Cinema (Hollywood) (1947)

such. Here I agree. I believe that it should not hinder or hurt the action and that it should fill its wallpaper function by having the same relationship to the drama that restaurant music has to the conversation at the individual restaurant table. Or that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading. The orchestral sounds in films, then, would be like a perfume which is indefinable there. But let it be clearly understood that such perfume "explains" nothing and "narrates" nothing; and, moreover, I can not accept is as music. Mozart once said: "Music is there to delight us, that is its calling." In other words, music is too high an art to be a servant to other arts ; it is too high to be absorbed only by the subconscious of the spectator, if it still wants to be considered as music. Furthermore, the fact that some good composers have composed for the screen does not alter these basic considerations. Decent composers will offer the films decent pages of background score; they will supply more "listenable" sounds than other composers ; but even they are subject to the basic rules of the film which, of course, are primarily commercial. The film makers know that they need music, but they prefer music which is not very new. When, for commercial reasons, they employ a composer of repute, they want him to write this kind of "not very new" music — which, of course, results in nothing but musical disaster. I have been asked whether my own music, written for the ballet and the stage, would not be comparable in its dramatic connotation to music in the films. It cannot be compared at all. The days of "Petrouchka" are long past, and whatever few elements of realistic description can be found in its pages fail to be representative of my thinking now. My music expresses nothing of realistic character, and neither does the dance. The ballet consists of movements which have their own aesthetic and logic, and if one of those movements should happen to be a visualization of the words "I Love You," then this reference to the external world would play the same role in the dance (and in my music) that a guitar in a Picasso still-life would play: something of the world is caught as pretext or clothing for the inherent abstraction. Dancers have nothing to narrate and neither has my music. Even in older ballets like "Giselle," descriptiveness has been removed — by virtue of its naivete, its unpretentious traditionalism and its simplicity— to a level of objectivity and pure art-play. My music for the stage, then, never tries to "explain" the action, but rather it lives side by side with the visual movement, happily married to it, as one individual to another. In "Scenes de Ballet" the dramatic action was given by an evolution of plastic problems, and both dance and music had to be constructed on the architectural feeling for contrast and similarity. The danger in the visualization of music on the screen — and a very real danger it is — is that the film has always tried to "describe" the music. That is absurd. When Balanchine did a choreography to my "Danses Concertantes" (originally written as a piece of concert music) he approached the problem architecturally and not descriptively. And his success was extraordinary for one great reason : he went to the roots of the musical form, of the jeu musical, and re 8 created it in forms of movements. Only if the films should ever adopt an attitude of this kind is it possible that a satisfying and interesting art form would result. The dramatic impact of my "Histoire du Soldat" has been cited by various critics. There, too, the result was achieved, not by trying to write music which, in the background, tried to explain the dramatic action, or to carry the action forward descriptively, the procedure followed in the cinema. Rather was it the simultaneity of stage, narration, and music which was the object, resulting in the dramatic power of the whole. Put music and drama together as individual entities, put them together and let them alone, without compelling one to try to "explain" and to react to the other. To borrow a term from chemistry : my ideal is the chemical reaction, where a new entity, a third body, results from uniting two different but equally important elements, music and drama ; it is not the chemical mixture where, as in the films, to the preordained whole just the ingredient of music is added, resulting in nothing either new or creative. The entire working methods of the dramatic film exemplify this. All these reflections are not to be taken as a pointblank refusal on my part ever to work for the film. I do not work for money, but I need it, as everybody does. Chesterton tells about Charles Dickens' visit to America. The people who had invited him to lecture here were astonished, it seems, about his interest in fees and contracts. "Money is not a shocking thing to an artist," Dickens insisted. Likewise there will be nothing shocking to me in offering my professional capacities to a film studio for remuneration. If I am asked whether the dissemination of good concert music in the cinema will help to create a more understanding mass audience, I can only answer that here again we must beware of dangerous misconceptions. My first premise is that good music must be heard by and for itself, and not with the crutch of any visual medium. If you start to explain the "meaning" of music you are on the wrong path. Such absurd "meanings" will invariably be established by the image, if only through automatic association. That is an extreme disservice to music. Listeners will never be able to hear music by and for itself, but only for what it represents under given circumstances and given instructions. Music can be useful, I repeat, only when it is taken for itself. It has to play its own role if it is to be understood at all. And for music to be useful to the individual we must above all teach the selfsufficiency of music, and you will agree that the cinema is a poor place for that! Even under the best conditions it is impossible for the human brain to follow the ear and the eye at the same time. And even listening is itself not enough, granted that it be understood in its best sense : the training of the ear. To listen only is too passive and creates a taste and judgment which are too general, too indiscriminate. Only in limited degree can music be helped through increased listening: much more important is the making of music. The playing of an instrument, actual production of some kind or other, will make music accessible and helpful to the individual, not the passive consumption in the darkness of a neighborhood theatre. And it is the individual that matters, never the mass. The "mass," in relationship to art, is a quantitative term which has never once entered into my consi (Continued on page 21) CINEMA