Music: The Hamlet of B. H. Haggin

In music, as in painting, the untutored man is at a loss. He not only does not know much about it; he is not even sure of what he likes. Last week a man who knows what he likes and is quite sure that intelligent ignoramuses can be taught to know likewise published a book to mend such matters. Music for the Man Who Enjoys ‘Hamlet’, by B. H. Haggin (Knopf, $2.75), the Nation’s music critic, is intended primarily for laymen, but might give any musical adept pleasure for the lucidity of its musical discussion.

Haggin begins with a hypothetical citizen who enjoys the language of Shakespeare but is baffled or bored by the sounds Beethoven makes. For years, music appreciation courses have tried to break down such resistance with anecdotes about the composers’ lives, or a chase after the music’s recurring themes (skipping most of the music in the process).

Hard Work. Haggin knows, however, what every musician knows: that the riches of music are only to be gotten by those with an appreciation of the whole tonal text: “A piece of music is, to begin with, an organization of sounds; experiencing it begins with hearing the sounds and the way they are related in each phrase, the relation of one phrase to the next in the progression; and learning to hear these relations is at the same time a process by which you learn to follow the grammar and logic of musical thought. . . .”

For this, thanks to the phonograph, it is not necessary to know “the technical facts and names of what you are hearing.” With the help of a cardboard ruler (provided with each volume), to indicate positions on records, Haggin guides his reader through recordings of more than a score of great compositions, pointing out the developing musical speech of each, the points of special eloquence. Of his reader he asks hard eye & ear work, but in the end the possible rewards may include, for instance, “the right frame of mind to listen to one of the greatest wonders achieved by human powers, Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, with proper appreciation of its forms in sound. . . .”

Shut Up. Bernard Haggin, an angular musical zealot who looks a decade younger than his 44 years, has been a New Yorker from his lower East Side boyhood, through the College of the City of New York, to his present upper West Side hideaway. There he keeps a super-phonograph, whose sensitive entrails are always getting out of whack, and a Mason & Hamlin, which he has been known to play for bosom friends. On paper he has no facility whatever, but by main strength has made himself a writer of exceptional pith and clarity (Music On Records, A Book of the Symphony).

Off paper, Haggin has a comic gift for impersonating musical stuffed shirts. He can also tell howlers on himself: once, at a concert, when he glared at Violinist Jacques Gordon, who was noisily shuffling a score, Gordon glared back at the noiseless Haggin and growled: “Shut up!”