Barber: a sideways-looking genius

Far from being progressive, he reimagined musical gestures as they already existed. But, says Philip Clark, his music still sings

Samuel Barber: in love with the art of composition (Photo: Tuller Potter Collection)

For a Luigi Nono-loving, John Cage-worshipping advocate for the hardcore avant-garde – me, in fact – Samuel Barber, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year, ought to be purgatory. Until his death in 1981, he wrote defiantly neo-Romantic music, engaging with new-fangled techniques like atonality and polytonality only occasionally.

His explorations of atonality in Medea, the ballet he wrote in 1946 for Martha Graham, don’t convince; likewise jazz in Excursions and A Hand of Bridge sounds forced and self-consciously awkward, like watching your dad trying to breakdance at your 21st. But Barber never questioned the validity of producing his nostalgic, serene, orderly music during the most turbulent decades of the 20th century. He was joint-out-of-time, happy – proud even – to be reinventing wheels that had been spinning for centuries.

So why does Barber’s music keep me coming back for more? On this side of the Atlantic (as a British writer), disentangling Barber’s output from the cult surrounding his 1936 Adagio for Strings, which eclipses everything else he wrote, is not easy. Like Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue or Ives’s The Unanswered Question, the Adagio has become a totem by which we judge American classical music in the UK. No surprise it was chosen to replace the usual pooterish diet of jolly jingoism at The Last Night of The Proms following the September 11th terrorist attacks. Its enduring emotional resonance has surely far outstripped anything Barber could have imagined, as though an unconscious, collective decision has been taken – think slow and mournful string music, think Barber.

But it’s not like Adagio for Strings is even the most affecting “slow string piece” around. Nowhere near it in fact: the structural and harmonic intensities of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth, Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen or the “Elégie” from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings all articulate an originality of voice that blows the Adagio out the water. Yet Barber’s directness of expression – that flawless arc of a single musical idea igniting, then dimming – unfailingly captures imaginations, whether or not people realise it was originally the slow movement of his String Quartet No 1, or even care about its provenance. The Adagio’s anthem-like qualities have lent themselves to being adopted by film-makers, sensitively in the case of Oliver Stone’s Platoon, less so in Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko, where Barber is used to shamelessly stoke-up sentiment; and also by the Dutch DJ Tïesto who, bizarrely, created upbeat dance music by knitting drum patterns under Barber’s elegy.

I have an idea about Barber, and it’s this. By composing the music he did, when he did, he effectively closed the door on originality. Unlike Copland, Tippett, Sibelius and Shostakovich (not to mention Stravinsky), all near-contemporaries, Barber didn’t have it within him to re-shape, or probe, for new structural sub-clauses within tonality. Barber was put on this earth to infiltrate, then re-imagine, archetypes of musical gesture as they already existed. So his Adagio might not be the “best” string piece, but it distils inside its tight eight-minute frame the heritage and expressive expectations of slow, mournful string music. It’s a masterly essay about slow string music, written as slow string music.