Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

146 ❧ chapter fourteen
two hundred years ago. I have lived long enough to fi nd that all of the seem-
ingly unassimilated borrowings of nineteenth-century architects have not
always resulted in complete stylelessness but rather in a new kind of style. The
seemingly inappropriate mixture of styles is one that falls into a general and
perfectly authentic perspective as distance is gained from it. I had this revela-
tion a few years ago in connection with an eclectic German architect, Gottfried
Semper, the architect of the Vienna and Dresden operas. At fi rst he appears
to be nothing but a borrower, but in the light of two thousand years of archi-
tectural tradition, he can now be seen not only as a stylizer but also as a styl-
ist. This happens with certain composers. For example, I suspect that in a few
decades much better justice will be done to the music of Busoni. Now it is com-
monly regarded as a pillaging from a variety of uncoordinated and unrelated
styles. Twenty or thirty years hence, Busoni’s Doctor Faustus may very well be
seen as a perfectly coordinated and homogeneous work.
Is style a product of knowledge or of ignorance? Much of what we talk
about as having style is highly sophisticated. It is the product of refi nement,
of conscious choice, of an exercise of taste, of study, of emulation, of histori-
cal consciousness, of a sense of orientation in an exceedingly complex and
rich culture. All of these qualities we associate with style, and yet there are
illiterate and primitive societies in which much is done with what we must
call consummate style. There is the dancing and the sculpture of certain
African tribes, and there is the superb physical bearing of natives in some
relatively primitive societies.
Throughout the history of civilization, the achievement of what we call style
has always been associated with procedures of self-limitation, whether imposed
voluntarily or from without. Perhaps a better way of describing this self-limita-
tion could be to term it a kind of sharpening of the focus of both experience
and expression. This self-limitation, this concentration has always existed in
the disciplines of various kinds of sports and in their rigorous conformity to
certain rules, as well as in those of dancing and of speech and singing. A per-
fect example of perhaps excessive self-imitation is the classical ballet. In poetry,
the restrictive and concentrating infl uence of various kinds of meter can serve
not only as a discipline in the manipulation of words but also as a means of sift-
ing out superfl uous ideas and as a means of helping to extract the essence of a
thought or feeling. It is usually the communication of the essence of a thought
or feeling that is associated in some way with the presence of style.
There are all sorts of rules that concern the limits of an artistic medium.
They indicate what is proper to engraving, what is proper to etching, what is
proper to drawing, what is proper to watercolors, what is proper to sculpture
in stone as distinguished from what is proper to sculpture in bronze, what is
proper to wind instruments, to strings, to keyboards, or to given combinations
of instruments. Observance of these often voluntarily assumed limitations
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