![\"Bach\"](\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/09\/Bach-214x300.jpg\")
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\u201cThank God for Bach<\/a> and Mozart<\/a>, anyway. They are a sort of common denominator in music,\u2014the two you can\u2019t argue about. \u00a0Beethoven<\/a>, Chopin<\/a>, Wagner<\/a>\u2014they give you an interpretation of music which you can accept or not as you like. \u00a0But Bach and Mozart give you music, not an attitude toward it. \u00a0If a man tells me that Beethoven or Brahms<\/a> leaves him cold, I can still talk with him. \u00a0But if he calls Bach dull and Mozart trivial I can\u2019t, not so much because I think he is a fool as because his idea of music is so remote from mine that we have nothing in common\u201d (The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp<\/em> 1:43.)<\/p>\n About Bach, Frye writes the day after his twentieth birthday: \u201cI have shelved the Temperamental Clavichord for a week or so in favor of the Three-Part Inventions. I have owned them for years and never realized it. The ones I am going after now are those in E minor, A major, B-flat major and C minor\u2014four of the loveliest little pieces I know. You should look at the B minor fugue in Book One of the W.T.C. [Well-Tempered Clavier] too. It\u2019s the longest of them all and covers the whole nineteenth century\u201d (ibid. 41)<\/p>\n \u201cMusic was the great area of emotional and imaginative discovery for me\u201d (Interview with Deanne Bogdan, see below)<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The letters between Frye and his girlfriend Helen Kemp in the early 1930s are filled with references to the music they are listening to and practicing: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Glinka<\/a>, Schubert<\/a>, Gluck<\/a>, and Brahms. \u00a0Kemp, who attended the Danard Conservatory, was considerably talented as a young musician herself.\u00a0 A reviewer of her first public recital (February 1929) wrote in the Toronto Daily Star<\/em> under the headline \u201cYoung Pianist Charms Large Audience with Varied Program\u201d that Kemp \u201cplayed with fire and conviction.\u201d\u00a0 She performed works by Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Goossens<\/a>, and Liszt<\/a>, and she played a Brahms trio with violinist Ruby Dennison and cellist Marcus Adeny.\u00a0 The Toronto Globe<\/em> pronounced her debut as \u201csuccessful.\u201d\u00a0 The following month she performed in Kitchener, Ontario, sharing the stage with the Kitchener-Waterloo Philharmonic Choir<\/a>.\u00a0 The reviewer for the Kitchener Daily Record <\/em>remarked <\/em>that \u201cwhile the choral work was of a high order, the evening\u2019s enjoyment would have been greatly lessened by the non-appearance of the assisting artists, Marcus Adeney, cellist, and Miss Helen Kemp, pianiste.\u201d\u00a0 During his first year at Oxford Frye foregoes the purchase of a typewriter in favor of a piano, which he has delivered to his Merton College room.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Frye\u2019s early musical training came at the hands of George Ross, organist at the Saint John\u2019s Presbyterian Church in Moncton.\u00a0 Frye reported to Ian Alexander that Ross, who had been a student of Sir Hubert Parry<\/a>, was \u201ca music teacher who had a tremendous influence on me, not so much from what he said or did but simply from the authority which he carried from knowing his subject.\u201d\u00a0 When Frye was sixteen he played several movements from Schubert\u2019s sonatas over WNRA, the radio station in Moncton.\u00a0\u00a0 His special interest was in piano music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.\u00a0 He was attracted to this music, he told Ian Alexander, \u201cbecause of the rather simplified, rather square-cut tunes. \u00a0The music expresses to me the kind of sanity which is the front entrance, so to speak, of a very profound serenity. \u00a0I have cultivated composers who are not as well-known or famous as Schubert, like Clementi<\/a> and Hummel<\/a> and Dussek<\/a>, because they seem to me to be eminently composers of sanity, which I find is very important in my general emotional stability.\u201d\u00a0 In an interview with Deanne Bogdan, Frye reported that \u201cthe night that my wife went into the hospital for a hysterectomy, I played 25 Clementi sonatas straight through.\u201d<\/p>\n I have been investigating Clementi–he really is a tremendous genius\u2011\u2011something of Mozart\u2019s polish and Scarlatti<\/a>\u2019s vigour held in solution. (Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp<\/em><\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Frye on Piano Playing (late 1980s):\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ve been resisting playing the piano for so long that I will perhaps never get any skill back.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know why, but instead of relaxation it\u2019s become a mechanism for churning up the gibbering monkey\u2019s recital of embarrassing memories.\u00a0 My adolescent interest in Classical music (I could never hear anything in popular music but an unpleasant noise) was obsessive, a reaction against Monctonian, parental, & school environments.\u00a0 I was never very good: my sense of rhythm was poor and I have always been too lazy (and weak) to play up to speed and volume.\u00a0 I had dreams of being a great composer but never worked at them as I worked at my writing.\u00a0 Why this furtive scurrying approach?