FLURRIES

Rob Stone

’Coy Teloi’, an essay about radios, architecture and uncertainty, was published in the Journal of Visual Culture in 2001.

But, how many things do we engage in without being certain? Lucien Goldmann

The narrative complication that keeps the lovers apart for ninety minutes will have to go down as the most flimsily prolonged romantic misunderstanding of the season. Andre Sennwald

i. Jollity, Intimacy (The Theoretical Structure of Loneliness) There are fascinations in this charged depiction of suburban listening (fig. 1). Even though it is clearly staged for commercial purposes, there appears to be a kind of coy romance in this image of prim attention to a score and a radiogram. This, or else some malevolence: looming, barely supressed. Or, in fact, anything else one may care to bring to it. This is an image of aural-architectural domesticity that could be said to be baroque – emotionally promiscuous in what it may contain. Produced in 1936, as part of an advertising campaign for Imhof radiograms, it turned up variously in the popular press. It is to be found in the more specialist publications of the period, like Novello’s Musical Times, Compton MacKenzie’s The Gramophone and Jack Payne’s Popular Music and Dancing Weekly. It was seen in The Listener and the Radio Times, produced by the BBC, and in the dailies. It circulated widely, and because of what it may represent as a fledgling or already established relationship, one whose details may not have borne too public a scrutiny, it is an image posessed of a kind of revealing ambiguity. Stanley Cavell, has hinted at a way of engaging with it.

Fred Astaire’s very specific way with cigarettes is well-known. With an unbuttoned insouciance, as the de-stressed, tinily acoustic preliminary to leaping off to rhythmically measure a room with his tapping feet, he goes to take a final draw, considers what he holds, drops it to the floor, places a toe on it. The ambition of Stanley Cavell’s book The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, is to describe a role for cinema in presenting what he referred to as the “reality of the unsayable”. In it, he directs quite startlingly, and in a fraction of a sentence, to an ordinary fact. In his dance routines, frequently Fred Astaire hesitates. He does so rhetorically, and in so doing presents a sense of heartbroken dejectedness. In the choreographic triumphs that Hermes Pan worked out with Fred and Ginger, those from the period of 1936-7, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time and Shall We Dance, Astaire’s characters are taken to the very thresholds of amorous and personal fulfilment, completion. But, at that very threshold all the woes and insufficiencies of Hollywood machismo are suddenly, painfully and in a wistful delight, contained in an agonising and defeating pause. Just as he reaches shyly to place a hand on Ginger Roger’s shoulder, to request a kiss or make some remarkable remark, the doubts and denials compile, and Fred turns away, only to rally; to turn and try again. But, no, such simply found romantic happiness is not for him. Later, perhaps. For now, some hurried banality or other more obviously available preoccupation will provide cover. One narrative characteristics of many of the films in which he appeared is that it is only by perfidious chance that Fred is kept from his desires. Equally, it is only by chance that he is eventually he allowed them. His characters frequently represent timidity, for all sorts of perfectly good, circumstantial reasons, and a failure of agency. For one view of intention, Fred could not better describe the distractions of Imhof’s listening man.

The subject, as it were, of uncertainty, has become an illuminating mechanism for those interested in history; whether it be of film, or music or architecture. Suspicions, dubious irresolutions, indecidability and the utopics of intangibility, imperceptibility; all have helped shape the recent conventions of historical accounting for cultural forms. What follows here, concerns the articulation of the historical variousness, complexity and uncertainty of Modern, suburban temporality in Britain in the 1930s. In part, it is a historiographical inquiry, one which broaches the likeliness of particular audiences for the writing of ‘Modernist’ cultural history, as well as the role of those, definably suburban, audiences in organizing varieties of significance for such histories. As an inquiry, it concerns the technical abilities of these mooted audiences to think about and between architectural and musical forms, as well as prevailing kinds of historical narrative convention, and acceptable directions of architectural discourse.

ii. Weak on the Weak Beat Nikolaus Pevsner’s account of the ontogenesis of the preferred compositional forms of architectural modernity, The Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936), is probably his best-known work. It could be readily read against another, contemporary and equally pedagogically influential work: Arnold Schoenberg’s Fundamentals of Musical Composition. These books, their subjects and their products may seem rather indigestible to each other. However, they do seem to share attitudes towards the historical emergence of Modernist aesthetic and cultural forms, as well as towards their critical interpretation and furtherance. Amongst concerns with vernacularity and other issues, they both broach the cultural historical significance of omissibility as a founding, Modernist aesthetic principle. They both also present arresting images of time and of temporal development. Moreover, when Schoenberg, for example, came to discuss the traditions of applied, ornamental musical metre, he castigated it by likening it metaphorically to the fraudulent and imitatively incohering deceits of the master-builder’s stucco-work. One can almost hear Pevsner’s applause at the idea. These commonalities are only illustrative, here, of the kinds of shared issues that lay between musical and architectural discourses in the 1930s; the heroic moment of both Modernist cultural emergence, and the formative accounts of its understanding.

