrong—I no sooner read it than I saw in my mind an image of Lord Leighton’s Greek Girls Playing at Ball, with its irreproachable, its even masterly use of perspective in the handling of the girls, the antique landscape, the airborne drapery, no sooner did I see this than I started to laugh, so shallow and superficial and even artless did it seem in comparison with (say) a print by Utamaro. But the basic argument was absolutely brilliant.

Before reading this brilliant book I had thought that books should be more like the film The Godfather, in which at one stage Al Pacino goes to Sicily and the Italian is all in Italian. Now I thought that this was a rather simpleminded way of looking at the question.

If you say that in a book the Italians should speak Italian because in the actual world they speak Italian and the Chinese should speak Chinese because Chinese speak Chinese it is a rather naive way of thinking of a work of art, it’s as if you thought this was the way to make a painting: The sky is blue. I will paint the sky blue. The sun is yellow. I will paint the sun yellow. A tree is green. I will paint the tree green. And what colour is the trunk? Brown. So what colour do you use? Ridiculous. Even leaving abstract painting out of the question it is closer to the truth that a painter would think of the surface that he wanted in a painting and the kind of light and the lines and the relations of colours and be attracted to painting objects that could be represented in a painting with those properties. In the same way a composer does not for the most part think that he would like to imitate this or that sound—he thinks that he wants the texture of a piano with a violin, or a piano with a cello, or four stringed instruments or six, or a symphony orchestra; he thinks of relations of notes.

This was all commonplace and banal to a painter or musician, and yet the languages of the world seemed like little heaps of blue and red and yellow powder which had never been used—but if a book just used them so that the English spoke English & the Italians Italian that would be as stupid as saying use yellow for the sun because the sun is yellow. It seemed to me reading Schoenberg that what the writers of the future would do was not necessarily say: I am writing about an Armenian grandfather Czech grandmother a young biker from Kansas (of Czech & Armenian descent), Armenian Czech English OK. Gradually they would approach the level of the other branches of the arts which are so much further developed. Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes, & having first thought of that would then think of some story about Hungarians or Finns with Chinese.

An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind, and all afternoon I kept hearing in my mind snatches of books which might exist in three or four hundred years. There was one with the characters Hakkinen, Hintikka and Yu, set provisionally in Helsinki—against a background of snow with a mass of black firs, a black sky & brilliant stars a narrative or perhaps dialogue with nominative genitive partitive essive inessive adessive illative ablative allative & translative, people would come on saying Hyvää päivää for good day there might be a traffic accident so that the word tieliikenneonnettomuus could make an appearance, and then in the mind of Yu Chinese characters, as it might be Black Fir White Snow, this was absolutely ravishing.

I had not really wanted to go to the party, and now in this distracted state I wanted to go less than ever—but I thought it would be rude not to go when the invitation was such a favour, so I thought I could just go for 10 minutes and then leave.

I went to the party. As so often it was much easier to come with the plan of leaving after 10 minutes than to leave after 10 minutes, for instead of making a polite excuse to leave after 10 minutes I found myself describing now to this person now that the brilliant
Theory of Harmony
. Who publish it, they would say, Faber, I would say and they would say Oh. Some people did not seem interested and I naturally dropped the subject but others did and I did not and I ended up staying three hours.

Schoenberg would say: This scale is not the last word, the ultimate goal of music, but rather a provisional stopping place. The overtone series, which led the ear to it, still contains many problems that will have to be faced. And if for the time being we still manage to escape those problems, it is due to little else than a compromise between the natural intervals and our inability to use them—that compromise which we call the tempered system, which amounts to an indefinitely extended truce

& in my mind I would hear languages related like a circle of fifths, I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words—I was just about to leave when I met a man who seemed to know quite a lot about Schoenberg. He had lost his last job through a merger and now the writing was on the wall so he was rather distracted but still he started telling me about the opera Moses and Aaron.

He said Of course you know what it’s about

& I said Well presumably