Contemporary music in Aldous Huxley's music criticisms

Although the music column that Aldous Huxley wrote for The Weekly Westminster Gazette in 1922-23 raises a wide range of issues (the status of music technology, the nature of the child prodigy, programme music versus abstract music, performers and their choice of repertoire), at the heart of his music criticism is the idea of ‘value’ and specifically, the thorny question of how to gauge the relative worth of composers’ musical works. After briefly outlining Huxley’s credentials as a music critic, and the Wirkung-Rezeption relationship at the core of any study of music reception, this article provides an overview of Huxley’s responses to a range of composers writing during the early decades of the twentieth century (including Schoenberg, Webern, Hindemith, Bartók, Bax and Delius). In explaining some of these specific reactions, it is clear that composers of an earlier age (Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven) were consistently used by Huxley as a comparative measure of musical value; and given Huxley’s self-confessed status as an ‘intellectualist reactionary’, the contemporary works that he admired fulfilled specific requirements: formal clarity and logic, melodic imagination, emotional sincerity, and a blend of tradition and innovation. Situating Huxley's views within early twentieth-century music criticism in Britain allows specific parallels to be made with those promoting Schoenberg's music in particular; furthermore, these opinions allow us to contextualise some of the references contained in Huxley's novels.