Eighty years have passed, and still no more than one fortieth part of A.C. Benson's 179-volume Diary has been published. But Members may be interested in this published excerpt containing his description of a Dolmetsch concert in 1913:

"We went to the Dolmetsch concert of ancient music in the hall. We sate in the gallery, behind Lady Braybrooke. The place was crowded with odd and faded undergraduates - from King's: the daïs full of strange, brightly-painted harpsichords. Dolmetsch, a man of sixty, a mass of grizzled hair, pointed beard, low collar: Mme. D. dressed as in a Medici picture: and a tall grim lady in a blue shawl, who sate gloomily in the background. . . .

"Dolmetsch showed his lutes and viols and talked on. 'The old people used to make music for themselves, in a room just such as this. Now we pay to hear noise; we do not hear music, it is noise we hear! What I am going to play to you is awfully beautiful, awfully simple, but really quite beyond the reach of the modern people.' He described the instruments . . . Then some odd tinkling things were played on virginals and lute - sounds as if one had shaken up a cage of mice and canaries together. . . . There were just one or two lovely things, a duet for two viols, a recorder solo; the rest was very barbarous, I thought. But the thing interested me - the strange pose, the unreal air of the whole, and yet the certainty that these odd creatures really lived in their absurd art - a curious mixture of admiration and despair, with a strong desire to giggle. It was all so real and yet so fanatical, as Dolmetsch glared over his recorder, or sate with his mop of hair tinkling on the virginals. Such an odd world to live in - it reminded me of Evelyn Innes. We went away after Part I, the absurdity of it being uppermost. The collection of people listening with grotesque earnestness to these very odd sounds, the deliberate antiquity of it all, the sweeping aside all the progress of the art - it interested me as a revival of what the old world called music - and the sense that they probably found the same emotions in it as we find in the new music. It is all a symbol, of course; but few people there understood that - they thought it was the thing itself which was beautiful. . . ."

Benson was so sound and sensible there, do not Members think? Experience has upon countless occasions shown us that his judgement is reliable. We love his references to the "barbarity" of the music, to Dolmetsch's "grotesque earnestness" and "absurd art," to the "sweeping aside of all the progress of the art," and especially to its being "all a symbol, of course - but people thought it was the thing itself which was beautiful."

No Syd, his 'review was very disappointing. The use of words like barbarity display ignorance. He has not discussed the authenticity and construction of the instruments. He has not allowed for the advancements in keyboard technology which gave modern instruments a different sound, not necessarily a superior sound. He should have made a list of the works and composers. The only thing I have learned about is Benson's ignorance.

John W

I can't help being tickled by Benson's amusing account of the Dolmetsch concert.  Around 2-3 months ago there was an edition of THE EARLY MUSIC SHOW in which Lucy Skeaping (herself the sister of two prominent gamba players) discussed the revival of the viola-da-gamba with Ian Gammie, one of Britain's foremost exponents....  In the course of the programme they unearthed a recording of the Dolmetsch Ensemble staggering through some fairly advanced consort work of the mid-1600's  (Gibbons, Locke, or someone of that generation).  Whilst one had to admire the achievement of reviving the instrument, having playable copies made, and teaching an ensemble to play them,  one had to agree that the performance was, in fact, diabolical  (identical phrases in a fantasia bowed differently by each player, wonky ensemble, one single level of dynamics, and - amazingly for a fretted instruments - some painful intonation).

Dolmetsch was a venerable pioneer, of course, and without him the revival of early music in an "HIP" environment would have gone much slower.  My first musical instrument, at the age of 8, was a Dolmetsch plastic recorder,  and in fact I still have a Dolmetsch instrument that even gets an outing now and then when volume is more important than timbre.  But there was something of the "Bunthorne" about him, and the story related by Skeaping of the way his children were tyrannised into learning instruments in which they had no interest, and then giving public concerts which left them hyperventilating with stage-fright, is certainly not a pretty one.

Somehow this strange cult-like background persisted in the "early music" world for decades, and a feature of Musica Reservata concerts was the bizarre array of kaftans and sandals that appeared onstage.  (The phenomenon also crossed the Atlantic - Noah Greenberg's concerts were apparently rather similar).

It's only been fairly recently that HIP performers have rejoined the rest of the musical fraternity spiritually - I think the first steps were the Munrow concerts, which were all in DJ and looked like "normal concerts" - and shaken-off the "lentil dip" image at last. 

What a poor piece of musical criticism we have been presented with for our approbation.  I am afraid I have to withhold mine.

We hear a great deal about the writer's subjective reaction to the music, the performance and the performers.  In fact, we hear most about the performers, their appearance and their demeanour on stage.  No special musical insight is needed to make such observations - a deaf man might have written them. 

As to the music and performance, we are presented with no objective information about it, merely the writer's subjective reaction to it.  Any fool can describe music he does not like as "barbarous" or "odd".  Perhaps the playing exhibited the features mentioned by Reiner - indifferent ensemble, poor bowing, sour intonation and a lack of expression.  Benson doesn't tell us.