\u00a0 Far worse, I can\u2019t play in public because the same gibbering monkey sits at my ear and says at intervals \u2018all right now, it\u2019s time for you to make a mistake.\u2019<\/p>\n I always really wanted it this way: I wanted to read everything and scurry over the top of the keys.\u00a0 This caused conflicts when I finally did take lessons.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been wondering recently if my relation to my brother had anything to do with it.\u00a0 He left some music\u2014I remember Mendelssohn<\/a>\u2019s Rondo Capriccioso and Raff<\/a>\u2019s Am Loreley-Fels\u2014which convinced me that he was a very able pianist.\u00a0 But perhaps he wasn\u2019t: perhaps he just bought them and didn\u2019t play them.\u00a0 Anyway, my mother\u2019s feeling that she had only one son and that I was a second-rate substitute for him (God provided the substitute, but God can be a pretty blundering fool in evangelical minds) may have affected me in some ways.\u00a0 Fortunately I was always too indolent & selfish to make silly efforts about it, trying to \u2018prove\u2019 myself and the like\u201d (The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 1:236\u20137).<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Some of the sources for Frye\u2019s ideas on music are:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 \u201cMusic in My Life,\u201d an interview with Ian Alexander in A World in a Grain of Sand<\/em> 269\u201379; rpt. in Interviews with Northrop Frye<\/em> 733\u201342.\u00a0 The six pieces Alexander plays during the course of this broadcast are:<\/p>\n Schubert\u2019s Impromptu<\/em>, opus 90, no. 1, in C Minor, played by Murray Perahia<\/p>\n Sullivan<\/a>\u2019s \u201cI am a courtier grave and serious\u201d from The Gondoliers<\/em>, Sir M. Sargent conducting the Pro Arte Orchestra<\/p>\n \u201cO Isis and Osiris, grant the spirit of wisdom to the new pair!\u201d from act 2 of Mozart\u2019s The <\/em>Magic Flute\u00b8<\/em> James Levine conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the<\/p>\n Vienna State Opera Chorus \u201cJerusalem,\u201d words by William Blake and music by Sir Hubert Parry, Alan Wicks directing the Choir of Canterbury Cathedral, the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, and organist David Flood<\/p>\n Clementi\u2019s sonata Didone Abbandonata<\/em>, opus 50, no. 3 in G Minor, played by pianist Lamar Crowson<\/p>\n Finale to act 3 of Verdi<\/a>\u2019s Falstaff<\/em>, played by The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 \u201cMoncton, Mentors, and Memories,\u201d an interview with Deanne Bogdan in Studies in Canadian Literature<\/em> 11 (Fall 1986): 246\u201369; rpt. in A World in a Grain of Sand<\/em> 323\u201341, and in Interviews with Northrop Frye<\/em> 790\u2013808.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 Two very early music reviews by Frye:\u00a0 \u201cBach Recital,\u201d Saturday Night<\/em> (30 November 1935): 8; rpt. in Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings<\/em> 188\u20139; and \u201cHart House Quartet.\u201d Saturday Night<\/em> (7 December 1935): 23; rpt. in ibid. <\/em>187\u20138.<\/p>\n 4. Section on Romantic music in \u201cRomanticism,\u201d in Northrop Frye\u2019s Student Essays<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 See part 3, pp. 53\u201365.\u00a0 A substantial portion of this section of Frye\u2019s essay appears in an unpublished paper, \u201cThe Social Significance of Music,\u201d which he presented on 10 February 1935, to a group in Toronto called the Society of Incompatibles.\u00a0 See also\u00a0 in Student Essays <\/em>\u201cThe Relation of Religion to the Art Forms of Music and Drama,\u201d where we get such remarks as this, written when Frye was 23: \u201cThe exhaustion of the possibilities of the chromatic scale in our in our own day makes it obvious that the rigidly conventionalized art forms of music based on this scale will break up and give place to something else.\u00a0 But as music is a group art form, this cannot be done theoretically: Schoenberg is a grim reminder of that fact.\u00a0 It cannot exist apart from a new and more cooperative form of society: and if we get that we shall assuredly get a new form of musical drama, as well as a renewed strength in religion, and the two things are bound to be associated.\u00a0 The ballet is perhaps our nearest approach as yet to this form.\u201d<\/p>\n 5.\u00a0 Three of Frye\u2019s notebooks on music (a) \u201cBaroque and Classical Composers\u201d\u2013\u2013a discussion of Mendelssohn, Schumann<\/a>, Haydn<\/a> (his \u201cfavorite composer\u201d), Beethoven, Mozart, Bach (Art of Fugue<\/em><\/a>: \u201cabsolute music\u201d; The Well\u2011Tempered Clavier<\/em><\/a>: \u201cpure thought\u201d), Purcell<\/a>, and numerous others; \u00a0(b) \u201cWilliam Byrd<\/a>,\u201d and (c) \u201cModal Harmony in Music.\u201d \u00a0These notebooks have been published in Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings<\/em> 159\u201387.<\/p>\n 6.\u00a0 \u201cThe World as Music and Idea in Wagner\u2019s Parsifal<\/em>,\u201d a paper presented to the Toronto Wagner Society, 27 October 1962.\u00a0 Published in Carleton Germanic Papers<\/em> 12 (1984): 37\u201349; rpt in Myth and Metaphor<\/em> 340\u201355, and in Northrop Frye\u2019s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries<\/em><\/a> 326\u201340.\u00a0 Frye\u2019s notes for this paper are in Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings <\/em>189\u201392.<\/p>\n