The contemporary audience to Nikolaus Pevsner’s arguments, may not have had Schoenberg in mind when reading The Pioneers of the Modern Movement, or any of Pevsner’s other and various articles which appeared in The Listener or in The Radio Times, and elsewhere then. Importantly too, they may or may not have had in mind the rude and reductive alien that was later coined as the reputation of his intellectual probity by other architectural commentators, at the time. John Betjeman, for example. Betjeman, the poet-proponent of an affected, choleric, studiously disenfranchised, conservative and offendably English masculinity, presented his own amateur elegism as the preferred subjective platform for the interpretation of architecture. He had a poisonous affection for the idea of a professionally unsentimental and proscriptive ‘Herr-Professor-Doktor’, a foreign and scientific anybody who “wrote everything down for us, sometimes throwing in some hurried pontificating too, so we need never bother to think or see again”. Pevsner’s larger audience, on the other hand, many of whom, incidentally, may have been in no great hurry to see themselves too clearly written into what Betjeman saw as the bland convulsiveness of Modernity either, could have known and preferred Pevsner’s poetic way with the Modern. If they held him in their thoughts at all, they may have known and preferred exactly the kind of inexplicit suggestiveness that characterises his writing; and which Betjeman helped to obscure. Such audiences may have known and preferred his legibly differentiated, overlain and dissonantly allegorical, architectural temporalities. More importantly, whilst Schoenberg mayn’t have figured for them, though the possibility remains that he could have, Pevsner’s audiences may still have known and preferred him and his interpretative devices, musically. The picture of a suburban listenership as a culturally and historically specific, mediating constituency, a kind of inconstant constituency of those who were ‘most dependent on and welcoming of radio’, is necessary here; one might almost say functional .

Whilst Schoenberg had things to say about the place of the sentence in the expectation-confounding, unsymmetrical, prosodic structure of modern music and the technology of its criticism, it should be noted too that the poet, Robert Frost, also oncepresented an abstractly aural basis for critical evaluation. Frost wrote that the most important thing that he knew was that good readers and good writers read and write with an ear. Each sentence, he said, has a sound, a sentence-sound. Words, as other sounds, may be strung along it. It is an intriguing idea, a kind of suggested though also apparent sound; and one simultaneously comprised in, but not constituted by, other, perhaps contrapuntal, and in any case, different sounds: words.

Frost didn’t seem to imply an attempt to foist some personal mode of critical mysticism by this notion of the carriage of poetry. It was presented simply: more in the way of a newly regardable, material fact of literature. He said that there were different kinds of sentence-sounds; some common, some mundane, some banal. Some, however, could articulate spontaneity, uniqueness or some recognizably genuine authenticity, one uncompromised by lazily formal academicism. Certain sentence-sounds, then, may convince of the revelation of something hitherto inarticulable by writing’s competence. The more striking the sentence-sound, the more estimable the writer, Frost proposed. It is possible that he took this strikingness to be some kind of autographic guarantee, something caught up in a fetishism of personal and formally unique expression. To think so would be a pity. His conceit, with some ill-will, can also be understood as formalist fogging, but that need not be necessary, either. In fact, Frost was quite clear in his opinion that no writer can legitimately lay claim to the invention of these sentence-sounds. It should be a plebiscitary and representative sound, then. In this, as with other, apparently Modernist critics at the time, he indicated that he sought the anonymous and current vernacular as the locus of good design.

Most arresting in what Frost had to say about the audibility of sentence-sounds is that this is not a matter of rude, acoustically perceptible facts. Sentence-sounds, as he understood them, evaporate literally at the tip of the tongue. They are heard better than they are spoken. And, what he referred to as ‘oral practice’ simply pushes this sound away. This figuration raises a noetic issue concerning the nature of abstract hearing that is bound to reading. Frost’s sentence-sound is conceptual. Though prompted by words, it neither inhabits the same interpretative world as vulgar semantics, nor may it be isolated for general inspection by physical acoustics. It may be dreamed.

The idea of a sound that is physically intangible, sound, if you like, conceived figurally from outset to end, occurs frequently in suggestive commentaries on the way that poetry might make meaning beyond the simple assemblage of words. Often and importantly, as is the case with T.S. Eliot, the figured sound is connected to some consideration of the way that a history may be seen to emerge musically. Both in a text, that is to say, in the posed formal internal history of a discrete work; and in a culture, in a desire to present some observable and imaginable tradition or development.5 A poetic concern with rhythm could be useful, then, in developing different perceptions of contiguity and inconsequence in argued historical meaning. Attention to figured sound could promote the recognition of different types of interpretative agency that could amount to a syncopation of history.

A conception of the acoustic figures of (architectural) history derived from poetry and its criticism is not exactly elite; it is only the thirstily self-promoting Eliot we are talking, about after all. It is certainly an aetiolated one, however. A perhaps more likely set of resources reached for by a suburban audience in attempting to grasp the nature of the aural, as well as architectural cultural landscape that they inhabited, were different. And, it is to these more informally articulated pedagogies, such those already mentioned, that we shall more properly turn. Any of a number of dance music magazines and any of a number of introductory guides to the appreciation of the classical orchestral and choral repertoire, were more familiar to these suburban audiences. This audience gleaned what perceptions it may have had of parsable metrical dissonance from here. Exactly this more popular literature, as we’ll see, provided access to formal ideas of the apprehension of metre and rhythm in relation to the greater argumentative design of a text as a whole. Notions of discrete and differentiated rhythms over-laying one another and causing such effects as structural ambiguity and imbroglio, or metrical feints were available, too. And, there was a recognized possibility of implied contrapuntal argument, and the intriguing theme of revenant or accompanying voices. It is a richly imaginative literature.

