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Page Twelve
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
(Continued from Page 8)
attention to its execution might be
held suspect.
Miss Grau's careful use of wordsA
is refreshing after the torrents
of prose which too often show the
same uncertainty of thought and
timidity 'of expression heard in
numberless political speeches. Our
forefathers could in one breath, chesO
"Rise fathers, rise let's go meet
them in the skies," get the sitter
through life, death, the resurrec-
tion and into heaven; it took, for
example, a speae i oeofr his young hero felt no ,kinship. wish, too, that Mr. Faulkner had the American Legion waving the
political conventions far more This, the almost constant aware- said "some artists" or "'one art- flag under God, the whiskey man-
words than this to get the bottoms ness of being above and different ist." Great art has undoubtedly ufacturer advertising his brand,
of his listeners out of their chairs: from the "man-swarm" is a re- been produced by those who saw not as a good thing in itself but
for h , had to say, "Now, let us curring note in Faulkner, who is the most of mankind as little ani- as a symbol of genteel living, or
rise and stand up on our feet." prone to dismiss large batches of mals, foreordained and doomed. Malcolm Cowley explaining the
Words instead of being used as the human race as being all alike The Pharoahs may have so rea- symbolism of one of his prized
symbols to communicate thoughts as in the case of his "little men" soned when they expended thou- pieces, we are one and all obsessed
can be used as little bricks to Polish miners. Other times it is a sands of lives in the building of with symbolism. The symbol has
build a wall to hide the thoughts, region; after a short tour in a the Pyramids; we do not know; become more important than the
and sometimes to hide the fact Ford car with Malcolm Cowley in they may have been unconcerned thing itself, and in our self fear
there isn't any thought. New England Mr. Faulkner was with art, knowing only they built we seize upon it as still another
able in a few short sentences to tombs. wall between us and reality, and
POSSIBLY the most common report to readers of the Ford so become but Pharisees.
symptom of fear, and often re- Times the exact nature of The New TILL one wonders; the fact that Much good literature is of course
a__. _ , -_.. .,_ _ 'nrln d~ d rc- nn dr A t ThP S. ", . ., 4 ;--
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flected in Southern Writing is the
everlasting preoccupation with the
sex act, instead of a more all em-
bracing sex pattern; for in man
as in the bull, maleness does not
consist entirely of what is car-
ried between the legs, but in the
right to disagree, to doubt, to
fight, and as a rule the response
of a mouse is more easily condi-
tioned than that of a man. The
artist's conception of present day
man might by symbolized in the
beaten bull that lives perpetually
afraid, able only to assert his
maleness on what straggling cows
come his way, while the victorious
bull bellows, paws the earth, leads
the herd, enjoys sex as he enjoys
grass and water, and so is unforced
to think of the sex act as the one
form of self expression left to
him, the one surviving proof that
he is male.
Miss Grau's approach to sex is
non-existent; it is there, an aware-
ness, lustier, less pervasive, yet
reminiscent of Jane Austen's abil-
ity to create maleness with all its
connotations. However, Miss Grau's
difference of approach from that
of the more conventional Southern
Writers, is possibly most evident
in her conception of man as re-
vealed through creation of char-
acter.
Wolfe saw the "man-swarm" as
an unlovely, overgrown mushroom,
and with his sprawling vegetable
n uglanuer as com pare w u
Southerner.
Thus, this summer in 'an inter-
view first published in the Paris
Review and like the dogmatic cer-
tainty of Mr. Hicks widely ac-
claimed, Mr. Faulkner had only
to capsilize and recapitulate in a
few factual sentences,-the concepts
so long revealed in his writing.
He conceived anartist to be one,
not rooted in, but above and be-
yond the little worms of humanity
that infest the earth; so far re-
moved he stood not only beyond
all doubt of his own art, but above
the old laws concerned with man's
relation to his fellow man; occu-
pying the same pedestal was art;
an ode we read was worth nine
old women.
Mr. Harrison Smith who used
Mr. Faulkner's remarks - maga-
zines are constantly repeating
each other as if thought were a
cherry pitter to be loaned among
all the women on the block at
cherry freezing time-as the ba-
sis of a hand-clapping editorial;
Mr. Smith hoped Mr. Faulkner's'
remarks and theories would be
used in writers' conferences and
so supplant the stuff now being
taught.
