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Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time |  | Authors: Nicolas Slonimsky, Peter Schickele
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Seller: quietcornerct
Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 141287
Media: Paperback
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 039332009X
Dewey Decimal Number: 780.9
EAN: 9780393320091
ASIN: 039332009X
Publication Date: August 28, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"A supermarket tabloid of classical music criticism."--from the new foreword by Peter Schickele. A snakeful of critical venom aimed at the composers and the classics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Who wrote advanced cat music? What commonplace theme is very much like Yankee Doodle? Which composer is a scoundrel and a giftless bastard? What opera would His Satanic Majesty turn out? Whose name suggests fierce whiskers stained with vodka? And finally, what third movement begins with a dog howling at midnight, then imitates the regurgitations of the less-refined or lower-middle-class type of water-closet cistern, and ends with the cello reproducing the screech of an ungreased wheelbarrow? For the answers to these and other questions, readers need only consult the "Invecticon" at the back of this inspired book and then turn to the full passage, in all its vituperation. Among the eminent reviewers are George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Hans von Bulow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Hanslick, Olin Downes, Deems Taylor, Paul Rosenfeld, and Oscar Wilde. Itself a classic, this collection of nasty barbs about composers and their works, culled mostly from contemporaneous newspapers and magazines, makes for hilarious reading and belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves--or hates--classical music. With a new foreword by Peter Schickele ("P.D.Q. Bach").
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
 I Laughed! I Cried! I Played The Rites of Spring! September 13, 2009
Dawoud Kringle (New York City)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
When most people think of the world of classical music, they think of stuffy, staid, reserved, and often pompous people. This book shows that Slonimsky could throw water balloons at the whole genre that "should" be approached with "reverence" and get a good laugh.
And he does. No matter how you look at it, weather the reviewer was being pompous himself, or even if the composer deserved it (personally, I wouldn't mind if someone were to rake Offenbach over the coals), this collection does exactly what Slonimsky intended. It makes us laugh.
Mind you, I love classical music! I get just as much of a thrill listening to Beethoven as anyone, and Vaughn Williams is a personal favorite. But they were human beings, not demigods. They probably never took themselves as seriously as most of the classical music world does (except maybe Wagner). This book is a refreshing and welcome change from the stereotype attitude of a dusty, embalmed world of self-aggrandizing fops who take themselves way too seriously - and are getting what they deserve.
Lexicon of Musical Invective March 11, 2009
Nyal Williams (Muncie, IN United States)
Of interest to the most serious listeners of classical music. The author, Nicolas Slonimsky, was a composer, conductor, and author/editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and was the most thorough chaser after obscure biographical information ever known. This lexicon compiles spiteful reviews of music from the 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century. It is essentially a look at the music critic's mis-judgment of the new and innovative music of their time.
 Good to flip through for a chuckle at how wrong some critics ultimately proved to be February 11, 2008
Christopher Culver
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Nicolas Slonimsky's LEXICON OF MUSICAL INVECTIVE collects those critical reviews of composers from Beethoven's time which proved "biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgements". It's handily arranged in alphabetic order by composer, so while listening to, say, Bela Bartok's first piano concerto, you can amuse yourself with a 1928 review from the Cincinnati Enquirer:
"Mr. Bartok elected to play his composition dignified by the title Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra. Note the ommission of key. Ultra-moderns cannot be bothered with such trifling designations ... It has been said that the Concerto is based on folk tunes. They have been successfully concealed. Only tonal chaos arises from the diabolical employment of unrelated keys simultaneously."
A 1913 review from the Boston Journal manages to make unprophetic judgements about two composers in one go:
"For the most part the latest symphony [the Sibelius Fourth] from the pen of Finland's foremost composer is a tangle of the most dismal dissonances. It eclipses the saddest and sourest moments of Debussy."
In addition to these citations, Slonimsky offers his own analysis of critical tendencies in the opening essay "Non-Acceptance of the Familiar". To the elderly among the old critics, Slonimsky notes, new music always seems louder than what they are used to. They also often resorted to linguistic similes, comparing new music to "Chinese", a then-handy symbol of incomprehensibility. He gives some general anecdotes about the world of music reviewing, such as a Russian journalist writing a review on Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite" before the concert even took place--he was fired when the review appeared but the piece had actually be taken off the programme at the last minute. There's even an index of Invective, so if you want to find all reviews making use of the terms "Hideous", "Grunting", or even "Feeding Time at Zoo", you'll know which pages to turn to.
