Robin Holloway's essay, Tovey, includes the following paragraphs.

Its many insights and some sustained stretches of brilliant illumination make this new volume indispensable despite a proportion of chaff, gas, replication and ponderous laying down the law. Even so, the supreme things in Tovey, all of them contained in the long out of print 1949 Essays and Lectures on Music (Oxford should be urged to make it available again), are not matched here. For all the excellence of his impromptu style, formal writing-up at maximum pressure suits him better still: such fully elaborated pieces as the essay on ‘Some Aspects of Beethoven’s Art Forms’ and the two on Schubert are in my ‘deliberate but not dogmatic’ opinion the most outstanding writing on music there has ever been.

Particularly as his reputation has sunk into depression, and since (despite reassuring evidences of a turning tide) this kind of writing on the arts in general has become so unfashionable, it’s worth trying to say why. Big woolly words like wisdom, humanity, depth, breadth, poetic sensitivity, spiritual insight etc. should answer, but have become debased. And supposing them restored to gold-standard, what have they to do with the notes? Everything and nothing. Even if a purist reaction rejects the humanistic paraphernalia as otiose, sentimental, unquantifiable, what remains chez Tovey is the antithesis of waffle. On his chosen ground, by common consent ‘the best that has been thought and said’ in the art, he is a great master—via total understanding, expressed with masterly cogency, of its grammar and language—of music’s how.

The principal comparison is with Heinrich Schenker (his elder contemporary who died in 1935, aged seventy-six), the celebrated arch-classicist analyst whose theories and methods cowed American academe, thence British, from the 1950s onwards. Schenker undoubtedly probes more intricately the workings of harmonic structure in tonal music. His notorious limitation is neglect of the detailed surface, of the way the fundamental processes are enlivened by caprice, invention, surprise; and of the rhythmic parameter that makes them breathe, their articulation in time. Far more disabling is his implicit snobbery, which, selecting only accredited ‘masterworks’ for examination, refuses to distinguish and evaluate quality; and the quasi-scientific rigour which declines to acknowledge and accommodate emotional content. Here, in just what matters most, in just what is so difficult to discuss usefully that the purist makes it out to be beside the point, is where Tovey, acknowledging the power of the big woolly words, transcends the technical supremo. As well as the how Tovey aims to reach the what of music: what it is, what it’s saying, what it means, why it’s good. He aims to reach the emotional core, expressed in a coherent organic/grammatical structure, embodied in a medium of sensuous physical immediacy and superimposed on / counterpointed with real time in a timescape of its own: all the complex interdependent actuality of a communicative experience so important to music-lovers that we want more and more of it again and again, always the same, yet different, infinitely renewable.

It’s not a matter of rules (though no one has understood them better). Creative freedom, with Schenker, is imperilled by theoretic rigidity which, if obeyed as compositional goal, could only result in idle and sterile pedantry. With Tovey the rules emerge from within the composition itself: there are no generalisations, everything is specific to the unique expressive and technical life and the chosen matière of the individual work of art, whether it is one of dozens or a one-off.

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