In 1936, H.H. Wintersgill published a rather beautiful short study, whose observations are in some ways quite valid today. Entitled ‘Handel’s Two-Length Bar’, its subject was the most characteristic of Handel’s style; his use of the hemiola; the distribution of three beats over two measures in triple metre. In the context of the leading characters here, it is interesting to note that he also made much both of the fact of Handel’s presence as a German in England, and of the apparent Englishness of the hemiola. Wintersgill’s essay was published at a time when many writers were attempting to similarly detail profound historical mutualities in English and German culture. This was a minor literary genre to which Nikolaus Pevsner himself contributed.

I’ll be clearer about the meaning of the hemiola, and, initially at least, try to treat it in ways apart from those that have caught it up in Wintersgill’s early national cultural wonderings. Musicology is a discipline possessed of a rich diversity of abstract figurations of history. For some species of musicology, the history of music might mean a particularly observed account of a particular tradition: from Bach, or Beethoven, or Korngold, or whoever. A detailed history of a specific piece of music, however, might just as easily be something aiming to record the social, cultural and technical circumstances of its production. To speak of a piece’s history, might mean to refer to the curriculum vitae of its reworkings, performances, recordings, editions, interpretations and criticisms. Each of these versions of anecdotal history is, however, largely supplemental to the requirements and ambitions of analytical musicology.

A piece of music is also understood to have an internal history or, rather, several potential internal histories. This history concerns the teleological statement and development of its subjects, strophes, motives and other components; its telemes. It is this view of musical history that provides the cherished object of formal, analytical musicology. This history is abstract and also, as indicated, considered largely without significant regard to the possible, extra-musical, social interpretations that may be made from it. It supposes a synthetic, specifically musical temporality; one which is comprised dually of the durative experience of the unfolding music and in an instantaneous view of its entirety. Quite score bound, even sentimental senses of historical emotional witness are rejected by it. The technology of conceptual language that has been used to articulate the astonishing variety and complexities of these internal histories, whilst for some a relic, is nevertheless remarkably accomplished. There are moments in the internal history of a piece of music that may be taken to articulate and define the nature of that specific musical-historical process. The hemiola can be construed as one of these. As a specific metrical device, a hemiola is effected by establishing specific metres and unexpectedly de-stressing a particular accent. This precipitates a kind of crisis in the perception of continuing or emergent rhythm. The effect is often regarded as a sudden slipperiness or cloudiness or, paradoxically, an uncontrollably tumbling, forward motion, together with a sense of stasis. Terms such as imbroglio, double-entendre, anacrusis, ambiguity, slyness, surreptitiousness, deceptiveness, incongruence, ungraspability, confusion, instability and enigma have all been used to describe its manner. The literature on the hemiola is struck through with accounts of its irresolving effects. It has been explained as a ‘dislocation of the metrical surface’ of the music. This dislocation is something that might be thought itself to figure the idea of the surface of the music in the first instance, and to figure it as a result of articulating, in the same disclosing gesture, the eddying confluence of other, perhaps larger currents moving beneath. It is a rhetorical device, and one that is technically dependent, in part, on the musical-textual (or other) entrainment of the listener towards a particular metrical expectation, and the confounding of it. As important as the fact that it is regarded as a significant element of the English Baroque, is the fact that it will evince on a score, but not necessarily acoustically. The point about the observable manifestation of a hemiola is precisely located in its cultural circumstances. Hemiolas are sometimes awkward to achieve technically. Moreover, they don’t always present themselves entirely frankly on a score sheet; as the recent literature has focused on. Hemiolas may be implied, they may overlap, they may result as an effect of large, architectural, extensively hypermetrical concerns or as a local detail of applied ornament. The interpretative and perceptual skill of the conductor is as important as the proficiency of the players in the successful articulation of the hemiola. Technologically they are often difficult to apprehend, too. Lousy concert hall acoustics can lose them. And, since the pertinent rhythmic components may be carried in one part of the overall dynamic range of the sound picture, and in another, it follows that poor recording, broadcasting or reproduction technology may easily lose a crucial detail and, with it, the fugitive hemiolic effect, altogether. The issue of expectation entailed here is of particular concern. The structure of a hemiola is such that in order to be usefully and pleasurably upset by the lifting of an expected beat, the listener must feel sympathetically entrained. This entrainment can only be grasped through attention to an overt (or syncopated) establishment of a principal metre. It should be noted that much musical meaning may be generated by the labour involved in simply ascertaining a principal metre in any given piece of music. As a corollary, inattention or, importantly, the differing construal of a principal metre, can mean that hemiolic effects will be either missed, or, rather more interestingly, even found where they have not been intentionally structured. This is an issue of the physiology of rhythmic cognition, but the point has also been made that such perceptions are in no way universal and are in fact thoroughly encultured. It may be perfectly possible to hear a hemiolic effect, yet simply fail to lend it any significant inflection through being culturally unaware of the likelihood of such an acoustic event representing a legitimate compositional feature in the narrative/philosophical organization of Western music. One further point is that entrainment may be effected in relatively localized metrical details, but it also implicitly involves the whole of the work. One might say much of the canon of Western orchestral and choral music, as it is these that work towards a listener’s propensity to attempt to establish an identifiable principal metre. It seems, then, that within the structure and dispersal of the hemiola, there is the suggestion of an always ambiguous and, even when discernible, enigmatic moment. This is comprised in the understanding of the confluence of differentiated historical, self-consistent, narrative metres as a completely contingent, but nevertheless legitimate, articulation of contradictions in the development of the internally historical, thematic materials of a piece of music. The hemiolic event may be recognizable, or not. It may be recognized as one thing, or another. It is entirely uncertain. As an historiographical morphology, however, the hemiola is compellingly suggestive and might tell something of the sentence-sound of Nikolaus Pevsner.

