Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/746

 longer durations than any other musician has ever attempted to use much longer durations.

‘Noces’ falls to pieces. After the Ballet it sounds like a few scraps of Wagner, a Russian chorale (quite good) a few scraps of Chopin, a few high notes ‘pianolistic’.

Technically, Mr. Antheil has discovered the Pleyela, and freed it from ignominy; it is now an instrument, not the piano’s poor ape. (I skip the details of the innovation.)

If in the Ballet Antheil has mastered these long ‘durées’, these larger chunks of time, in the third Violin Sonata, he has made a less obvious gain, for this Sonata thinks in time’s razor edge. Whether this shows incontestably on its written pages, I cannot say, but it does show in its playing by the composer and by Miss Olga Rudge, who has borne the brunt of presentation in all three sonatas.

This is not a simple question of playing ‘in time’ or even ‘in time with each other’.

It means that, via Stravinsky and Antheil and possibly one other composer, we are brought to a closer conception of time, to a faster beat, to a closer realisation or, shall we say, ‘decomposition’ of the musical atom.

The mind, even the musician’s mind, is conditioned by contemporary things, our minimum, in a time when the old atom is ‘bombarded’ by electricity, when chemical atoms and elements are more strictly considered, is no longer the minimum of the sixteenth century pre-chemists. Both this composer and this executant, starting with the forces and iterations of the 1st Violin Sonata have acquired—perhaps only half-consciously—a new precision. There is something new in violin writing and in violin playing. Violinists of larger reputation who looked at the earlier sonata and walked away, those who thought it ‘bizarre’, will possibly awake and find themselves a little out of date, and the initiative of the first performer, may in time receive its reward. There will be a new hardness and dryness in fashion, and the old oily slickness of the Viennese school