One wishes Mr. Harrison hadl
given us a short and concise defi-
nition of art, for anything so read-
ily yielding to complete agreement
between both creator and beholder,
will lend itself to definition. We
Milton loaned his pen to poli-
tics in no wise enhanced his art,
though some of his sonnets so
written seem close, but could a
man who lived in Milton's England
and had no thoughts on the tem-
pests around him, could a man so
uncareing have written Paradise
Lost; could a Keats so callous to
state of being or thoughts of oth-
ers that he cared not what the
critics said or for the sufferings
of his brother have written Ode to
Autumn?
As we read letters or of their
lives we learn that most writers
have struggled and suffered and
hated and loved with the same
emotions as lesser beings; often as
in the case of Dostoievsky their
capacity for suffering seemed
greater instead of less, and one
might say the artist as a rule has
not less, but more of the senses
to see, to know, to feel the world
around him, and that much of his
artistry lies in his ability to dis-
till these for lesser men, who in
turn read and are enriched.
However, we no longer read; we
t r a n s 1 a t e; Faulkner's remarks
concerning art and the artists
have doubtlessly already been
translated into symbols, and the
symbols translated back again.
Never has western Oman been so
preoccupied with symbols; be it
the hammer and sickle of Russia,
symbolical; the man who battered
his wife to a bloody pulp in the
last front page murder, the crowd
throwing pop bottles at the re-
treating car of a would-be student
who happened to be a Negro; for
these I need no words; instead I
see Proust's cook putting a fowl
to death; I cannot even say that
Proust would see the same, for
reading is a creative act and to
it we bring what we are so that in
the end each reader creates his
own symbol not taking it second
hand, for the slipping of a symbol
from one mind into another is an
intellectual process that alienates
art.
THOSE who insist all art must
be symbolical, in a sense deny
the very existence of the art it-
selef; for once given a burden to
bear, art, like the mouthings of
the American Marxists of the thir-
ties, becomes but a means to an
end, fit partner to police state
man for he, too, is but an end to
greater things.
Can we contemplate nothing for
the pure joy of the thing: I have
through the years collected many
valuable possessions: a ragged
sweating tumbler among roses in
the snow, a lone gray bird among
the reeds, taste of Thoreau's wild
apples, hungry sheep with lifted
heads, and many other things,
some forever carried and often put
to use; others never used; early
frost has come and killed my flow-
ers, but somewhere back in the
woods when the treesarekbare my
swans will be only the plainer; for
I, too, have the white swans of
Coole; clean, calm, immutable, un-
touchable, they are always there
and always mine; long ago I think
it was a curve of an equation,
fixed, yet always moving' in the
same unalterable pattern, going
and no man to stay its going or
change it, looping in the clean
flower-like pattern on and on into
infinity; I forgot the equation; the
swans are still there; it is enough
for me that they exist; for me a
symbol would be a spoilation.
AND so it is with many things;
Miss Grau we can read with
no translation, and though many
would consider that an abomina-
October 7, 1956
tion it may be only that such writ-
ing is out of fashion. Today's fash-
ion in any field may arise froi
circumstances long since forgot-
ten. Much of the feeling that man
is a small thing, fit only for pity
or loathing, may have subcon-
sciously arisen out of the old doc-
trines fo predestination and fore-
ordination; we do not know; the
beliefs were old, belonging to no
one creed of protestanism, but in
the rural regions of the south they
were at times less tempered with
the more humane interpretations
of the teachings of Christ.
Men knowing they were fore-
ordained from the beginning of
time to live without the grace of
God became the most rip roaring
sinners of all or lived crushed and
worm-like; in either case there
was an eternal consciousness of
sin, and this is apparent in much
southern writing, especially in the
work of the preacher's son, Erskine
Caldwell; though no character in
Southern Fiction, that is of nor-
mal intelligence, can achieve eith-
er pole of complete innocence; the
ignorance of Natasha in the mioon-
light or the sweet unknowing of
Zola's goose girl; all have eaten of
the tree and know sin and the sin
is always ugly.
This awareness of sin, man's
feeling that to it he was predes-
tined by God, makes for great
popularity in the school of Intel-
lectual Approach with a Psycho-
logical Probing. Modern psycholo-
gy foredooms man, not through
God, but through his subconscious,
and thus again we have the little
man, the creature foreordained;
much of the popularity and com-
plete agreement of the Southern
School may arise from happy
chance; the writer sub-conscious-
ly wrought in literature through a
religion twisted and not peculiar
to the South the same thing that
Freud and others consciously
wrought in theory that was ele-
vated to science and fact.
