The Critic ~ Part 3: A critic has an insight

At Queen's Hall in London on 3 September 1912, Sir Henry Wood conducted  the first performance anywhere of Arnold Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16.  Here is a review from the London Times (4 September 1912) quoted in Nicholas Slonimsky's article in Schoenberg.

"It was like a poem in Tibetan; not one single soul could possibly have understood it at a first hearing.  We can, after all, only progress from the known to the unknown; and as the programme writer, who had every reason to know, said, there was not a single consonance from beginning to end.  Under such circumstances the listener was like a dweller in Flatland straining his mind to understand the ways of that mysterious occupant of three dimensions, man . . . .  At the conclusion half the audience hissed.  That seems a too decisive judgment, for after all they may turn out to be wrong; the other half applauded more vehemently than the case warranted, for it could hardly have been from understanding."

 Here is the classic 1884 novella to which this unknown critic referred.  It was written by Edwin Abbott, writing pseudonymously as "A Square."

About the book (from Open Library):

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, though written in 1884, is still considered useful in thinking about multiple dimensions. It is also seen as a satirical depiction of Victorian society and its hierarchies.  A square, who is a resident of the two-dimensional Flatland, dreams of the one-dimensional Lineland. He attempts to convince the monarch of Lineland of the possibility of another dimension, but the monarch cannot see outside the line. The square is then visited himself by a Sphere from three-dimensional Spaceland, who must show the square Spaceland before he can conceive it. As more dimensions enter the scene, the story's discussion of fixed thought and the kind of inhuman action which accompanies it intensifies.

Today Abbott's underlying social commentary seems to be ignored in favor of the book's more obvious practical value in helping students understand and become comfortable working in higher dimensions in mathematics.  But surely the Times critic's metaphor in 1912 was stretching beyond the mathematics to the problems surrounding "fixed thought and the kind of inhuman action which accompanies it" as the summary in Open Library put it ~ or, as it might be further honed, the problems surrounding a fixed mind in any age.  We may no longer live in that particular "Victorian hierarchy," but we do live in hierarchies ~ social, political, musical ~ that we have invented for our own age.

So, in your own "Present Age," how does Op. 16 strike you today?  Listen again.

[As a post script, when Flatland was first published it had only moderate success.  It was not until Einstein's theories of special and general relativity were published, positing higher dimensions and non-Euclidean geometries as uncommon-sense realities, that Flatland took on a second life.  For further connections see the previous post in this blog, annus mirabilis.  And it must be noted (as I now realize I neglected to do back then)  that I am certainly not the first to note the co-incidence of so many related new ideas "in the air" in just a 5-10 year span just around the turn of the century connecting what were previously thought to be entirely unrelated - and unrelatable - areas.]