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Music . . .

Logic and Style

Formal logic, tonal or otherwise, must of necessity be an analytical study: we write our harmony according to Dr. Kitson's rules, thus "If A. then B. But A. therefore B" which every student of logic will recognise as an elementary form of argument. Too few musicians, however trouble to ask the question "Why, if A. then B." etc. The average music student is quite content to reason harmonically and contrapuntally, from the premises prescribed by Prout et [unclear: al]., but not to try to discover for himself why in fact these premises are presupposed.

To a certain extent this presupposition is of analytical origin, insofar we find Mozart and the Classical school using chords in a certain manner, and from their example we form our rules; but to suppose this to be the be-all and end-all of musical logic is to adopt a very narrow view of the art. It can, and in many cases docs, reduce Music to the level of the syllogism, and an artistic logic, or formal unity, was never achieved by purely algebraic methods

The only absolute conditions for a formal unity are repetition and [unclear: eys] tension, and within the framework of these the composer's possibilities are limitless. But he will succeed or fail according to his balancing of these factors within the whole Tills will, of course, apply to the lessee as well as to the greater aspects of a work the consistency or [unclear: puroose] shown in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony lies no less in the length and control of the individual phrase than in the balance of the sections of the sonata-form in which it is written.

A "form" of any sort is therefore not so much a matrix as a principle, synthetic in derivation, that does not necessarily depend upon aural experience for the validity of its existence. The synthesising of this formal principle, however, can be achieved only by empiric means. Beethoven required a lifetime of artistic experience and practice before he could produce the Isosceles triangle of the A minor quartet. Op 132: Schubert was unable, even with his peculiar genius, to create the great are that is the last movement of his C major Symphony until he had assimilated the principles of construction revealed in the earlier experimental works.

The architectural sense which is evident in the works of the musical great was not "applied" like a yardstick to their compositions—the process of inspiration itself was regulated by the musically logical mind so that the outcome could not fail to have an intrinsic formal unity.

The great drawback of the school of atonal composers in that their evidently closely-reasoned works possess only an arbitrary or super-imposed unity: a new logic must by synthesised from the new material, and until then they must continue to pour their new wine into old bottles and hope that the product will be palatable.