Twilight of Twaddle?

Hans Keller is a London music critic whose aim is to stop most talk about music. This apparently self-destructive ambition is prompted by Keller's belief that emotions slip through the loom of language like herring through a cargo net. Keller's solution: analysis by music instead of by words. His criticism of Mozart's String Quartet in D Minor (K. 421) broadcast last week from Hamburg, convincingly demonstrated that a few snatches of music, pointedly juxtaposed, can make a sharper comment on a composition than a column of critical prose.

Aside from its tendency to jargon, the trouble with verbal music criticism, says Keller, is that it tends to describe musical forms but fails to penetrate beyond them to the "fundamental unity" at the heart of a composition. To lay music's "inner architecture" bare, the critic must abandon language ("The age of description is over") and so immerse himself in analysis of a work that he "lives with it and dreams about it."

After several months, when he knows the music so well that he understands the composer's unconscious logic, the critic is ready to write an "analytical score" that isolates and interweaves the composition's various themes, phrases, harmonies and rhythms, thereby demonstrating how they relate to each other and to the central idea. The analytical score is played as a series of interludes after each movement; in the case of the Mozart Quartet, the original piece takes about 30 minutes, the interludes 17 minutes. Their effect is like looking at a painting, then watching a series of lantern slides of different portions of the painting, stripped of minor embellishments and arranged to stress the picture's harmonies and tensions.

Vienna-born Critic Keller, 38, a violinist and teacher, wrote verbal criticism exclusively for years before he decided that words failed him. They simply created "unbearable divisions," he says, "between music critics and music lovers." His Mozart analysis was hailed by word-bound, cliche-tied British critics as "a most important departure." Keller is now working on an analysis of Beethoven's String Quartet, Opus 95. Says he: "Most of what passes for musical criticism today is sheer bunk; I think functional analysis will bring about the twilight of the twaddle." He is not disturbed by the thought that it might also spoil the market for the written criticism with which he still partly supports himself. "The critic's job," says Critic Keller, "is to make himself unnecessary."

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