Darius Milhaud: the composer speaks.*
Published october 5, 1943 by Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Edited by David Ewen.
*(This statement was written by the composer expressly for this book).
Darius Mílhaud
The MOST difficult thing in music is still to write a melody of several bars which can be self-sufficient. That is the secret of music. While the technique should be as perfected as possible, that is a lesser essential. Anybody can acquire a brilliant technique. The important thing is the vital element — the melody — which should be easily retained, hummed, and whistled on the street. Without this fundamental element, all the technique in the world can only be a dead letter.A composer should be acquainted with all of music; above all, he should love all music that is worthy of being loved. Beyond this, a young musician should not permit himself to be shut within the prison of any one system. He should develop the wealth of his fantasy and of his imagination, and constantly strive to renew his means of expression.
He should learn to familiarise himself with the secrets of every technique. Diatonic expression may lead one primarily into the polytonal domain, but it should not exclude the study of atonal chromaticism. What I cannot tolerate is the slavish adherence to any one system. Why should one limit his means of expression? It is not easy, in the first place, to express one-self. Ali the different stages through which musical technique should enrich our present musical idiom. When K speaks of tonality, bitonality, polytonality, atonality, or neo-dassicism, all this seems to me to be an elementary and useless division of music into compartments. We should of everything at our disposal which can help a work to present itself as fully and as completely as possible. We should open our windows wide on an unlimited musical horizon.
I have never been able to understand the establishment of dífferent categories in music: classical music and modern music; serious music and light music. It is most unjust. There is only music, and one can find it in a café melody or an operetta tune as well as in a symphony, an opera, or a work of chamber music.
Overlengthy developments and useless repetitions are to be avoided. We should strive to maintain exact proportions in every work. Sobriety and simplicíty are the best counsellors of any composer. A solid and logical construction is indispensable. I am left helpless in the presence of rhapsodic works, devoid of structure or overladen with endless developments of unnecessary complexity.
But each work calls for its own special style. A quartet is not wdtten in the same way that a ballet is, or a film score like a sonata. The composer must adapt his tendencies, and remember that a ballet must be danced to, and must be subject to choreographic necessity; also that a film must move a wide and varied public at the same time that it preserves the puré expression of the composer. The composition of an opera or a quaritet demands the same love as a score for the theatre, in which the dramatic necessity limits the composer, and where often a gripping atmosphere hás to be created within a few bars
I have no aesthetic rules, or philosophy, or theories. I love to write music. I always do it with pleasure, otherwise I just do not write it. I have always made it my business to accept musical jobs of every kind. Naturally, there are certain types of woik which I prefer; but a composer should do everything with applicatíon, with all the resources of contemporary technique at his disposal. He can then hope that, after a life of hard work, he will see some works survive, works in which the melodic line hás impressed itself indelibly on the memory; for melody alone — the only living element in music — permits a work to survive.
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