Much of what we see today is
a manifestation of the old time
religion; sophisticates would smile
at a weeping sinner, who having
confessed his sins, now feels the
grace of God; yet when Whittaker
Chambers came up to the mourn-
er's bench, confessions, tears, rhe-
toric and all, the intellectual ap-
plauded; in this day and age he
probably did the safer thing to
put his past defection on a moral
basis. The difference is that re-
ligion, not even the old time re-
ligion at which we all now sneer,
was ever quite so dogmatic. The
saved sinner, too, was often quite
an humble man, who looking
about him saw God in his neigh-
bors, instead of himself as the
only saved among the damned.
AS a child I listened to endless
theological arguments, some-
times quite heated, but always
lacking the certainty with which
the Psychological Approachers
discuss literature they fling out
with the greatest of ease words
and statements of fact over which
the poor working psychologist who
has studied the matter for thirty
years may only wonder.
As in their discussion of Art
they tend to make an absolute of
the relative; the subconscious is
See SHIRLEY, Page 15
By A. TSUGAWA
THE FACT that this is the 200th1
anniversary of Mozart's birth
year has prompted musicians to
go all out in performing works by1
Mozart, and record makers to is-
sue a torrent of Mozart composi-
tions. Whatever the logic behind
this curious cultural ancestor wor-
ship on anniversary years (espe-
cially of deaths), the result has1
not always been fortuitous.
The recording industry today,
(Hi-Fi and technical advances or1
not) doesn't have the corner on
good performances. This was amp-~
ly showntby the Mozart produc-
tions at the Metropolitan Opera,
whose Cosi Fan Tutte, the Magei
Flute, and the Marriage of Figaro
have all been far from festal.
Even the vocal work, except in the
first. opera, has been undistin-
guished, as the radio broadcasts1
have indicated. Fallen birthday of-.
ferings, to say the least.
The situation in recordings have
been nightmarish. One record
company (Epic) has announced.
its determination to publish the
complete works of Mozart, and
what is more, has doggedly gone
on pressing them out, one diverti-
menti after another. Even a genius
like Mozart had his off days, and
most of his juvenilia is just that
-works by a child, even if a re-
markable one. The interest in1
them is, I find, mostly academic.1
They foreshadow what is to come
later, as well as point out what
he had to learn, from Haydn es-
pecially, and von Swieten's view of1
Bach and Handel.
Not the least nightmarish part
in the record situation is that it'
is impossible to know where to be-
gin. I find the listening booths of
the record shops womb-like and
dulling to my perceptions. And as
for the record reviewers in cur-;
rent journals, most of them seem
to be eccentric and unreliable, or;
in the pay of the record compa-
nies,
The list that follows, too, at best
reflects the compiler's bilious
views; but it is short. It concen-
trates on semi-familiar items. I+
excluded the quartets, quintets
and the symphonies, since by pre-
judice, I prefer the works by;
Haydn in these genre (except the
quintets); and the problem of se-
lection anyway is not difficult.
IT IS nice, of course, to have
some of Mozart's bread and but-
ter music, since it comes with
whipping cream coverings. The
chances are, though, that if you
own much music of this category,
you will end up by not listening
to it, but mostly using it as party
music, letting the sound fill in the
uncomfortable interstices in the
conversation - giving the space
around you a tonal depth. Just the
use this music was put to in the
eighteenth century.
The man behind this affecting
and sympathetic music is revealed
in his letters to have been some-
times nasty and naughty, moved
by a nagging and gnawing sense
of vocational and sexual frustra-
tion. His cruel glee can be seen
best in the arias he wrote for his
wife, Constanze, with technical
difficulties beyond her ability.
The arias are contained in his
Great Mass in C Minor, but he
soon lost interest in it and never
finished it. W. J. Turner in his
study of Mozart says that he was
really in love with Aloysia Weber
"who was not prepared to return
his love." So he married Aloysia's
sister, Constanze, who admired
him mostly for his talent.
Mr. Tsugawa, a teaching fel-
low in the philosophy depart-
ment, has contributed music re-
views regularly to The Daly.
This is his first Sunday Maga-
zine article,
___
..
The same Mozart, in his ado-
lescence, wrote frequent smut to
his mother and sister. It is some-
times "charming," but it is usually
embarassing and borders on the
incestuous. One doesn't usually
write dirty stories to one's own
mother. But this trait foreshadows
the theatrical, and the sneers that
lurk behind the powdered wigs in
The Marriage of Figaro.