iv. Pevsner’s Pedals It is worth remarking on the degree of rhetorical certainty that surrounds apprehensions of Pevsner’s Modernist intentions. The main cognitive part of his influential model of architectural history is founded on the speciations he introduced. That influence comes with a burden, however, and Pevsner has been regarded as aggressive, singularizing and proselyte, unafraid to distort a historical picture, through omissions and weighted interpretations, in order to promote a model of the correct forms and ambitions of Modern architecture. Such malicious questioning of Pevsnerian scruples has been a popular British cultural pursuit for something more than 60 years. What could be its basis? Much as in the same way that Schoenberg is thought to have argued for the natural inevitability of the kind of musical methodology that he proposed, so Pevsner is said to have argued for a particular architecture to be both the inexorable necessity and the summum bonum of a Modern historical epoch. Of many arguments that he proposed, concerning many architectures, for most Pevsner’s sustained voice is the one that places the architecture of Walter Gropius exemplarily at the beginning of a Modern tradition. In The Pioneers of the Modern Movement, he has Gropius’s factory building, of 1911 at Anfeld am der Leine, as the archetype of the true and appropriate, international architecture of the Modern period. This kind of presentation of an instant of German culture as the corporealization of an imagined international zeitgeist is familiarly Hegelian, and has something of an integrationist and étatist aspect to it. In this historicist manner, Pevsner provided a lineage for Gropius’s architecture, which many have seen as a selective and brutal reduction of a diversity of instances of architecture and design to a single, functionalist nisus.7 His perception of the frank expression of materials and structural features, and the single-mindedly resolute organization of space in Gropius’s factory is understood to commit all those preceding, and diverging examples of architectural detail, texture and structure that he evidentially conjures, to the status of mere photographic telemes, whose sole historical existence, whose entelechy, as it were, is only to occupy necessary places in the description of the emergence of Gropius’s buildings. But, the rhemic subtleties of Pevsner’s text are rather more resistant to summary than this.

In some senses, it isn’t surprising at all that Pevsner should be thought of as pursuing a monothematic historical agenda. At times, he drew himself as a proponent of a particular and increasingly widely read variety of historical semiotics, Panofskyan iconology. The method of this tripartite analytical approach is described thus: first, the identification of different kinds of signifier in any given cultural artefact from any supposed historical epoch (a drawing by Michelangelo, for instance). Second, the iconographical ascription of those signs to one or other stories or allegories available at the time, as a preliminary interpretative ground. Third, the iconological ascription of the sign, through its narrative referent, to a personification of the world-view of an epoch, ‘qualified by one personality and condensed into one work’. It is this that presents the true, principal metre against which all else gains its character, its sense, or its anomalous non-sense. For Panofsky’s system of historical personalizations, Michelangelo was the person who characterized the Baroque, and characterized it as the emergence into the Modern period. It is interesting to note that where Pevsner made his clearest public alliance with that image of the moment of presumed singularization of Modern historical perspective, was in an article on the Baroque published in 1928. This was at just the time when he was involved in the research that led to his 1930 lectures at Göttingen University on Modern design, which contained the arguments of The Pioneers; and which supplied Gropius as the character of Modernity.. Approving of Panofsky’s method, he countenanced the idea of the characterization of the Baroque and the characterization of the Modern simultaneously.

When it comes to the resolution of The Pioneers, things are not as clear as they may seem from all of this iconologizing context. Even the most schematic précis will recognize that Pevsner’s text is structured by at least three reprising strophes. There is a Corbusian notion of engineering design conceived of as problem-solving and founded in an unsullied ignorance of cosmetics. There is one sponsored by the use of vernacular, English domestic idioms in a remedial relation to German industrial design, pace Walter Rathenau and Hermann Muthesius. The third is a figuration of the enablement of Modern innovation through descriptions of breakthroughs in materials science; advances in concrete technology, etc. These strophic burdens may be thought as the different conceptual metres of the text. Representing discrete and differentiated historical speeds and evennesses of emergence, they are used to introduce the wide variety of Pevsner’s historical examples. They reprise and intersect with each other at points and, at those points, Pevsner is able to make specific, significant remarks.

Which of these many remarks actually qualify as the significant remarks, depends on the decisions made by the reader of the text, part cued and part extraneous, as to the structural vraisemblance of the narrative. This is because, aside from being a Functionalist tract, it is easily possible to read The Pioneers as an anti-fascist, pro-Weimar allegory. Suspicions of socialism in Pevsner’s thought aren’t groundless, and the subtitle of the book is, after all, ‘William Morris to Walter Gropius’. This might all be a little more personal, however. Pevsner left Germany in 1934 and secured a research position in Birmingham, where he drew together the arguments for The Pioneers. It is also, incidentally, here where, fellow Baroque historian Ellis Waterhouse was working at the time; and it should be noted that Pevsner was later, as editor, to commission Waterhouse, with who he publicly disagreed at times, to write Painting in Britain 1530-1790, for the monumental Pelican History of Art series. Pevsner’s family didn’t manage to get out of Germany until 1937. It may be that, sensitive to the situation of his family, Pevsner felt the need to allegorize any discontent with Nazism. It is certain that no Modern credence is lent The Pioneers to classical architectural modes, the favoured civic vernacular of National Socialism. For Pevsner, iconologically, it was the culture of the Weimar Republic that produced Gropius and the Bauhaus, and not that of the Third Reich.

