THERE HAS been an everlasting sad waste of energy in wrongly viewing twelve-tone music as satanic chaos perpetrated by diabolic madmen solely toward the death of music. It is true that the danger of Schoenberg's techniques is their elegant simplicity. In the hands of a master they can be a revelatory means to expression, while in the grip of an ordinary musical merchant they can depreciate into rococo pyrotechnics, vapid and uncommunicative. The calumny heaped upon Schoenberg is disgraceful. He sought not to create "modern" music but to allow music to speak her feelings in the modern war-blasted world. The bitterly ironic result of his lonely work or renewal was that his own works have been ignored while the refuse of his hack imitators has been sanctified in his name and thus established a tradition more constricting than that which be labored to break.

The radical post-war avant-grade split into those wishing to fulfill the logic of dense twelve-tone organization, represented by such composers as Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez, and those desiring to create music with the least possible constraints, represented by Cage and Stockhausen. The latter reacted against the old ghosts of Kingsor and Vienna, Wagner and Schoenberg himself. The new principle was that the legitimacy of music flows simply from the auditor's effort to feel sheer sounds. Music is the sensitized constancy of the world's masses. To borrow a term from language studies, music is mimetic; it imitates life as it strives to express it. In the music of chance, the craft of composition refers more to the preparation of the listener than to the formal organization of technical elements. The cry that chance music is anarchic is not obviously correct. There is no reason why chance music should be unidiomatic. The composer still has to choose the rules of the game, and choice is composition. Ideally, the effect of Cage's esthetic is to obliterate any distinction between the romantic notion of inspiration and drab exigencies of everyday life. Cage's music is in a sense everyone's music. It is the simplest possible realism.

But his leads into a problem. If music ultimately depends solely on the individual nervous system rather than patterns imposed by the composer, then music may reduce itself out of existence as an identifiable, separate art. The further extremity of Cage's esthetic of chance would eliminate Cage himself. The universality of the art would have been destroyed as well as all reasonable artistic communication, since that presupposes some conscious relation between at least two people. I suppose that the reason for anxiety over the death of music is that the avant-garde will lead unswervingly to solipsism, in which each sound in heard not in terms of itself, but in terms of oneself. In solipsistic art, there would be no style, only epiphanies. But the death of music seems impossible so long as there are sounds to be heard, minds to give them personal texture, and wills to give them meaning.

IV

THE AVANT-GARDE spirit is in the most general sense a reaffirmation of the sanctity of irreverence. Precisely because its challenges are so dramatic on one level and yet so familiar on another, it draws strength from an inescapable tradition. Igor Stravinsky, almost certainly the century's greatest composer and one who moved independently of the orthodox avant-garde, more a less stated this tradition in his Poetics of Music:

Tonal elements become music only by virtue of their being organized, and such organization presupposes a conscious human act. Music is a will giving shape.

Stravinsky himself, as well as the other non avant-garde master, Bela Bartok, was able to come to intellectual terms with the esthetic crisis of post-romantic music. Each one of Stravinsky's works, especially Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Symphony of Psalms, Agon, and the new Requiem Canticles, represents a new solution in considerably more traditional terms to the problems of contemporary musical speech. If the avant -garde chooses to ignore his principle, if it is possible to ignore it, then renewal will have become chaotic.

The quality of the conscious human act is something about which we should concerned. The fundamental purpose of the avant-garde esthetics, reeducation of mind and reinvigoration of sense, is pertinent to all of the plastic arts. Because of the grim market character of our hourly entertainment, we are having to struggle simply to hang onto our pathetically shrinking vocabulary for art. The avant-garde's attitudes have not yet ossified into a Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service. No calcine theosophy encircles it. It is healthy. It will remain healthy so long as it spurns pretensions to evangelicalism, insouciance, and absolute self-sufficiency. It is valuable only so long as it maintains both critical perspicacity and sensitivity to the deeper claims of humanity. Radical innovations should follow from personal expressive needs, and not from an hysterical desire to destroy the past. This is another way of saying that we can preserve, much less refine our sensibilities only so long as we are in dynamic possession of them. We lose something every time Nixon makes a speech, or a Vietnamese hamlet is secured, or a superhighway inaugurated, a tinderbox subdivision implanted. We gain something each time we walk around a garden, rediscover a color or notice a refraction, see a movie by Sternberg or Renoir, vivify a remembrance, or enjoy a great work of music. There is an intense beauty in moving among this America of sloths in the avantagarde's mood of incorruptible hostility.

The only certain value of an avant-garde is that it is a sign of fecundity. There apparently will be a long and agonizing interregnum between the act of separation and the new art which must inevitably follow. Hence the avant-garde deserves neither cultist celebration nor complacent denunciation. Someone in the future may conclude that it was purest fantasy, wantonness disguised as on act of faith. It may turn out to be only senescent romanticism. But we cannot envision that future. For the moment we might breathe and touch the things of our poor, sweaty, nervous present and consider that even a living illusion can be more valuable than a dead reality. The generic challenge to dullness is not an irritation but a moral obligation, not heroism but perhaps a duty of every life of any quality. To claim that the avant-garde as well as the musical art is irrelevant is to suffer from precisely the coldness which they seek to temper. It is the impossible balancing of the remains of inheritance and inheritors which lends a sturdy nobility to the labor of the modern voice of the avant-garde. In East Coker Eliot speaks of the disparity between the attempt at insight and the inevitable sense of failure:

That was a way of putting it--not very satisfactory.

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter ...

There is, it seems to us

At best, only a limited value