Though the work is entertaining, it's no essential addition to a home library. You can read it in an hour at your public or university library. Also, the work was never updated after 1965--it ends with the generation of Bartok, Webern, and Varese--and so those hoping to read invective against Boulez, Stockhausen and others won't find it here.
Great Fun May 6, 2004
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
The ill-informed and pompously long-winded "12x88" completely misses the point. It doesn't matter what Slonimsky says in the Forward - the content of the book is hugely entertaining and in many cases hilariously funny. And "12x88" doesn't seem to realise that a good deal of the most vituperative attacks on music came from other composers, frequently of equivalent eminence, so condemning or praising "critics" leads nowhere.
Also it is not clear the previous reviewer has any clear idea what he means by "atonal" music. Is aleatoric music, which may be "tonal" or not or beyond such classification, included ?
And what about much baroque music, that also creates little if any emotional involvement ?
 A book for people who require periodic comic relief with their serious music June 5, 2002
Joseph Schmolsky (Los Angeles)
13 out of 62 found this review helpful
The author seems to have believed, along with many Modern music fans and others in music education, that many music critics are ill equipped to make sound judgments on new music because they generally don't appreciate musical innovation.
The book reads like a browser: Anyone who finds novelty in reading a century old criticism of music that everyone knows turned out to be well regarded will find such humor here. There seems little substance in such an endeavor. So a critic didn't like a piece of music because it hurt their ears at the time. So what? So we've all heard the story of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" having been despised for its atonality, and many other similar tales. None of this is vital any longer. In fact, today we have the opposite problem: a culture of vanguard minded music educators, classical musicians and their brethren who disdain all music that is considered, in their view, over-played, overly commercial, simplistic, dated, cliche.
With a little research, anyone may discover the opposite of Slonimsky's findings: Within most tradition of artistic criticism lives a common prejudiced view against art that isn't innovative. This is especially true among today's commercial music critics. If you read around you'll discover that most music critics, and art critics in general, are involved in a campaign to rid the world of creations that are not original enough for their taste.
The worst result of this is found in how individuality becomes confused with originality. These two attributes are quite different. Yet, most intellect surrounding music carries the former vanguard attitude, which supplants individuality with the notion that academic innovation is better, ultimately discouraging emotion and the importance of subjective response.
Music does not, and should not, require high browed appreciation. It is, above all an art that seeks emotional responses from its audiences.
In Sam Morgenstern's classic 1956 anthology of composers' essays entitled "Composers on Music" (available here at Amazon) Dmitri Shostakovich panned a performance of a new composer's music citing how its innovation and academic versatility did not help it accomplish music worthwhile to the listener. He claimed that the composer was part of a trend in Modern music toward the vanguard, where the mantra of innovation subverts actual music talent.
The author was clearly serious in his discussion of music criticism. To deride my comment (A reader, above) for taking him seriously seems in error.
Maybe it's my Russian glands, but I never have a problem staying serious for long periods of time. There are people who regard this as mental illness. They are dullards, conformists pushing their own behavior on others. Schickele always struck me as someone of that ilk. It's not offensive to me if people make cheap fun of music and musicians, but it also seems pointlessly unnecessary, considering how much better humor there is to find elsewhere in the world. I think mainly this cheap music humor stuff is for college students who can't hack doing anything seriously for long periods of time.
The book is also popular among composers who've apparently been unfairly criticized and need to boost their self esteem by reading erroneous reviews of famously loved music. They needn't go so far, since every issue of Rolling Stone magazine has pans of popular music records, and all, of course in the name of innovation over.... what? My guess: envy is the motivation. "It's so fun to see the pretty ones fall."
Vanguards, along with the street smart ("the low spark of high-heeled boys") have a commonality: they all hate the beautiful and the popular. I've been outcasted by such conformist idiots as the most popular kids in school, but I don't let it turn me into a vanguard. Maybe this is because I was cute AND unpopular, disliked by both of these extreme sets.
-A reader- above says Baroque music is emotionless. Maybe to you, buddy. Let's take Bach, who's music is from an age that is similarly regarded as emotionless (as compared to Romantic, for example). Here's what I do to put emotion in Bach:
Much of J.S. Bach's music that's performed up to tempo tends to sound like an emotionless mechanization of 16th notes. You can listen to slower pieces by Bach, but why stop there? Some of the pieces that were meant to be played at a fast tempo contain favorite passages, so I pluck that passage out of the composition, say 4 bars of a three-part Invention, slow it way down, and then comes the tingling and the raised hairs. It can be sensual: over & over the same short, lovable passage is like being caressed.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
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