Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/744

 Monsieur Krettly, is manifestly what Mr. Antheil was driving at two and a half years ago.

Krettly has got used to it. I console myself with the thought that Keats was at first considered incomprehensible because he omitted various moral fervours and axioms which the eighteenth century had got used to finding in poesy in the favour of some element  conceivable to himself.

Technically Mr. Antheil has, in this quartette, avoided the smaller clichés. The polyphonic element in his composition continues its development in the Symphony in F (eighty-five instruments), and in this partially conservative work the composer shows his ample ability for dealing with the full orchestra. He avoids various habitual conclusions, and commits numerous innovations in the details of orchestration. It is a symphony on more or less accepted lines (voices from the audience murmuring: ‘reactionnaire sans le savoir’), a symphony with the usual slush left out, or even ‘a symphony debunked’. We suppose this is what Mr. Koussevitzky means when he complains that, ‘It is all here’ (tapping his forehead), ‘it has no heart’).

It should in any case terminate discussion of Mr. Antheil’s musical competence, and has, indeed, largely done so.

If none of the above works would have ‘made’ Mr. Antheil’s reputation, they all go to making it solid, and to establish the copiousness of his talents. None of them would give a reason for discussing him in a periodical not exclusively devoted to music; a competent musical chronicle would however record an innovation in chamber music, an addition to the literature of the string quartette, and a new symphony for large orchestra, which latter is a means ready to hand, and needing, probably, nutriment.

With the Ballet Mecanique we emerge into a wider