Word: scale
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...traditional twelve-tone scale, Paris' newspaper Le Figaro wondered, "exhausted to the point where a new tone scale should take its place?" Or was it still possible "to discover new expressions and new harmonies" inside the old scale? In short, had musical composition become "a problem of vocabulary or a problem of style?" Last week, after mailing questionnaires to French composers to find out, Le Figaro had some answers...
Only one of the composers who replied thought the traditional scale was all washed up. Wrote 79-year-old but still rebellious Florent Schmitt: "The end of our twelve-tone system is inevitable . . . It has been tortured to the point where it is now as barren as an old skeleton . . . We have to venture into new fields." His solution: an 18-tone scale, made of third-tone intervals instead of the usual half tones...
Shaggy Composer Arthur Honegger, one of France's best, violently disagreed: ". . . A new division of the tone scale . . . would [not] serve any useful purpose. Modern man is already surrounded by such a lot of continuous noise that [his] sense of hearing is beginning to suffer from it." But, he wrote, "this does not mean that it is impossible to say new things . . . Beethoven renewed music without adding a new chord, a new rhythm or a new melody not already employed by Bach, Haydn and Mozart...
Dutch Engineer Cornelis Pot, 64, arrived in Manhattan last week with a slightly different solution. For Pot, the old scale was still serviceable: the trouble lay in the way it was put to paper, with a confusion of sharps, flats and keys. In his Klavarscribo method ("marvelously simple, simply marvelous," says Pot happily), all of that is eliminated by indicating notes (and measures) on vertical lines that correspond to the keys of the piano, black notes for black keys, white for white...
Feike Feikema fits the large scale. His publishers think it relevant that he is 6 ft. 9 in. tall and the eldest of six brothers, all over 6 ft. 4. He has already written several sprawling novels of his native Sioux country which stirred the hayseed in many a city heart and established him as a prose bard of the tall corn. Now he plans a triple-decker to be called World's Wanderer, of which The Primitive is Part...