He says it was all "a symbol".  What are we to suppose it was symbolic of?  What lazy writing this is!

As for the "grotesque earnestness" of the audience, the "deliberate antiquity of it all" and the "sweeping aside of all progress of the art", the same might be said today of any performance of the nineteenth century orchestral repertoire.

Alas, Mr Benson seems to have wasted his time in attending this concert.  Mr Grew has wasted ours in asking us to read Benson's vacuous review of it.

It appears that Mr A C Benson may have suffered from manic depression.  A condition common among geniuses, musicians, mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, dictators, critics, comedians, barbarians, grotesques, symbolists, absurd artists etc ........ and even members of this board ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_C_Benson

The causes and symptoms are many and varied, they are hard to pin down and you can't tell the doctors from the patients .... continued on page 20,821 of volume 179.
 

It is undeniable that a kind of authenticity was what Dolmetsch was after. And if we look at the original editions of Shakespeare we find a) many inconsistent spellings, and b) many grammatical "irregularities" - which to-day are seen as errors and would not be tolerated. Pages 295 to 316 of the "Shakespearian Grammar" of E. A. Abbott, D.D. (1879), are devoted entirely to the many irregularities, inconsistencies, and downright errors of this kind in Shakespeare. Dolmetsch our wily but sensitive little Frenchman with his pointed beard may well have intended in the interest of his kind of authenticity to introduce similar inconsistencies irregularities and errors into his performance of these pieces. He may have wanted perhaps to confuse his audience, to show them the irrelevance of their modern certainties and lust for consistency, if not actually to annoy them; perhaps indeed he has already managed to confuse this twenty-first century message-board audience with its twenty-first century mentality!

For some reason, I am reminded of the rather abstruse character of Salacious Crumb, the otherwise anonymous constant companion of Jabba the Hutt in George Lucas' "Return of the Jedi"...

A. Mr. Dough's contribution appears to be founded upon a misreading of our own. When we say that the irregularities to which we drew attention - irregularities of grammar not of spelling - are to-day seen as errors we mean of course that were some one to write them to-day it would be seen as erroneous. Mr. Dough appears to have misinterpreted us as saying that we of to-day see them as errors in seventeenth-century prose! Not so. No one has said that. It is a regrettable confusion of the general principle with the particular instance!

In fact we see no evidence of Mr. Dough's "lack of historical grounding" in the grand work of Dr. Abbott. On the contrary the very first words in his Introduction are these:

"Elizabethan English, on a superficial view, appears to present this great point of difference from the English of modern times, that in the former any irregularities whatever, whether in the formation of words or in the combination of words into sentences, are allowable. In the first place, almost any part of speech can be used as any other part of speech. . . "

In speaking of "errors" what we principally had in mind was this example:

       "Young Ferdinand whom they suppose is drown'd."

As Abbott points out, it is a confusion of the two constructions "Ferdinand who, they suppose, is drowned" and "Ferdinand whom they suppose to be drowned." It is clearly an error in modern English which is all we said.

In the pages to which we referred, Abbott lists a great many examples of irregularities under these headings:

 - Double Negative
 - Double Comparative and Superlative
 - Double Preposition
 - "Neither . . . nor" used like "both . . . and," followed by "not"
 - Confusion of two Constructions in Superlatives
 - Confusion of two Constructions with "whom" (already cited above)
 - Other confusions of two constructions
 - Confusion of Proximity
 - Implied nominative from participial phrases
 - The redundant Object
 - Construction changed by change of thought
 - Construction changed for clearness
 - Noun absolute
 - Redundant Pronoun
 - Foreign Idioms
 - Transposition of Adjectives
 - Transposition of Adjectival Phrases
 - Transposition of Adverbs
 - Transposition of Adverbial Expressions
 - Transposition of Article
 - Transpositions in Noun clauses containing two nouns connected by "of"
 - Transposition of Prepositions in Relative and other clauses
 - Transposition after Relative
 - Other Transpositions


But no one has done this; Mr. Dough has leaped to a misunderstanding, that is all.



B. We do not follow Mr. Dough's reference to a pronunciation "no-ting." The Oxford English Dictionary cites examples all the way back to the Laws of Hlothaer and Eadric in 685, nine hundred years before Shakespeare, and it has always been "thing" not "ting." Perhaps Mr. Dough is confusing some Old Frisian or Danish forms.

Dr. Abbott has a long section devoted to the many words which in Shakespeare's time were accented in a varying manner. Under the heading "nothing" he cites this line from Richard the Third:

       "And I' | nothíng | to báck | my suit | at all."

This too conflicts - in a second way - with Mr. Dough's "nóting."


C. In summary then we gain the impression that there is at bottom general agreement among the good Dr. Abbott, the authors of replies 11 and 13, and ourselves in respect to the possible admission of latitude into Dolmetsch's performances. Let us rejoice thereover!