There is more. Pevsner is thought to have changed his religious affiliations at least once during his life, converting from Judaism to Lutheranism at the behest of his wife. This may mean anything: a profound fideistic change or a domestic comfort or prudence in the face of terrific persecution. It could mean all of these things, some or none. It depends. This is, nevertheless, a consideration that throws The Pioneers into a further light. A theological dimension, and the possibility of Pevsner’s relative diffidence towards the spiritual, over the intellectual aspects of it, bears influentially on the way that the identifiable strophes of the text structure the teloi of the argument. If it is viewed solely as a resolution of our trivia of differentiated historical metres, in the singular image of Gropius’s factory, then the dénouement of The Pioneers is a curious affair.

The passage, for instance, where Pevsner finally heralds Gropius’s work, is couched in the terms of pre-Modern, Catholic traditions of architecture. He offered 13th-century Gothic precedent. ‘Never since the Sainte-Chapelle and the choir at Beauvais had the human art of building been so triumphant over matter’ (Pevsner, 1936b: 206). The potential for such theological suggestions is great. The term functionalism is something that has a notable presence in developments of Gothic Revival aesthetics in Europe in the 19th century, anyway, and Pevsner could also have meant to conjure a Modern and secularized form of Guild Socialism. As possibilities, these are more or less orthodoxies. He may also have wanted to suggest a mystical, alogical or divine character for Gropius’s work. As one such paradoxical remark amongst many, his comment is odd because the more energetically Pevsner goes on to disallow a spiritual dimension to his conclusions, the stronger that suggestion fixes.

Despite the fact that it is worth noting that, at various points, especially in his studies of the Baroque, he was interested in the manner of the public articulation of inner spiritual life, there is little point in psycho-biographically insisting here that any of this is evidence of Pevsner feeling his way towards a critical mysticism and a Catholic God. There is, however, the possibility that within the framework of a perfectly reasonable and respectable, secular academic interest in Catholicism as the defining nexus of philosophies that he and others saw as founding the European cultural forms that he chose to study, Pevsner may have developed a set of allusions which allowed him to articulate a kind of sympathy with dissenting cultures. His primary academic interest was, as suggested, in the study of the Baroque, which in Britain anyway was then considered a dissenting and insultable culture, and he was more specifically interested in the Catholic cultures of southern Germany, which at the time of his writing appeared to be both coming under the threat of the Third Reich, and making its accommodations with it. This rather unfamiliar way of understanding his cultural commentary on Modern architecture is defensible. However, its defensibility depends on a view regarding whether or not, in The Pioneers, a text that is generally considered of exemplary, severe and assertive clarity, Pevsner desired somehow to preserve a sense of mysterious irresolution. Such a view would depend on a form of readerly re-entrainment concerning his supposed polemic interests. It would suggest a kind of overly sophisticated, shall we say Baroque, allegoresis. But, the implication of a kind of intellectual sympathy towards Catholicism on Pevsner’s part might also make a kind of social and cultural sense, especially to the audiences of more widespread varieties of popular culture in Britain.

v. Pseudonomy So there is still further context, context which more fully reintroduces the interpretative abilities of an imagined suburban audience to Pevsner’s writing on architectural modernism. Elsewhere, I have attempted to locate The Pioneers in a different popular context: that of the most pronounced feature of landscape of the period; crime fiction, the Golden Age of the English murder. Normative systems for crime narratives were legislated for by such professional mutual interest organizations as the Detection Club of London, at this time. These rules established the grounds for a contract that sought to deter writers from making fools of their readers. They legislated over the revelation of evidence, disallowed certain late-in-the-day appearances by supernaturally gifted characters and demanded a clear resolution of the mystery in the closing sections. They treated the examination of murder syllogistically, like a conundrum. The rigorous, near-Thomist logic presented an idea of a text that may be legitimately resolved in only one way. Practice, however, confounded theory. In fact, many of the writers in this circle consciously went out of their way to break those rules that they were party to the agreement to. G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries are the clearest examples of texts that provide resolutions tenable only if some point of Catholic faith is accepted.

I suggested that the nature of this Modern literary contract between readers and writers was also a suburban one. Crime fiction was one of the literary staples for new, suburban, commuting audiences. The idea of a suburban population suspicious of transient visitors to their new urban environments is an attractive one, too. So, the crime novel, even in its strictest, ‘locked room’ form, meant more than just a teaser, entertainingly resolved, or irresolved. An audience to Pevsner’s The Pioneers may have already been highly skilled in reading for imbroglio and irresolution in texts teleologically composed of unfolding evidences. They may have been suspicious in their interpretations and have tended towards holding probationary attitudes to any too glib a concluding gesture. It would be possibly too deterministic to insist that these people had mortgages and, therefore, complex, historically subjective investments in teleological closure. But the crime novel may have provided a mechanism whereby, in their diversity, members of a suburban readership could have read themselves into and out of the tangible instabilities of an international, economic and cultural Modernity which periodically appeared to threaten the tenability of their newly, and only partially secured, roles as members of a nascent, property-holding, popular democracy.

