One finds the
experimental and methodical at every turn throughout these compositions.
Behind them one seems invariably to perceive some one sitting before a
sheet of music paper and tampering with the art of music; seeking to
discover what would result were he to accept as harmonic basis not the
major triad but the minor ninth, to set two contradictory rhythms
clashing, or to sharpen everything and maintain a geometric hardness of
line. One always feels in them the intelligence setting forth
deliberately to discover new musical form. For all their apparent
freedom, they are full of the oldest musical procedures, abound in
canonic imitations, in augmentations, and diminutions, in all sorts of
grizzled contrapuntal manoevers. They are head-music of the most
uncompromising sort. The "Five Orchestral Pieces" abound in purely
theoretical combinations of instruments, combinations that do not at all
sound. "Herzgewaechse," the setting of the poem of Maeterlinck made
contemporaneously with these pieces, makes fantastic demands upon the
singer, asks the voice to hold high F _pppp_, to leap swiftly across the
widest intervals, and to maintain itself over a filigree accompaniment
of celesta, harmonium and harp. But it is in the piano-music that the
sonorities are most rudely neglected.
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