MOZART is at his best in the
dramatic and theatrical vein*
where the hub-bub of the audi-
ence just before the rising of the
curtain, even if unfulfilled, makes
for keen anticipation of surpris-
ing thrills. Mozart thrives in the
operatic and the concerti forms,
where the art lies in the working
out of the tensions and the
struggle among the soloists (if
there are more than two) and the
orchestra in terms of themes (and
emotions).
Cosi Fan Tutte has been mag-
nificently recorded by Angel. It
not only has Elisabeth Schwartz-
kopf and Leopold Simoneau, but
the Philharmonia Orchestra,
whose beautiful, silken, incandes-
cent playing constantly surprises,
pulling your attention to the or-
chestral details.
Von Karajan's conducting is
taut and dramatic enough, but
gratefully, the work emerges as a
well articulated, finely etched
cameo - well balanced and cool,
except at two moments, when
Fiordiligi, sung by Miss Schwarz-
kopf, cries out her arias of an-
guish, revealing glimpses of a
woman's heart in turmoil.
The rest has a trance-like aura,
magical and well cntrolled. The
singing from every one in the cast
except Despina (who has a Teu-
tonic gutteral) is mellifluous and
miniature. Sometimes I wish Miss
Schwarzkopf would sing out like
Ina Souez (that singer of furious
temperament in the old Glynde-
bourne recording of this work).
But Angel records come in econo-
my priced packages, and are em-
inently worth the price.
The new recording of Don Gio-
vanni (on London) even with Ce-
sare Siepe has disappointed me.
The Don ought to have a lighter
voice - and I find that we listen
to the old Glyndebourne recording
oftener. It is better paced, even if
it is "Lo-fi."
OF THE piano concerti, which
seem to me the summit of both
Mozart's art and the art of the
concerto, any single one is fine
after Number 9. But the best seem
to me Numbers 19 (K. 459) 24
(K 491) and 25 (L. 503). Clara
Haskil plays Number 19 with a
gaity and aplomb which makes it
literally swing. The occasional
bits of melancholy in the slow
movement are touching in the
general tenor of quiet well-being.
The orchestral support is not all
it should be, but Miss Haskil com-
pensates for it all.
Number 24 is an amazing work
with a dark and dissonant begin-
ning. Paul Badura-Skoda's per-
formance seems to me to be all it
needs to be - dash and all.
Number 25 is probably my fa-
vorite, from the majestic military
opening in the orchestral tutti; the
way the piano in its first entrance
quietly sneaks up on the orches-
tra and the listener; to the flood
of lovely counter melodies that
fight to drown out the vulgar
rondo theme in the third move-
ment.
Here you have a choice between
the performances of Edwin Fisher
,with Josef Krips (HMV) and Gie-
seking with Rosbaud (Angel). The
former is a broader, more outward
perfomance; but Gieseking's is
*I think D. Tovey said this, but
if he didn't, he should have.
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October 7, 1956
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
Mozart -Anniversary
A Review of Some New and Old Recorded Wor
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
... Lo-Fi and fallen birthday offerings
no less effective even if it is small.
He makes the music tell in quieter
ways. Both are rewarding to listen
to: your decision can be made on
what is on the verso of the rec-
ord, and the price.
T HE Sinfonia Concertante are
usually lighter in character,
though akin to the concerti in
technique. There are at least two
examples in this form that war-
rant acquaintance. The lesser
wind soloists and an orchestral
tutti, variously numbered K. Anh.
9 or K. 297b. The performance by
French soloists on Oiseau Lyre is
exquisite in tone and sensitively
articulated. The work truly pleases
me, (and the record too, which
BEAUTIFUC SHOES WITH A MAD -TO-MEASURE
COLLEGE TOURS 1957
DURING SPRING VACATION
APRIL 5th to APRIL 14th
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Rate: $169.00 including roundtrip airtransportation, tax, hotel
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BERM UDA Rate: $276.00 including roundtrip airtransportation from De-
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etc.
Via Guest Airways Mexico Constellation service. Accommoda-
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M EXiCO Tropical in Acapulco.
Rate: $369.00 including roundtrip air transportation, hotel
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all breakfasts, all meals in Acapulco, all sightseeing and bull-
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BOERSMA TRARVEL ERIC
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