This all suggests something that brings into relation aspects of relict Catholic culture, articulations of Modernity, different social habits and rituals, different creative-cognitive enigmas in popular literary forms and an understanding of a suburban audience as something that was entirely coy about itself and its romantic place in Modern culture. Whilst this supplies a way of reading that may have been taken to The Pioneers, you will notice that a biography of Nikolaus Pevsner’s authorial intentions, no matter how compellingly appealing, could barely figure at all in such a reading, let alone decisively.

You may never guess it, but despite his hard urban reputation, Pevsner was rather interested in private, suburban architectures. The idea of a suburban location for Modern domestic architecture is no surprise. It is often noted that, where they did exist as more than paper proposals, much of the Modern architecture of the 1920s and 1930s existed mainly in isolation on the private estates of individual patrons and in the suburbs of Europe’s major cities. Nevertheless, aside from these episodic occurrences of Modernist adventure, Pevsner took time and care over other architectural forms of suburban domesticity. He eventually used his editorship of The Architectural Review, the crusading journal of architectural Modernism in Britain in the 1930s, to exercise his surreptitious interest. The Review published a series of articles, entitled ‘Treasure Hunts’, in which the historian Peter F.R. Donner maintained a celebratory account of his ongoing researches into suburban building types. He itemized ideal porches and chimneys, mullions and gables, even the special flora and street furniture of suburbia. He spotted Caroline and Georgian features. He watched for Italianate and other national influences, and he assembled them loosely under the headline of an attempt to divine a Coburg-Windsor idiom; one appropriate to the age. This turned out to be a fragmentedly eclectic, contemporary national style, a consensual language of romantic individualism.

These suburban inquiries were noted by such an internationally eminent promoter of the formal appreciation of European Modernism as Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who knowingly recommended the example of ‘Mr. Donner’s little exercises in the London suburbs’, especially to those interested in the development of national and regional architectural forms. Hitchcock’s archness, and his deviation from what has come to be expected of apologists for the Modern European architectures of the 1920s and 1930s, may be explainable by the fact that Peter F.R. Donner was Pevsner’s own pseudonym. He seems to have borrowed it from the German Baroque civic sculptor, Georg Donner, whom, at that time, he thought simply the best visual artist that there had been. It may be possible to suggest that wilfully, and against the general impression of his reputation as a Modernist historian, Pevsner made some kind of shy address to the subjects of a usually vilified concept of a suburban architecture, and did so through autobiographic identifications with the idea of the Baroque.

This bears directly on The Pioneers. As Donner, Pevsner made a Modern plea for domestic historical eclecticism. Again, given the kinds of imbroglios we can now find in Pevsner’s workings, this could mean the confluence of many things at once. One of these things is a faith in the approach to culture argued for by aesthetician of the Picturesque and favoured theorist of Pevsner’s, Richard Payne Knight. Over the years up to 1942, the connoisseurial, associative principles of the Picturesque, which Pevsner played a great part in elaborating and bringing to a wider attention, came to intrigue him more and more. Viewed from this perspective, The Pioneers seems less interested in Gropius’s Functionalism and more concerned with shaping the image of Modern architecture around the domestic, suburban historical eclecticisms of the architect Richard Norman Shaw; someone who occupies a rather privileged place in the text of the book.

This seems to indicate a preferred mode of architectural interpretation on Pevsner’s part, one based on a knowing and informed game of historical association and allegorization, played with the textures, details and plausible symbolisms of architecture. Here the architectural object is never thought to mean just one thing, its meaning never static; historical and intellectual sophistication is the rule. This is something that may quite radically complexify the meaning of Pevsner’s Modernist teloi, but it still doesn’t justify any insistence that Baroque devices like hemiolas organize them. For that to make any sense, there needs to be some further kind of agency.

vi. Klang (The sound of music) Until now, I’ve only suggested the noetic significance of phantastic sonorities. At some point, sentence-sounds and hemiolas must come into morphologizing relation with the idea of a material acoustic in the popular, associative social and cultural constellation of Modern suburban space.

Earlier, in the introduction to this book, I noted that Rudolf Arnheim, writing about the radio in 1936, noted that rather than harmony being fostered by public music, it is perhaps conflict that should be more readily expected. At a time when loudspeakers in suburban back gardens, letters of complaint about ‘radio smoke’ and moralizing arguments about the iniquitous effects of broadcast jazz music on adolescent girls were novel moral furniture of cultural Modernity, the idea of a highly figured kind of socially constellative, national acoustic geography is bound to be a complicated one. The kinds of tussling that showed in the letters pages of the popular press, where complaints were less about radio sound per se, and more about a neighbour’s loud enjoyment of broadcasts of recitals of Bach’s music interfering with another’s enjoyment of the broadcast of Henry Hall concerts, seem to bear out Arnheim’s observation. In this warring context, the fact of the sudden availability of large amounts of air-time dedicated to the classical repertoire, caused its own problems, especially in 1936. In 1936, the departure of Edward Clark from the BBC marked, though most likely doesn’t account for, a shift in the BBC’s policy towards the broadcasting of classical music. The schedules show a move away from the innovative and enlightened programming of contemporary, often overtly Modern music, overseen by Clark, towards more recognizably canonical music; Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and especially towards music deriving itself from the elegiac, somewhat nationalist, landscaping of Moeran, Vaughan Williams, Bax and even Rutland Boughton.

