Once when people lived in lands from time out of mind, found themselves in
a time out of its mind, they searched backward towards the idylls of that
past for a sense of self.  And with that sense of self face the noise and
hurly burly of the present.  The time when people drained from the farms
and into the cities in search of work has past in our own lands, but it
leaves works and days as reminders.  In China they are facing now that same
dilemma, how can a plant be pulled forth from its roots and still grow in
the soil of an urban landscape.

One need was a source of authority, of reason.  By the 1930's one had
evolved as being the popular shape of the Modern world - Mass.  Mass and
solidity, the ability to build larger, more solidly, more powerfully.  Have
neo-classical temples ever been so big boned as in the 1920's and 1930's?
Has a sense of Mass in architecture ever been so powerfully deployed as by
Art Deco's blocky angular muscles and the large line and oval stylings a
top the Mercury building?

Mass then represented a solidity and authority, a safety and authority.

The visual arts created massiveness by combining long straight lines with
ovals which were just distorted from circular.  The well spring of this
visual idea came from Picasso's emmergence into the sun of the south from
the convolescence of the blue period.  It became a popular illustration
style found in Germany, in the US, it became the favored style of
"Socialist Realism" and yet is also used to illustrate the works of Ayn
Rand.

In music the sense of light fleet neo-classical wit gave way to a
powerfully massive neo-classical style.  One lead by Hindemith in Germany,
though one can hear it as early as Holt's "The Planets" in England, some of
Reger's orchetral works and Schulhoff's 3rd symphony.  The style as being
a "contemporous" expression to a great extent ended with Bartok's concerto
for orchestra - more on that later.  This form of neo-classical style
borrows heavily from Mahler's use widely separated voices, from the "Back
to Bach" ethos, from Stravinski's polyrhtymical polyphony and Sibelian
poly-structuralism.

Musical mass comes from the deployment of deeper sonorities - not quite
the deepest, but at the lowest middle register, longer suspensions and
prolongations of tone, from octatonic fugues and counterpoint, from figures
that repeat a note, step modally and then use a whole tone motif at the end
or shift to the tritone of the base modal note, the use of great brass
fanfares.  In the end it rests most firmly on a sense of organicisim as
continuous unfolding, in the belief that the germinal force of the seed
must be perserved, almost as a homonculous which becomes the persistent
character, narrator and protagonist of the entire story.

Edmund Rubbra was a man born with the century in 1901. His second symphony
is of this kind of Modernism - the modernism of Mass.

- - -

With the encroaching chaos of the first world war, with the playing out of
the Victorian program to civilise the world, at least as they understood
civilising, there came a deep void in the minds and souls of a generation.
It was a generation that began to, inspired by Darwin and Freud, to ask
where the origin of things came from.  It was a generation that invented
they idea that the purpose of man's philosophy was to answer "the big
questions" of "where am I going? where do I come from? what is my purpose
on earth?" And to reply with a powerful authority that would alay these
fears.

This program is writ large from the opening bars of Rubbra's symphony #2,
which presents us with a broadly painted string unison of a theme.  As if
Bach were presenting his fugue theme.  However the sonorities are deeper,
the rhythm more uniform.  When the unison is broken we are given a
momentary lyrical term, before the main theme the takes over, and it is
repeated, in fragments and as a whole, broadly across the orchestra.

In a sense this is the kind of music ridiculed by the very French pen
of Charles Koechlin in the second episode of "Les banders-log", and its
persistent darkness seems to stand against the composer's insistence on
"importance of making contrasts between different facets of a pervading
idea."

And to reply - this is the music of a particular kind pain.  It is the
music of one born under an open sky, and living in cities choked by dust
from burning coal and belching soot.  It is the music of open fields turned
to brick walls, of small rooms clustered together on narrow streets.  It is
the music of a twilight that begins in late afternoon, as the sun grows red
so clotted with blackness is the air, and of a blessed darkness of night
where silence finally finds the great metropolis of that burgeoning age.
We are both alone as an explorer on a distant continent, and simultaneously
crowded together as rats in a sewer.

Here we are left in a soundscape reminiscent specifically of Holts'
*Jupiter*.  In this night a man stares at stars that he can no longer quite
see, but remebers from his younger days.  He walks out into the darkened
streets and sees here and there a center of light and gathered people -
only to move on to places where he can be alone, alone, rather than as
they, alone with company.  We follow less his journey, than the thoughts
which plague him, how he wanders through twists and turns, not only in the
urbography, but through his own ruminations.  The drum beat of problems and
fears.

In this sense the night is passed, and the vantage point shifts from the
man alone to the awakening of the whole city.  Its action is organic in
itself, it is far larger, far more important than the alienation of its
denizens.  Rubbra takes a subject directly lifted from "Jupiter" as the
symbol of the engine of movement.  It gives us the trains, the wakening of
households, the crying of children, the flooding of light into alleys where
morning comes not with dawn, but with the sun.  This becomes a rhapsody to
the urban life and the explosive energy of concentrated humanity, undercut
by a dark ambiguity.

- - -

For those who have wished for more music in the cast of Bartok's piano
concerti, and of his Concerto for Orchestra, and yet have found the
American Symphonists such as Hanson or Bill Schuman lacking in wit,
diversity and imagination - it is to this work specifically that I would
point them.  It is not this style of music must of its nature be leaden
with academic rectitudes, but that it relies far more than other musics on
the quality of its ideas.  Music of wit can skewer the banal, the mercurial
moods of Liszt and Hadyn might build a whole arc out of bricks of the
basest clay and dirty straw.  But music which relies on such huge blocks
and tight working out must, of necessity, find musical ideas of a higher
quality, which have a greater individuality, so that they may be subjected
to denser reworkings.

Stirling Newberry