Rachmaninoff
It was in an interview given at the beginning of his recent American
tour that M. Sergei Rachmaninoff styled himself a "musical
evolutionist." The phrase, doubtless uttered half in jest, is scarcely
nice. It is one of those terms that are so loose that they are well-nigh
meaningless. Nevertheless, there was significance in M. Rachmaninoff's
use of it. For he employed it as an apology for his work. His music is
evidently wanting in boldness. On the whole it is cautious and
traditional. Even those who are not professionally on the side of the
musical anarchs find it somewhat unventuresome, too smooth and soft and
elegantly elegiac, too dull. And in substituting for revolutionism a
formula for musical progress less suggestive of violent change, more
suggestive of a process like the tranquil, gradual and orderly unfolding
of bud into blossom, was not M. Rachmaninoff very lightly and cleverly
discrediting the apparently revolutionary work of certain of his
fellows, and seeking to reveal a hitherto unsuspected solidity in his
own?
However, it is questionable whether he was successful, whether the
implications of the phrase do quite manage to manoeuver his work into
genuine importance. No doubt, music does not invariably reform itself
through the process we call revolutionary.
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