Despite the BBC’s lessened interest in the productions of international contemporary musicians, one international contemporary figure, Jean Sibelius, nevertheless became rather prominent. Suggested as a northern European precursor to the nationalist romance of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sibelius’s music was hugely popular in Britain. Different attempts have been made by different commentators to explain this popularity. Theodor Adorno has recounted a likeable discussion with Ernest Walker. Adorno said that he couldn’t understand why a musician who ‘combined meaningless and trivial elements and alogical and profoundly unintelligible ones’ and who ‘mistook esthetic formlessness for the voice of nature’, should be admired in Britain. Newman replied that it was precisely these values, reviled in German musical-philosophical culture, which were cherished by the British. The discussion around Sibelius was shaped by a number of things, and not just those themes that bore on his position as an international justification for a renewed attention to parochial cultural forms. His reputation developed in the context of already established enthusiasms for Scandinavian architecture and design, for instance, which seemed to connote, for some, a kind of clear, reasonable and wholesomely healthy Modernity. Moreover, the idea of Scandinavia was important in arguments about Britain’s place in a northern European culture, rather than one that sprang from Mediterranean origins. These arguments were widespread and pervasive, pursued in both the popular and the academic press by Herbert Read and others.

However, what is most striking in this contextualizing of Sibelius is the level of sophistication which the popular, pedagogical discussion of choral and orchestral music reached, especially with regard to the practice and rituals of radio listening. The images of advertising for radios, or indeed for furniture, gramophones and other domestic durables, suggest that radio-listening was something to be taken seriously. One recurring image is of concerned, almost fixatedly attentive listening. Whilst jolly, avuncular images of light radio are plentiful enough, there is also an undeniably intense earnestness figured in the iconography of radio-listening. Whether alone, as couples or in the extended family, the radio audience was figured in terms of a committed eagerness to understand what was going on. An augmentation of this image of domestic listening came with the figuration of the sound engineer. Crisp young men, suited, headphoned and wearing efficient haircuts, these were the modern acoustic artists: virile and earnest whilst, at the same time, somehow clerkishly responsible and dependably administrative (fig. 2). Scrutinizing the broadcast aural picture, they sat with sensitive fingers hovering over dials that monitored and controlled exactly which portion of the technically available sound would go out to the nation.

fig. 2

This notion of the administrative mediation of the technically available sound was no mystery, nor was it isolated as the privileged domain of technophiles. The Radio Times and The Listener, amongst others regularly published articles by engineers like P.P. Eckersley, and made it clear that since the recording equipment used in live broadcasts could only capture a fraction of the dynamic range of the orchestra, then someone had to be responsible for the placement of that acoustic window most appropriately during the playing a piece which might, in the course of its performance, exercise the whole of the orchestra’s range. These short articles on the function of balance, tone and colour controls, for instance, rarely failed to remind of this partiality. Both visually and in terms of imparted technical information, it is possible to see that a further compact was envisaged between, on the one hand, the sound engineer as a young, modern, suburban individual with a kind of moral responsibility for the cultural welfare of the nation, and the equally committed, increasingly suburban listenership, on the other. It is worth recalling again here Adorno’s diagnosis of the supposed effects of such technological deficiencies on listening skills. For him, the partial nature of the acoustic image of live music made available by broadcast radio, directly resulted in an eradication of all the aspects of timbre and tone which in turn disintegrated the sonic and philosophical corporacy of a piece of music; reducing it to a series of knowable themes, ‘whistleable ditties’.

Whilst this may well have been true, what is gathered from the generality of popular musical discourse at the time is an expectation that the audience would have had a first-hand experience of a live performance of any given piece of music discussed. This implicit separation of the discursive musical imagination from the sound made by music is historically significant. What it suggests is a condition whereby, in the mid-1930s, a philosophical approach derived from the context of performances of live music, produced by critics, historians and other interested commentators, was supplied as the means of listening to a broadcast music which was dissimilar in kind from the live music it purported to represent. Fractioned so, the discrepancy between what was heard and what was read may have produced the type of suspicious reading that I have been discussing here: one which may have allowed for contingent readings not only of Pevsner, but also the very idea of the coyly knowing social condition of suburban Modernity.

There is a further form of musical reading which accompanies this view. In one of those many, widely read introductions to the appreciation of concert music aimed at radio audiences, J.H. Elliot, the Manchester-based critic, started a discussion of the role of colour in music. He described musical colour in terms of timbre, the particular characteristics of particularly played oboes, for instance, and suggested that the important use of colour was to differentiate between different coherent strands of musical argument. Colour has a substructural role, here. Elliot was someone who preferred to think of musical historical issues in terms of extension rather than in terms of well-behaved linear progress. Also, he differed subtly from Adorno in his views about the way that radio changed music. Where Adorno heard the combined overtones and other aggregate sonorities of live music as the technologically vulnerable acoustic matrix which both articulated and comprehended a manifold, Elliot presumed that it was inattention to argumentative consequence and the moments where arguments cut across each other that led to a floundering confusion in music. Shoddy colour reproduction could fool attention, affect the perception of rhythm and harmony; and metre.

It is just at this over-interpreted point that Sibelius, specifically as an adept in the use of the hemiola, becomes really significant to the historical interests of a British suburban listenership. Many took a hand in his invention. For Cecil Gray, author of the first book-length monograph, Sibelius’s scores became the test of the probity of any performer in their ability to realize what could be found between notes. For Neville Cardus, in a sense Gray’s nemesis, the texts represented the opposite; the creative and negotiative occasion for the meeting of the musical minds of author and working performer. Elliott thought him eminently diverse and capable of bearing twisted half-quotations in ‘a torrent of oratory’. Ernest Newman, speaking of the illusory nature of musical progress, argued that the by then familiar accusation of ‘formlessness’, came as a result of too ardent a critical search for conventionally expected symmetries. Donald Tovey, formally describing his 5th Symphony and unable to resist the adjectives of mystery, spoke of a dominating rhythm composed of several different tunes. He also described a symphony that ends ‘with all the finality of a work that knew from the outset exactly when its last note was due’. In this complex figuration of an acoustic personalization of an epochal zeitgeist all nevertheless agreed on the fugitive rhythmic complexity of Sibelius’s music.

Tovey’s conceit of the subjectively self-conscious, comprehending nature of some symphonic music emerged as the stake in perhaps the most immediately related interpretative text to a broadcast performance of Sibelius’s 5th Symphony on the National Programme on a Saturday evening in 1936. Ernest Walker provided the programme notes published in The Listener. ‘Rightly’, he told his readers, ‘we plume ourselves’ that Sibelius has been more warmly received in England than anywhere outside his native Finland. And, having established English musical culture as an accepting one, Walker went on to draw a picture of the weighty rhythmic foundations from which ‘something vital’ would emerge. In all, he offered a version of the symphony where complex, deep-lain rhythmic interaction would eventuate in the precipitation of recognizable musical entities. For some of those concerned, Tovey and Walker included, Sibelius’s symphony was an apparently simple thing which organizes itself entirely towards the final exposition and resolution of the massive ‘hammer theme’ which dominates the concluding rotations of the final allegro molto section. In this, and as with Pevsner, Sibelius is conventionally accused of a singularized, concluding simplification. To reiterate: an acknowledgement is made of the rhythmic complexity of the work, but the idea of the simple, ‘whistleable’ theme is allowed to predominate. There is a kind of conceptual dehiscence between what was likely to be radiophonically available in people’s homes, and that which Ernest Newman had described concerning Sibelius, as what ‘the audience thought they were hearing’, informed by the diversity of popular commentaries.

As with Pevsner’s concluding conceit, Sibelius’s whistleable, concluding theme is a curious affair, especially given all the critical emphasis on its teleological, expository nature. It has a famous last note, one that supplies a wilting and banal resolution. It might be thought deject, or shy. It is one which is involved in a theatrically portentous-sounding statement of the main theme as a realization of the preceding, only part-formed material. Each note of the phrase is distinctly enunciated and with each note the final tonically resolving note is deferred, again and again, until the likelihood of its being played, the very inevitability that demands its approach, becomes more attenuated and questionable. When it comes, it may seem a deeply disappointing, retrospectively autobiographic closure to an open, complicated and suggestive argument. Its parenthesized self-consciousness is enough to prompt suspicion about the arbitrary and expedient nature of its terminating function. More than anything, it appears to articulate a dubiousness about the whole project of articulating the single, historical theme. But, already, there is suspicion of a different order here.

Rhythmically, Sibelius’s music is particularly prone to suffering from a lack of the distinct separation of its components. It can sound murkily confused, or simply start to lose its hold on listeners’ attentions, especially in that structural-argumentative way that Elliot had suggested as a preferred way to listen to radio music. All the critical talk of a thematic emergence from half-uttered musical materials may have seemed irrelevant or misleading to listening audience. A live broadcast, monitored by dutiful engineers, working with insufficient equipment, was heard on generally limited receivers by people who were attentively listening for rhythmic nuances which may never have materialized. All those features of the Sibelian historic (or national mythic) landscape, those complex hemiolic effects signalling inexorably tumbling rivers and sweeping topographies, may, or may not, have been available to suburban audiences for further symbolic interpretation. As important indicators of an evaluable, Sibelian sentence-sound, these effects may, or may not, have even been heard. It is impossible to be certain. This idea of a phantastic, morphologizing sonority, one conjured in the popular critical narratives on the work, and separated from the actual sound made by domestic radio receivers in thousands of suburban homes, is important. The material acoustic facts of Sibelius’s hemiolas alone may be regarded as forms of theoretical and historical knowledge in their own right. Their possible durative and involving implications, Baroque or otherwise, could have supplied a popular, aural-philosophical model for interpreting Pevsner’s architectural Modernity, as well as paralleling the conditions of an always contingent reflection on a suburban sense of involvement in the main, perceived narratives of Modernity.

Whilst Adorno, in the early 1940s was content with the idea of a suburban listenership unified in their stupefying subjection to the insufficiencies of broadcasting technology, he neglected both what people knew of music otherwise, and what they found in the contexts of listening to music. Suspecting device at all resolving points, and augmenting this skill through engagements with the plotting malfeasance of crime writers, suburban listeners to Sibelius’s 5th Symphony in 1936 could exercise quite animated senses of uncertainty and suspicion about the absence of particular kinds of expected rhythmic material from the acoustic representation of the music supplied by radio. Or, they could simply consider falling in love. That opening up of an extra-diegetic space of interpretative possibilities between a phantastic and a material sonority, each equally dreamed, equally noetic, is all that is needed now to suggest the agency of a suburban audience in these differing articulations of the history of cultural Modernity; particularly in the terms of a recognition of one’s conditional absence from, or presence in it. That, or tentatively, like Fred Astaire or Imhof’s attentive pair, they may simply consider falling in love … or something.

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